SilverLining 2.34 is now available from our download page. This updates speeds up the rendering of cumulus clouds by about 10% in our tests, by reducing CPU load. On our test system with an ATI 5850 graphics card, we’re seeing framerates in the high 300’s for scenes with cumulus congestus clouds stretching to the horizon.

This update also introduces finer control over precipitation effects, by exposing some new configuration settings to control the terminal velocity of snow particles, and to allow use of the depth buffer when rendering precipitation particles if your near clip plane is close to the camera. See the full release notes for more details.

There are also a few bug fixes related to stratocumulus clouds included in this update; thank you to our friends at Tree C Technology for sending those our way. Updated commercial game engine integration packages are also now available, built against Havok Vision Engine 8.2.6 and Gamebryo Lightspeed 3.2.