WIP - Environmental Visual Enhancements Development

[jsimmons]

Hello everyone

I'm the maintainer of the 10x Kerbin RSS configuration and I have just started to look at moving the work to Overhaul. Thanks to Pete the oceans and terrain look really good but what is lacking are the clouds. So I started to look at the behavior of clouds over time on earth to see how to properly model them. What can be observed is 3 distinct behaviors for the clouds. At the equator region the clouds appear to form quickly and break down quickly without traveling very far. This is not the case tho, instead as the cloud move out of the region they formed in new clouds appear right away to replace them. They also tend to form over the tropical land mass regions and travel a certain distance over a ocean before breaking up. As the travel eastward they are pushed south in the southern hemisphere and north in the northern hemisphere. The other two behaviors are based on the jet stream which causes the clouds to travel quickly compared to the equatorial clouds and they experience rotational dynamics as they travel. These two bands don't appear to be pushed to the north or south consistently. I have some links to this behavior below.

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=3723

My suggestion for really realistic clouds is two fold. First the easy part of implementing the 3 bands for the various cloud types. The second would be to expand Overhaul to support animated 2D cloud textures. This would added great realism to cloud behavior. Sorry I'm by no means a expert at Unity development.

[falken]

Everything seems to work for me, except for that the atmosphere is incredibly dense looking and too thick?

e: I fixed the issue by carrying over a previous EVE Overhaul folders from another .90 install. No idea what caused that.

Edited February 9, 2015 by falken

[jsimmons]

Since rbray89 is on leave who is a unity developer here that understands his work?

[Proot]

Only a few people, I'm afraid. But I refuse to believe that Rbray89 has abandoned this mod. In his own words, this was gonna be months of hard work for him, so he warned his absence...

The mod is in his very best moment, and Rbray's math knowledge to handle his shaders is pretty hard for the most.

So yeah, we can agree in one thing: is a pretty visible absence. I miss him so much...

And that is why I insist that we must give love and all our support to our favorite modders.

[drtedastro]

and BACON....

do NOT forget the BACON....

cheers.

[Ziw]

Only a few people, I'm afraid. But I refuse to believe that Rbray89 has abandoned this mod. In his own words, this was gonna be months of hard work for him, so he warned his absence...

The mod is in his very best moment, and Rbray's math knowledge to handle his shaders is pretty hard for the most.

So yeah, we can agree in one thing: is a pretty visible absence. I miss him so much...

And that is why I insist that we must give love and all our support to our favorite modders.

Can you share some of your preliminary clouds configs for overhaul? You know, for SCIENCE...

[Nitrous Oxide]

So yeah, we can agree in one thing: is a pretty visible absence. I miss him so much...

And that is why I insist that we must give love and all our support to our favorite modders.

+1

If it wasn't for people like rbray pushing this game to the limits, I probably would have moved on to playing something else a long time ago. Certain mods accomplish things that Squad themselves say isn't possible. EVE is one of the best examples.

[RobotsAndSpaceships]

Feels good man.

[jsimmons]

Proot you stated earlier that you got clouds to form in a column. How did you do that? I like to make some nice thunderheads for my Overhaul version.

[spidersVise]

Everything seems to work for me, except for that the atmosphere is incredibly dense looking and too thick?

[image]

e: I fixed the issue by carrying over a previous EVE Overhaul folders from another .90 install. No idea what caused that.

Forgive me for this random intrusion, but I've installed this and some portions of Proot's KSPRC, just the EVE and BoulderCo folders, and I have this problem. I was wondering if anyone knows a fix? I've tried reinstalling both, but no dice.

[sashan]

Any ways to decrease volumetric clouds density? My 8-year-old krap of a pc is freaking out at them, especially as my rocket pierces the layers.

Even at this level of "optimization".

Also. Is the current version compatible with .25?

Edited March 9, 2015 by sashan

[INSULINt]

Noticed it's been almost a couple of months since the last post here. How is this going? From the post above it seems as if the horizon drawing ahead of the mountains is no longer a thing. Less nullrefs than the 7-4 EVE? Plans for post 1.0 KSP release?

I guess I could just try this out LOL....

[Ork]

I love these mods.

I play at high res (not max) with around 55 mods plus EVE and still smile at launch.

Standard settings.

Lots of clouds; I like clouds

Combined with some nice textures and OMG!

Just after launch.

Lovely textures (from RSS mod, thnx Pingopete etc), cities and yes... purple oceans.

Really thickly stacked clouds give a sense of the dramatic during ascent.

Pretty at night too.

How can anyone not fall in love with the look of this game?

I run on a 5 year old PC.

Windows 7, integrated graphics, 4gig RAM.

Not far off max graphics with near on 60 mods.

For me, this is only possible because of a little program called ReShade+SweetFX.

