[RELEASED] trueSKY Alpha for Unity Pro - Volumetric Skies, Clouds, and Time-of-Day

I have Windows 8.1, and for that the DirectX SDK is included in the Windows SDK. But I wasn't getting anywhere with that, for whatever reason, and couldn't figure out how to fix the problem. Then I downloaded the DirectX SDK from June 2010 and TrueSKY stopped coughing up errors.

I realize I'm not the most adept person at handling Windows OS stuff. Was this really the best way to go on this? And is this really needed?

 

Hi there! I'm interested in picking up a license when the OSX version comes out (I'm only on a mac). But I'm also debating rolling my own opacity shadow map rendering system for clouds and atmosphere (obviously TrueSky would probably be better than my own). I'm curious how TrueSky deals with multiple cameras. If i have several active rendering cameras all drawing multiple views on the same screen, can TrueSky be used on each one (perhaps even with reduced quality on smaller viewports)?

The world actually takes place from an aerial drone perspective, but has viewpoints on the ground too. I made an extremely large game-world through a new terrain system. volumetric clouds are a must.

 

I've had it running on 3 cameras with no major effect on fps. Plus rendered clouds on each camera matched each other.

 

Unfortunately, it's needed until MS stops supporting legacy DirectX altogether, then we can all move to the Win8 version. In the meantime, in the world of games, DX from 2010 is still the standard, and almost every game you buy ships with the DirectX 2010 installer!

 

Still getting the same errors as hopeful posted. Installed the directx sdk June 2010 on windows7.
Demo scene runs perfectly as does manually setting up Truesky. Error pops up when using the Initialize Truesky from menu or when trying to open any sequence. Running latest version.

 

Hi John, are you on the 32-bit or 64-bit editor? Having confirmed that the DLL is present, can you select it in the Unity Editor and send me a grab of what you get in the properties window? It should be set to the corresponding platform and CPU - i.e. x64 for the 64 bit version, x86 for the 32. Is that what you have?

 

Yeah, I'm not getting errors reported, but using the Initialize trueSKY in Scene option (in an empty scene) makes things a little scary, with portions of the editor display disappearing and so forth. Clicking "play" will get the editor to refresh, but all that shows up in the game window is blue sky gradiating to white ground. No clouds or anything.

I'm using Unity 5. When running the demo I get grid effects in the sky.

Running "Initialize trueSKY in Scene" when the demo assets are in the hierarchy changes the scene, but in a sane way, not a scary way. No blanking out of editor windows. Removing trueSKY from the demo scene also works, and when that is done re-initializing it will work.

So it seems like there's something in the demo scene that facilitates the initialization that is not present in the initialization itself.

EDIT: 64-bit

 

Hi hopeful, same question as for John - are you on 32 bit or 64 bit?

 

Hi Roderick hopefully screenshot has the info you need


http://i1248.photobucket.com/albums/hh492/Sim2Reality/Temp/TrueSky-Error_zpsndidvxiy.jpg~original

Was able to get rid of the msvcr110.dll error by copying the file from C:\Windows\SysWOW64 to C:\Windows\System32

But the : DllNotFoundException: Assets/Simul/Plugins/x86_64/TrueSkyUI_MD.dll remaing?

 

OK that's great, and can you unzip depends.zip and run the batch files in the depends folder?

 

Still no go, will mail you the logs (To big to attach here).

Also properties of the dll

 

Ok I think this needs vcredist - we added this for Unity 4 a while back but that was the 32-bit version. Can you run https://simul.co//wp-content/uploads/private/temp/vcredist_x64.exe. The clue is msvcr110.dll - I doubt just copying the file will do it. If this works for you I'll add the vcredist to the package.

But is the rendering working fine for you John?

 

Installed Vcredist_x64, now have the following:

Failed to load 'Assets/Simul/Plugins/x86_64/TrueSkyUI_MD.dll' with error '%1 is not a valid Win32 application.
', GetDllDirectory returned ''. If GetDllDirectory returned non empty path, check that you're using SetDirectoryDll correctly.
UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallDelayFunctions()

At least it sees it now

 

And this is definitely the 64-bit Editor? Are you on Unity 5 Beta, or the release version? Which version number?

 

Rendering is broken here on latest unity - basically any downsampling covers the level with blocky cloud textures (not just the sky). Also characters are partially eroded somehow when shown against the sky - as if there's some weird z buffer issues. This is from latest truesky on website today. I am running with alloy shaders, deferred, linear etc the full works. I turned off all post effects and the same issue persists. Please let me know if I can further assist in fixing these issues.

 

Thanks Rob, can you also let me know what Unity 5 version you're running? I have 5.0.0.b20 x64 for example.

 

Yessss got it working. Remembered that I had copied msvcr110.dll form C:\Windows\SysWOW64 to C:\Windows\System32 yesterday.
So went back and deleted the file then Re-installed Vcredist_x64, restarted Unity 5 and it now works.

Thanks for that Roderick

 

Awesome. I'll make sure vcredist is included in the package so it runs automatically if needed.

