41 replies to this topic

[axe360]

The only time we will go to dynamic moving skys is when they look very, very realistic. I dont see the point of a moving smudge in the sky.

lol...

[IanD]

Wait til you get as old as the rest of us Mike... everything is a smudge...  keep still damnit lol...

[Kablammo11]

The only time we will go to dynamic moving skys is when they look very, very realistic. I dont see the point of a moving smudge in the sky.

 

…and with banks of low clouds slowly gliding over the golf course, casting deep shadows and plunging the next few holes into some thick mist, some others bringing rain, while distant parts of the terrain are still glowing in radiant sunlight? Lovely! My CPU just started howling in despair and the little cooling fan is hyperventilating frantically.

That would be a "nice to have". We're still dealing with the "must have"s for the moment, I'd say. Also, the protracted "tomorrow" phase of the project has my permission to progress into the "now" stage any day now…   

[axe360]

Even though TWO had a lot of flaws in it.. You should have seen how nice it looked when they went from a "static sky" to a "moving sky". It really made it look a whole lot better...

Granted, the game play was still lousy but the skies sure looked nice... Really gave you the feeling of being there..

 

Of course, there are more important things that need to be done first and I am very willing to wait for a "very very realistic" moving sky..

 

Golf is a game of details and paying attention to details is critical IMO...

 

I wouldn't want to see a "moving smude in the sky" either...

 

Thanks..

[Jimbo63]

Has no-one yet developed moving cloud skyboxes for Unity? Or is this just not achievable?

[Acrilix]

Has no-one yet developed moving cloud skyboxes for Unity? Or is this just not achievable?

 

It is perfectly achievable, but you can't move the skybox if the pano is currently attached to it!

[Kablammo11]

I'm not sure if the skybox can be moved at all to create the impression of moving clouds - it's a render function that is calculated into the scene, as far as I know, not a movable object. I may be wrong, though, but even then, all you could do was to rotate it a bit. Unity Skyboxes only show clouds above the horizon, the rest is simply blue sky, so you couldn't turn it on it's head, just gyrate it.

With a pano added to the skybox, you can't move it all. You would need a "panorama box" with transparent background, showing just the landscape, inside the skybox, so that the clouds behind could be moved.

 

Yet this is were more problems surface: The clouds in the skybox are a still image (tiff, 1024x1024). So they basically will always show the same picture. To have clouds rolling in, condensing away, billowing about, changing their shape etc, the skybox would be of no use - it would have to be like a time lapse movie happening above and I have no clues as to how to achieve this effect. Particle effects? A few juxtarposed 2D planes with transparent shaders showing cloud structures? 

Then there is the small matter of lighting: As the cloud cover changes, the light hitting the golf course should be changing as well. Will there be a way to display the changing shadows and highlights of the clouds on the ground? And what of the pano underneath a moving sky? Parts of it should catch or miss some light as well - but since its a flat image, this is not easily done.

Un-smudging the Unity sky is possible. But not urgent immo: Just give us a guy with a stick and a ball and some greenery first.

[axe360]

Ok, To whom it may concern: So what's so wrong if some of us TW's PC Series users want everything to move? That doesn't mean we don't want a realistic game. Come to think of it, that shows just how realistic of a game we do want.. Right?

We are just used to Every thing moving, clouds, trees, grass blades, water, birds etc. etc and since that old ass game engine for TW's  could do all that, from at least 04 thru 08. I wouldn't have thought discussing it would have brought about such amazement for some.. As if it's something that was never heard of... As if I was asking PP to reinvent the wheel, hell this is old stuff...

 

I will end my thoughts on this for now, as we don't even have a playable game yet but be sure, you will hear about it again from me. Like I always have said, if this game doesn't have some of the things that have been in TW's PC Series or Links, for years now, then I will be doing a lot of suggesting to get them in...

 

TWO went backwards in time and they are the ones that came out with some of this gr8 stuff, only to NOT use it in there latest debacle..

Golf is in the details...

 

Happy Turkey Day to all.

 

Oh yeah. Yes, I am tired of playing TW's PC, it is time for something new, something that has the latest technology. Just hard to figure why some want to stay in the past.. I do however respect everyone's opinion and mine is of course, not the only one that matters. I will just try to help out as much as I can.. Hoping we can all stay on friendly terms while we do it...

