✔️ FIXED BUG: Contrails of Civilian Planes

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Krishty
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✔️ FIXED BUG: Contrails of Civilian Planes

Post by Krishty »

Civilian planes use an outdated, buggy contrail system. Problems include:
  1. Different visuals
  2. Graphics errors when overlapping
  3. Destroying a plane also destroys its contrails
The outdated system must go and the new contrail system must be established globally.
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Krishty
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Re: 🔴 OPEN BUG: Contrails of Civilian Planes

Post by Krishty »

This is mostly complete in my development branch. There is definitely a performance hit, but I can still render hundreds of contrails concurrently. This should *vastly* improve with a new renderer, when most of the particle generation is offloaded from the CPU to the GPU (via geometry shader).

2023-09-18 real-time contrails.png
2023-09-18 real-time contrails.png (2.89 MiB) Viewed 727 times

(Note that every plane in the screenshot has four contrails)


There is still a problem left with the intensity of the contrails. It seems like the intensity reduces drastically when I take control over a plane. This could be a problem with either the vapor density computation in the engine (different paths for partly vs. full simulation) or a graphics glitch.

It also looks like contrails suddenly become more intensive when their are transferred from dynamic rendering to static rendering. Not sure if I want to tackle this now, as a new renderer will replace all of that anyway … but it’s a very ugly thing that everyone will notice immediately.
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Krishty
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Re: 🔴 OPEN BUG: Contrails of Civilian Planes

Post by Krishty »

The current build comes with three separate plane type generating three different types of dynamic contrails.

If you shoot the plane, the contrails do not immediately vanish. Instead, they fade properly.

While the dynamic contrails work okay-ish with the F-22, the intensity for airlines etc. seems way too high. Like 100× too high. It hurts your eyes.

Even the F-22 contrails have a coverage bug where you can see the static contrail version pop up a few hundred meters behind the plane, although not as catastrophic as airliners.

I still need to investigate this before I can close this issue.
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Krishty
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Re: ✔️ FIXED BUG: Contrails of Civilian Planes

Post by Krishty »

This continues to confuse me.

Through some magic numbers, I was able to fix the contrails for all civilian aircraft as well as for the KC-135. I don’t know how and why – the GPU seems to love the factor 2.0 for some reason.

But now the F-22 contrails fade out too fast in one-second intervals.

I refuse to debug this any further because the renderer needs a rewrite anyway, but I must admit that something may be very, very broken in the contrail logic.

With the latest revision, it’s good enough until I rewrite the renderer, so this issue is now marked fixed. With a very bad feeling.
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