Volumetric clouds changing shape?

[metalcraze 290]

I dunno man. Sprite clouds look terrible when flying through them - at some point they stop changing size and simply fly past you rotating with you as you go. They are also not lit properly (each sprite being lit separately looks messy). Plus they really kill performance during overcast conditions due to sprite amounts.

These ones definitely seem faster while also allowing for some properly overcast skies due to richer detail.

BTW it's possible to have really overcast sky with sprite clouds in ArmA2. Just drop 20 3D clouds modules. But that performance drop... oh man

[EricM 0]

Clouds look great in Take On : the way they look, group, react to the light etc... but it's true that in some conditions they do rotate a bit, especially on the most extreme sides of the screen or when turning your the view a lot.

Though in all fairness it's great and rather stable most of the time, and clouds are "alive" in real life as well and can change shape due to the wind, so it's not like it's totally stupid to witness this (only a bit extreme).

I'll take that any day over any other solution I've seen to date in any other game or flight sim so far.

[Smurf 12]

When those volumetric thingies begin to reflect rl behaviour, like seen in some NVIDIA tech demos, clouds reacting to aircraft turbulence, or proper smoke simulation on the ground where e.g. rotor downwash should blow away any smoke particles beneath it - then we can toss volumetric all day :D

Tech demos? I play with them every day!

It's just cosmetic (otherwise you disperse a smoke screen just flying above it) but its nice enough.

@Clouds: It could be more or lesse the same thing that happens with shadows that are cast from objects behind the player?

[tremanarch 6]

it still like the new clouds more than the old ones

[Red_Ninja 10]

Yup the clouds look great! And like people have been saying, they may not be noticeable when actually playing the game.

On a related note: Is this same technology going to be used for smoke screens, or even fire smoke? If so it would look great! but wondering how this issue will then effect game play.

eg. there's a smoke screen in front of you and you cant see the enemy. The trick would be to just look left and right, until a 'gap' appears and you can see through. Bring crosshair back to that point and open fire. :butbut:

[liquidpinky 11]

Yup the clouds look great! And like people have been saying, they may not be noticeable when actually playing the game.

On a related note: Is this same technology going to be used for smoke screens, or even fire smoke? If so it would look great! but wondering how this issue will then effect game play.

eg. there's a smoke screen in front of you and you cant see the enemy. The trick would be to just look left and right, until a 'gap' appears and you can see through. Bring crosshair back to that point and open fire. :butbut:

In first person the clouds are very realistic and immersive once in them, looking side to side isn't going to help. In fact possibly won't even work in third depending who large the cloud is.

For anyone not playing ToH I stress, these clouds are worth it.

[antoineflemming 14]

It's been like this since TOH where they first implemented them. I hope they fix them in a timely manner and shove a patch in TOH's direction.

I know this is some days old, but I haven't been active on the forums in a good bit. Thing is, it's not just the SimulWeather cloud system (third party cloud system that BIS uses in TOH and ArmA3) that does this. Remember the NIM Weather system from ArmA2? Well, those volumetric clouds do the same thing, just they are a whole lot less noticeable.

Edited February 19, 2013 by antoineflemming

[neodammerung 8]

I'm really sorry to dig a more-than-a-year-old thread and I don't know if it's better to create a new one as I have the exact same problem.

I tought they would get rid of the problem in alpha & beta but I can see it's still there in the final release.

For me it's really noticable in 1st person as I'm using a TrackIR, even more at night.

I tried with the latest AMD Catalyst 13.4 WHQL drivers then with 13.10 BETA drivers but it doesn't seem to change anything.

Any idea ? Trick that could help ?

I'm really disappointed by the numerous bugs I'm still having with despit the "final" release (along with flying tanks, flickering lights, IA walking trough walls, etc)...

Also here's my config :

[-=seany=- 5]

I agree it's very distracting. I hope there is some way they can fix it or make the effect less extreme. Probably the only negative of the excellent new environment.

[aoshi 1]

Solution don't use volumetric =(

[progamer 14]

I made sticker a while back for this cloud changing issue: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=13467 you can discuss the issue and post videos showcasing the problem for the developers to see.

---------- Post added at 21:02 ---------- Previous post was at 20:59 ----------

This ticket here is for clouds disappearing in a sphere shape as the player falls through or flys through them: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=13455

[neodammerung 8]

I've added a video :

Use 1080p & FullScreen

Dev Build : 1.03.110653

The problem is still there.

