[WIP] Rald planet/moon addon, basically a terraformed mars

[eddiew]

@KerikBalm it's at 32 degrees south (coords are just about readable in the KER panel)   There's a few flat zones of similar size in the Kargyre Impact Basin too, though I think that's even more south than this one. The spot I scouted last month in the Firebird shots was something like 8 degrees north, but I don't think it was such a big area of pure flats. I'll check later, I left a rover parked there for the use of any future miners  

And yus, I would expect the north pole to be a big ice sheet. The south... I visited the south yesterday, and it is scary. I suggest calling it the Lightless Reaches biome  

Spoiler

 

[KerikBalm]

There's nothing special about the south pole of Rald regarding the illumination... the poles of all bodies might as well be "lightless reaches" - particularly without axial tilt, at the exact pole its always perpetual twilight for any body (except kerbol, obviously) - unless their orbit is noticably inclined relative to the sun (indeed, I think this is how RSS approximates Earth's axial til - it makes the orbit inclined by 23 degrees).

So the duna version will have the sun move by +/- 0.06 degress... not much.

The L4 version will have the sun move up and down a little as it orbits as well - since i gave it some inclination and eccentricity so that it moves around the L4 point, rather than being precisely at it... IRL objects can "orbit" L4 and L5 points as well.

I'm tempted to do a lot of "remodelling" of the north pole of rald to make it like a smooth ice sheet, I think its much lumpier now because its based on real mars data, where they are basically ice mountains and hills. - but truthfully I've never been to the north pole of Rald in KSP to assess its topography.

The south pole I'd leave as it is.

[eddiew]

South pole does have some viable landing spots, even in a plane, but you need to pump up the ambient brightness to see them. Maybe that's why Kerbin's poles are so smooth... the game devs are kind and allow us to set down with poor visibility  

[KerikBalm]

I might try increasing the ambient light to help with that aspect...

But since I care about "stability", I may be making some tweaks to the moon versions of Rald according to this thread:

It wouldn't be too hard to move Mun and Minmus into orbits that should result in a stable resonance with the inner moon Rald version.

Rald stays at geostationary orbit, with an orbital period of 1 sidereal kerbin day (1 day)

Mun moves a little outward, orbiting in precisely 7 days instead of about 6.43 days

Minmus moves a tiny tiny little inward, decreasing its orbital period from ~49.875 days to 49 days.

They would thus be in a 1:7:49 resonance... each one in an odd number resonance with the other, I'm told this should be stable even in an N body simulation. I think most people wouldn't notice the changes to Mun or Minmus just by looking at the map view as it doesn't take much to move them into this resonance.... but using an online transfer window calculator for Mun-Minmus transfers would quickly give you bad results.

Still looking into the best way to make the outer moon version stable - probably going to go with a 1:7:49 resonance too... but the orbital period of Minmus around rald isn't clear to me at the moment

 

 

 

[Benji13]

Nevermind.

Edited October 24, 2016 by Benji13

[Benji13]

Can you please add a cfg for Distant Object Enhancement?

[KerikBalm]

I actually recently did that and also added a .cfg for planetshine... but its not so hard to do.

For 1.2 I had to reinstall scatterer, and EVE. At the same time I added planetshine and distant object enhancement. I also note that the gravity parameter changed ever so slightly:

So for the versions that had a moon orbiting Rald (Duna or Minmus) with Rald supposedly tidally locked to the moon, its orbital period is off with the old .cfgs.

I have updated a lot of it for 1.2, but there may be more changes incoming with regards to gravity constants and orbital periods (see the linked thread). I've also been busy with other stuff, but I do intend an updated upload for 1.2. I don't think I'll bother with the 1:7:49 resonances that I mentioned earlier - at least for now, until I'm sure of how the grav parameter changes have stopped.

Also I note many planets/moons got more biomes in 1.2 (Duna in particular went from 4 to 14), so I'm thinking that I'll also add a division in the biomes equivalent to adding "tropics" (ie a band around the equator), and polar regions (not just the ice caps)... but then again, maybe focusing on just drawing new biomes isn't a good use of effort... I want to figure out how to redefine the ground scatter.

Edited October 28, 2016 by KerikBalm

[KerikBalm]

So I'm trying to figure out how to use this land control stuff to get a transition from terrain scatters of small grass and greyish boulders, to brownish boulders and almost no grass, to red boulders with just a few brownish ones, with snowy "ice boulders" at the poles....I notice that the terrain scatters on the previous version are a bit screwed up.

While I'm doing that, I see there's a way to get kopernicus to add procedural craters to worlds... so I have some other bodies I've worked on a bit and did nothing with....I'm thinking of making a planetpack.

