small_optimization

Looks great, good stuff.  Optimizing projects is the fun part. 

Implemented the downscaling: Maybe some additional AA needs to be added, but all in all it is a big performance increase.

and just to show something how the cloudshape can be modified by an artist or so: 

Now that's cool.  So you can use masks to change the shape?

Not directly, the clouds system is based on a weather texture, where red is used for the overall coverage of  clouds, green is used for the cloud type and blue is used for the cloud wetness.  So if you modify one of the channels it will reflect on the clud rendering. In this case i just pasted "UltraEngine" Logo directly in the red channel. Also you may notice, that currently a plain texture is used which leads to repition, i later will also support cubemaps which can then be used to create individual weather for whole planets.

Sounds pretty flexable.  Will it have cumulonimbus? 

in theory yes,  I still need to figure out the bet weathermap format to support all of them. some systems use just the rgb and some 4 channels with the alpha map. 

This looks significantly better than your last iteration.

The SSR effect uses reprojection from the previous frame. That shader code might be helpful if you need that.

It would be interesting to fetch data from a source like this and display approximate real-time weather conditions:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/global-maps/MODAL2_M_CLD_FR

@Josh, that would be interessting. I have seen some parameters for the screen velocity, but is there already a posteffect texture i can use for that, like albeado or depth?

ok, doubled the raysteps and reduced the raycasts per frame to 1/16 as a first step to reprojection: and this is the result (with the old raystep range (32-64) i even get around 700-800fps):

Wow impressive stats!  Good job.

I have no implemented screen velocity yet, but it is planned for.

In the situations where reprojeciton can be used, it is like magic. I think this is how real-time ray tracing is usually done.

I got a first version with reprojection working. it is not fine tuned, but in general the algo is very basic. 

This gif shows the debugging of the reprojection.

Red shows the pixels which went offscreen and needs to be rerendered as well.  In the non red area only every 16th pixel is rendered per frame, the others are reprojected from the previous frame.