passinglurker

That's not an in engine render things would look differently in game. Still you've peaked my curiosity how much shiny is "too shiny"? Some of these have thier bright spots (where it's warranted) sure but none are totally uniform and flat shaded like the new HECS2 or other recent parts squad's put out, and as @panzer1b explained taking advantage of contrast in the specular map (ie the shininess in the right amounts in the right places) is a key element to making the sort of detailed porkalike textures we appreciate. As for gold foil the tricky part that makes this so hard in KSP is that it usually comes in one of two forms either it looks like krap, or it looks too photorealistic personally I think @CobaltWolf's MEM decent module, and ranger probe core are the best examples of kerbal foil that finds a middle ground and fits in with the other hand painted parts while still leaving the impression of shiny foil

And if they need more inspiration @CobaltWolf's BDB mod is a veritable gold mine of wildly different designs all adapted to get along under a hand painted kerbal style (and porkalike too boot) btw @Deddly would you say that any one of these are more attractive for KSP than either HECS2 iteration?

To be fair this isn't unusual I was positive when I first saw it too, but looking closer at some pretty bald flaws, and realizing this is essentially the old part it came across as a slap in the face after the last few weeks of positive results and reinforcement. I can understand where you are coming from but I think if anything is going to bury feedback its going to be these long debates on the nature of criticism. Even if they feel compelled to disagree with the tone people should still be sharing their opinion on the preview piece or whether they agree or disagree with the core point of a piece of criticism instead of solely focusing on whether it reads like someone was smiling when they wrote it. If they don't have an opinion on the contents of the devnote and just take issue with the tone of those who do care then I'd suggest they take thier issue to another thread (like the positivity movement thread) or communicate with the one they have issues with in private so that the weekly doesn't get derailed over offhanded passionate words. let me preface by saying neither is porkalike so for the goal of a unified aesthetic attractive has nothing to do with the core lynchpin of criticism that has been leveled against the HEC2. As for which is the "lesser of two evils" I'd have to say the old one. the shoddy UV map aside it looks painted like more attention was paid to it vs. the new one that basically looks (as I said before) photoshopped or rather it doesn't look painted it looks scrapbooked together, and a decent normal map alone can't really save it you know what I mean?

@Vanamonde This is incorrect I've made a point of saying how previews appear, how they come across. This is very different from a direct accusation it's a warning of how things will be taken if a preview is released as is. Any directness is in reference to and backed up by the actual and poor assets squad has added to the game even recently in order to back up why I warn things could turn out so. Squad receives the same courtesy I expect from others if I start trying to pass off ms paint previews as an art "upgrade" feel free to call me out on that. Now that that's out of the way let's speak constructively. Do you have any feelings on the HEC2 "update"? If what I fear is true and the asset optimisation turns out to be a lie in various cases would you be disappointed with squad? @Deddly after the evidence me and @panzer1b presented about what is thoroughly wrong with the HEC2 by subjective and objective metrics I fear your standards for "looks good" may be dangerously low. Speaking from my own insight into kerbal asset creation this part is bad enough that they are better off starting fresh. The source for thier foil normal map being about the only thing of note that can be carried over.. Either way you should be wishing squad actually produces good assets more than obsessing over my choice of words everything "negative" I've said is backed up by history, and is well deserved. Squad's welcome to change my mind all they need to do is stop cutting corners. This isn't even modern AAA photorealism some "good" indie quality hand painted assets shouldn't be too much to ask. Look you've seen I can be positive when there is something to be positive about, but with this asset this week there are no real positives, and you're just bogging things down and drawing it out trying to be the hug police. A lot of the negativity in this thread only came about because people decided to attack criticism instead of discuss the actual devnote...

