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[1.8.x] JoolBiomes v1.1: Add biomes (and Great Green Spot) to Jool


Snark

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What it does

  • Re-textures Jool to give it a Great Green Spot.
  • Adds four distinct biomes to Jool, with their own distinct science definitions.

The biomes roughly follow the patterns of Jool's cloud bands, and are:

  • Equatorial Cloud Belt
  • Temperate Cloud Belt
  • Polar Cloud Belt
  • Great Green Spot

Note that you still can't land on Jool (it's a gas giant!), so the biomes are only useful for space and atmospheric science.

Download from SpaceDock
License: MIT

Note:  Requires Kopernicus (install separately; not included with this mod).

GxfQCF3.png

 

How to install

  1. Make sure you've installed Kopernicus.
  2. Unzip into GameData, same as with any other mod.

 

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6 minutes ago, CaptRobau said:

Didn't know that biomes worked on gas giants. Might try that for my own mod's gas giants.

lol... dang, that was fast.  My very next thing was going to be go over to the OPM thread and say, "Hey, CaptRobau, any chance you could add biomes to the OPM gas giants, sometime?"

(Actually, when I was writing this mod, I was tempted to call it GasGiantBiomes, and go ahead and add a bunch of ":AFTER[OPM]" sections to add biomes to Sarnus, Urlum, and Neidon.  Came this close.  Then I figured, nah, my little mod's just a small thing, probably most folks won't even notice it, I'll just see if I can get Jool to work and then go poke CaptRobau.)

I absolutely worship your mod.  Total fanboy glee now.

Really beat me to the punch, there.  :)

Edited by Snark
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How is compatability with retextured jools or jools with clouds? 

(Sorry i cant test, live off grid and have no electricity for ksp right now until generator is fixed)

Edited by Errol
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11 minutes ago, Errol said:

How is compatability with retextured jools or jools with clouds? 

(Sorry i cant test, live off grid and have no electricity for ksp right now until generator is fixed)

I don't actually know, but I'd guess that it boils down to "works for biomes, doesn't work for visual features."

In a bit more detail:

I used a custom texture to add the Great Green Spot.  If you're running some other mod that also wants to re-texture Jool, then I'm not sure how the game decides who wins.  Maybe just random based on which one loads last?

If the other mod "wins" and you're looking at a Jool that has some other custom texture (i.e. instead of mine):  then this mod ought to still "work", in the sense that the biomes will be there, and you can get science from them, and you can see them with the "make biomes visible" debug option, and so forth.  However, it won't make any visual sense-- i.e. your instruments will be telling you "I'm over the Great Green Spot" when there's so such thing because you've repainted the planet.  Similarly, the biome map for the major cloud bands that I've put on there (equatorial, temperate, polar) have been designed to approximately follow the dark/light contours of Jool's stock cloud belts, so those also wouldn't make a whole lot of visual sense.

As for "with clouds", I'm not sure exactly what you mean, there.  I can think of a couple of possibilities:

If you mean a Jool that uses the Kopernicus feature of procedurally generated gas giants, then I expect that would wipe out my texture, and again, you'd have a situation where the biomes work as expected but don't have any visual correlation to the visible surface features.

If you mean a Jool that just has some clouds that are layered on top of the underlying texture, without replacing it, then it should be just fine.

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7 minutes ago, Snark said:

I don't actually know, but I'd guess that it boils down to "works for biomes, doesn't work for visual features."

In a bit more detail:

I used a custom texture to add the Great Green Spot.  If you're running some other mod that also wants to re-texture Jool, then I'm not sure how the game decides who wins.  Maybe just random based on which one loads last?

If the other mod "wins" and you're looking at a Jool that has some other custom texture (i.e. instead of mine):  then this mod ought to still "work", in the sense that the biomes will be there, and you can get science from them, and you can see them with the "make biomes visible" debug option, and so forth.  However, it won't make any visual sense-- i.e. your instruments will be telling you "I'm over the Great Green Spot" when there's so such thing because you've repainted the planet.  Similarly, the biome map for the major cloud bands that I've put on there (equatorial, temperate, polar) have been designed to approximately follow the dark/light contours of Jool's stock cloud belts, so those also wouldn't make a whole lot of visual sense.

