Realistic Clouds - Sapiens Devlog 54

[@ThinMatrix]

Ooh the clouds look amazing!

[@yosha_ykt]

Agree, in the future I hope the whole earth will probably be so realistic.

[@dg_dmtll]

Eyyyy. ThinMatrix. I remember telling Dave that his devlogs remind me of yours for Equilinox. Great stuff.

[@majicDave]

Thanks, that new city builder game of yours is coming along too, looking forward to another video!

[@potatopotato7561]

whew i thought you were dead or something

[@NotBojosos]

Expecting nothing less from your city builder!

[@nemesmatyi]

Now with the realistic sky, I have noticed how unrealistic the ground is. Especially the distinct lack of forests. On distant landscapes there are no forests at all, and even up close they are way too sparse to feel natural. When settling on a hill, it would be really nice to see large forests in the valleys and the further hills and mountains. I don't know how this could be achieved without hindering the performance too much, but if it could be done, it would be really awesome.

[@riccardoorlando2262]

Hmmm. Maybe use the same technique he used for the clouds, to make a forest that's not actually individual trees but a big tile, to save performance? Although I have no idea how you would transition from that to the real trees when the camera gets closer...

[@GustavSvard]

Your thought made me have a related thought: specks of light at night where there are other camp fires. A campfire's light can be seen from very far away if there is no light pollution (i.e. before electric lights). Would be a nice touch.

[@nemesmatyi]

@@riccardoorlando2262 Im thinking of maybe using a heightmap on the terrain to raise height to be believable as a forest and change the texture to be forest-like. Then a LOD (level of detail) technique could be used to slowly transition from terrain heightmap, to a generic forest model to individual trees. Maybe that could work

[@someonewithsomename]

instancing of low poly and color the ground itself in tree leaves color way in the distance might do the trick

[@louise19808]

I think it might help if he introduced giant trees. Having more variety in the size and height of trees would make the forests more visually interesting, look more dense and also make more sense for trees to be spaced further apart. Think of very tall pine trees, thick willow trees etc. It would be great for the trees to be converted to 2D planes from afar to save performance but still make the landscape look more lush.

[@Jabrils]

You made those amazing clouds our of billboards? Man I learn something cool every episode.

[@aw1lt]

*out

[@aw1lt]

Also hai Jabrills

[@yonimeller]

Oh no, this channel is going mainstream! Everyone, abandon ship!

[@nocultist7050]

You can make a tutorial on this. I'd enable ads on this video. XD

[@delphicdescant]

You know, your solution looks better than a lot of truly volumetric clouds do. And that's also probably thanks to being able to do a lot less in real time. I wouldn't even call it a downgrade from volumetric. Or maybe you're just really good at clouds in general. Or maybe I'm just a bad judge of clouds. No idea lol.

[@pchris]

these clouds blew my mind too. They looked volumetric to me

[@My-nl6sg]

Its the perfect solution for this situation. I'd really love volumetric clouds you can fly thru tho :/

[@carl-johanhorberg1399]

Wow, Dave! Your game is starting to look amazing! What really gets me is the immense SIZE of everything, so many games just look so frickin' cramped because they try to put so much stuff into such a small space. Watching those lakes in the far distance reflecting the sunset i just amazing. Never seen anything like it in a game before, and adding clouds just made it ten times more breathtaking. Although, a big world like that just really wants to be explored in my opinion. I have a hard time seeing that I would be satisfied with a game which such a beautiful large environment but where you just stay in one place. I think you should work on the theme that early human populations were highly mobile and led a nomadic lifestyle, rather than going to far the track of a convoluted crafting system. Getting your tribe past mountain ranges to find a more suitable hunting ground, crossing perilous ravines, sheltering from a sudden snowstorm, those are the kind of things I am thinking about. You could integrate this with the camera as well. I think we all find hard camera boundaries kind of annoying. Maybe you could make it so that the camera is able to move further away for a limited amount of time, Kind of like the hand in black and white. Maybe the time you're able to look just a bit further away could be connected to how the health of your tribe is, so that in the event of a predator attack, or the arrival of a storm, your ability to survey the surrounding is hampered.

[@tryfanevans7047]

you could send them out in sailing ships to find trade routes and riches.

[@aesbj9228]

Absolutely beautiful! Cool clever clouds contribute colossally :)

[@majicDave]

Creative comment, cheers!

[@farfi55]

If you hadn't told me it was achieved with billboards I would have said it looks volumetric

[@ADHDanny1]

Been following this game for over a year now and with every update i fall more in love with this game.

