The current work on Pure (Patreon)

I'm proud to present you a new way of drawing clouds in the sky!
The current state of Pure 0.75 has already a nice color composition and more ways to have good tonemapping. It already has various solutions for old AC problems, like Autoexposure and the way weather is created. It is also way more advanced than Sol code-wise.

But the current 3d clouds are lacking quality, if the are generated to use less gpu/cpu consumption. Many people wish a port of the 2d clouds from Sol to Pure.

I will not do this! Sol's 2d clouds also stressing the system. There is another method, which will bring much better skies, but causing nearly no additional consumption of GPU and CPU.

The next Pure puplic development preview will feature 360° skydome. This are very high resolution skydome pictures, projected at the sky shader's dome.

They only taking space in the VRAM, but with the usage of DDS files in Nvidia's BC7 format, a 16k (16384x4096pixel) file will only cost 64 MB of VRAM. Also with BC7, which was introduced in CSP 1.76, the loading into the VRAM is extremly fast, because its made by the GPU not by the CPU. So such a 16k BC7 picture loads into VRAM in parts of a second, while a BC5 picture takes over 5 seconds.

But on the other side, you wouldn't notice this loading time, because this is done in the asynchronous thread, so AC will not notice it and so there is no frame flow influence.

Those skydome picture has some disadvantages:
You will not see the sun, because its a picture infront of it. Maybe i can solve this in the future, by editing the skydomes and making the plain sky parts transparent.
Another one is, that they are static. They just rotate with the sun.

But after some tests, those disadvantages are minor in comparison to the much nicer look of those real skies.

I also added a new shadow mode for these 2d clouds. A very simple 3d clouds layer draws some shadows on the ground. You don't see those clouds,  only their shadows! This will give you a great immersion, having the nice real sky domes and fake 3d clouds shadows.

We are currently working on an unloading of textures from the VRAM after usage. This will give people with all kinds of graphics card the ability to use very high resolution sky texture, even if they have limited VRAM. It then needs at maximum just 128 MB of additional VRAM.

I think this clouds render method will have a boost for all people, esp. in VR.

Last but not least:
The new method is already build to give modders the ability the create their own skydome sets. Pure will have a default set and maybe an advanced set with much more texture. Those sets are managed via an individual script per set. Sets are selectable in the Pure Config app. I hope this will open a whole new catagory of graphics mods with AC!

best regards

Peter