Hi VBH,
As you have already played with it:
Have you tried to see if those clouds actually behave as volumetric clouds?
Can an aircraft actually be seen to be flying infrontof / behind / inside the cloud or is it more like the terrain where buildings and aircraft show through mountain terrain.

I have trouble visualizing how volumetric clouds can be made to behave realistic without using Z Buffer for the rendering, as we don't have that capability within EAW.

The other obvious question when looking at them is ..... is there a transparency link available so we can make them less 'solid'.. ?...


cheers,



Pobs

Hello Allen,

thanks, i will have a look, for now i was fiddeling around with what EAW have to offer.















As you might see, this realy seems to eat fps, so i will have a look for other 3d clouds.

Greetings,

Knegel

Raised Smoke textures?

Maybe try adding more layers, using bigger textures to get more defined clouds, rather than our blodges of White and Grey

Hi Ralf,

I can not make it out clearly from your pictures.
When an aircraft flies into one of those clouds does it transition from full visible, and then slowly becomes invisible the further it progresses into the cloud?

Hi Peter,

yes, it do!

Like always the screenshots dont show how it looks in game.

In game it looks very nice, at least as good as the aces high clouds, though, they realy need to much PC performence for now.
Iam sure its possible to reduce this, somehow.

Greetings,

Knegel

Thanks Ralf,

So it must be made up of a huge cluster of individual sprites rather than an individual 3DZ.(or am I missing something?)
That probably explains why the huge loss in FPS.

A most interesting effect.

Most of the modern game make up their clouds using horizontal and vertical sprite plains. This way one uses much fewer sprites, but to get the volumetric effect with them, one requires the Z buffer.

Regards sydbod

EDIT: UGGGGGG!!!! after rereading your post ... it is a cluster of 3DZs rather than a cluster of sprites ..... that is even worse.

Nope, its sprites, the 3dz dont get loaded, i only use the already existing cloud position routines.

I can increase the size of the sprites, then it look much better, but strangewise the fps gets down even more, although i reduce the number of sprites much.
Looks like a big drawn sprite cause more trouble then many sprites.

This isn't strange Ralph, it's very easily explained.

Pixels are just a single spot in 3D space and a zoom calculation is used to calculate the size of each pixel to be displayed on your monitor depending on the viewdistance. Best display is when one pixel corresponds to one pixel on the monitor, which doesn't need a calculation. Add to this the alpha texture and things get a bit more complicated and more timeconsuming too.
I think that all these calculations in EAW are done by the software and not by hardware accelleration as this feature only came later and therefore isn't implemented in the game.
It shows why smokestacks are just as problematic, the longer and bigger the smoketrails/stacks the heavier the calculation. The same drop in FPS has been observed with hires in cockpit propellor views when they're drawn full screen, switching the cockpit off improves FPS by about 25% and that's just a single texture.

VonBeerhofen

Clouds like this?



http://www.markmark.net/clouds/RTCRImages.html