Vista Thermal Camera

Changelog 3.53

Changes since 2.0.1. The thermal view is now based on a physical model of the climate, the materials and the heat sources. Client and server must both run release 3 (network protocol version 3).

Version numbers now have the form R.N: R is the number of the release, N the number of the build counted over all versions of the mod. This is release 3 and the 53rd build since 1.0.0.

Climate

• The air temperature depends on the biome, the time of day and the altitude. Every vanilla biome has its own mean temperature, daily range, solar heating and humidity; biomes of other mods are matched by common biome tags or derived from the game's biome parameters.
• The daily temperature curve has its minimum at 06:00 and its maximum at 14:00.
• Rain, thunder and snow reduce the visibility and change the air temperature. Surfaces become wet in rain, approach the air temperature and dry out gradually afterwards.
• The Nether has a hot ceiling instead of a sky and geothermally heated ground; soul sand valleys are cooler and basalt deltas hotter, surfaces near lava are much hotter. The End is cold (228 K), has no sun and no daily cycle, and its void is very cold. Other dimensions receive a profile from their dimension type.
• The climate is defined in the new data file climate.json, which a resource pack may replace.

Materials

• The material of a surface is determined by its block instead of its colour. The client keeps a map of the block classes of the loaded world on the GPU; the colour is used only where no block data is available.
• New data file materials.json with the parameters of 15 material classes (stone, soil, sand, wood, vegetation, water, ice, snow, glass, metal, cloth, lava, lamps, soul sand and soul soil, magma) and explicit block assignments. Blocks of other mods are classified automatically by their tags, sound type and map colour.
• Ice and snow are never warmer than 273.15 K; ice placed in a warm biome is visible as a cold object. Water warms up and cools down more slowly than the air: it is coldest in the morning and warmest in the evening.
• Glass, water, ice and stained glass are opaque, as in the real infrared band: a window shows the temperature of the glass, and nothing is visible under water or ice.
• Grass blocks, and grass and flowers growing on the ground, have the temperature of dirt; moss, leaves and sugar cane are vegetation.
• Seagrass, kelp, coral fans and bubble columns have the temperature of the water around them.
• Metal has an emissivity of 0.85 and partly reflects its surroundings; wet surfaces emit like water.
• Sable structures use the same material model as the world. A structure without heat sources has the temperature of the same blocks in the world.

Display

• By default a fixed temperature window is shown (263–313 K), so the climate is visible directly: a desert by day is bright, a snowfield and the End are dark, the Nether saturates the image. Temperatures outside the window are clipped.
• Automatic gain control is optional (client setting autoGain or per camera from a computer). It fits the window to the histogram of the surfaces in the frame, including hot objects but not the sky, and follows the scene with a delay ("breathing" of the image).
• Protection against blooming: lava, fire and other very hot areas go to solid white and do not take part in the window, so they no longer darken the rest of the scene.
• The visible block and its face are found by following the ray of every pixel through the map of block classes. Distant terrain no longer shows stripes, ripple or grids at high zoom, and the edges of objects in front of water no longer have bright rims.
• Far away, where one pixel covers several block faces, the terrain takes the average temperature of the tops and sides of its steps instead of flickering between them.

Heat sources

• Heat sources have absolute running temperatures in kelvin, so an engine stands out more in a cold biome than in a desert. Sources may also be colder than the air.
• The hull around an engine warms up over minutes and cools down more slowly; the warm zone is smaller in cold air and while the vehicle moves. Heat from several sources does not add up.
• New running conditions for the heat source list: running sounds, Create shaft speed, chains of block entity methods and fields, and permanent operation. Warium engines are recognised by their running sounds.
• Running gear of Create Tracks+ and Offroad heats up from movement, most of all when the vehicle turns on the spot, and cools down over tens of minutes.
• Moving parts of Create kinetic blocks and the tracks of Create Tracks+ show the temperature of their block.
• Heat source overlays follow the block model, including model parts outside the block shape (rotated barrels, muzzles, rails).
• Barrels, running gear and hulls cool down while the thermal view is not in use.

Guns

• Guns heat up by groups: machine guns, autocannons, tank guns, rockets and light weapons. Every shot adds heat that is stored in the barrel and saturates towards the group's limit, plus a short flash that fades within seconds. A tank gun flashes with each shot and stays warm for tens of minutes; machine guns and autocannons heat up over long bursts and cool down within minutes.
• The breech heats more than the barrel, muzzle devices less. Fast-firing weapons heat less per shot, so all autocannons heat equally per second of fire.
• Only the weapon that fired heats. The sounds of one shot are recognised together, so a shared echo no longer heats a different kind of weapon, and guns standing side by side no longer heat each other.
• New supported guns: Mianbao's NewModernWarfare, additional blocks of CBC Military Supplement and CBC Modern Warfare; the shot and echo sounds of Warium guns.

Peripheral

• New functions for the display window: setAutoGain, isAutoGain, setGain, setLevel, setSpan, getGain, resetGain. The settings are stored in the camera.
• New autoLevel(): the fixed window is set once from the current scene, like the auto-adjust button of a real thermal camera.

Configuration

• New client settings: autoGain, gainLevel, gainSpan (display window), slowCoolingScale (shortens the slow cooling of running gear, hulls and barrels) and classVolumeSections (GPU memory for block materials). With a large render distance raise classVolumeSections, otherwise distant chunks look coarse and striped (see Client settings).

Data files and resource packs

• All thermal data files use absolute temperatures in kelvin; differences are named *_delta. The older heat and idle_heat fields of heat source packs are still read.
• The server log checks the identifiers of all bundled data files on start (blocks, tags, biomes, dimensions, sounds, gun groups).
• Resource packs may replace any thermal data file (heat_sources.json, materials.json, climate.json).

Fixes

• Glass and heat sources near the camera no longer disappear at a large render distance.
• The thermal view no longer falls back to colour classification when another mod leaves a pixel buffer bound.
• Heat sources on a structure no longer add up to a white hull.
• Blocks in the Nether and in caves, including fire and lava, no longer take the material of their surroundings.