[Kablammo11]

Axe, there's nothing wrong at all, in my book, to want to have everything moving - and I think your motives and aims are absolutely legitimate. No need to be apologetic about them.

For my alpine golf course, for instance, I toyed with the idea of a mono cable gondola, including pylons, to slide past over the golf course. Feasible, but… naah, too much work. For my Mulligan Municipal course I originally wanted a railway track layed out around the golf course, the rails bisecting one of the fairways, with a long freight train rattling past every two or three minutes, forcing the player to either lay up short and play a blind shot over the wagons or to wait for the next opening (I even imagined that if the players walked ahead and were caught by the next train they would be told that they were dead and their round would end immediately). 

 

The possibilities are endless! My patience and my dedication are not. Because for the time being, there's only one thing I really want to see moving, asap: A virtual golf ball propelled by a computer golfer controlled by me. Absent this, all else is moot. Baby steps, first things first...

[Acrilix]

@axe360 - I don't think that there's anybody here that doesn't want to see some movement added to the game. The human brain associates movement with life, and so the immersion factor is increased by it, whether that movement is done realistically or not. The point some of us disagree with is your post below, that insinuates that the game would somehow be seriously affected by the lack of a moving sky. To me, this really won't bother me at all, and is in no way 'lame'! 

 

Good news, cause theres nothing lamer then a sky that doesnt move. 

[axe360]

Axe, there's nothing wrong at all, in my book, to want to have everything moving - and I think your motives and aims are absolutely legitimate. No need to be apologetic about them.

For my alpine golf course, for instance, I toyed with the idea of a mono cable gondola, including pylons, to slide past over the golf course. Feasible, but… naah, too much work. For my Mulligan Municipal course I originally wanted a railway track layed out around the golf course, the rails bisecting one of the fairways, with a long freight train rattling past every two or three minutes, forcing the player to either lay up short and play a blind shot over the wagons or to wait for the next opening (I even imagined that if the players walked ahead and were caught by the next train they would be told that they were dead and their round would end immediately). 

 

The possibilities are endless! My patience and my dedication are not. Because for the time being, there's only one thing I really want to see moving, asap: A virtual golf ball propelled by a computer golfer controlled by me. Absent this, all else is moot. Baby steps, first things first...

 

Ok K11, maybe not everything...LOL..

 

Yes, let's get a game going first, I agree..

[axe360]

@axe360 - I don't think that there's anybody here that doesn't want to see some movement added to the game. The human brain associates movement with life, and so the immersion factor is increased by it, whether that movement is done realistically or not. The point some of us disagree with is your post below, that insinuates that the game would somehow be seriously affected by the lack of a moving sky. To me, this really won't bother me at all, and is in no way 'lame'! 

 

So I guess you just have to understand where I'm coming from.. I have been playing TW's PC Series for some 9 years now  and we have always had a Moving Sky.. Clouds, rain,  a few birds.  So I guess when your used to playing something that long, with those things in it, you would think something else was (I"ll say, a little boring) in  a way, if that wasn't included. 

 

I've never played the game with a "static sky" I'm sure I could get over it for a while but a Moving Sky would definitely be something I would want added to the game in the future..

 

Don't look to much into my choice of words, of course it wouldn't seriously affect the game.. It's certainly not a Show Stopper for me..

 

I'll say it again.. I know just as well as anyone else, we need a playable game first and there are far more important things that will have to be handled before we even think about a moving sky.. It's been fun chatting though..

Peace

 

Axe..

[Dazmaniac]

I'm sure there are games currently in existence that have been developed in Unity and have moving skies and also particle effects like fog, clouds, rain etc.

 

I'm sure it is something that can be looked in to down the road as far as Perfect Golf goes. I'm sure the community would be happy to have a playable game with many 'advanced' features missing to start with and not forgetting a working Course Forge to accompany the game build.

 

[vfe]

I'm sure there are games currently in existence that have been developed in Unity and have moving skies and also particle effects like fog, clouds, rain etc.

 

I'm sure it is something that can be looked in to down the road as far as Perfect Golf goes. I'm sure the community would be happy to have a playable game with many 'advanced' features missing to start with and not forgetting a working Course Forge to accompany the game build.

 

 

I've actually already been looking into it. It might not be in the initial release, but I'd certainly like to do more than static weather.

I'd like to do full volumetric weather, but there's Unity3d limitations that make it impractical.

(I know my title is "Mac guy" basically, but I'm actually a specalist in high performance and distributed computing, looking at weather, AI, online server architecture, and mac stuff.).

