Some of the things I'd really like to sink my teeth into require tools and skills I don't posess.
1) The core of cloud generation. Assign fewer textures to smaller clouds. Do NOT make those gigantic, nearly invisible single-texture clouds. Better randomize things; often two or three adjacent clouds are clones. Try to make individual cloud bases flatter, if feasible without employing excessive numbers of textures.
- Rendering of ground haze, particularly for poor weather settings. Reduce the severity of change over small height change. Tone down the too-strong blue tint in a couple cases.
- Decoupling of high and low cloud illumination/color during twilight. Reduce the intensity of red near sunsrt/sunrise. High clouds remain brighter/whiter at given sun altitude. For big clouds, potentially grade texture color with height, giving less reddening for higher ones.
A very fundamental issue which might not be alterable is how the distant landscape and sky are handled as viewpoint moves up in altitude. The atmsphere is treated as becoming completely opaque at the same distance at all altitudes. The result at altitude is a severely depressed 'horizon line' where the ground disappears. If only even a very simple extension could be drawn out to the real horizon. Even after many years it's truly jarring to be surrounded by a modeled 'pea soup' atmosphere which makes it *appear* the Earth is more the size of an asteroid, with a horizon depressed by more than 10 degrees when at the tropopause.
Related to the foregoing is the way high clouds are mapped. They essentially are placed on a surface which bends down to the ground where it disappears into the murk. As you climb higher, this curvature becomes more visibly pronounced, it becoming a real dome. Along with the introduction of a 'true' horizon, the high clouds could be mapped to a much flarrer surface, and rendered when you're *above* them (as opposed to disappearing.) Doable within current engine limits?
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Topic: WxTech's Environmental Mods (Read 29806 times)