And I wish every time squad shows a subpar preview that we can raise attention to it without some deflecting into a philosophical discussion on positivity vs negativity. We tell them its good or bad we tell them why its good or bad that is constructive criticism and that should be enough for anyone. Oh cry me a river you know what else is a downer to read? Squad's corner cutting updates I'm not gonna stop as long as they shovel out utter krap. You want positivity? Then you hold squad to standards so they produce something to be positive about. I said the work came across as lazy, not that the artists are actually lazy. It's not exactly lazy to mass produce quantity over quality krap all day every day full time for example. So you admit to taking what I said out of context. Now this is an actual personal attack I outright refuse to police my tone beyond what's needed to follow forum rules. I instead speak honestly I am "positive" when squad does something that warrants it, and I'm "negative" when squad does something to deserve it my history speaks for itself in this regard. Deal with it. They are the ones saying "we're optimizing the art and making it more efficient and pretty! get hype!" so they can RUD'ing prove it. I actually know what goes into making a part for ksp and what happens when you try to cut corners and salvage old assets from personal experience so I have more of a clue than you(self admitted "only a player"). Why do you think I want to see thier sheets? cause unlike you I can tell what's going on by looking at them though honestly I expect most people would too when it happens.

This sounds like something out of "we happy few" you're asking us to force a smile to avoid raising a fuss. Well forget that the game is complete enough and the modding community large enough that Squad can either do the job right or they can just quit :p. we don't need them anymore and would arguably be better off without them if this is the general level of passion, quality, and attention to detail they are going to put into their work. You might as well get used to the fact that the positivity of critics is tired directly to the quality of squads previews and releases therefore it is squad making the forums a nasty place by pushing this garbage as stock.

Actually you can ex-dev @taniwha has you covered.

Couldn't have said it better myself...

I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree this week... don't get me wrong creating decent foil is a laudable feat but the rest... lets just say If you are truly committed to revamping and optimising the art you'll send this straight back to the art team and tell them to try again for the following reasons. First from what I can tell all you did was just bevel the edges and left the rest of the mesh (and the rest of the bad non-pork-standard UV map seen below) largely intact. Because of this I'm going to have to again insist that you show texture sheets to prove you're actually optimizing the art, and not just cutting corners and lying to us about it again. Additionally along the vein of geometry you should quit it with the attempts at mesh "salvaging" this went terribly the last time you did it (remember the mk1-3 pod? Other than the door positioning the mk1-3 pod has pretty much the same flaws as the mk1-2 pod it replaced because they are essentially the same mesh. For those who have not yet discovered from normal play the top node for both the mk1-2 and mk1-3 are not not true 1.25m which is why the MH conical service bay sits on it with an overhanging lip where it should be flush...), and honestly most parts in kerbal and particularly the parts you seem to want to salvage are simple geometric shapes it's an extremely lazy looking thing to do and its prone to carrying over flaws from the parts you are supposed to be revamping. Seriously just trash every part porkjet didn't make and start fresh you are supposed to be making parts to a common standard after all it's not worth it to try to salvaging handful's of vertices here and there and why the heck would you want to anyway? Its arguably more work to figure out how to salvage geometry this simple than it is to make something equivalent from scratch if you need it... Second this is just depressing you call this an "update"? To put it blunt this isn't kerbal's hand painted style this is RUD'ing middle school photoshop. I can pretty much name what you used too lets see... circle selector, fill tool, some copy/pasted rivets, and some white mouse scribbles... Even if its "just an end cap" this doesn't pass scrutiny not even close. First because its just plane bad and lazy no matter the style you're going for(as expected from a mesh salvaging job), Second because style wise it looks too sterile to fit in regardless of quality, and third because probe cores of all parts are prone to finding themselves with thier end caps exposed because of players "vacuum optimized" cobbled construction so you need to give them more to appreciate than a pitch black void(so no copy/pasting the space plane endcap to get out of this either). needless to say much that is wrong with this texturing technique is also wrong with the HEC1... Third looks like the specular map (like the diffuse map) is plain and flat and all the detail is in the normal map (you picked a decent normal map but that's all the good that can be said of this part) this is another bad habit you guy's just won't let go of that clashes with pork-alike standards. Spamming the normal map jus isn't a substitute for diffuse and specular details. I was letting it slide with the mk1 pod last week because you did a decent job in other places and it looked like a step in the right direction, but clearly I see now that cutting you slack was a mistake...

