Cloud rendering issue(s)

[Semor76]

Maybe someone with a better technical knowlege can help me here.

 

This is how my clouds are now looking ingame. I still have no clue whats caused this rendering issues or since I have this. Didn´t play IL-2 much these days.

 

My specs are in my sig

Radeon settings to default

No mods on for the moment

Driver up to date

Ingame settings as in the screenshot

 

Any help would be appreciated

 

 

 

 

[RedKestrel]

Saw your post in the other topic.

To me this looks like clouds set on Low. When I have mine set on High and my preset set on High, they look quite ab it better than this. Could you check your config file and see what it says there? Maybe your changes aren't 'sticking' and the game is actually setting the clouds to Low?

[JG300_Egon]

Seems normal in high setting...

 

Try clouds quality : Extreme

[Semor76]

Thanks for the help guys.

 

7 minutes ago, F/JG300_Egon said:

Seems normal in high setting...

 

Try clouds quality : Extreme

 Yup. Here. I think it looks even worse.

 

Maybe for comparison reasons:  Red Tide campaign, mission 01, this is where I did the screenshots.  Do the same and post your result here please.

 

 

19 minutes ago, RedKestrel said:

Saw your post in the other topic.

To me this looks like clouds set on Low. When I have mine set on High and my preset set on High, they look quite ab it better than this. Could you check your config file and see what it says there? Maybe your changes aren't 'sticking' and the game is actually setting the clouds to Low?

Good tip. My config was still from 2017 despite numerous reinstalls over the time.

 

The game runs better now...? but the clouds still looks ugly as hell.

[RedKestrel]

26 minutes ago, Semor76 said:

Thanks for the help guys.

 

 Yup. Here. I think it looks even worse.

 

Maybe for comparison reasons:  Red Tide campaign, mission 01, this is where I did the screenshots.  Do the same and post your result here please.

 

 

Good tip. My config was still from 2017 despite numerous reinstalls over the time.

 

The game runs better now...? but the clouds still looks ugly as hell.

Just throwing this out there...have you tried setting your clouds to Low to see if they look better, since going to Extreme makes it look worse? 

I haven't tried extreme clouds yet but these look more like the clouds I see on Low or Medium, where I have had the clouds set lately. I had reduced them from High after BoBP launch to keep performance up and they looked better than this IMO. 

 

[Semor76]

Oookay.

 

So I reinstalled the whole game in the last 2h. Still the same cloud issues..... what the heck is going on here??

 

I will reinstall the radeon drivers now.

 

Question: Have anybody else here the Radeon RX580 Nitro too?  Did you have the same problems? Can you please share the driver version number and your driver settings?

Edited December 20, 2019 by Semor76

[Semor76]

Update: The cloud rendering issues still remains. Even after a complete driver reinstall.

 

@Jason_Williams or any other from the staff, could it be possible that the new Radeon drivers or the Radeon Cards itself causes incompatibilities with how the games renders the clouds after the last update(s) ?

[Semor76]

7 hours ago, RedKestrel said:

Just throwing this out there...have you tried setting your clouds to Low to see if they look better, since going to Extreme makes it look worse? 

I haven't tried extreme clouds yet but these look more like the clouds I see on Low or Medium, where I have had the clouds set lately. I had reduced them from High after BoBP launch to keep performance up and they looked better than this IMO. 

 

Fun fact: I tried all three settings: low and med & high and I can´t see any difference!  That´s why I ask for other Radeon users here at the forums if they have similar issues since the last patches.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Semor76

[RedKestrel]

1 hour ago, Semor76 said:

Fun fact: I tryed all three, low and med & high and I can´t see any difference!  That´s why I ask for other Radeon users here at the forums if they have similar issues since the last patches.

This is some weird stuff man. I don’t know what to tell you. I have a Nvidia card so I have no idea about yours. I take it everything was fine before the patch?

 

[Semor76]

8 hours ago, RedKestrel said:

This is some weird stuff man. I don’t know what to tell you. I have a Nvidia card so I have no idea about yours. I take it everything was fine before the patch?

 

You say it! ? I have absolutely no clue what´s going on here.

