[1.1] EveBiomesPlus v1.0: Add new biomes to Eve

[Snark]

What it does

Tired of "Explodium Sea" everywhere?  You've taken the trouble to visit this inhospitable one-sea, one-moon, crushing purple Kerbal-eater.  Seems like the least Eve can do is make it worth your while to take the trouble to navigate to specific locations.

This mod does the following:

• Adds several new biomes to Eve
• Adds many science descriptions to new and existing biomes.

The new biomes which this mod adds are:

• Kraken Sea
• Sea of Sorrows
• Crater Lake
• Impact Basins
• Minor Islands
• Mount Neverest

 

Download from SpaceDock
License: MIT

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

 

How to install

1. Make sure you've installed Kopernicus. (If you're running KSP 1.1, you need Kopernicus 1.0 or later.  If you're running KSP 1.0.5, you need Kopernicus 0.6.)
2. Unzip into GameData, same as with any other mod.

 

See also...

If you like this mod, you may also enjoy JoolBiomes.

[Nightside]

Cool! Can't wait to splat some stuff into Eve!

[Andem]

Once again another great Snark mod! This is great!

[Nansuchao]

Beautiful idea! I ever thought the planets of the Kerbol system needs some love. Actually you can find more biomes in Mun and Minmus than every other planet in the system.

[Cornholio]

This looks excellent, going to try this when I get home.

Edit:  I say keep these extended planet biomes coming, Snark. Moho, Dres, Eloo...

Edited March 11, 2016 by Cornholio

[Snark]

3 minutes ago, Cornholio said:

This looks excellent, going to try this when I get home.

Edit:  I say keep these extended planet biomes coming, Snark. Moho, Dres, Eloo...

Duna's next. 

One thing to bear in mind is that my primary motivating factor in producing mods is my own amusement. Therefore, I wouldn't hold your breath for Dres, for example, because it's dull and I never go there (and it has a fair number of biomes already), so I simply can't be bothered.  Gussying it up with extra biomes wouldn't make it more attractive to me. 

Maybe someday when I get around to educating myself about how to make custom planets and moons, I may come back to lonely Dres to give it a couple of playmates.  Until then, it's just gonna have to remain a sad and lonely space potato, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not highly motivated for Moho & Eeloo for much the same reason as Dres, though they're a bit more likely because I do go there occasionally, if only for the challenge.

(Seriously.  Dres is dull.  I'm more likely to mod it to move it somewhere more interesting than I am to give it more biomes.)

[Cornholio]

Similarly, I was suggesting those particular destinations because they WOULD make them at least slightly more interesting to visit for me personally and probably others as well.  Your biome mods definitely inspire motivation as far as I am concerned.

[Snark]

4 minutes ago, Cornholio said:

Similarly, I was suggesting those particular destinations because they WOULD make them at least slightly more interesting to visit for me personally and probably others as well.  Your biome mods definitely inspire motivation as far as I am concerned.

Thanks, I'll bear it in mind!

But Duna's still next. 

Fewer biomes than its own moon?  Really?

Edited March 11, 2016 by Snark

[fourfa]

On Duna...

I kinda like the "Polar Craters" biome. It exists, it's a tiny speck, it's really hard to target it on a traditional retropropulsive landing.  Rover, planes sure.  But I kinda like having challenges like that out there.  Do others find that to be fun?  Or just annoying?

[Andem]

Definitely fun.

[Nightside]

Thanks Snark! I'm looking forward to this series.

Have you thought of adding Mini Biomes to the other planets like around the KSC as easter eggs? (or maybe you already have...).

Edited March 12, 2016 by Nightside
Reread OP

[Snark]

On 3/11/2016 at 9:45 AM, Nightside said:

Thanks Snark! I'm looking forward to this series.

Have you thought of adding Mini Biomes to the other planets like around the KSC as easter eggs? (or maybe you already have...).

I thought about it, decided not to, for a few reasons that are mainly technical.

First, installing a custom-biome mod is more memory-intensive than you might think-- there's a biome map that needs to be loaded into RAM.  So, for example, I'm not going to add custom easter-egg biomes to a planet that I'm not otherwise modding, because you'd pay the same RAM penalty as if I were re-working the entire planet.

Okay, I hear you ask, then why not add custom mini-biomes to the planets that you are modding already anyway?  No penalty then, right?

Well, you're right, it wouldn't add significant additional RAM to do so.  However, there's another practical problem.  It has to do with a bug in the way KSP handles the biome maps.  Technical mumbo-jumbo in spoiler section.

