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Volumetric Clouds

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Volumetric Clouds

Postby merspieler » Wed Feb 17, 2021 6:31 pm

Someone posted links to this Open Source X-Plane addon for volumetric clouds a while back on irc.
These look amazing

... I don't know the advanced weather system at all and my render and shader knowledge is still very minimal.

What would it take to port this to flightgear?
Last edited by merspieler on Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Volumetric Clourds

Postby Hooray » Wed Feb 17, 2021 6:57 pm



For some added context, it's worth noting that X-Plane is multi-platform software and already uses OpenGL, too - so the corresponding shaders are indeed GLSL.

Also, the code is distributed as freeware under the LGPL: https://github.com/FarukEroglu2048/Enha ... er/LICENSE
However, the standalone shaders I found are rather trivial actually (under 50 lines of code apparently?)
Most of the meat seems to be inside the cpp sources and textures themselves.

Looking at the sources, they're already using mostly plain OpenGL/GLSL calls, so people interested in using those sources in FlightGear would first of all want to port those to use OSG instead, and add everything to a standalone osg example - at that point it will be much more straightforward to tell if/how this could be integrated into FlightGear.
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Re: Volumetric Clouds

Postby wlbragg » Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:23 pm

That does look compelling. I would really like to see it in contrast to X-Plane's default clouds however.
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Re: Volumetric Clouds

Postby Hooray » Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:31 pm

I guess this could be one of those things that could be added to a list for the next hackathon, so that we can grow a list of ideas over time
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Re: Volumetric Clouds

Postby icecode » Wed Feb 17, 2021 9:53 pm

Even if the shaders themselves are GLSL, shader code is extremely dependent on the rest of the program (uniforms, vertex attributes, render pipeline, etc). Having an open source implementation doesn't change much for FG, as there are plenty of implementations in webs like shadertoy and guides in game developer conferences and talks. The hard part is actually making it work seamlessly with the rest of FG (and its limitations).
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Re: Volumetric Clouds

Postby Hooray » Wed Feb 17, 2021 9:56 pm

right, but from a legal/coding standpoint the situation certainly is better than the usual MSFS/DirectX feature commonly suggested here :lol:
Besides, we've had dozens of topics on autogen-based procedural city generation using shaders (PixelCity), and there everything was using fixed function pipeline code - which would be more work to "port".
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