trueSKY

[TaaTT4]

Hi guys, does anyone of you use trueSKY in your own projects?

[SolarPortal]

We were going too, even had the contract from the developer so we could use it free for a couple years but life got in the way and it got put to the side. After the free section though, the asked price was expensive.

Don't know how much it will be now due to market changes but it was 4 zeros at the time a year. The developer is easy to talk too though and the system looks incredible

Its implentation happens in pure dx11 and opengl but if I remember correctly at the time one of the renders system demos didn't work and crashed.

[TaaTT4]

Don't know how much it will be now due to market changes but it was 4 zeros at the time a year. The developer is easy to talk too though and the system looks incredible

We bought it few months ago discounted for less than 100$.

[SolarPortal]

wow.. thats quite a diff in price, might have to check it out. It could have been because we were trying to implement into our engine and let users use it free of charge.. But we could make a plugin for our engine that people could then buy a license for
Thanks for the information

Did you get anywhere with it, does it produce good results.

[TaaTT4]

Its implentation happens in pure dx11 and opengl but if I remember correctly at the time one of the renders system demos didn't work and crashed.

Correct! It's one of the worst library I had to deal with since I've started programming: all the samples they provide just crash (or don't build), the documentation is scarce (and apparently also outdated) and their support is ridicolous (I'm still waiting for an answer about a major bug for over a month: the installer of the 4.2 version doesn't contain the lib/dll). I imagine that Unity/UE4 represent 95% of their business, but it's a shame they apparently don't care for non-commercial engines since, on the market, there aren't equally valid competitors.

Anyway, after a month of frustrating tries (and a bit of blasphemies), I've been able to render a sky! <3 I had to put this task on hold due to impellent side tasks for artists, but I hope to being able to continue with it (day/night cycle, cloud shadows) from the next week on.


Feel free to ask if you have questions.

[SolarPortal]

That sky looks good..
a month to get that, no surprises with that codebase though haha
Good job!

If we come to integrate it, ill certainly be hitting you up

[Nickak2003]

can you post an idea of what exactly is involved to get it to integrate with a basic ogre scene or tutorial app? I'm wondering if I should examine it too.

[TaaTT4]

can you post an idea of what exactly is involved to get it to integrate with a basic ogre scene or tutorial app? I'm wondering if I should examine it too.

I'd recommend the integration of trueSKY with OGRE just to advanced user.
To make it extremely simple, it consists in create a custom Ogre::CompositorPass to put in between the rendering of opaque and transparent objects. But since the devil is in the details, there's a lot of additional little things you have to consider/deal with. E.g. to subsequently apply scatter effects to transparent objects or to cast cloud shadows (still have to do both) you have to customize the HLMS PBS implementation, on C++ side as well as shader side.
In addition, semi-advanced knowledge of the render system you're interested in as well as the OGRE internal operations is mandatory in my opinion. Don't know what are you skills, but if you've never handled OpenGL/DirectX API, wrote some shaders and modified OGRE sources (ideally: creating your own customized PBS implementation), I'd let it go (or I'd pay someone else to do the job for me ). I don't want to be tough neither scare anyone, but I believe is better to be warned in advance.
At the end, I could probably share some code snippets too, but I have to discuss this with my boss first.

[al2950]

Interesting post!

I looked at truesky nearly ten years ago and again back in January. The tech seems very promising and uses the same techniques I would like to implement if I had the time. Sadly nothing has changed in ten years, the demos dont compile, the pre-compiled demos dont run. I did put some effort in getting some of them to run, but then everything was horrendously overexposed so was ultimately a negative sales point.

However to get an idea of what the tech is capable of, their sky sequencer app works, and although is a bit buggy in places, it gives you a good idea of the capabilities.

I have used and still use Sundog Software's for sky (Silverlining), and water (Triton ) in some of my systems. I do not feel their tech is as good, but they are very helpful and its fairly simply to integrate into Ogre as just need a custom compositors pass, although this does assume clouds are always behind any transparent objects.