For future reference, this is only needed to enable the editor UI plugin - you won't need to deploy vcredist to your customers.

Is rendering working ok for you John?

 

5.0 p3 (ie should be up to date) - it's newer than b20 - 64 bit

Some things were fixed - I think the crash issues with sequencer have been fixed. Still can't use TrueSKY yet while the rendering issues persist

 

Rendering is working ok, have noticed similar to hippocoder that the clouds are rendering with a cube mesh look unless clouds are set full on cloud steps and downscale.
Also clicking on a sequence to change it to another brings up the Select Sequence panel, but its completely empty and Unity lock up - need to ctr-alt-del to close it down.


Running 5.0.0f4 Personal.

 

More info: just downloaded Unity 5.0.1 from the site just now, and redownloaded version trueSKYAlpha-Unity5-3.52.0.0007.unitypackage from simul.co.

Tested using the automated process which adds everything and sets everything up for me (Initialize trueSKY in Scene).


(click to enlarge) - In this simple test scene, we can see the sphere geometry is smashed out. it Gets more occluded upon distance. Sphere is near the ground and is 2 units square, using the default unity shader.

This also happens with the player but much worse. I've tried switching to gamma and everything else I can think of. Card is a bog standard 780 ti with latest drivers.

 

Hi Roderick,

Another calculations prob to look at. Did a bit of testing on the Sun and Moon regarding There size and something is not correct.
Resized the moon and sun by 100, so sun from 0.533 to 53.3 and Moon from 0.52 to 52 degrees and the moon appears to be much larger then the sun, where it should be just a touch smaller.



Will be getting quite a lot of solar eclipses with the moon being so much bigger
Also is it possible to adjust the hue of the sun, very white as is.

 

Can you try disabling the TrueSkyCamera script on your main camera and see what it does to the view? And disable TransparencyCamera also.

 

Another small one to add to the list. Find Constellations feature is not displaying the names in scene or game view.
It Highlights them ok, just not displaying the names. (Also would it be possible to add them without having to capitalize the first letter of constellation name).




Edit: Sorry noticed it only displays certain constellations names not all.

Looks like sun is 3 times smaller then should be, When I set it to 15 degrees its occupying 5 degrees on the ShowCelesticalDisplay Grid.

 

Disabling True Sky Camera component naturally restores it but also, there is no cloud rendering (obviously).
Disabling Transparency camera script has no effect either way (except for a small black bar along top and bottom of display - ie it letterboxes ever so slightly).

 

Another small issue, sun renders on top of moon, instead of behind.
Edit: It appears Moon is not even rendering when in front of sun. (The moon is rendering transparent due to time of day, but is not obscuring sun when in front.)
Is it possible to have the moon render black when its obscuring the sun??? And even better if it could effect the light intensity of the sun to simulate eclipse event.



Setup for the eclipse as seen in Norway last month
http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/in/norway/longyearbyen?iso=20150320

 

Thank you for the info on OS X progress. Fingers crossed it is here for August. As I have a project slated for Halloween that trueSKY will be perfect for! In the mean time our Windows cousins would have debugged it for us!

 

A quick question, is there a solution to ask for wind speed from the sequence at current time?
so something like wind_speed = getWindSpeed(time)?
Cheers!

 

Hey Sasha, you've got a really good point with this - values like this are actually properties of the current interpolated keyframe - we have an API to get keyframe properties but it can only retrieve keyframes from the list.

So this will need to be added. The way we'll do it I think is to add a uid for the interpolated keyframe of each keyframer - sky, clouds etc. Then you'll be able to get the properties. But it will take another week or so.

Yes. The new update (going up now, probably on simul.co later today) has the moon correctly obscuring the sun, and also darkens the sunlight based on the amount of visibility.

 

Excellent, thanks Roderick.

 

@rvkennedy

Hello,

1. Is it possible or will it be possible in the futute to get actual time and date from TrueSky?

2. AFAIK at this moment, moon light is not generated by directional light. Do you plan to use directional light for moon lighting?

3. Looks like the reflection probes are not able to bake/get TrueSky sky at this moment. Would it be possible to feed them with maybe TrueSky environment probe and skybox somehow so they would see it?

4. I can't see cosmic background texture even when it's set. Is it common in actual releases?

 

You can certainly put it in - so from the "Time" value you can retrieve from the trueSky object, multiplying that by 24.0 gives the fractional hour. Then that's a modifier to the originally input date.

If you get it out via the API, what format would you like to have it in?

Yes this has been on the list for a while but I'll bump it up the priorities.

The way we do it is to use the TrueSkyCubemapProbe script (see the demo scene) to generate the sky-only cubemap. Then set TrueSkySkybox as the skybox in Lighting properties and set the ambient source to Skybox. It seems to need to build lighting before it shows up. That should work - let me know if not.

I've just checked this, and it's gotten lost due to some depth buffer shenanigans - I'll get the fix in before we upload tonight.[/QUOTE]

 

That would be perfect! Thank you!
Ideally this would be the setup, an artist / game designer creates the sequence with keys and the game will read these values and turn it into gameplay values to effect physics and other immersive dimensions. This way truesky can visually match the physics of the game world.

