Cloud cover

I'd be intersested to hear the answer to this one. Had forgotten that Frontier had cloud cover. It would add a really good sense of distance when approaching the surface. Also would tell you if you're coming in too fast lol

Yea, I would love to see clouds appear and super dense atmospheres for planets like Gas Giants and Venus-alikes at some point too, as well as both a blue shifted (if your looking forward) and red shifted (if looking back) hyperspace effect during a jump. The original game has this too. Things are always improving though with every alpha and I actually love looking forward to see what going to be in the next alpha. You cant fault the dedication of it's contributors 😎

Speaking of which, isn't a new alpha due out soon?

Yes, clouds are in our plans for making planets look pretty, along with magic atmosphere, ground textures and all manner of things. I can't guess when or what will happen, but it is being actively worked on.

Geraldine, Pioneer alpha releases happen on the second Friday of every month. Alpha 19 is due on 10 Feb 🙂

Feb 10th, check! Thanks for that update Robn, I have put it into my diary 😉

Wow! Clouds and atmospheric effects are very high on my "Pioneer wish list". I think it will greatly enhance the feeling of being on the surface of a planet! Hopefully we'll be seeing blue skies without stars (except for the sun) during daytime on planets like Earth as well. I'm really looking forward to that update but take your sweet time, guys. This will be epic! 😎

If I am not wrong on earth you should be able to see blue skies without stars at daytime if shaders and HDR are turned on. It was a great visual improvement.

Greetings

I just checked and you're right! It's been a while since I played Pioneer with HDR enabled. It looks a lot better now. It's still a bit dark on Earth at daytime and I can still see stars but all in all it's a great improvement. After I left Earth, I visited a planet in Kapteyn's Star sector. It had a nice orange sky. I need to spend more time with this game again 😀 .

By the way, my joystick still makes the ship wobble like crazy when I have timecompression enabled. Also, everytime I start the game, I need to press ESC and click the pitch, yaw and roll buttons to calibrate my joystick. The game doesn't seem to remember these settings. Whenever I take off from a planet after a fresh start of the game, the ship is hopelessly uncontrollable until I reset the axis. This is not a big problem as it only takes 5 seconds or so to calibrate, but the timeacceleration problem remains, even after the resetting of the axis. Right now, I can only pilot a ship in realtime or with autopilot enabled or with keyboard instead of joystick. 2x Compression is doable with joystick control but higher than that and I start spinning around. Any tips? Do I have to manually enable the deadzone support or something? I use the latest Robn build.

EDIT

Sorry for being offtopic, by the way. I was under the impression I was in the "ask questions thread"

Answered in that thread 😉

It would be really nice if they were big thick clouds like in frontier and not a thin (almost virtual) plane of "flat" clouds.

yeah the clouds do not have to be very high spec like in flight simulator or any recent air combat sim. Even in frontier they look well.

Unless you want them to cast shadows or let you see the ground in a haze. Yes, they don't have to be, but you lot won't stop asking until they look perfect 😉

Don't worry, clouds are coming. I don't know when, but they're coming 🙂

aaah, i miss clouds!

😆 😆 I had to laugh at this robn. Not only is it funny, but so true as well 😆 😆 ................ 😳

Yaaay! 😀

The solid lumpy clouds did look well in Frontier, but that's because their simplistic look matched that of the rest of the game. Since we're going for photorealism, we'd have to do something a bit more sophisticated. Modeling of good-looking clouds is apparently insanely difficult to do in real time, but maybe we can pull off one of the simpler ideas in here.

😯 Um ...... care to elaborate on that point and yes looked at those stunning cloud scapes in your link. Even the most basic shot in that gallery would be very pleasant indeed! 🙂

I looked the link also and I approve the quote 🙂

looks like I opened a pandora box lol, I had no idea some people where hoping for this.

Heck yeah, I was hoping for this. Good to read it was actually being planned by Robn and the gang. If it will look half as nice as FSX's beautiful default clouds (multiple layers at different altitudes, stratus, cirrus, etc.) I'll become a Pioneer addict. Oh well, I have a slight Pioneer addiction already...

Oh clouds have been something we've planeed since day one its been mentioned many times but probably about up to a year ago. But these things don't get written by themselves 😉

Hi all !

I have come back to pioneer after some time (years, actually) and am impressed what has been done so far. The lack of a cloud layer, however, was the first thing that caught my eye and earth simply doesnt look "right" without those clouds imho. So has there been some progress/thoughts/ideas/whatever towards this goal ?

Yes there has as discussed on another forum/thread however as noted it is difficult.

You can do a simple, global cloud coverage which won't look quite right but might be good enough, however it will be 2D.

Doing psuedo-3D clouds is tricky but possible, and doing fully 3D volumetric clouds would also be possible.

However each of those is difficult and because of the way that we can go from space->surface it makes it even harder.

I just need to find a whole lot of time, and ability, to get it done.

Yep it's a tricky one, but I have faith clouds will one day be in Pioneer and in my experience, I have sometimes found,....faith manages.

Thanks for the fast response. For me, the 2D solution would be OK - what I miss most is the look of the couds on earth-like planets seen from space.  Until there is a real procedural solution, this would be fine. I guess this mentioned simple cloud coverage (fro the cloud-sphere branch) cannot simply be copied over to my recent pioneer install here on my computer ?

No it was just a cloud coverage texture that I applied to another sphere within the atmosphere. It's not something Pioneer would work with right now.

It will happen, eventually 🙂