But my Graphics card runs fine with every other game on my rig. So it must be something with the Patch/Driver/the way the game renders the clouds now.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Semor76

[HappyHaddock]

In part the following may only be meaningful to those who understand enough to not ask the question in the first place, and in part it doesn't really provide a solution to the original post anyway.

 

however...

 

The issue under discussion ( I assume you are referring to the slightly granular look of the clouds and not other aspects of their appearance?) relates to the noise function used to "distort" the basic cloud models. Without any noise the clouds are very "cubist" so you need something to break up the flat edges to make them look more natural. Presumably using a small number of large simple rectangular blocks distorted with noise is much less GPU demanding than accurately modelling complex organic shapes.

 

@LizLemon has been doing some experimental work to completely rewrite the appropriate parts of the shaders to give better results with a new noise function in the clouds but I'm not aware of him having released any mod for this yet so this query presumably relates to the devs standard cloud rendering rather than modded clouds. If you are sufficiently familiar with identifying  and editing in game cfg. files then you could change the various noise parameters in the offending sky.ini file to reduce the noise applied and spread it over a larger area as this would reduce the appearance of the granulation. However I can say from experience that finding the "Goldilocks" settings that are not too much and not too little takes a lot of effort and can lead to having to re-balance lots of others settings to achieve good looking clouds.

 

In terms of simple changes, as others have said using the lower resolution cloud settings will "blur" things out but does introduce a lot of other technical  issues people have complained endlessly about and which some say make the game unplayable for them. I personally find that the "high" cloud setting is the best balance between aesthetics and addressing  technical limitations.

 

After the introduction of the recent "extreme" cloud setting I've spent a fair while trying to get to grips with exactly what this is doing as it doesn't seem to fit in the same sequence as the other "low" to "high" cloud settings as it seems to act differently. It very aggressively addresses the technical issues that others have endlessly complained about, so in that respect it is to be welcomed, but it is a very subjective decision as to whether it compromises the look of the clouds more than the technical issues it seeks to address. In part where I think the other settings apply a degree of blurring to soften the effects of lower resolution cloud models (where whole aircraft are smaller than individual pixels in the cloud mapping hence needing the noise function to further break things up at a level much finer than the underlying cloud model)   the extreme setting seems to force some type of sharpening which fights with attempts to blur out the otherwise blocky nature of the clouds... In truth there's probably a very clever bit of coding been done which the programmer in question will get no acknowledgment for because nobody gets to see the actual coding, but without knowing exactly what this setting is doing it is proving very challenging to keep all it's many benefits whilst still modding other settings to bring back some of the aesthetic benefits of the lower cloud settings.

 

As to whether the original post is  related to recent driver changes or game updates I would not be so sure, I have always run an Nvida card and have seen the same issues for as long as I can remember. I think what is most likely is that the stock game includes many different sky.ini files and it is possible to spend quite some time with this sim  without ever encountering all of them (unless, like me  you spend all your time dismantling the cloud system to heavily mod it) . It could simply be that the OP is encountering this particular sky.ini file for the first time and that this particular sky.ini files happens to have a more aggressive noise profile than any of the others previously encountered.

 

I might suggest that you try a few dozen different missions through the Quick mission generator (which randomly selects between the games different sky.ini files, whereas scripted missions always draw upon the one file chosen by the person who wrote the mission )  and see if they all show the same problem. If the problem shows up under every circumstance you can be sure that the issue relates to broader issue with handling noise functions in the clouds. If it only shows up sporadically you can be sure it is to do with individual noise settings within particular sky.ini files and not the broader game engine itself.

 

Cheers

HH

 

 

[Elem]

@Semor76 I'm pretty sure it's not your drivers. You'll see I have a similar AMD GPU and we will use the same drivers. I keep mine updated and they have never made any noticeable difference to the clouds. You keep pointing out your Radeon settings are default and I asked you to check the AA settings, please check to see that the AA is Application controlled, NOT GPU controlled. This is what caused my problem a few weeks ago.

[Semor76]

@Elem Well that is the weird thing here,  the AA is Application controlled. I´m 100% sure. I´ve doubble, tripple checked this last evening and even now. No matter which ingame setting I use, or which driver settings I have (even to turn everything off). The look of the clouds stay more or less the same.

