passinglurker

maybe they should ask @CobaltWolf for the normal map he used It works very well in kerbal's hand painted style don't you think? hrm... I'd agree the old hecs looked like someone had just discovered the extrusion tool, but I'm not sure I'd agree that the new geometry is good either as it incorporates this toony protruding lip on the top and bottom. A design element almost everyone seems to want to be rid from kerbal as a whole if reaction to the fuel tank revamps have been anything to go by, and also engineering wise what purpose does it serve? Now this I can get on board with

If you're apathetic to how your game looks then you'd have no problem with us pushing for it to look better. You laugh but this is just a visible symptom of a much larger problem as this was produced in the same string of updates that gave us new stability issues and graphical glitches like the reentry bug. And before you say it this isn't a case of "oh they were just focusing thier resources elsewhere under the hood" We've seen time and time again throughout this games history that when squad fails they fail everywhere and they fail hard, and as a consequence everything now needs to be scrutinized. If they can't produce professional work and if they can't stand haveing thier work checked then they shouldn't keep working on this game, because we've reached a low point where if that low trend were to plateau or continue we'd actually be better off if squad just stopped. As such I don't care if squad feels unappreciated if that actually had an effect it would still be a win for the community. This is the consequence for cutting corners for so long it comes back to bite you. Thanks! now can you make sure it shows in future part previews? good first impressions and all that.

@5thHorseman I can like crisp and clean don't get me wrong beale's tantares pulls off that style extremely well but this... Is not crisp and clean this is just bad-CG. The emphasis on porkjets style is simply a matter of practicality since the largest single block of parts are already done by porkjet that makes doing everything else in his style is the least amount of work to achive the goal of a unified aesthetic the only way you could possibly go lower is if you either abandon the goal or cut quality drastically. As for the constant negativity squad gets... honestly between the launch debacle, the console debacle, the abandon ship debacle, the MH debacle etc the venture deserves our scrutiny and ire. outcry has proven the only way to budge squads set course in that past, and after this long I've come to terms with the possibility that KSP development could end, and the devs could move on so to me if they can't do this right give us a porkjet rocket revamp in everyway but name then they can just quit and move on to thier next game. We have a strong enough modding community to patch on without them. If you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen as they say.

They were given thier due credit I promise it won't hurt if you settled for that. People complain both ways because neither way is a style that fits with porkjet's work. Its almost as if people want a unified aesthetic instead of two piles consisting of "porkjets space plane parts" and "everyone who wanted to be a household name like porkjet".

There's some parts that would greatly benefit from the effect though especially engine and command parts that people pay more attention too.

so now they look like a student's first photoshop project so much better/s No one liked the oil barrels for thier design I'll acknowledge that, but that doesn't mean we should accept something that could be made with just a box selecter and a fill tool as a substitute. If that were the case squad could have gotten away with replacing everything with untextured cylinders years ago.

I didn't have time to say this before but credit given where credit is due thank you for acknowledging this problem. Now all we need to due is get you to adopt pork-a-like elements (cause if you are gonna go through the effort to condense the layers of ksp's art style geology to two layers why not go for one layer?)

Given that we can see the effects of the old hecs's specular/normal map but no such effect coming from the new hecs model all in the same frame I think it's safe to say that the new parts don't have specular/normal maps until it's been confirmed and proven otherwise Optimization is nice but it shouldn't come at the expense of standards, and you can very much meet standards while still being optimal. a specular map costs next to nothing and it's just plain lazy not to include one (looking at you stock service bays) @Darth Badie can you ask one of the artists for a water marked copy of the new hecs texture sheet to share with the community so we can see just how optimal it's uv layout and file size is? Oh and the normal map too just so we know it exists that would also be very appreciated

Porkjet was good but he wasn't unequalable or insurpassable, and we technically already have porkalike's for 1.25m parts on the books. They can do it, we should accept nothing less, and if they somehow can't then they give up on dev entirely move on to he next kerbal game. Then we don't have to worry about modded parts getting out-dated anymore. It's basically win win to hold them to standards.

@panzer1b Squad won't change if we just hugbox them all the time they'll just block everyone else out as long as there are vapant fanboys frothing with praise. Also its not exactly fair showing it with a bunch of post processing mods, but I digress. The 2.5m parts have UV mapping issues(its basically miming the 3.75m placeholders and all thier flaws) this skews with texel density in a way that can only be fixed with a mesh edit to make a new UVmap to even out the texel density and use the space more efficently. What you've done is a band aid at best and will look blurry and pixelated next to actually good parts like porkjet's spaceplane work. we can do better starting the fuel tank over from scratch. honestly there is no point in settling for half measures. (I should know I once tried to fix those 3.75m tanks with just a texture change)

I believe he said when he showed them off on reddit that its for his near future launch vehicles mod which presently covers diameters 5m and up you could probably replace MH's saturn tanks with that if you need to find something already released to support.

he has a donation button on the bottom for his mod threads you know I don't think the "official content" edge means as much as it once did we've seen squad push out "offcial" content with a lot less stability, quality, and polish and take forever to fix it if ever/at all. IMO people's DLC money would probably have a better return spent on thier favorite mod authors instead.

Yeah no on second thought you're probably overthinking this I just parsed the thread I saw no rover bashing. specifically this -> "I'm not very fond of his texturing, he can get fairly detailed, but, at the risk of going very subjective, Porkjet had flair that I, personally, just don't feel in the new work." <- isn't rover bashing. the rest is just confusuion over when he started working at squad and if he's still there.

