Should SQUAD make parts shiny and reflective?

[Joco223]

As the thread name says. Should SQUAD implement shine and reflections to parts like Texture Replacer allows you to?

[KerBlammo]

Shiny good.  Explosions bad.

[Stone Blue]

Absolutely NOT!!... Shiny would no fit in with the aesthetics & feel of the game

[KerbonautInTraining]

My body is telling me yes....

My GPU is telling me no...

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

...Are rockets normally shiny? I think it'd be cool to have things like cockpit windows glimmer in the sun, but not stuff like reflections and the like.

[Francois424]

I'd rather have them update all stock cockpits/pods to have lights inside them.

 

[tater]

10 minutes ago, Stone Blue said:

Absolutely NOT!!... Shiny would no fit in with the aesthetics & feel of the game

Because unlike spaceplanes, rockets are supposed to look terrible?

 

4 minutes ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

...Are rockets normally shiny? I think it'd be cool to have things like cockpit windows glimmer in the sun, but not stuff like reflections and the like.

 

These are obviously faked, as real spacecraft are rusty. For reasons.

[Edax]

I'd only want this after they solve the framerate issue on all 200+ part spacecraft.  Otherwise, this game would devolve into a power point presentation.

[InterCity]

I'd love the literal polish on my craft. But...

My desktop broke. I am stuck with my laptop's Intel HD 6000. Soooo it would probably explode. 

A kerbal way to go, I admit, but nevertheless an unpleasant one. 

[Buster Charlie]

Well the glowing windows would be a huge boost for me, especially if they would change relative to the scene

 I they appeared normal in daylight, but as you entered the shadow of a planet the windows appear to be lit without you having to turn them on and off, because they look kinda goofy lit in daylight....

 

But the windowshine mod didn't appear to make the game any slower, I just couldn't justify losing window lights for a mod that didn't work with all other mods.

 

 

If this was a stock thing, I think moders would do it

 

Edit: why do people use their machine performance as a reason?  I'm sure it would be an optional  graphics toggle that you could completely ignore. 

Edited March 3, 2016 by Buster Charlie

[Renegrade]

I'm kinda NO on the shiny myself.  I'd much rather 'em spending time making the planets nicer than the ships if they're going to be doing a prettyness pass.  Volcanos, ice geysers and rings and whatnot.

 

1 minute ago, Edax said:

I'd only want this after they solve the framerate issue on all 200+ part spacecraft.  Otherwise, this game would devolve into a power point presentation.

That would actually be trivial to do - as it stands, ships are a bunch of interacting physics parts, which each part being it's own separate component.  Each component exerts force on every other component, etc, hence slinky rockets made out of battery stacks and such.  Like most serious problems, this does not lend itself well to multiprocessing, or even computing for that matter.  The simple and obvious solution is to part weld each stage (or indeed, the whole rocket) into a single part.  It would easily speed the game up tenfold (if not a hundredfold or thousandfold or more), allowing for much, much bigger rockets.   The downside is that structural design would pretty much vanish at that point.

That's why Space Engineers can handle much larger ships part wise: they're actually just minecraftian voxel grids and have little or no self-interaction.  The grid as a whole moves, not the individual parts.

[Edax]

4 minutes ago, Renegrade said:

 

That would actually be trivial to do - as it stands, ships are a bunch of interacting physics parts, which each part being it's own separate component.  Each component exerts force on every other component, etc, hence slinky rockets made out of battery stacks and such.  Like most serious problems, this does not lend itself well to multiprocessing, or even computing for that matter.  The simple and obvious solution is to part weld each stage (or indeed, the whole rocket) into a single part.  It would easily speed the game up tenfold (if not a hundredfold or thousandfold or more), allowing for much, much bigger rockets.   The downside is that structural design would pretty much vanish at that point.

That's why Space Engineers can handle much larger ships part wise: they're actually just minecraftian voxel grids and have little or no self-interaction.  The grid as a whole moves, not the individual parts.

Even if the solution is simple, it hasn't been implemented yet, and I believe it should be addressed before start thinking about improving the graphics.

[Joco223]

@Edax Well, it should be fixed with 1.1

 

[Renegrade]

Just now, Edax said:

Even if the solution is simple, it hasn't been implemented yet, and I believe it should be addressed before start thinking about improving the graphics.

There's actually a mod that does that, by the way, heh.

I suspect the real reason it hasn't been done is that Squad likes the battery-slinky ships.

[Stone Blue]

32 minutes ago, tater said:

Because unlike spaceplanes, rockets are supposed to look terrible?

Not at all... I'm just saying the game originally started out with a dull, cartoony look, and has pretty much kept that... I guess I cant get a vision of how the current "cartoony" parts would look anything but ridiculous, all shiny, and crisp... Nor how those parts would fit in with the planetary textures... Especially when KSP is run with minimal graphics settings on older or low-end computers...

