Potential improvements for sky colors

[Alvega 2,125]

39 minutes ago, Drunq said:

 

 

For all those who just downloaded v1.2.0, please update to v1.2.1. Just noticed there was a performance regression with that update that may cause increase in CPU usage for no good reason 😔.

Can we keep the same ini file and just replace the other two?

[Drunq 98]

4 minutes ago, Alvega said:

Can we keep the same ini file and just replace the other two?

Yes, only the .asi has changed.

[Alvega 2,125]

1 minute ago, Drunq said:

Yes, only the .asi has changed.

Thanks.

[Alvega 2,125]

11 minutes ago, Drunq said:

Yes, only the .asi has changed.

Is it ok to have something like this in the ini so it's easier to change between them inside the sim instead of having to type the numbers?

[COEFFICIENTS]
RED = 0.002723
GREEN = 0.001831
BLUE = -0.000083096

;RED = 0.00508
;GREEN = 0.00318
;BLUE = 0.0

 

Edited October 13, 2023 by Alvega

[Drunq 98]

9 minutes ago, Alvega said:

Is it ok to have something like this in the ini so it's easier to change between them inside the sim instead of having to type the numbers?

[COEFFICIENTS]
RED = 0.002723
GREEN = 0.001831
BLUE = -0.000083096

;RED = 0.00508
;GREEN = 0.00318
;BLUE = 0.0

 

Yes, anything after the `;` character is interpreted as comments and ignored. 

[turbomax 3,304]

2 hours ago, Biology said:

and the wishlist description says "Work is progressing. Looking good for SU_14."

TurboMax said:

"I am confident the sliders are already finished at Asobo's  internal version for the next update. "

Martial humming: "C'est Si Bon"

 

Edited October 13, 2023 by turbomax

[Krakin 5,840]

@Biology I'm guessing you heard Seb's comments about atmospherics being completely rewritten for 2024. What do you think we can expect to see when 2024 launches?

[turbomax 3,304]

34 minutes ago, Krakin said:

What do you think we can expect to see when 2024 launches?

Seb in last Q&A: "a completely revamped graphics engine"

Edited October 13, 2023 by turbomax

[Bond 128]

GPU will make calculations in real time....

[Biology 1,347]

9 hours ago, Krakin said:

@Biology I'm guessing you heard Seb's comments about atmospherics being completely rewritten for 2024. What do you think we can expect to see when 2024 launches?

They will be completely ditching Bruneton's method for Hillaire's method or something similar, so instead of pre-calculating the atmospheric scattering integrals into a lookup table, they will calculate them in real time. This means they no longer will have to deal with the precision issues near the horizon which is what caused the horizon line issue, so it will be gone for good. Another advantage is that Hillaire's method is significantly better at estimating multiple scattering, so the luminance during sunset / sunrise will be much more accurate. Lastly, they talked about an "all new color engine". Given the context of it was that they are going to do more than simply rendering in RGB with more accurate coefficients, it could mean only one thing - ditching RGB rendering altogether and going for full spectral rendering, which means the colors will be even more accurate than what can be achieved with ARPC coefficients.

Edited October 13, 2023 by Biology

[Redge 245]

Hi @Biology When comparing the two methods the other day, you wrote this:

On 10/11/2023 at 2:22 PM, Biology said:

they have distinct advantages and disadvantages. For instance Bruneton's method gives you a full LUT for the scattering and transmittance integrals, so you can easily take the the effect of the clouds into the atmosphere into account, which is the case in MSFS. You can see how the aerial perspective / haze on the ground disappears when there is cloud coverage and how the clouds cast light shafts into the sky in MSFS, neither of which are simulated in XP12. It's because it's much harder to implement these effects accurately with Hillaire's method as it doesn't pre-calculate a LUT for the scattering and transmittance integrals but renders a low resolution sky each frame.

By moving away from Bruneton's method, does this mean that it will be harder for them to render the light shafts in the sky? Or are there other potential ways they could retain some of their spectacular atmospheric effects?

 

 

 

Edited October 13, 2023 by Redge

[Biology 1,347]

55 minutes ago, Redge said:

Hi @Biology When comparing the two methods the other day, you wrote this:

By moving away from Bruneton's method, does this mean that it will be harder for them to render the light shafts in the sky? Or are there other potential ways they could retain some of their spectacular atmospheric effects?

 

 

 

Hi, this is indeed my concern. Hillaire's method assumes that the sky is rather uniform and lacks high-frequency components which is how it can get away with rendering everything at real time at a lower resolution. But it is only true for a clear sky and not a sky with clouds. Thankfully there are potential workarounds for it, like falling back to raymarching for such atmospheric effects, which is why I decided to say "Hillaire's method or something similar" instead of just Hillaire's method as it's hard to know exactly what they're planning without more information - even though it's not straightforward, it's possible that Asobo, who are really skilled in computer graphics, already found a workaround for it or maybe even developed their own Hillaire-like method. But it's also possible that they are going to use Hillaire's method as is and think that compromising some atmospheric effects is worth fixing the horizon line issue and having more accurate multiple scattering, only time will tell.

Directly quoting Hillaire's paper:

"An important visual effect to reproduce is volumetric shadowing, for example from mountains onto the atmosphere. It is not possible to use epipolar sampling because the atmosphere is not a homogeneous medium. And it is also not possible to use a shadow volume approach from Bruneton et al. because our LUTs do not allow that kind of integral sampling over view ray paths in the atmosphere."

As Hillaire's method doesn't have a lookup table like in Bruneton's method to evaluate the atmospheric scattering integrals in any direction, they can't add the effects of other things like clouds or mountains to the sky in a straightforward way, but again this doesn't mean it's completely impossible. In fact Hillaire's paper itself mentions that it's possible to use raymarching and CSMs to achieve light shafts in real time and the results can be seen in Figure 14, but it doesn't go into much detail on how they implemented it.

Edited October 13, 2023 by Biology

[Redge 245]

Thanks again for a really detailed response. I must say that, personally, I'd happily live with the horizon line if it was the only way to retain the rest of the lovely atmospheric lighting and shadowing effects that we have now. But I typically fly in non-mountainous regions in the middle of the day, when the horizon effect would be minimised.

Also, I agree with you that Asobo are clearly very skilled when it comes to the graphics. Let's hope the've got a solution for this one already in place 😉 

Edited October 13, 2023 by Redge

[Krakin 5,840]

@Biology thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts! I gotta say tho, I highly doubt Asobo will want to let go of their god rays so their implementation will be very interesting to assess indeed 

[blueshark747 1,847]

The best settings are still MorThe2nd's values?