As for "with clouds", I'm not sure exactly what you mean, there.  I can think of a couple of possibilities:

If you mean a Jool that uses the Kopernicus feature of procedurally generated gas giants, then I expect that would wipe out my texture, and again, you'd have a situation where the biomes work as expected but don't have any visual correlation to the visible surface features.

If you mean a Jool that just has some clouds that are layered on top of the underlying texture, without replacing it, then it should be just fine.

AFAIK, rmods work in alphabetical order, then following the :AFTER tags, before the :FINAL tag.

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4 minutes ago, MatterBeam said:

AFAIK, rmods work in alphabetical order, then following the :AFTER tags, before the :FINAL tag.

Thanks, good to know!  So I guess I should have named this AaaandHereAreJoolBiomes.... :P

Anyway, the moral of the story is, if somebody's running a mod that reskins Jool, then either that one will win or this one will, as far as the visual texture is concerned.  However, the biome map should come through unaffected (assuming that the other mod isn't trying to do something with biomes).

(If you want to tinker with the biome map, it's pretty easy-- just fiddle with the image file that comes with the mod, using any paint program.  As long as you stick to the same colors I've used, you don't even need to update the .cfg files.)

Edited by Snark
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Question for @Snark or others -

what does the temperature profile look like at depth? Pressure vs altitude? I gather there is a config or table somewhere to define that for the planets. Is that available to mods?

seems like it would be an appropriate challenge to have the deepest flyable depths to have extreme high temps and pressures. Could be an interesting angle to have to tune your lift, drag, cooling etc for the conditions at different depth layers. 

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1 hour ago, fourfa said:

what does the temperature profile look like at depth? Pressure vs altitude? I gather there is a config or table somewhere to define that for the planets. Is that available to mods?

I don't know off the top of my head what the actual numbers are for Jool in stock, but yes, it exists.  Atmospheric characteristics as a function of altitude (such as temperature and pressure) are defined by "curves" for altitude (i.e. tables with entries for various altitudes), the same way that engine Isp is a curve for pressure.

And yes, it's totally moddable.

For planets that are added by mods using Kopernicus (such as Outer Planets Mod, or New Horizons), you can see the data just by opening up the .cfg file for the planet in question-- it's right there in human-readable config, the same way that part config works.

However, for the stock planets, there's no text .cfg file that you can open to see the data-- it's not like the stock parts, which use text .cfg and are easy to read.  However, just because it's not in a human-readable text file doesn't mean it's not there, and it only takes a snippet of code to extract the information.  It's available via the API, if not via Notepad.

Not only is it quite moddable, but it doesn't require code to mod it.  As long as Kopernicus is installed, you can tweak any planet (including the stock planets) just by writing a snippet of ModuleManager config, same as with parts.

So it would be totally easy to rejigger Jool's temperature/pressure profile.

More interesting to me is the idea of having different science situations for gas giants, e.g. adding "lower atmosphere" or "deep atmosphere" or whatever.  I'm curious about that, I should go look at the code.  Some aspects of KSP are more easily moddable than others-- without looking at the API, I don't know whether adding additional atmosphere situations would be like pulling teeth, or trivially easy.  If it's easy, that would be a fun mod to write.  :)

[Edit] ...damn it.  Just looked.  Unfortunately, they've chosen to implement the class ExperimentSituations as an enum.  That means they've got a hard-coded list of possible values (e.g. InSpaceLow, InSpaceHigh, FlyingLow, FlyingHigh, etc.), and it's not possible to modify it in any way.

That means that trying to create additional science situations would be like pulling teeth; very unfriendly territory for modders.  Oh well.

Edited by Snark
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Ah, pity. Perhaps then, FlyingLow on Jool should be something totally unique. Like over the explosion temp of ordinary wing parts, with so much pressure that unexpected things fly by body lift alone, engines behave in strange and unfamiliar ways. Make it the hardest biome to reach in the whole system, and (if possible) give it a matching science value that far exceeds any other single biome. 

Edited by fourfa
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1 hour ago, fourfa said:

Ah, pity. Perhaps then, FlyingLow on Jool should be something totally unique. Like over the explosion temp of ordinary wing parts, with so much pressure that unexpected things fly by body lift alone, engines behave in strange and unfamiliar ways. Make it the hardest biome to reach in the whole system, and (if possible) give it a matching science value that far exceeds any other single biome. 

There are a couple of options that spring to mind.