Is there something in particular you want? I hope its not asking they focus on code that's a completely different man power resource from art, squad is a studio not a one man modding team they can do both. If it's about keeping the old pod then they'll probably keep the old part hidden in the background for a while as they've done with other revamps so old craft files load properly before downscaling the textures or deleting the part entirely to save space after people have had a chance to replace craft or backup thier files in a distant update, but it would defeat the purpose of optimizing the art assets if they kept it around forever. also... there are many modder revamps... if one suits your fancy better. It's not a high poly model or a physic collider an extra (counts...) 96 vertices won't hurt anything. Though personally I'd just give it a nice 0.625m specific end cap texture and call it a day rather than reusing the same spaceplane endcap everywhere but hey why not a texture and geometry change right?

Yeah its almost as if I was being honest, and serious this whole time, and wasn't just criticizing for the sake of stirring up fights. Weird right?

(geez I'm late for this one) congrats you have landed within the ballpark of acceptable results I can happily play with this as is. I especially like how I didn't notice the fasteners on the "cheeks" next to the hand hold until I zoomed in (this is good do fastener details like this in the future instead of framing panels with excessive shirt button rows of the stuff that you can pick out from orbit please ) Though there a few minor things that could make it just a little better. 1. as others have said a proper hatch texture or 0.625m standardized end cap texture instead of a scaled space plane end cap would be lovely 2. this is really subtle but slightly rounded panel corners like you find in porkjet's spaceplane's and elsewhere generally make things look more playful without being painfully cartoony, and would help subtly tie this "sleek and modern" pod to the already regarded as sleek and modern looking space plane parts if they follow similar que's like that. 3. Show us the texture sheet its a great crunchy dev detail to show off especially since you are making a point of being optimal. all in all a good devnote. Probably not if squad had implemented PBR or some other reflection-esque scheme I'd bet they'd be bragging about it more. Rather that's the work of the specular map. You know the thing I've often gone on about how every part should have no matter what (@nestor why don't the 1.25/2.5m service bays have specular maps?) it tends to make a difference doesn't it?

hows this? I photoshopped away the rivets and brightened it to match the suit kinda like the real life MMU?

Well this was a welcome surprise over all. I went with the r/w/b suit but to echo what the others said I'm not a fan of the helmet both in terms of color/shade and that noise map if it's gonna keep the same iconic shape them it should have something closer to the iconic color scheme. Also can we get a pallet swap of the fabric in orange for the original 4?

Who disturbs my slumber!? @CobaltWolf sick'em boi!

@Delay an understandable concern but not insurmountable. This issue comes from how with ven's it literally replaced stock parts by telling the game a different set of art assets to associate each part name with, but In 1.4 when squad replaced some old stock assets (the command pod, the decouplers, the 2.5m tanks, etc) they took a different approach. Instead of changing which assets are associated with which part names they just gave new part names to the new art assets and hid the old part names with their old art assets from the vab editor, still keeping them around in the background. That way prerevamp craft file's load old art assets and avoid the hicups with proportion and balance changes while still allowing for the art to be steadily overhauled as any new craft made with the editor would be made with new parts. This is likely going to be the case no matter what squad does be it porkalike, venalike, or their own style really... @Terwin as long as we understand that programmer resources and artistic resources and largely separate and therefore squad can do both without one being at the expense of the other then I think we have nothing to really disagree about.

Sorry I didn't account for mod users in my definition of apathetic people I had assumed that if you are using a mod you have at least some small wish about how you want the game improved, shaken up, or simply left alone so you wouldn't have to update anymore. In that case you should check out nertea's space station expansion mod it has porkalike replacers for most of these parts It sounds like you want some coding work done. nothing wrong with that not shooting you down, but I'd like to discuss this. What do you want squad's artist's doing while the code monkey's hammer out more stability from the physics engine? RD being an exception these two hats aren't often worn by the same people at a well staffed dev studio so while the programmers do this what would the artists do to be productive?

