Atmospheric scattering!

[tajampi]

Hey there!

I have been lately messing around with unity, trying to get a basic atmosphere scattering script working, after many hours, i gave up, and used google, i found this:

http://scrawkblog.com/2014/05/19/proland-to-unity-core/

Basically, it's a port to Unity of an OpenGL library to manage rendering of whole planetary surfaces, oceans and atmospheres.

It looks awesome, and its implementation *seems* easy, so i came here to start a little discussion on how could that work.

Here is what i have managed to extract from the website:

Pros:

It's fast. (Not the best, but it's fast)

Realistic atmospheric scattering. (Pale blue dot )

Realistic sky colors from ground.

Realistic climbing into space, smooth transition.

Works from space and from ground.

It manages terrain, oceans, and even forests.

Oceans look awesome

Cons:

Licensing, for comercial products you need to buy a comercial license from Proland.

Precision, the atmosphere suffers from floating point precision, and who knows how will it handle KSP's way of moving the center of the scene...

It implements a ton of stuff KSP may not need, like procedural terrain and forests (Thanksfully, the scripts are editable, so easy to delete)

Cache, the script saves all the stuff into another cache script, which may result in RAM usage.

So, do you think it will be posible, and useful to implement this or should KSP keep using its homemade scattering protocol?

Cheers!

[Whirligig Girl]

KSP's terrain is procedural. And there are forests if you turn on terrain scatter. So that might not be a problem.

To clarify: The heightmaps and terrain are manually made, but the fine level of terrain generation, including small craters, is procedural. Actually, the original map for Kerbin is the default seed for the LibNoise library, just switched backwards.

[NathanKell]

And by fine level you mean "90% of the terrain beyond the generic features" and, in the case of bodies without heightmaps, 100%.

Seriously, about all the heightmap does is say "this is water, this is land, this is mountains"--*all* the rest, the hills, the fine coastal details, etc.--that's all procedural. With a fixed seed because Squad doesn't like randomness, but procedural.

[blackrack]

So, have you made any progress on this at all or have you simply dropped the idea? I started looking into atmospheric scattering myself and I'm currently investigating the feasibility of such a mod.

[tntristan12]

I like atmosphere scatter because so much nicer night time side of planet. sky looks now like there is no sky blocking view because real life sky makes night time hazy. Adding this would make the night sky look more realistic and realism is a good thing.