 

Even if I roll back my drivers to the ones from November takes no effect. The last possibility would be my graphics card itself. But the Card runs fine with all my other games.

 

This is crazy....

 

Again. I know I repeat my self: But to isolate the issuse. Please, if somebody here has the same RX580 Card. Post a screenshot of your Radeon settings and how your clouds looks ingame. (Plane on the ground,Cloudy situation.)

 

 

 

2 hours ago, HappyHaddock said:

I

 

I might suggest that you try a few dozen different missions through the Quick mission generator (which randomly selects between the games different sky.ini files, whereas scripted missions always draw upon the one file chosen by the person who wrote the mission )  and see if they all show the same problem. If the problem shows up under every circumstance you can be sure that the issue relates to broader issue with handling noise functions in the clouds. If it only shows up sporadically you can be sure it is to do with individual noise settings within particular sky.ini files and not the broader game engine itself.

 

Cheers

HH

 

 

Thanks. I will try this.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Semor76

[Semor76]

@HappyHaddock mate, I think you´re right and I was a victim of these sky.ini files with it´s aggressive noise profiles.

 

I did a couple of tests in the quick missions builder with various cloud settings on various maps and seasons. Some of the mission generates this ugly clouds, some not.

But I can´t tell you the numbers. It seems more or less random how the QMB choose this specific sky.ini files.

 

I also spend some time in the screenshot section and watched the ingame shots from other users. I would say that roughly each 4rd to 5th screenshot who was taken with clouds in the background shows the same problems that I have.

 

Here are 2 of my fresh ingame shots with an average cloud setting on the Stalingrad winter map. Looks quite normal.

 

Edited December 20, 2019 by Semor76

[RedKestrel]

10 minutes ago, Semor76 said:

@HappyHaddock mate, I think you´re right and I was a victim of these sky.ini files with it´s aggressive noise profiles.

 

I did a couple of tests in the quick missions builder with various cloud settings on various maps and seasons. Some of the mission generates this ugly clouds, some not.

But I can´t tell you the numbers. It seems more or less random how the QMB choose this specific sky.ini files.

 

I also spend some time in the screenshot section and watched the ingame shots from other users. I would say that roughly each 4rd to 5th screenshot who was taken with clouds in the background shows the same problems that I have.

 

Here are 2 of my fresh ingame shots with an average cloud setting on the Stalingrad winter map. Looks quite normal.

 

I'm glad you found the issue! And it was just as weird as we expected it to be I guess. I didn't even know the sky.ini files existed!

[HappyHaddock]

20 minutes ago, Semor76 said:

@HappyHaddock mate, I think you´re right and I was a victim of these sky.ini files with it´s aggressive noise profiles.

 

I did a couple of tests in the quick missions builder with various cloud settings on various maps and seasons. Some of the mission generates this ugly clouds, some not.

But I can´t tell you the numbers. It seems more or less random how the QMB choose this specific sky.ini files.

 

I also spend some time in the screenshot section and watched the ingame shots from other users. I would say that roughly each 4rd to 5th screenshot who was taken with clouds in the background shows the same problems that I have.

 

Here are 2 of my fresh ingame shots with an average cloud setting on the Stalingrad winter map. Looks quite normal.

 

 

 

 

The Quick mission generator does choose sky.ini files at random which is why I suggested it would be an easy way to distinguish between a wide ranging problem with the way noise was handled  and specific cases of certain files with problematic noise profiles.

 

For the last year or more I've been chipping away at a WIP ambitious project to overhaul the look of the natural world in IL-2, it is a fair way from there being anything others can download but there are many aspects about the look of the clouds I'm working on improving. You may or may not have seen my thread about this work in the mods section of this forum?

 

 

[Semor76]

@HappyHaddock I follow your thread from the first day ?

 

31 minutes ago, RedKestrel said:

I'm glad you found the issue! And it was just as weird as we expected it to be I guess. I didn't even know the sky.ini files existed!

Nahh, Kudos to our cloud Wizzard. But be aware, If you have bad luck this can happen to you aswell. This is how software works, we´re living in a WIP world ?