One would be to mod Jool to adjust the altitude of "flying low" to be a lot lower than it currently is (to make it a lot harder to get to), and boost its science value by a lot.  Doesn't give a richer experience, but at least it adds challenge and reward for plumbing the depths.

Another option would be to add a new science experiment, "Atmospheric Crush-O-Meter" or whatever, that only works under the right conditions (e.g. at least such-and-such amount of atmospheric pressure, or at least N kilometers below atmosphere top, or something) and generates a lot of science.

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1 hour ago, Paranoid Shark said:

Congratulations on being featured on Modding Monday.

Thank you!  :)  Was not expecting it.

Here's the link, to save any interested parties a mouse click or two.

 

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Congrats! Pretty nifty little modlet, since I have Kopernicus anyway I gave it a go. Not disappointed at all! Are you planning to add other science experiments? Can't think of any off the top of my head but other mods have some pretty cool ones and frankly, I like your descriptions.

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9 hours ago, batman78781 said:

Are you planning to add other science experiments?

Not totally sure what you mean by that-- there are a couple of interpretations that spring to mind.  :)

If what you mean is "Are you planning on adding science defs for other experiments from other mods?" -- well, on my own initiative, probably not, because in my own games I don't happen to run any mods that add any additional science experiments.  However, if there's enough demand from other folks to add support for specific mods, I'd be happy to consider it.  Do you have any specific suggestions?

If, on the other hand, what you mean is "Are you planning on implementing any new science instruments for the game?" (i.e. create my own experiments):  Yes, hopefully and eventually, but not before 1.1.  Adding a new experiment would mean that I'd have to create a part model, which I don't currently know how to do.  I'm a dab hand at programming, but not modeling.  I have never used Blender or Unity in my life, I'm not especially artistic, it would be a learning curve for me to climb.  (None of my current mods involve any modeling or serious UI work.)  And with the upcoming move to Unity 5 in KSP 1.1, I wouldn't be surprised if that has some sort of impact on modeling.  So I figured I'd wait until after 1.1 hits and the dust has settled, then see if I can teach myself how to model (and whether I can actually make something that doesn't look stupid).

If I do add a new experiment in such a fashion (e.g. one that's designed to operate at extreme atmospheric or oceanic depths), I'd probably put it in a separate mod, and then make sure it's compatible with JoolBiomes.  I'll be sure to post an update here, if-and-when I do.  :)

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Congratulations on making Modding Monday. Looks like a neat stock-alike mod, happy to download. Can't have enough biomes.

 

EDIT; Also love the Vector Repurposed mod.

Edited by -ctn-
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On 2/16/2016 at 5:29 AM, plague006 said:

When you have your github repo setup and a release pushed, pinging us (CKAN) at https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/NetKAN/pull/3066 would be greatly appreciated so we can index the mod. =)

Thanks, I'll definitely post here when I have an update.  I've been closely following the SpaceDock status thread, sounds like they're making good progress.  The simplest thing may be just to wait a few days until they've got it functioning, then restore the mod there, since it'll include the same CKAN functionality that the previous site did.

(If they run into problems and it starts looking like it'll be a long time before they get it up and working, I may reconsider and go ahead and set up the repo.)

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Hi all,

Apologies for the service outage when the mod's hosting site went off the air (may it rest in peace).

The site's replacement, SpaceDock, is now up and running.  (Mostly.  They're still working the kinks out, and it will take a while until all the mod authors have re-uploaded their mods, but it's "up enough" to be able to put mods there.)

I've uploaded JoolBiomes to SpaceDock.  See the updated OP above for a download link.

Thanks to the hardworking devs and admins who have gotten SpaceDock up and running so quickly!

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@plague006, the mod is back up and on SpaceDock, so fire away.  :)  I flagged it for CKAN.  I know that the devs working on getting SpaceDock up and running are still working on CKAN functionality, so not sure the degree to which it is working yet.

1 hour ago, eberkain said:

Is there anywhere to grab this from right now?

Yup, there ya go.

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  • 2 months later...

FYI, this mod now works with KSP 1.1, as long as you've updated to v1.0 of Kopernicus.

I haven't bumped the version number of JoolBiomes, because no changes were necessary.  :)  All that was needed was an updated Kopernicus version that's compatible with KSP 1.1, which Thomas P. was kind enough to release today.

So... enjoy!

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