I don't know how it does it, I think it uses magic or unicorns or something, either way it now allows me to run KSP the way I've always wanted to; and it's glorious!

[Gaalidas]

That's starting to look more like something from a photo-realistic landscape for a minimalistic flight simulator. Hmm... that wasn't supposed to sound like a bad thing, but I think it came out like it. Anyway... looks nice.

[rbray89]

So... I'm back.

I want to first apologize to anyone/everyone about disappearing like that. I don't handle pressure well, and after getting so much attention from my mods it started to overwhelm me. I had to take a break, and the only way I could stop thinking about it was to get away. This was supposed to be a relaxing hobby, but turned into something like an obsession. Hopefully I'll manage better this time around. Don't be too surprised if you don't see much of me aside from once or twice a week as I try to keep things balanced.

I uploaded a new version on Github today... It is a new atmospheric model, and it should have (nearly) all the params needed to tune the atmosphere to perfection. Some things I have not implemented or tuned fully myself (few more params to come, along with scattering and sunsets), and I plan to make a few more improvements to the clouds, ocean and terrain. The new version of Unity is fantastic in that I can actually use the depth buffer (unity 5 acts like pro for everyone. They just changed the licensing terms) so it allows me to test and debug the shaders MUCH faster than I had ever been able to in the past.

Thank you all for the support and your well-wishes. Now Lets make KSP beautiful.

P.S. You can reach me over in reddit as waka324.

P.P.S I've been aiding blacktrack whenever I can with their new scatter mod. It is absolutely gorgeous, and honestly, that is what I was hoping for with this atmosphere model.

[Gaalidas]

I think they're all so shocked to see you that they've lost their ability to post.

[TMS]

Nice to see you around, man. Hope you're keeping well.

Regarding atmo scattering, the dev was looking for some support earlier today: http://boards.4chan.org/vg/thread/101191492/kspg-kerbal-early-access-game-development#p101236948

[rbray89]

Thanks!

Yeah, they contacted me on Reddit. My best guess is that either a param isn't being scaled, or the camera chosen is not the right one.

[blackrack]

Rejoice brethren, our hero is back!

Btw I got stuck on that scaledspace thing today and decided to get a break and come back to it when I'm thinking clearly.

[rbray89]

Rejoice brethren, our hero is back!

Btw I got stuck on that scaledspace thing today and decided to get a break and come back to it when I'm thinking clearly.

That always helps. Let me know if you want me to take a look at all.

[blackrack]

That always helps. Let me know if you want me to take a look at all.

I'll try some old-fashioned debugging first, by adding a gigantic UI that changes every parameter to every single possiblity until it works, funny enough, this is how I got the sky shader to work when I got stuck on it and it was rendering gibberish to the screen. Then if it doesn't work I'll clean up the code a little so it's understandable and update github.

[Motokid600]

Rbray is back... So my day is made. My week... No my month. Is made. Lol. Welcome back Rbray and good timing to boot with 1.0 around the corner.

I too often find hobbies can easily start to feel like jobs. Because you do get obsessed. And you soon get burnt out to the point where even the thought of your once loved hobby makes you sick.

The best thing for it is exactly what you did Rbray and that is to simply stop. And take a break only to hope one day that spark that made you fall in love with the hobby ignites again.

I can speak for the entire community when I say Im glad you found that spark again. Just make sure you take the time to actually PLAY the game. Do whatever it is you have to do to keep it fresh.

PS: Is it weird that I got as giddy as a school girl at a Bieber concert when I saw last post by rbray? Probably a little weird. Oh well. I don't care.

Edited April 23, 2015 by Motokid600

[jsimmons]

Yeah rbray is back!!! Can't way to try this out on my 10x kerbin work. BTW to help balance you out what is needed is more people to get involved with code. Right now I'm working on redoing the kerbin landscape but once I'm done I will be asking you questions about your code.

[tygoo7]

Rbray is back... So my day is made. My week... No my month. Is made. Lol. Welcome back Rbray and good timing to boot with 1.0 around the corner.

I too often find hobbies can easily start to feel like jobs. Because you do get obsessed. And you soon get burnt out to the point where even the thought of your once loved hobby makes you sick.

The best thing for it is exactly what you did Rbray and that is to simply stop. And take a break only to hope one day that spark that made you fall in love with the hobby ignites again.

I can speak for the entire community when I say Im glad you found that spark again. Just make sure you take the time to actually PLAY the game. Do whatever it is you have to do to keep it fresh.

PS: Is it weird that I got as giddy as a school girl at a Bieber concert when I saw last post by rbray? Probably a little weird. Oh well. I don't care.

This is pretty much what I was about to say too.

[Proot]

Aside from the KSP topic: I'm truly and genuinely happy that you are fine, Ryan.

As much as I enjoy your work, I must say: come back only to enjoy the ride, that is the minimum that you deserves.