Prevent distant planets from being visible trough the Atmosphere

[Lisias]

Fellow Kerbonaut Krazy1 remembered about an old request from another Fellow Kerbonaut infinite_monkey:

Planets appear as a dark spot visible through the atmosphere. They should be hidden behind it, just like the stars. Would it be possible to fix that?

Additionally, Fellow Kerbonaut Krazy1 complements:

Planets show directly though the sun. Like this:

Well… I will try. :)

I don't have the slightest idea how to fix it, but I remember something on Unity about layers (it's the reason it's so difficult nowadays to select a craft on KSC as target - the layer of the icon if the craft, mistakenly, is lower than the layer of the icon of KSC).

[Lisias]

The layer stunt works on sprites. It will not help my ass here.

I will need to give a nice peek on Scatterer et all to understand how the Atmospheres are drawn, but from a preliminary overview, things does not look good - the Atmosphere appears to be drawn immediately after the skybox and before any 3D object…

Since reordering this would be essentially reimplementing Scatterer myself (a daunt task to say the least), I will try to stunt my way out of the mess. Perhaps I could try to use transparency?

[Lisias]

Additionally, perhaps we could do the same to Comets as request on Forum?

[Lisias]

Fellow Kerbonaut Alioth81 also talked about this on Forum. Nice shot, by the way!

[Lisias]

That's the problem… Somewhere in the past, the body flares was moved to the layer 10 due PlanetShine. But then they started to misbehave.

Later they were all moved to layer 15.

My best guess is that moving the Body Flares to layer 15 was a bad idea. Even 10 was less than ideal. The Body Flares should be placed behind the Atmosphere layers (9).

See https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/API:Layers for gory details.

[Lisias]

it worked as intended.

Fixed on commit https://github.com/net-lisias-ksp/DistantObject/commit/88341b75bea344ff30ba2aa9896c1ffda1f7fa21

[Lisias]

Reopening the damned thing, as the fix made the flares (unsurprisingly, to tell you the true) be rendered behind their bodies, screwing up with the damned feature.

The way to go is more or less this one, but I'm afraid I will need to cast a new ray to check if there's an atmosphere behind the body flares….

[Lisias]

Removing the milestone of this thing, as I don't know when I will have time to research this thing again.

[Lisias]

Reopening this thing again. How in hell this was closed???

[Lisias]

Fellow Kerbonaut ColdJ suggested the following material as reference (documenting it here or I will lose track of the info):

• Unity Layers and Tags updated 12 June 2018
• Render Texture Camera and KSP, Culling, Layers, Masks?
  • This one looks perfect for a new feature on KT!
• Somewhere to put any knowledge learned about using the .mu plugin.