Release 5 changelog (28‐09‐2025) - LGhassen/EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements GitHub Wiki

14/03/26

• Fixed pixelated puddles after a long time in-game

03/01/26

• Improved cloud upscaling:
  • Fix pixelation in motion when thin clouds/fog passes in front of thicker clouds, this was especially bad when very thin fog passes in front of farther away clouds and causes them to pixelate.
  • Fix smearing on overlapped cloud layers at long distances
  • Reduce trailing artifacts on clouds on fast camera movements
• Add ability to set cloud layer linear speed relative to the planet's radius, or as angular speed instead of defaulting to linear speed at layer's altitude. Makes it easier to sync layers to each other and avoids them desyncing when rescaling the planet's radius (eg planet rescales that don't modify the cloud configs). Default to existing behaviour (linear at layer altitude) for compatibility
• Fix singularities in cloud flowmaps causing visible discontinuities/artifacts on Jool
• Improve Jool 2d (orbit view) flowmap
• Fix puddles shifting/moving around in some cases
• Improve ocean generation and scene switch times by generating ocean spectrum and variance on the GPU. Thanks to @Phantomical/steamroller for the tip and initial parallelized CPU version.
• Small performance improvements in ocean FFT shader
• Fix square artifacts on ocean surface on NVidia 50 series GPUs
• Fix some case sensitive cloud texture paths for Linux. Thanks to @pipai for the tip

12/10/25

Scatterer:

• Fix scatterer causing darker ground ambient/reflection in reflection probes
• VR fixes by JonnyOthan
• Fix duplicate instance message when switching scenes in editors

Deferred (download separately)

• Fix nested reflections in reflection probe causing overbright reflections on minmus flats

30/09/25

• Fix Scatterer causing parts in the VAB to become dark

• Deferred updates (download separately)

  • Fix Deferred SSR getting "phantom" bright white reflections on Minmus when there is nothing to reflect
  • Force reflection probes on to fix some users getting no ambient lighting because they disabled it
  • Check for NaNs when doing lighting and SSR to attempt to fix some issues with SSR becoming black

3.1.0 - 29/09/25

• Fix serious issue causing kraken attack (ships going off-course or disintegrating) when switching to map view in some conditions

3.0.0 - 28/09/25

• New features:

  • Improved volumetric clouds

    • Reworked noise and shading to get more realistic-loking clouds
      • Improve noise quality, more detail can now be extracted out of a single baseNoise texture
      • More control over noise is provided through persistence and lacunarity variables and how "deep" inside the cloud erosion is performed. Also added a setting to get a more billowy/rounded noise
      • Remove obsolete noise/brightness settings that are difficult to control and direct
      • Remove obsolete detail noise
    • Improved cloud upscaling
      • Reduced noise
      • Fixed noise appearing on sudden camera movements
      • Add a distance-based continuous accumulation setting, this increases noise absorption at long distances allowing larger step sizes. Distance adjustment is a trade-off for smearing (which falls off with parallax/distance)
    • Add density gradient curves to make clouds get denser over height
    • Upgrade anti-tiling method, less 3d noise tiling will be noticeable on clouds
    • Old configs are incompatible, change node name to layerRaymarchedVolumeV5 to not load old configs, bump major version
    • Handle overlapping volumetric layers, the solution is not perfect and overlapping layers should ideally be rendered densest to thinnest, added a manual "overlapRenderOrder" setting to control this
    • Add/fix normalmap support on 2d clouds
    • Add a lambertian setting to 2d clouds to finetune the shading, previous versions (With scatterer integration) would be the equivalent of lambertian set to zero
    • Add loading of BC5 format for normalMaps in EVE (with on-demand texture loading)

  • Wet surfaces

    • Add puddles that accumulate when it rains and slowly dry off, accumulation is simulated locally and can happen off-screen and on game/planet loads
    • Add different settings to modify Buildings/Terrain/Craft' smoothness and albedo with wetness and puddle accumulation
    • Add rain ripples on puddles when it is raining

  • Add screen-space reflections (using Deferred)

    • Compatible with all deferred shaders and Scatterer Ocean

  • Improved lighting and shadows

    • Render clouds in reflection probes making them appear in off-screen reflections and impact ambient light
    • Make scattering render correctly on reflection probes
    • Integrate cloud shadows into the lighting correctly instead of being overlaid on the final image, render cloud shadows at lower resolution
    • Add sunset colors and cloud shadows to the IVA lighting and reflection probes
    • Sort atmospheres and cloud layers back-to-front correctly, most noticeable when observing Jool behind Laythe
    • ParticleFields receive ambient light from reflection probe and shadow from lightVolume
    • Improved accuracy of screen space cloud shadows to the actual volumetrics

  • Ocean improvements

    • Add SSR support to ocean
    • Render Scatterer ocean in a Deferred manner, removes the pixel lights cost for the ocean and enables them by default
    • Improve ocean refractions to look more realistic/accurate, using an SSR-like method
    • Additional settings for ocean reflection and ambient colors, for emulating metallic or exotic oceans

  • Improved authoring tools

    • Add tile-based painting tools to volumetrics painter
    • Add live preview to painter brush (no longer need to click/paint to see the result, just mouse over)
    • Screen space cloud shadows now see painter modifications
    • Add exporting of 2d cloud maps (albedo, transparency and normals) from volumetric clouds

  • Other

    • Small performance improvement for lightVolume updates
    • Remove obsolete KeepUntilingOnNoFlowAreas option (due to sample count difference between anti-tiling and flow) and add a per-layer option to disable anti-tiling if needed
    • Improve performance on a cloud layer if all cloud types use the same noise scale
    • Add per-type multiple scattering brightness setting, to tweak excessive brightness on very thin clouds
    • Add per-type curl noise strength
    • Add fxOnly option to avoid raymarching layers used only for particles and sounds

• Configs:

  • New Kerbin configs
    • Hand-painted cloud formations taking advantage of new cloud features
    • Added several new cloud types better approaching the look of real convective clouds
    • Cumulonimbus clouds are now on their own layer overlapping the main layer for a more complex realistic look
    • Added several tiles to paint realistic cloud formations using the new tile painter
  • Redone Laythe Volcanoes to look more imposing and realistic, taking pyrocumulus clouds as inspiration

• Fixes

  • Fix clouds disappearing below a certain density, making thin clouds not work well
  • Fix pitch black darkness on dark side of planets caused by Eclipse bug in EVE
  • VR fixes by @JonnyOThan
    • Fix SMAA in VR
    • Use the correct resolution in VR for multiple effects
    • Reduce smearing on right eye for volumetric clouds
  • Fade out wave interactions for craft going fast, makes seaplanes easier
  • Fix Volumetric cloud shadows on the ground sliding around with zoom at some distances
  • Make TAA see volumetric clouds motion vectors for less blur on clouds when TAA is active
  • Fix scaled space camera skybox motion vectors adding additional TAA blur
  • Fix artifacts/clipped neighbours on some snow particle texture
  • Fix minor issue with the kerbal IVA portrait viewport matching the main camera's
  • Reduce global keywords and use local keywords to avoid crashes with many mods adding keywords
  • Fix memory leaks when generating atmos or just pressing generate and loading atmos from cache