Atmospheric Rendering in DCS - a suggestion

[RhineHornet]

Hello all,

 

reading Wags' comment today in the update section

 

Today the team also started to set up the ground shading and sun lighting color parameters that we believe will start to give the world a much more natural look.

 

I thought it may be the time to mention that the atmospheric rendering currently in DCS should be improved. IMHO, most of the time the visual appearance of the atmospheric scattering and the lighting do not look very convincing.

 

A few years ago I discovered the amazing results of Eric Bruneton's work regarding atmospheric rendering in realtime simulations. The results can be viewed on their website http://proland.inrialpes.fr/index.html

 

From its documentation:

 

We present a new and accurate method to render the atmosphere in real time from any viewpoint from ground level to outer space, while taking Rayleigh and Mie multiple scattering into account. Our method reproduces many effects of the scattering of light, such as the daylight and twilight sky color and aerial perspective for all view and light directions, or the Earth and mountain shadows (light shafts) inside the atmosphere. Our method is based on a formulation of the light transport equation that is precomputable for all view points, view directions and sun directions. We show how to store this data compactly and propose a GPU compliant algorithm to precompute it in a few seconds. This precomputed data allows us to evaluate at runtime the light transport equation in constant time, without any sampling, while taking into account the ground for shadows and light shafts.

 

The good thing is, Eric Bruneton has made most of the code publicly available (minus some additional effects like light shafts from terrain or earth shadow).

So far, Vladimir Romanyuk, the creator of SpaceEngine has used this code with spectacular results, also Google Earth makes use of it since a few months!

 

As far as I can tell, the atmospheric rendering code of proland/Eric Bruneton is the best out there currently existing, it blows FSX and similar sims in that department out of the water.

 

So I am very much hoping, that Wags' comment is pointed to a new atmospheric rendering too. Perhaps they could license Bruneton's code for the beloved DCS and turn it into to most immersing flightsim ever produced, unless of course, the devs of ED have created something equally stunning or even better...

 

Thanks for looking!

Happy flying!

Edited October 29, 2013 by RhineHornet
typo

[OttoPus]

I don't think that using an intellectual property for commercial uses is that simple... beside that, it would be amazing to see this implemented in DCS.

[cichlidfan]

At this point, since EDGE is already built, we will just have to wait and see how it looks.