Spoiler

Try turning on "see biomes in map view" on the debug menu, and then zooming really close into the map view of a planet, and look at the edge between two biomes.  It's blurry, right?  The biome map is a color-coded image in which the pixels are made up of discrete colors... but when they're brought into the game, it does interpolation between them.  And when the game needs to look up "what's the biome where I am now?", it uses this interpolated color and looks  among all the biome colors to look for a match.

So suppose you have a "Highlands" biome that's orange, and a "Midlands" biome that's blue.  There will be an interpolated-from-orange-to-blue fuzzy boundary between them that's kinda gray.  And if there's a "Poles" whose color is white, the game says "okay, the color where I am now is gray, and the closest biome color to that is white, so my current location must be Poles"-- even if you're on the equator.

It's a silly bug, and I wish they'd fix it.  What I wish they'd do is:  go ahead and do the interpolation, sure... but when looking for a match among the biomes, pick the closest match only from the biomes that were used in the interpolation.  It would make things a lot nicer.

...what it boils down to is that if you have lots of biomes, you have to have lots of colors for them, and the interpolation bug means you're going to have increased problems where there are little buggy "patches" of unexpected biomes in the wrong place, like finding a patch of "Poles" at the equator.  The more biomes you have, the worse this problem gets.

 

That said, I do like the challenge of mini-biomes, and will happily add them where they fit well, especially if there aren't too many biomes already.  I just won't spam them.

For example, one of the biomes I added to Eve is "Mount Neverest".  It's a tiny biome, just six pixels out of the 2048 x 1024 map of Eve, comprising just the top of Eve's highest peak.  So if you can manage to land right there on the peak, you get the payoff of the biome, along with quite a few custom science descriptions. 

When I get around to Duna, I haven't finalized my decision about exactly which biomes will be there-- probably not a lot more.  However, I'll probably add one for Duna's highest peak, too, just as soon as I can think of an appropriate name for it. 

Edited March 13, 2016 by Snark

[Snark]

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 EveBiomesPlus, 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!

[jpinard]

Hi Snark, I have a dumb newbie question.  So Eve has some biomes already by default in 1.1 apparently.  Does your mod  add more biomes or more variety?  I have not been there myself and am busy modding up my game to go beyond the Mun!

[Snark]

9 hours ago, jpinard said:

Hi Snark, I have a dumb newbie question.  So Eve has some biomes already by default in 1.1 apparently.  Does your mod  add more biomes or more variety?  I have not been there myself and am busy modding up my game to go beyond the Mun!

Not a dumb question at all!

Eve already has several biomes in stock. What this mod does is to add several new ones, while leaving the old ones still in place.

For example, Eve has a lot of "water". In stock KSP, all of it is a single biome, "Explodium Sea", even though physically it's divided into several geographically separate seas. So what my mod does is to "repurpose" some of those separate seas as their own new biomes, but the biggest ocean is still left alone as "Explodium Sea".

There are some new land-based biomes as well, but it's the same basic idea.

[jpinard]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

Not a dumb question at all!

Eve already has several biomes in stock. What this mod does is to add several new ones, while leaving the old ones still in place.

For example, Eve has a lot of "water". In stock KSP, all of it is a single biome, "Explodium Sea", even though physically it's divided into several geographically separate seas. So what my mod does is to "repurpose" some of those separate seas as their own new biomes, but the biggest ocean is still left alone as "Explodium Sea".

There are some new land-based biomes as well, but it's the same basic idea.

Ooh super awesome!  Will this be ok with the EVE and distant objects mods?  Ie. mods that enhance the planets visuals?

[Snark]

Just now, jpinard said:

Ooh super awesome!  Will this be ok with the EVE and distant objects mods?  Ie. mods that enhance the planets visuals?

I've never used those mods myself, so I can't actually say with authority, but I expect that they ought to work just fine.  I would assume that those mods would just work with whatever biomes a planet happens to have.

The only way I could imagine that there might be any issue at all would be if those mods want to provide different visual effects for different biomes (e.g. "oh, we're over the Explodium Sea, let's add oceany clouds!") and have biome-specific config for that, in which case they wouldn't recognize my new biomes.  But I don't actually know that they do that.  If it turns out that they do, please let me know-- hopefully I could just add some patch config to EveBiomesPlus to handle that.

But hopefully it won't be necessary and they'll "just work."

[King Something]

On 3/12/2016 at 4:21 PM, Snark said:

When I get around to Duna, I haven't finalized my decision about exactly which biomes will be there-- probably not a lot more.  However, I'll probably add one for Duna's highest peak, too, just as soon as I can think of an appropriate name for it. 

