Permanent cloud layer over night side in trunk

[Lestradae]

Not sure if this is a bug or somehow intended behaviour or if an oxp does it ...

But now I have installed Povray Planets instead of System Redux - and observe the same phenomenon with trunk rev5520 - the night side of planets is always completely covered in clouds, only the side directly in full sunlight can be seen.

Is this a known issue of trunk or some oxp or oxp combination? Or can I reduce cloud cover somehow?

[cim]

There was a bug in 1.76 where if the planet was textured, the atmosphere generator wasn't seeded properly, and all the clouds ended up in a single starfish-like blob. That was fixed relatively recently in trunk.

Where the planet textures already include clouds (or are entirely clouds - a gas giant, or a Venusian world), this gives some odd effects, and the new cloud_alpha property in planetinfo.plist can be used to fade out the atmosphere layer.

What shouldn't be happening is the clouds all clustering on the night side (well, it could happen on occasion just through random chance, but it shouldn't generally be happening). I'll take a closer look when I get a moment.

[Diziet Sma]

But now I have installed Povray Planets instead of System Redux - and observe the same phenomenon with trunk rev5520 - the night side of planets is always completely covered in clouds, only the side directly in full sunlight can be seen.

Umm.. shouldn't you update to r5545 first, and check if it's still happening?

[cim]

Looking at this a bit more closely, it's not that the clouds aren't on the sunny side, but that they're much harder to see when they're on the sunny side.

[Lestradae]

Looking at this a bit more closely, it's not that the clouds aren't on the sunny side, but that they're much harder to see when they're on the sunny side.

Does this mean the cloud bug still resides in the newest revision of trunk, and is just not very visible in bright sunlight?

[cim]

Looking at this a bit more closely, it's not that the clouds aren't on the sunny side, but that they're much harder to see when they're on the sunny side.

Does this mean the cloud bug still resides in the newest revision of trunk, and is just not very visible in bright sunlight?

No. The clouds are (on average - the planet rotates, after all!) just as dense on both sides, and correctly laid out.

Looking at the code, this is because lighting is disabled for the cloud layer - so they're effectively more brightly lit than the surface on the dark side, and less brightly lit than the surface on the light side.

[Eric Walch]

Does this mean the cloud bug still resides in the newest revision of trunk, and is just not very visible in bright sunlight?

There was never a cloud bug in trunk. The only thing in trunk was that the cloud layer was never implemented for the new planets. Something is only a bug when it does unwanted things and not when it is just unfinished. The past few months the unfinished cloud layer was just disabled in trunk, so you did not see the problem, or any clouds.

And clouds still don't not work for the new planets. But, since a few weeks, trunk is compiled again with the old planets (the planets used in 1.76). In the shader planet branch, the clouds look perfect and can use shaders. This part is still far from finished though.

[ZygoUgo]

Any news on shady planets branch?