@Delay sorry I seem to have caused a misunderstanding here it's not that other styles can't look good alone. The new hecs by itself or with a coordinated set away from ksc would look very nice I imagine, but to achieve an optimized consistent aesthetic or even just the simple pixel density standardization @SQUAD mentioned in the weekly over the splintered layers of different art styles and standards we presently have we would find that porkalike is the most straightforward and practical solution. The largest single block, I dare say almost half the stock parts were done by porkjet, and his work is professional and consistent each made to the same standard. To adopt something else of similar quality but radically different style or standard would mean a lot of extra work getting the parts porkjet made redone, (and perhaps even the ksc b9 made redone so that the styles match.). The standardization work they mention in the weekly would already practically be half done if they'd just go porkalike. Similarly doing some close but different style like rd-alike or beale-alike just raises the question of why not just make the short hop to porkalike? And finally there is the option of standardizing on something higher quality than porkalike which opens a new can of worms about simply licencing ven's stock revamp and being largely done with it all in an instant XD So when you look at it porkalike is the easiest way to standardize kerbal's art assets so really we shouldn't be saying "everything but porkalike is terrible" but rather "in this instance everything but porkalike is kinda wasteful... Except ven's ssr..."

Yep this exactly I say what I say because I doubt they really are apathetic so I want them to come out and say what they really want. If one were truly apathetic not caring how things look as long as it's reasonably smooth running then wish granted they can download the last stable version and be set for life. Squad has their money they have squads game all as jeb intended. So there is no reason to be involved further other than to show off in game creations and accomplishments, unless of course they aren't actually apathetic and so have some opinion about the direction of development which I would genuinely like to hear.

While this is true apathy is not a valid argument. Status quo would be a valid argument, aggressive optimization at the expense of style would be a valid argument, rd-alike would be a valid argument, beale-alike would be a valid argument, wanting anything at all would be a valid argument but simply not caring isn't/wasn't/never will be a valid argument.

Good thing that isn't the case here. Credit is given where credit is due and criticism is given where criticism is due. No more no less. And again if one is so apathetic to the way things go then they really have nothing to add to the discussion.

Then you don't care if it's pushed to look better.

As I said before in terms of practical consistency porkalike already comprises the single largest block of parts, and his style is readily emulatable it's not like he was the only one who could do it(just look at all the stuff nertea, cobalt, and other modders pump out) it's essentially the fewest number of parts you need to make to achieve consistency, and therefore the least amount of work. (really compared to AAA modern game assets his hand painted style isn't too much to ask for). Redoing EVERYTHING(including the space center buildings cause pj made his style fit with b9's) would be much more work the only way to come out ahead is to either abandon consistency, or cut quality drastically (neither of which should be acceptable to this community) So in the end porkalike is the only way that makes sense unless you are going beyond porkalike levels of quality it's just not worth the investment of manpower.

I think that's a load of bunk "constructive criticism" is such a subjective wishy washy term and makes it very easy to dismiss raised issues as being "negative" when it's convenient for you. We saw this during making history development when asked why some useful parts weren't made part of the core game the excuse was that they were "historical" and wouldn't fit in the main game and then when asked why some historical parts didn't look like the real world equivalent, wasn't balanced right, or simply looked bad the contradictory excuse was that the parts were made to fit in with the core set, and anyone who highlighted that contradiction was cast as being "negative" and "unconstructive" and ignored. Our problem is we put too much emphasis on constructive to the point that few can realistically reach it or are just denied on flat out BS grounds(and as you would recall at one point I sure tried my hardest to give positive reinforcement, be constructive all that jazz, and you know what? It did NOTHING. So why bother?). After all constructive criticism and valid criticism isn't always the same thing don't you think the latter is more important than the former? Don't you think the validity of criticism should be discussed over it's tone? Honestly I rarely see anything in response to criticism other than someone didn't like how it was phrased talk about being unconstructive... As for alienation. Like I said If the community did alienate squad at this point it would be a win they've consistently botched things for long enough with little to really show for it. No one has reason to have faith in the quality of future updates, and until they deliver results that prove this otherwise (thereby earning or trust and positivity again) we'd be better off without them so again alienation is a win. Alienation being a win is the consequence of extended long term corner cutting it comes back to bite you when people don't think you hold value to them anymore. Have I made my view on this matter clear?

@Redneck they are at least acknowledging the problem and not making embarrassingly false excuses like "we have our own internal design reference", and "these are not placeholders you shouldn't call them that" so that's due a small measure of positive reinforcement(credit given where credit is due and all that jazz). Next we need them to walk the walk (i.e. make pork-a-likes) this is the most headway we've made in a long time