The hard deck of the cloud base layer rendered here purely using shaders!
It uses a fullscreen quad which resembles the near plane of the viewing frustum which means the depth/stencil evaluation is worthless… so we have to do a painters’ algorithm to render the clouds before the models and terrain for proper sorting below the cloud layer.
I am pretty confident that this will preclude ships or structures from rendering correctly if the subject model is in the scud layer below the hard deck… but I have to work on the scud layer first before we will know what the effect is.