As you can see it's really distracting, but it's less noticable when zoomed in.

One question : Is the problem only for AMD/ATI Radeon owners or NVIDIA GTX owners have the same problem ?

[St. Jimmy 272]

I've added a video :

Use 1080p & FullScreen

Dev Build : 1.03.110653

The problem is still there.

As you can see it's really distracting, but it's less noticable when zoomed in.

One question : Is the problem only for AMD/ATI Radeon owners or NVIDIA GTX owners have the same problem ?

Has always been like that. Probably intended and saving some resources. I got GTX.

[neodammerung 8]

I really don't see how this annoying bug could be intended and save ressources...

Disabling clouds does but then why would I play ArmA3 instead of ArmA2 if it's not for better game graphics :confused:

[dunedain 48]

It's related to TrueSky. War Thunder uses the same technology and has the exact same issue. I don't think BiS can do anything about it...

[Dwarden 1125]

it's issue of middleware, something with FOV, rendered objects and such ...

definitely one of isses we and Simulweather and War Thunder devs want gone ;)

[gammadust 12]

i had noticed this early on too, it appears related to paralax, or differences on how it is accounted for in the case of clouds rendering and the rest of the scene. As if there was less precision in one case to another.

I suppose RV4 passes distance, direction and (fov or lens length) to the Truesky component, differences in the latter calculation (difference lens properties) could lead to such discrepancy.

Edit: i did a lot of panorama stitching, and a thing i remember is that the wider the lens the more compressed would be the pixel resolution/(per spacial angle) at the borders of the frame the further away from lens center it got. If for any reason one had used different lens lengths one would get noticeable resolution differences at the seams.

Follow this for an example, notice how the fov/lens length stay the same but the plane of projection is different.

Edited October 2, 2013 by gammadust
Linking correction

[vlad_8011 10]

Si i'm not the only one who noticed this, and cant enjoy gameplay beacuse of it. I've got it since begun, since first play arma 3 - year ago - and i was hoping its some bug after ALPHA version, that remain not long. Today, in 2015 its still present. Is this so hard to implement back Arma 2 coulds as optional? I heared that they ere in Arma 3 Alpha, they are in PiP, so somehow they are in game. It would be cool to see good, old, less CPU eating clouds from arma 2, after disabling volumetric cloud in game menu.

Ticket:
http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=25005

[KoalaDSK 122]

Hi guys,

yesterday I got in contact with Roderick Kennedy (roderick@simul.co.uk). He is a developer of TrueSky.
I asked him, if the shape changing clouds are a general issue of TrueSky.

He replied with:

"Thanks very much for your message.

In the latest version of trueSKY, this issue is fixed, due to our new rendering approach.

Best,
Roderick"

It seems, it was a general problem of TrueSky, that could be fixed.

Dear developers of ARMA 3, is this a big deal to upgrade to the latest version of TrueSky?

I really hope, you answer.

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=13467

[Vasily.B 529]

I really hope they will fix it, really, beacuse it must be fixed does it?

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

Yeah, the clouds used to look amazing in Alpha, (despite the turning), but i heard from Koala, they fixed it in the recent update, which is amazing. Hopefully this update to TrueSKY can be applied to Arma aswell.

[honey hole white 1]

Glad to read this .. I thought it was just me

[Vasily.B 529]

Dear devs, please update TrueSky plugin, all games using this "feature" havent this problem since months.

[KoalaDSK 122]

Dear devs, please update TrueSky plugin, all games using this "feature" havent this problem since months.

I got in contact with some guys of the ARMA 3 development team a week ago and talked about that cloud shape issues.

I asked why they don't just upgrade the TrueSky plugin?

It seems that it is not as easy as we think.

This (TrueSky) seems to be one of those core features of ARMA 3 and an update might crash or damage the whole game.

An upgrade would be like a surgery on an open heart.

Unfortunately it seems we have to live with those ugly cloud shaping issues until the developers of ARMA 3 find their own solution.

[St. Jimmy 272]

I remember hearing something in the lines that it maybe would've been better to make own system than using 3rd party software. The TrueSky wasn't easy thing to implement in Arma. They might have learned the lesson because DayZ will also use them so it's interesting to see how that goes. Could face the same issues or things will work better there.