 

Hi, I have been having severe performance problems seemingly only on machines with AMD GPUs. My main CPU thread jumps from 10-15ms~ to 100ms~ while the GPU render time stays around 10-15ms~ after adding it to an already fairly complex scene. It also slows down the editor and occasionally causes crashes when building or crashing AMD display drivers when running a standalone build. This has been tested on multiple systems and does not occur on Nvidia machines. Any ideas or suggestions?

 

Yes - if you select the trueSKY object, you'll see a checkbox marked "Performance", and above it, two sliders for GPU and CPU. crank down the GPU, and increase the CPU slider. Below these you'll see a text area, which will now fill with profiling information from trueSKY. This should identify the source of the slowdown. I suspect it may be to do with queries and latency - perhaps AMD has a different latency requirement. But let's find out. If I can get an AMD system set up in the meantime I'll look into it, most of our machines are nVidia or Intel GPU's though.

 

Thanks for the reply, It says the wait time for queries is 0ms, however I have attached all of the information displayed in the performance box with the settings you suggested. The sluggish performance extends past in game however and into unitys editor which can make things a bit of a pain.

 

That's the wait time for performance queries, I'm thinking more about cloud and lighting queries, which do GPU-CPU data transfer. But the values here add up to about 1ms, so we need to look elsewhere. Just to eliminate the possibility, can you crank down the CPU slider and show the GPU profiling instead? Also, launch Task Manager and see if there's any disk accessing going on.

 

Hi Roderick still a small scale issue in latest version . Sun is 4x to large.

 

Thanks for the reply,

Unlike previous tests I had done TrueSky, now the GPU render time increase and hovers around 30-50ms~ and occasionally everything peaks up to 200ms+. If in the editor I load a scene without TrueSky the GPU render time drops down to 15ms~ again but the CPU thread stays at about 100ms~. If I export a build and run a scene first without TrueSky everything is normal, but as soon as I load a scene with TrueSky in it the performance drops and if I go back and load the previous scene again I get the same as the before mentioned results in the editor even though TrueSky is not in the scene.

Disk access appears completely normal, I have attached all of the information displayed in the performance box in regards to a GPU test.

 

This looks incomplete - can you repost, we just need plaintext.

 

Fixed in the next upload, thanks John!

 

While we're working on the above issues, here's an Oculus Rift demo - take a look, let me know if there are any problems! There are a couple new updates we used to make this a bit faster so those will go into the next upload. Here's the demo:

https://simul.co//wp-content/uploads/private/temp/trueSkyRiftDemo64bit.zip

 

Sorry for the late reply, I have attempted the test again, I double checked, this is everything displayed in the performance box with the settings you asked for.

 

ok thanks - nothing there that's taking much time up. It must be on the c# side. Does the Unity profiler give any clues?

 

None at all, other then GFX wait for preset (for which I don't even have vsync enabled). The scene runs fine, I import TrueSky, and any AMD GPU machine the game runs on has its CPU thread time spike up 5 fold. If I try your demo scene it runs fine, but if I exit back to any of my scenes (even without TrueSky in it) it tanks again, if I drag one of my setup cameras into your scene the frame rate tanks also, but if I go one by one and remove any of my changes until its identical to your camera the problem remains.

I purchased TrueSky right when it came out and have imported it and deleted it a dozen or so times through the updates, testing things and cutting it out as a possible variable for problems and such. Maybe its some some conflicting files left over or something I buggered up. The only files for it are in the Simul and plugins folders correct? Anything I miss? anything it might be conflicting with or that I should check? Just looking for a few suggestions that might be short list of most common issues.

Thanks for your time.

 

Yes for Unity 4 it's just Assets/Simul/ and Assets/Plugins/. Although, in Unity 5, it's just the Simul folder - because U5 allows us to host plugins in any directory, so we now put the dll's in Assets/Simul/Plugins, and we don't use Assets/Plugins. So if you're using Unity 5 maybe make sure that Assets/Plugins contains no Simul stuff.

To eliminate the possibility of conflicts, do you see any issues if you import to a blank project, using the demo scene or creating a fresh scene from scratch?

 

Did you try my suggestions in that pm a while ago? I outlined how polling the address c# side would really cost performance on some systems, ie you probably need to cache that. I haven't checked if you fixed that or not and wanted to share just in case you missed it on PM & wanted to be helpful.

 

Yep, we're caching the native texture addresses now.

 

I have TrueSky for a while now but some things are still unclear.

-Is there a manual available on how to use the sequencer? A manual is really required because I can't figure out how to use it.

-What is the difference between the presets named KeyFrame and no key frame?

-The fog example keyframe does not show any fog at all.

-How do I add fog or haze to the scene (not using the build in fixed function fog)?

-Does How do I make objects in the distance appear blue-ish (not fog, this is haze and rayleigh scattering), like this:?

 

hi there.
is it possible to see correct cloud setup if i have 2-3 cameras in same place but watching in different rotation axes? i mean cloud match.