[@janikcodes]

What I would do for weekly uploads :(( Man your videos are so well done and good. I could watch them all day no cap

[@longbowman2306]

still can't believe u made blockheads! used to play that as a kid and totally forgot about it until found ur dev logs on sapiens and looking at ur channel and there were vids about blockheads. watching dev logs cos i want to be game dev so its really weird. ur doing a great job on sapiens! keep it up 👍

[@frontyardians]

I still cannot believe you put in 6 years of work in this masterpiece

[@pchris]

My jaw was on the floor this entire video! You blew my mind with how good the clouds looked, and then blew my mind again with how stupid simple they were! So cleaver! I really like this type of video where you pick one topic/technology and focus on that instead of doing a general devlog of everything you've worked on. I was hooked through the entire video!

[@TimmyBlumberg]

Wow these clouds were absolutely worth the wait. Amazing work, Dave.

[@trafficface]

*Sea fairing nomads* would be so cool, that would give you more opportunities to see the beautiful clouds on the water.

[@WA-Y]

FPS:adios

[@marsmann007]

Every time you talk about the technical stuff and show some code you say it's probably not interesting. BUT let me tell you that's exactly what I want to see! Awesome video keep up the good work!

[@twistedpeanuts6958]

Wow. That looks absolutely beautiful. I'd pay unlimited money to just look at the beautiful clouds. When I buy the game I hope I don't get distracted with these breathtaking views.

[@seize2581]

This adds so much to the scene, your talent keep showing up in every videos ^^

[@ecla141]

My favourite time of the month. Love the progress so far!

[@stupidrainbo]

If it's any consolation, I had no idea they were billboards until you showed how they were. They looked volumetric to me. But after you showed they were billboards, it's like, "Oh, I see that now."

[@invalid5777]

thanks for making the blockhead, that game was my childhood. I used to play it with my old friends after-school. I can't wait for this game.

[@zakmorgan9320]

Love how the game is turning out dave, love watching these videos and seeing your progress. The only thing now graphically breaking the immersion for me is that the ground seems to be lit evenly, even when far away. It just looks a bit too perfect.

[@aryaawesome1999]

Wow this looks absolutely amazing, I’m a programmer myself and everything you’ve achieved in this game BLOWS my mind! I can’t wait to play it!

[@progresque9738]

This gives so much atmosphere to the game, something I think will be very important. Absolutely love the looks of this!

[@kyrin408]

Been about 10 devlogs since I last checked in, its starting to look really nice.

[@supergaminggeek5546]

They look so gorgeous☁️

[@howdyhowdyhowdyhowdyhowdy]

It feels like it's been so long since your last upload

[@kanishkachakraborty]

Ikr?

[@appsenence9244]

Amazing work. Been following for a long time and now and getting more and mor excited. Pretty nice

[@MrJonnyPasta]

Dave you sincerely are a wizard. Thank you.

[@Magnogen]

17:21 oo I can see myself adding some fog to make this a lot more gothic and spooky. Not sure why that came into my head, but it did! :)

[@Forcemaster2000]

Fantastic looking clouds! Perfect for a ground-based game!

[@davidfails2866]

17:16 clouds look great... rain needs to be using the same cloud vector and you need to determine in a list of small-mid radial scales for rain coverage... would be my guess..

[@richardwilson9476]

Clouds not ray traced nor created using real world meteorological data - literally unplayable! Seriously though, looks amazing. You are a very talented guy.

[@Tiny.Shiny.Things]

Incredible! The way they look at sunset is gorgeous

[@cameron6464]

Just a brilliant mind, such a bold idea. It's amazing to see the work you've made, I can't wait for the release.

[@GhostedGamer]

Everything looks AMAZING 👏👏👏

[@virtuosimedia]

These look great! Been following for a while and always love it when a new video pops up. As a suggestion for further development, ground shadows from the clouds would make a huge difference in tying everything together even more.

[@AntonioNoack]

@11:14 you should be able to write float cloudLight = dot(cloudLightAmount, abs(outSunPosLocal)) as well, glsl has many practical vector functions :)

[@kidd9]

Absolutely breathtaking!

[@zetathix]

You are the one who keep me lit on my game and feels stupid in the same time

[@RugbugRedfern]

Looks beautiful! I'll see if I can replicate this technique for my own game.

[@jambie]

Just... Thank you for this video.

[@tloch14]

I recently found your dev logs and have been going through the backlog. They're great! I know this is an older video and the code might not even exist as-is anymore, but I wanted to point out that the line you found the bug in at 10:50 ish looks to be an expanded dot product. You could simplify the line to `float cloudLight = dot(cloudLightAmount, abs(outSunPosLocal));`. The benefit being that you'll never mistype an x, y, or z. Depending on your shader compiler, it may also generate fewer opcodes. Ok, back to watching the rest of the video!

[@jonny__b]

Personally, while I think the clouds look great, I'm not sure they really gel with the aesthetic of the game. I like that oblique look of the hexagonal ground textures a lot more - and if the clouds could somehow conform to that motif it would, in my opinion, make it much more cohesive!

