Atmospheric scattering, with terrain shader preview

[fredb]

Vidéo took from the ISS :
http://vimeo.com/32001208

[planetacancun]

Hey Thorsten, when you posted this code I tried it and it worked flawlessly, but now that I updated to the latest GIT version I had some serious "freezes", I'm upgrading as I speak right now to see if it works, but maybe it won't. I honestly liked this because it fixed some horizon issues I'm having, like a green band over it. I'll post some pictures later so you see. This code gave me a nice soft blend and I want it back man. Please fix it when u can! Pretty please? hehe. Bye.

[Thorsten]

I'm still out with hardware problems, so I can't fix anything at the moment.

I think the plan was that Emilian and Vivian take the terrain haze shader code and integrate it into their general shader reworking program. Being cut off from Flightgear since 6 weeks, I don't know the status of that, but unless I am told otherwise, I have no plans to develop that particular experimental code patch further or provide bug fixes for it. It may well be that the reworked shaders appearing on GIT are what causes the problems you observe.

[durk]

Quoting Vivian on the developers mailing list:

Emilian and I have just about finished this phase of shader development.
This includes:

1. Standardized fog calculations.

2. Unified lightmap, bumpmap and refection shaders - known as the
uber-shader

3. Enhanced water shader.

We have also adopted Gijs' rendering gui, which enables all shaders to be
controlled collectively or individually. There are no longer any
dependencies between shaders: Trees and 3d Clouds can be controlled
individually.

This doesn't sound like much - but almost every shader has had to be
modified. I will start to push this lot into Gitorious shortly. The process
is heavily interdependent, and there will be times when the shaders will be
broken: please bear with us.

On the upside you will get a better appearance, and might even see a slight
improvement in framerate:

http://flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 24#p143707


I hope you enjoy this. We still have further improvements in the pipeline.

This is an email from December 1st, and since then I've regularly seen updates. My impression is that not all changes have been committed yet.

*Please* note that git is a deveopers version. This means that in order to obtain a long term goal, things may be broken temporarily.

Cheers,
Durk

[Thorsten]

As an update: In recent discussions, we agreed that the terrain haze shader will not be put into the release process of 2.6 because it is a complicated beast and difficult to merge into the overall setup (since the feature freeze is now in place, we can't really put it in now till a 2.7 branch is created).

On the bright side, I have managed to rebase my private branch with recent GIT, so there is a working copy of the files for recent GIT, and I have also done some amount of additional tweaking. However, this branch doesn't seem to be working well with global weather and doesn't work with basically any other shader, thus it has to be kept in its own GIT branch. If there is interest, I will make the relevant files available now and then.

[planetacancun]

What I do like of your approach is the way the horizon looks, I have to post some clear examples of what I mean. If you repost your code for a latest GIT I would love to take a look at it. I don't want to bother no one's feelings but I think your shading looks better.

[Thorsten]

Here is a link to the most recent code which I've successfully run on GIT from yesterday.

Install most recent Local Weather for best effect.

Disclaimer: Run this in a separate branch, it breaks default stuff! Use no other shaders! Doesn't seem to run with Global Weather.