[axe360]

vfe, you sound like the right guy for the job, thanks for the insight into what's happening...

[Kablammo11]

Thanks for that, vfe. 

… "volumetric" sounds scary and strikes me as something requring huge amounts of RAM and state-of-the art video cards. 

 

The question, to me,  is not "Can it be done?" The answer to that is yes, of course, everything can always be done somehow. But rather: "Can it be automated and dumbed down enough to be squeezed into a few buttons and matching sliders within the CourseForge, or rather, the game itself? Would the weather magic be conjured up by PerfectGolf and exist as one of the game settings to be selected at the beginning of a round, so that the CF designers need not bother with it? 

[vfe]

Keep in mind, in this post I am speaking in hypotheticals, not concrete plans.

Most golf games have some variations of just having a variable that says "Windspeed is 11mph" and then that wind speed is added into a physics equation for direction, force etc.

That's not how real weather works though, real weather is "volumetric" in that it's an interaction between volumes(pockets) of air(of different densities, tempature, etc). If you strike a golf ball and it goes, say 250yds, the density of the air, speed of wind, etc is not constant through the entire flight, the ball is passing through 1 or more air pockets that may be introducing different forces.

There I'm talking mostly about physics, but you can take that volumetric information and create cloud patterns, movements, etc out of it.

But like you point out, this is actually computionally expensive. So well I'd like to do something along these lines, it's very unlikely we actually will. Primarily due to Unity3d constraints rather than end-user constraints(unity3d scripts are single-threaded only, and true volumetric weather requires high parallelization, which means making it an external DLL...which means breaking compatability with web-player...etc, there's a lot of trade-offs).

 

On that note though, one thing I've been contemplating is offloading volumetric processing to cloud clusters(the name finally makes sense!). Well there's many tradeoffs to calculating it client-side, it's not nearly as difficult to run the computation once on a small cluster. The way I picture this working, is that for each of the "official" courses, and maybe some of the really popular customs, we calculate the weather once and push it to every client.

So as a user, you could use the "standard" weather system and tweak the options, or use the volumetric system(where you can't change the options, but it'd be much more realistic).

What do you guys think? Would you want to play like that? A more realistic course you can't control? or would you opt for control most of the time?

[axe360]

I was just saying that in TW's PC Series, you can choose clear, partly cloudy, cloudy, rainy weather when you set up your game, you have no control over how cloudy or rainy it might be on the course, but when it's cloudy, you do see the clouds move in the sky.. I was just asking if we are going to see clouds move in the sky? Or will there just be pictures or static sky?

The moving sky was built into the game, you just had a choice of clear, cloudy, etc.. Also, if the wind was gale force, then the clouds (if you chose them) moves as if there being blown by a gale force wind. Calm winds would have the opposite affect...

 

Seams like your contemplating some thing much more involved then that?  I am open to new things, would like to hear more...

[vfe]

I can't say for certain what system we'll have at initial release, it's something we'll be settling on in the near future. When we do I'll let you guys know our plans.

[Kablammo11]

So as a user, you could use the "standard" weather system and tweak the options, or use the volumetric system(where you can't change the options, but it'd be much more realistic).

What do you guys think? Would you want to play like that? A more realistic course you can't control? or would you opt for control most of the time?

 

Thanks for your elaborate explanation, vfe, but, honestly, I can't follow most of your statements. My bad, certainly, they are just way above my head. Single-threaded scripts in Unity, offloading volumetric doodas to external watchamacallits?… Oy! I'm very sorry, Vic, I'm really not trying to make fun of you. I just can't quite wrap my old, analogue brain around this.

 

But you asked us a question and since you kindly and diligently answered ours so far, I must return the favor. So I would say that, imo, to me, personally, a "standard" weather system with tweakable options, as established in prior games, is a must. It should probably be the prevailing, meteorologic currency in PerfectGolf. I would of course very much like to play with a volumetric hyper-realistic, uncontrollable weather system, and may do that often if and when it's made available, but on balance I feel that I and many others would prefer to be able to control the atmospheric conditions of their next round of golf or tournament. I consider this a part of my fun-seeking experience. To expose myself fully to the mercy of the volumetric elements, without having a say in them, feels more constraining than liberating. That said, I'm willing to relinquish control over my golfing weather, but only on my own terms and provided I can regain it whenever I want to.