Hello everyone! Finally... some time to work on Simple Clouds at last.
This week I managed to implement stretchable and rotatable cloud regions. You can now have ovals alongside your classic circle cloud formation in any angle you so desire. These will be the basic shapes for now. In a future update I made add more complex shapes.
The biggest reason for having these stretchable cloud formations is to allow storms to be appear super big, but when they pass over you, they only last for a short time. This helps solve the problem of me wanting storms to look massive, menacing, and move slow, but then consequently they last forever. After some more testing, this issue should be solved!
Some extra commands have also been introduced, most notably one to remove all storms. This should help in the event players are tired of a storm that may be lasting for longer then expected, and so they can manually remove it (which is not possible in the currently released version of the mod).
Shaded clouds were previously disabled, but are now back and will be on by default due to a new periodic simplex noise algorithm which includes the calculations required for shaded clouds. It runs a lot more efficiently than my previous method. The difference visually is night and day and adds an extra level of realism, especially for the cumulus clouds with their transparency. This periodic simplex noise also should help improve stability with floating point errors.
Scroll has also been revamped. For those who may not know what this is, it's what makes the individual cubes in the clouds move around. It can no longer be specified by commands and is now controlled internally to prevent it from scaling to super large numbers causing precision errors and motion jitteriness. Speed can still be controlled however.
Simple Clouds now also skips empty chunks when mesh generating hopefully improving performance a bit. In general the mod should be a bit more polished and more stable. All that's left is testing (which hopefully I will have a new BETA out sometime soon), bug fixing, and then release!
Until next week!