Cloud rendering parity with retail confirmed visually under Phase 0 of
the #27 fix plan: launched acdream with no DG override (LCG-picked
matches retail's pick), compared cloud coverage / color / edges /
movement at the same in-game time. User verdict: "Cloud and colors look
correct."
The original #27 observation from earlier in this session was a
side-effect of the broken `effEmissive=1.0` default that saturated every
sky mesh's vTint to white. That bug, plus the orthogonal `surface.Translucency`
plumbing gap, were both repaired in commit 4678b3e:
- Fix 1 (Translucency): cloud surface 0x08000023 has Translucency=0.25,
now plumbed end-to-end → clouds at 75% opacity instead of 100%.
- Fix 2 (Luminosity): cloud surfaces have Luminosity=0.0, so post-fix
they run through `vTint = ambient + sun·N·L` instead of saturating
to white — clouds pick up the keyframe time-of-day tint.
User also flagged that acdream's clock is "a few minutes ahead" of retail
(sun higher on the horizon at the same wall-clock moment). That is the
existing #3 (`Client clock drifts from retail after ~10 minutes —
periodic TimeSync missing`), reproducing exactly as documented. Out of
scope for the sky-fixes branch.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>