The tallest mountain on Mars is Olympus Mons, named after Mount Olympus in Greece (and more specifically, the Mount Olympus of Greek mythology). Hopefully this nugget of knowledge will help you come up with a name for the highest mountain on Duna.

Or you could name it Mount Adelaide, after Captain Adelaide Brooke.

[Snark]

11 hours ago, King Something said:

The tallest mountain on Mars is Olympus Mons, named after Mount Olympus in Greece (and more specifically, the Mount Olympus of Greek mythology). Hopefully this nugget of knowledge will help you come up with a name for the highest mountain on Duna.

Yes, I'm quite aware of Olympus Mons, thank you.

Would love to have a name that pays homage to it, but haven't been able to come up with anything yet that quite clicks. I'm not gonna just give it the actual IRL name; that's just not Kerbal, it doesn't "fit", no other KSP place names are directly taken from IRL. There's "<something else> Mons", but I haven't found anything that doesn't just sound dumb.

(Similar problem with the big valley that's my primary motivation for wanting to do Duna in the first place.  Would love to have a name that pays homage to Valles Marineris, but coming up with something good is a challenge.)

And then there's the thematic problem. "Olympus Mons" is a big, dramatic name, as befits a big, dramatic mountain: a gargantuan colossus, the biggest mountain in our solar system by far; 22 km high, and the area of Arizona. Whereas Duna's highest point is really nothing to write home about. Not super high, not super distinctive, can't even easily spot it from orbit. So giving it a super-dramatic name just doesn't seem to fit well.

I'll come up with something. Just have to wait for inspiration to strike.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

On 5/21/2016 at 8:31 AM, Snark said:

Yes, I'm quite aware of Olympus Mons, thank you.

Would love to have a name that pays homage to it, but haven't been able to come up with anything yet that quite clicks. I'm not gonna just give it the actual IRL name; that's just not Kerbal, it doesn't "fit", no other KSP place names are directly taken from IRL. There's "<something else> Mons", but I haven't found anything that doesn't just sound dumb.

(Similar problem with the big valley that's my primary motivation for wanting to do Duna in the first place.  Would love to have a name that pays homage to Valles Marineris, but coming up with something good is a challenge.)

And then there's the thematic problem. "Olympus Mons" is a big, dramatic name, as befits a big, dramatic mountain: a gargantuan colossus, the biggest mountain in our solar system by far; 22 km high, and the area of Arizona. Whereas Duna's highest point is really nothing to write home about. Not super high, not super distinctive, can't even easily spot it from orbit. So giving it a super-dramatic name just doesn't seem to fit well.

I'll come up with something. Just have to wait for inspiration to strike.

I can think of a couple of naming approaches that strike me as appropriate.

The first is to go for "overcompensating", e.g. "Titanicus Mons", "Gargantuous Mons".

The second is to give it a "small" name, like "Viminus Mons" (after Viminal Hill, the smallest of the seven hills of Rome), "Lilliputus Mons" (after the miniature Lilliputians), or "Smolikas Mons" (after Smolikas, the second-highest mountain in Greece -- second to Olympus itself, of course).  I kind of like that "Smolikus" sounds like it has the word "small" in it.

[King Something]

44 minutes ago, Kerbas_ad_astra said:

"Smolikas Mons" (after Smolikas, the second-highest mountain in Greece -- second to Olympus itself, of course).  I kind of like that "Smolikus" sounds like it has the word "small" in it.

"Smolikus" also has a K in it, which makes it perfekt for a KSP mod.

[Andem]

How about "Megaleiodis Mons"

In english that would be Grand Mountain.

[DStaal]

Just wondering: Do you know if this conflicts with Outer Planets Mod?

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

On 5/21/2016 at 8:31 AM, Snark said:

(Similar problem with the big valley that's my primary motivation for wanting to do Duna in the first place.  Would love to have a name that pays homage to Valles Marineris, but coming up with something good is a challenge.)

And speaking of the valley, how about Valles Mortineris or Mortiferus, as a pun on "death valley" -- the first is a pun with Marineris, while the second just means "deadly".  Or you could use alternate translations of "mariner", e.g. Valles Nautaris (from nauta, sailor) or Piscatoris (fishermen).

[Snark]

1 hour ago, DStaal said:

Just wondering: Do you know if this conflicts with Outer Planets Mod?

Yes it is, no problem.

One of the nice things about Outer Planets Mod is that it stays true to its name.  Outer Planets.  It just adds new stuff on the outskirts, and doesn't touch any of the stock bodies (except for moving Eeloo into Sarnus orbit).  So anything that tinkers with the inner solar system is generally fine.