I just realized it’s been awhile since we posted anything on this blog – but that’s because we’ve been busy, you know, building things!

The SilverLining 3D Cloud, Sky, and Weather SDK is now up to version 7.007, and most of our recent updates have centered around refining its new support for Vulkan, now that it’s seeing integration into real-world applications. The main change is improvements to sharing resources across multiple windows or render targets while sharing a single Atmosphere instance among them. If you have multiple windows, probes, and textures to render to at once, these changes will help you stay within Vulkan’s resource limits. We’ve also rolled out compatibility with the newer 1.3.290.0 Vulkan SDK.

There are also some exciting performance improvements for users of OpenGL 3.2 or newer core profiles; bindless indirect rendering is now supported with core profiles (without backward compatibility enabled.) This can produce a noticeable speedup when you have a lot of clouds in a scene!

And finally, for those users linking in their own user shader programs into SilverLining, we’ve rolled out the ability to also have them linked into the shader used for lightning – which can simplify the development of your user shaders by removing the need to treat SilverLining’s “line shader” as a special case.

We continue to support the Triton Ocean SDK as well, of course – but it is in “it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it” mode. It appears to be in a very stable state and still meets our customers’ requirements, and we don’t want to mess with that unless a bug or new requirement arises that we need to address. So far we haven’t heard any demand for Vulkan support in Triton, but let us know if that’s something you could use.

Finally there is ongoing development for SilverLining for Unity from our partners at SimBlocks LLC – they are working on updating Universal Render Pipeline (URP) support for SilverLining in Unity. If you’re developing projects in Unity, be sure to check out their Unity add-ons for both SilverLining and Triton.