Distant Terrain settings in Launcher

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AnyOldName3
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Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Distant Terrain settings in Launcher

Post by AnyOldName3 »

To me, it looks like those mountains in the photo aren't covered in fog and that looks how I'd expect things to if the fog didn't reach 100% opacity until way behind them. IRL, if you can see a silhouette of a mountain, there isn't opaque fog between it and you, and when there is, you can't tell that the mountain is there at all and you can only see a single uniform colour.
Chris
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Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Distant Terrain settings in Launcher

Post by Chris »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 11 Feb 2018, 14:16 if you can see a silhouette of a mountain, there isn't opaque fog between it and you, and when there is, you can't tell that the mountain is there at all and you can only see a single uniform colour.
Sure, but there's a difference between when fog reaches full opacity and when you start seeing things in silhouette. When rendering fog reaches max, you start seeing things in silhouette without detail. This isn't physically accurate fog rendering, but it's decent enough when also combined with the skybox shading. Better looking fog shaders can make more physically accurate fog, but they can still use the fog settings to work out its intended density (if not, a new set of weather-defined variables will be needed, in which case these ones won't make a difference when such shaders are enabled).
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Distant Terrain settings in Launcher

Post by AnyOldName3 »

If we have a long-term super-brilliant fog shader, I'd expect it to be controlled by uniforms at runtime with those uniforms relying only on weather type records in the game data (e.g. lowAltitudeFogDistance and other things we don't have yet). While we have the current system, I don't like the idea of putting things in place for a completely hypothetical system which may never rely on them.
Chris
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Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Distant Terrain settings in Launcher

Post by Chris »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 12 Feb 2018, 00:39 While we have the current system, I don't like the idea of putting things in place for a completely hypothetical system which may never rely on them.
The PR doesn't. It provides options for the distant fog added by the PR, which works better with distant terrain. A hypothetical physically-accurate shader will either be able to piggyback on them, or need new settings.
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