[@liamkoehler8820]

Yeah I have to agree. If anything, they are soo beautiful they actually make the ground look kind of lifeless.

[@louise19808]

I agree. The clouds and sky are gorgeous and hypnotizing, but it does take away from the terrain. I was so blown away by the beautiful grass update not too long ago but now I not only don't notice it, it looks dull. Making the clouds look more like hexagons sounds like a great idea. They can still have great variety and an organic look by building them up from various different-sized hexagons. I hope this wouldn't affect the lighting of the clouds, though, since I could stare at that for hours.

[@decstar77]

Look awesome ! Thanks for sharing the implementation details.

[@CandiRabbit]

I reemebr being suggested the start of this project YEAARS AGO It's Looking Super Good :D

[@stvnmiracle]

It's coming along nicely, keep it up!

[@YellowBriefs]

I see you were heavily inspired by BEFORE. Glad to see this game in development!

[@ryann7760]

Wow looks great. Would be cool to see some more of the architecture behind the game/engine.

[@Simtar123]

The clouds look great! :) Overcast days and snowy days often just have one big grey/white cloud cover, but im sure this will be adressed with the weather system :)

[@nachocortizo3321]

Awesome work Dave!

[@GamesInHouse]

Great work, the clouds look amazing!

[@winterSweet-k4m]

Love your work. it's so clean

[@ashwinmods9576]

Amazing Technique! I was recently working on clouds and end up with 2D textures. QUESTION! Why not use single Normal map to get pixel's direction and Lit instead of 2 textures with Lit info ?

[@christrenkov4304]

Those clouds look awesome

[@EEDev]

nice to see you didn't got all crazy and made volumetric clouds! people usually try to do the most and than they don't know what happen to performance...

[@lowellcamp3267]

I feel like it will likely be worth rendering out a version in Cycles with the volume bounces turned way up (4-8), since the interior of the clouds feels a little dark. This is of course just for when you have some free compute power, likely an overnight render. Also, for the future: Cloud shadows? Hmm... Seems surprisingly doable, since it's billboards. They may or may not need to actually correspond to the actual clouds.

[@brettgoldsmith8584]

Thoughts: Clouds are very impressive. Even better than the new flight simulator clouds on mortal computers. (though you cant fly through these) They feel a little low sometimes, but that could just be where I'm from, in Arizona most clouds are very high in altitude. The waves in the water aren't great because of how perfect and tile-able they are. I'm not sure if that's a placeholder, but I think even no waves would be an improvement as it might better fit the "style" of the game. Rain slider does a good job in my opinion. Definitely made it feel like it was raining.

[@jorockgalvan]

dang that atmosphere is nice

[@TheBookDoctor]

Hey, Magic Dave! It's been a while, and I'm itching for an update! I hope you're just having a nice winter break and all is well with you and your family.

[@PatrickPissurno]

Hi, Dave! I hope you’re doing fine. I really miss your videos. Looking forward to watching them :) Cheers

[@Pleochism]

This looks superb!

[@lyongreene8241]

Love the clouds, they add so much atmosphere to the game! I was also wondering if you had considered adding more complex biomes. I see that every biome has trees that randomly and sparsely populate the landscape, but would it be possible to add lush forests with a wider variety of vegetation? Maybe giant redwood trees in close conglomeration with one another that dwarf the surrounding landscape. I think forests that you can get lost in would an extra element of realism. That and perhaps rugged mountainous terrain. Maybe you could take some inspiration from the Swiss Alps?

[@headgames4945]

Bro I just realized I am using your glsl linter! How funny!

[@error17_]

wow it looks stunning!

[@nokkturnaldev]

It looks fantastic, though I wonder how it would look if you tried to simplify the cloud shapes a little. They look very realistic against the lower detail world and it might be a little jarring. Might be something worth experimenting with. Looking forward to the next episode!

[@rebeccarisk1772]

Looks great! Thanks for the update :)

[@oelx0]

The clouds look very good, will they by chance end up animated later down the line? If they weren’t moving it probably wouldn’t stand out as much but the stiffness of clouds when they are moving looks a bit odd, regardless I love the idea and implementation of the clouds very very nice! 👍

[@chikenbell7127]

Good work, that look amazing !

[@AasaaL]

gorgeous

[@azrhynichol]

There's an early access game on steam that is very similar to Sapiens, at least on the surface. I'm sure both games will branch out into different paths upon further development. The game is named Ancient Cities.

[@phillsol]

Can't wait for this game to come out!

[@averageinternetuser1457]

wow that's a really clever way to get normals from volumetrics, I always ran into the issue of not being able to just render out the normals because it's a volume and not a mesh but I never though to just use lights.