I mean, c'mon, KSP may be a 3D game, but its graphics-style has ALWAYS been very early-2000-ish...Iguess what I'm saying is, if you want shinier, metallic textures, to make them more realistic-looking, then I dont think they would fit in with the rest of the "environmental" textures...

Now if they want to make the stock game more like using Scatterer or EVE, etc, then MAYBE....

Edited March 3, 2016 by Stone Blue

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

23 minutes ago, tater said:

Because unlike spaceplanes, rockets are supposed to look terrible?

 

 

These are obviously faked, as real spacecraft are rusty. For reasons.

I can give just as many reasons of un-shiny rockets. It just doesn't seem like a priority to add that effect.

[worir4]

1 hour ago, KerBlammo said:

Shiny good.  Explosions bad.

Other way around, bro.

I think shiny space ships will not look good. I am all for reflections in windows and on solar panels though. (So long as frame rate is not affected)

[pandaman]

Making shiny parts, like windows and polished surfaces, shiny and reflective then yes, that would look 'right'.  But no to making normal parts shiny and reflective for the sake of it, that would just add to the processing and graphics strain for no real benefit.  

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, Joco223 said:

As the thread name says. Should SQUAD implement shine and reflections to parts like Texture Replacer allows you to?

Not for me.  Nothing in the game is shiny so having shiny parts just looks wrong to me.  I've tried it with various mods and just don't like it.

[Basto]

I say yes.  Give my graphics card something to do while its waiting for the CPU to calculate all the physics. 

[tater]

1 hour ago, Renegrade said:

I'm kinda NO on the shiny myself.  I'd much rather 'em spending time making the planets nicer than the ships if they're going to be doing a prettyness pass.  Volcanos, ice geysers and rings and whatnot.

I wasn't addressing if KSP spacecraft should be shiny, I was merely pointing out that real spacecraft are shiny (sometimes even mirror-finished  ). I agree completely that planetary surfaces are vastly more important, all need terrain detail of a small enough scale size that landing is non-trivial (as it should be).

 

1 hour ago, Stone Blue said:

Not at all... I'm just saying the game originally started out with a dull, cartoony look, and has pretty much kept that... I guess I cant get a vision of how the current "cartoony" parts would look anything but ridiculous, all shiny, and crisp... Nor how those parts would fit in with the planetary textures... Especially when KSP is run with minimal graphics settings on older or low-end computers...

 

Then Squad did all the spaceplane stuff looking stunningly futuristic, as if it just came out of a clean room. It makes the rockets look awful by comparison. In addition, and as part of an answer to another post:

1 hour ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

I can give just as many reasons of un-shiny rockets. It just doesn't seem like a priority to add that effect.

You cannot really give many reasons for un-shiny rockets, they are pretty much all brand-new the only time they are ever used. They might not be mirror-finished like Apollo, but they are certainly clean, and shiny (matte would be more draggy).

The spaceplane pictured above is exactly why the current difference between rocket and aircraft parts is perfectly backwards. Spaceplanes that get reused... get weathered. Rockets that don't get reused... don't weather at all, they are built in a clean room, launched once, and then exposed to the vacuum of space. The only dirty parts are the capsule after reentry (or the scorched bottom of a Falcon 9, which will certainly be cleaned before reuse).

 

Edited March 3, 2016 by tater

[tater]

1 hour ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

Use a close up:

Quite filthy.

[EladDv]

new parts should be polished to a mirror level and even MORE! 

ok ok , some parts can be a bit shiny, with metalness acceptable for their material IRL

[hoojiwana]

We already know PBR is coming down the pipeline at some point, and that includes some reflectivity built into it, since the whole point of PBR is to have materials reflect light realistically. What did you all think of the "shininess" of say, the weapons in Fallout 4? Those weapons use PBR but aren't necessarily perfectly reflective, they instead reflect a pre-defined skybox or cubemap rather than the exact environment around them. This is particularly obvious if you look at them when wet, the reflected image clearly isn't the same as the environment its in. As an example, look at the reflection on the gun in some of my screenshots (one and two), that's not showing the environment I'm in, but rather a generic catch-all "wasteland" environment. This is done because real-time reflections on every single thing in the scene would murder performance, so it's common practice to sort of fudge it instead since most people won't notice in the first place.

Edited March 3, 2016 by hoojiwana

[NoMrBond]

Since they're moving to the Unity standard shader this functionality will be supported, but that doesn't mean it'll suddenly be applied to everything

It's not an all or nothing thing, a part can be reflective if it needs, shiny if it needs or matte if it needs, as applicable on a case by case, and even detail by detail basis