Did you ever consider the possibility this isn't roverdudes work? Like the textures for the outside surface are super simple like box selector and fill tool simple anyone on the staff with intro-photoshop knowledge could do it and modeling cylinders ain't hard either. Even I would consider it an insult to RD to pin these tanks on him so it has to be someone less qualified.

You are wrong. I insult thier poor work not the people who make it. I don't know why the work is poor after all maybe it's time constraints dictated from the top maybe it's inexperience resulting from lapses in judgement from the hiring manager maybe they just suck but I can't see that I can only see thier products and vocally judge thier product to be lacking by both subjective and objective metrics. EDIT: Also need I remind you they asked for feedback

@klesh and what if you did have a bunch of nice parts to match the 2016 set? What if squad gave in? what if modders came through? I mean by the looks of it nertea's already halfway there with the launch vehicle side of things. We shouldn't have to settle for halfbaked goods

Its even my new flag

Ven's revamp started on the idea of how far you could push things and still fit in the same footprint as the squad-folder if you did it efficiently. As a result its has its own standards for texel density and polycounts from what is often refered to as "stock-alike" As for other modders I'm not sure who all you are refering too but one example I have is Cobalt's BDB which has over 400 high quality parts of all sizes from sounding rockets and probes to saturnV's and skylabs (the squad folder has like ~300-350 parts?) yet has half the footprint. Any modern post-porkjet mod at least is going to be crazy resource friendly compared to what we've seen squad put out. You don't need 2k textures for 2.5m fuel tanks especially ones using practically flat colors like this. The texel density as a result is all out of whack and wasted on such a dull sterile design. Not only that but the texture is then duplicated for the pallet swap a feature they are also adding to the 1.25m tanks. this may not be a problem if done efficiently but squad has demonstrated that UV mapping is another corner they often cut... Not even 100kb. Its better to leak geometry than it is pixels. vertices go farther. Also pop that model into blender you'll see that fuel pipe on the side is weirdly high poly compared to the rest of the mesh its just sloppy, and is a sure sign of bigger problems if they would be willing to ship mistakes like these. Done efficiently you could fit good 2.5m textures in a half to a quarter of that look at the techniques porkjet and modern modders use, and they make good use of that space for detailing. Something as simplistic as these flat color monstrosities could be recreated in an even smaller footprint. No it very much is due to bad modeling the UV map is part of the mesh and a sucky one like this helps drive the crazy inefficient use of texture space. Which is again wasted because they are just painting the diffuse map with flat simple colors and what detail you think you see such as foam or corigation is actually in the normal map(which is why the normal map resolution is so damn high). I'd go as far to say they are NOT better than the oildrums as out of place as they may have been somebody still actually had to use more than a box selector and a fill tool to make those...

You're excited for them to break and quadruple in ram footprint like the 2.5m revamp?

Don't even need to look at mods. porkjet in stock showed you could do a lot with diffuse/specular/normal mapping, 200pxm, lowpoly meshes, etc... We want parts to be made to thier fullest potential within those standards because if they go the mile to get that right they might be going the mile to get the under the hood elements right aswell instead of shipping updates with config file typos of all things...

no one's asking for the most modern of techniques or the highest fidelity, but we still have standards and squad has shown consistently that parts that don't meet those standards on the surface often don't meet standards under the hood either resulting in heavier system resource use, or even bugs. If they are willing to cut corners where we can see them then they are definitely already cutting corners where we can't see them. As a result its very important for the community to care and hold squad to the standards for professional work and quality we've come to expect from squad's predecessors.

It would be a different story had squad establish a reputation of utilitarian low fidelity work on the outside but solid professional work under the hood, but after this long that has soundly been proven to not be the case.

I think porkjet wore it better. Ok now being serious... Lets look at this objectively. Take the parts porkjet made not because of some subjective love for his style or anything like that but because they represent the single largest block of consistent quality in the part catalog. The model meshes are efficient clean and error free, the texel density doesn't vary wildly unless necessary for something like a UV island with lettering, the pallet is consistent for each formfactor, and texture space is brilliantly efficient. it's all very professional. Now take the 2.5m parts you put out for the MH update @SQUAD you somehow managed to make parts that were objectively worse than thier hated predecessors by about every non-subjective metric. The mesh triangle count is off the scale by an order of magnitude, the texture file which before was merely layed out inefficiently instead got bigger, was still mapped just as inefficiently as always, and then the whole travesty was duplicated for a color variant, texel density was still a mess of course, and the mesh had errors that cast weird creases and shadows. Its like you gave the task to a diploma mill intern and told'em "just copy what the last guy did" you absolutely failed to make a professional quality part even by ksp's whimsical standards and yet you still pushed it out as official without recognizing your error or attempting to adequately correct it. Now you're telling me you are attempting this again and are showing parts done in the same subjectively dull sterile corner cutting style. What guarantee do I have that these won't be the same wreck the 2.5m parts were? The lesson from all this is if it looks amazing on the outside it might be good and professional on the inside but If it looks cheap on the outside then its 100% rotten through on the inside. That's what I learned following your development of 1.4/MH, and what I assume I'll see if you push that dull [snip] as a "quality update".

@QvestionAnswerNeeded and just to be sure you did extract the mod folder from the zip file it came in right? Similarly you dropped in the mod folder and not like another folder labeled "gamedata" as some authors organize their files so. Either way if you just want vtol parts for f-35's then you'd be out of luck in the stock implementation department as this isn't a war game.

What's wrong with using a mod? They're usually higher quality and more reliable than any part squad's put out since porkjet left.