[@janikcodes]

Looks like you finally got good clouds running! :)))

[@tomasmartty9864]

I guess it's time to re-make that Steam trailer video with clouds now!

[@ak.0354]

Rip The Blockheads

[@justinparkan1300]

The clouds almost look too good? Kind of draws attention to the unrealistic ground, esp at far distances

[@davidfails2866]

16:03 there's a lot of water are you going to do something with it or is it more of a barrier for the civils... also think of those chef cooking games how they have mini-games In the game to do tasks... would be a fun way of feeling the void of just clicking them to do some tasks..

[@davidfails2866]

for example, cutting logs three lines down perfect lines give you more build pieces for example... or cooking gives a boost of health or hunger depletion... burning your food could deplete more toxicins from players if sick or something sim..

[@paulocaruncho7696]

Hey Dave Framptom, are you gonna make update the Blockheads version 1.8 or 1.7.5??

[@zakb4198]

Ooooh I’m stoked I knew one was coming up

[@torkdevs7723]

Looks really good!

[@vincentcleaver1925]

Light-years beyond my world building! 8-)

[@TheAnzurion]

Beautiful man!

[@itsMiatch]

Between that recording I need to do and a Sapiens devlog, I think I know which takes priority. Clouds look jolly!

[@WipesDani]

You probably already considered it/noticed it, but I would think the clouds look better if they actually move with the wind. At around 16:10 the clouds move against the wind that makes the gras move. You probably wouldn't notice, but I think this would make the feel of the clouds even better. But other than that I love them so much! :D

[@majicDave]

The wind at sea level in coastal climates usually blows out to sea in the night/morning, and in from the sea from the afternoon. The clouds above move in totally different directions most of the time, governed by upper level wind. So in Sapiens I think I have artistic license to make clouds move independently from local winds and it's all good.

[@WipesDani]

@@majicDave Interesting, it seemed so weird looking for me. Thanks for the answer!

[@TheBookDoctor]

I want to play this game mostly because the graphics are just so beautiful.

[@dylan6801]

these look so good!

[@CodeParticles]

Bravo! I hope someday you can try volumetric clouds just for curiosity sake! 👍👍

[@liamxyz9255]

this looks so cool

[@nocultist7050]

I wish this explanation was enough for me to know how to replicate it, because It looks prefect and I can imagine how well it performs.

[@BLUYES422]

this is a GREAT solution if you wanted you could make those looping animation clouds ez by moving the x and y in a circle so long as you make some path that end back up in the same xyz position at the start

[@someonewithsomename]

Great clouds! Will you make them more stylized to fit the game better? Also, how expensive shadows would be? Are you planning to add shadows on the ground from clouds? That would make such a great difference!

[@karlfundingpedersen2862]

The abouriginals on the Vancouver Island did this cool trick where they Would go out to kneedeep High water and place rocks with a bit of air betwene Them which made mussels and such grow on it. It Would be cool to impliment some these ancient techniques :)

[@surrealsupercell7217]

Clouds are impressive.

[@100_Dollar_Bill]

Wishlists on Steam many months ago. 😊

[@SemOnLP]

it look´s soo smoth ... like it

[@Zalex612]

I think your clouds look amazing! I especially like the sunset and rain blending. As you mentioned, it isn't perfect but it looks really nice for just a prototype stage. I may be out of place saying this... While the clouds look nice, they do not match with the trees at all! Your trees are low-poly while your clouds are life-like. It's a pretty dissonant visual effect. I think you should either change the way the clouds look to something more low poly or actually change the trees. Going with the style of the game and the work put into consideration, it may be easier and more appropriate to change the cloud style to something closer to a low poly texture. Additionally, I think the ground looks rather barren and blank in the distance. It would be neat if the grass texture could be placed on far away hills possibly even with the same wind animations? I think that just a permanent grassy/rocky/sandy texture for ranged viewing should do the trick without affecting your performance. It would also be a huge natural/visual improvement to have trees that clump up into forest patterns. It has a pretty barren, almost savana feeling throughout the game right now, which I think is fine to some degree for certain biomes but it's uninviting to me as a prospective player trying to enjoy the aesthetics. Keep up the good progress! I'm thoroughly enjoying the series so far.

[@andreaaristokrates9516]

I think the dithering for alpha testing could have a bit of work, it being so griddy makes it stand out so much.

[@HaeriStudios]

The only thing missing are shadows from the clouds.

[@4rs0nn]

Ive been waiting for this so long xD

[@Skeffles]

These clouds look amazing! I loved your explanation of the smoke and mirrors behind them, especially when you flew the camera up and you could clearly see the billboard. Would it be possible to animate them or would that be too much work?

[@majicDave]

Thanks! It would probably be possible, and could look quite good. Though it’d take a fair amount of VRAM, so I’m not sure if it’d be worth that performance cost really.