Hello there! It's been a long time since I made a forum post!

Introduction:

Since the 19th of January of this year, I've been working secretly (relatively) in a new mod that will provide a beautiful experience for every Windows, Mac and Linux player (sorry iOS and Android players, y'all won't be on this one), with volumetric clouds. I've always enjoyed looking at clouds whenever I go outside (and whenever the climate is good enough since my country is almost a desert), so that is why I thought for a while on doing a mod that would add this to the game, months passed and nothing happened, until I got the sudden motivational 'spark' (as well as enough knowledge to venture into the Unity editor and Visual Studio IDE)

The research starts (phase 0)

So I began looking for solutions online, there were some varied results, like these beautiful clouds from Sebastian Lague, he made the assets publicly for everybody too, but in the end I did not use his method due to performance costs and a relatively limited procedurality.

Testing inside the Unity Editor begins! (phase 1)

So after some days of researching online and some code attempted on my own (that looked like garbage or straight up didn't work), I found the perfect solution; Kode80's volumetric clouds. These clouds are not only beautiful, but they also run extremely fast (if tweaked correctly)

(GIF doesn't look particularily smooth due to 30fps, but trust me, it runs very smoothly inside the Unity editor!)

(I did not move the camera trough the clouds completely due to current bugs)

They look fabulous don't they? And it runs pretty fast too! Of course, there are some 'unintended' side effects and some things that need fixes and implementations.

Current bugs and missing features that need to be fixed

As of now, there are some bugs that I don't particularily enjoy, like for example the fact that when you go trough the clouds, they get rendered in the opposite direction (so the clouds rise up again). Also, a big feature that I have to add is to curve these clouds around a planet, something relatively hard to achieve.

An invitation to experienced modders!

So yes, this might be a reality soon for JNO, but I don't have much time left to finish this since I will enter highschool again soon and I will be super busy with other things (and I'm not particularily good at modding since this is my first time doing it), so I want to propose an invitation to any modder of JNO that is interested in these developments to work cooperatively with me and achieve a release of this mod (soon™)

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed reading this first dev-blog (and I hope that I can continue on this until release), and good luck!

(Phases of the JunoClouds project)