Hi Stuart,
Thorsten R. - please feel to provide a prioritized list of
fixes/enhancements you need.
A summary list of current issues ordered by priority (leaving out what
your recent commit addressed - I still need to pull that):
1) placement in flat layer instead of curved
That is currently blockig a lot of things. For instance, I need to adjust
parameters to get the relative placement between new and old elements
right (the effect reducing visibility in larger clouds should be where the
cloud actually is, rain textures should connect with cloud textures), or I
need to verify that vertical motion driven by terrain interaction works
correctly - neither of which I can really do without having accurate
vertical placement - I'll have to redo it after the fix anyway.
2) clouds don't obscure some objects (newly discovered)
For some reason, some objects can be seen through even a very thick layer
of new clouds (which otherwise obscures the terrain). Examples are one
tower in downton Las Vegas (the rest of the buildings are just fine...),
villages in Corsica, or, most problematic, all old cloud models.
Since some elements aren't addressed in your system (the static cirrus
models, rain layer textures) because they require different/no rotation in
the shader, they'll remain models. But that means that I see Cirrus clouds
*through* a thick layer of Nimbus from the ground, or, visually worst, I
see the ring of rain layer textures from above a Nimbus layer.
3) Antishading
For some reason, I still get antishading in many situations even when I
make cloud size larger than texture size. Looks odd in many cases and
prevents me from adjusting the shade parameters. You mentioned finding a
bug?
If it's of any help, I can pack my current devel version of everything and
you can see for yourself what happens (with the understanding that only
specific settings in the gui are meaningful).
Apart from the issues above, there are some things to discuss and think
about:
4) Fading in poor visibility
I'm now in the shader down to 0.1 for the fading factor in
fogFactor = exp( -gl_Fog.density * fogCoord * 0.1);
This looks too crisp in slightly hazy conditions, but I was basically
forced to the setting by rainy conditions with ~2-4 km visibility. What
happened otherwise was that clouds in that amount of haze faded so much
that blue sky became visible above where the overcast cloud layer should
have been drawn, which looks really bad.
Maybe there shouldn't be a fixed number intended to fit all but a function
of visibility? Or a parameter to be passed on - although you mentioned
that passing too many parameters to the shader may lead to different
problems...
5) Specify top and bottom shade
I mentioned that previously - it's not in any sense a 'must', but I think
it would allow for very cool visual effects if the system had the
possibility to shade clouds in a different way if there's a layer above
(or even do some simple ray intersection tests when drawing a tile for
greater realism). Again - would require to pass more parameters.
I think that's pretty much it. There's still lots of parameter tuning to
be done on my side, and vertical motion of clouds still needs to be done,
but basically it's functional (see the screenshots I'm already producing)
- I haven't encountered any other problems so far. So we're clearly
getting somewhere :-)
* Thorsten
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