Rald: 0.22 atmospheres, 0.5Gs, Duna and Ike orbit it (in a 1:9 resonance). Scatterer, planetshine, Eve, and distant object enhancement for it

Eki: an inverted Ike heightmap with procedural craters added, orbits at kerbin L4. 175km radius, ~0.136 gs. Distant object enhancement for this one

+ 2 "asteroids:

Vot: starts with a vesta heightmap, will add procedural craters to it, in a resonance with Dres and Pact

Pact: starts with a Phobos heightmap, will add procedural craters to it, in an orbital resonance with dres and Pact

Then I want to make a variant with KSC moved to Rald

 

So... preliminary ground scatter examples:

Plants with some rocks

Spoiler

 

higher elevations with just rocks:

Spoiler

Im pretty sure that if I got closer here, id be able to see plants, but all I can see are rocks (which cuase shadows, unlike the grass)

Spoiler

I don't know if I like the grass scatters, and I don't want to go for full trees, maybe I should stick to rocks, and make some green rock scatters, thoughts?

Edited November 1, 2016 by KerikBalm

[eddiew]

@KerikBalm I like the grasses, and the lack of them at elevation

Can't help but notice the rock shadows don't match the rocks... if they insist on being offset (they were during my last career too), it might be nicer to do them without shadows, if possible. Green rocks would be fine - that's just the omnipresent algae, a.k.a. Rald goo 

 

...in completely different news, I had a go at adding Rald to Galileo's Planet Pack, and got a really odd behaviour. GPP's moons are (much) further out than stock so I put Rald where Mun is, merged the scatterer configs and...

...yeah, oddness. Only when Rald is in orbit of the homeworld (Gael, though still referenceBody = Kerbin due to reasons) and when Rald's entry is present in the scatterer config. Without the scatterer config entry, it's totally fine.

Obviously that's not your fault nor responsibility, but I did wonder if you might have seen the same effect at any time during Rald development and if you might know how to fix it?  

[KerikBalm]

5 hours ago, eddiew said:

@KerikBalm I like the grasses, and the lack of them at elevation Can't help but notice the rock shadows don't match the rocks... if they insist on being offset (they were during my last career too), it might be nicer to do them without shadows, if possible. Green rocks would be fine - that's just the omnipresent algae, a.k.a. Rald goo 

It should be easy...

In the land control } scatters section there is this:

Quote

Scatter
                        {
                            materialType = AerialCutout
                            castShadows = False
                            densityFactor = 10.0
                            maxCache = 1024
                            maxCacheDelta = 128
                            maxLevelOffset = 0
                            maxScale = 2
                            maxScatter = 200
                            maxSpeed = 200
                            minScale = 0.5
                            recieveShadows = False
                            name = Grass
                            seed = 44444
                            verticalOffset = -0.125
                            delete = False
                            collide = False
                            science = False
                            Material
                            {
                                color = 0.1476336,0.3458209,0.1077634,0.254902
                                mainTex = BUILTIN/Grass2
                                mainTexScale = 1,1
                                mainTexOffset = 0,0
                                texCutoff = 0.5
                                fogColor = 0.8941177,0.8941177,1,1
                                heightFallOff = 0.2
                                atmosphereDepth = 5000
                            }
                            Experiment
                            {
                            }
                        }
                        Scatter
                        {
                            materialType = DiffuseWrapped
                            mesh = BUILTIN/boulder
                            castShadows = True
                            densityFactor = 1
                            maxCache = 512
                            maxCacheDelta = 64
                            maxLevelOffset = 0
                            maxScale = 4
                            maxScatter = 10
                            maxSpeed = 200
                            minScale = 0.25
                            recieveShadows = True
                            name = boulder
                            seed = 123887
                            verticalOffset = -0.25
                            delete = False
                            collide = False
                            science = False
                            Material
                            {
                                mainTex = BUILTIN/rock00
                                mainTexScale = 1,1
                                mainTexOffset = 0,0
                                color = 0.2537314,0.2194097,0.1003564,0.4588235
                                diff = 0.4
                            }
                            Experiment
                            {
                            }
                        }

From what I've seen in game, the grass *** doesn't cast shadows, and the "Cast shadows" variable certainly seems like a good candidate to change to false.

"receive shadows" also could be interesting to alter.

That said... I'm still not fully understanding this land control scatters stuff. I added the same stuff to my other "planets" with less scatter types (no grass, just two types of boulders)... and I don't see anything showing up. I also haven't had much luck with adding proceduraly generated craters... so I again turn to real world height map data:

Pact: Mercury heightmap... thinking about modifying it to make it more egg shaped like vesta. Given the same SMA as Dres (same orbital period)... IRL Pallas and Ceres have nearly the same orbital period(within 1% iirc), but I'm making these analogues have exactly the same orbital period

Vot: Vesta heightmap, in a in a 4:5 resonance with Pact/Ceres

Eki: My idea of an inverted ikE heightmaps with some procedural craters is dead, but the name derived from Ike can stay I guess... uses a heightmap from Callisto, orbits at kerbin's "L4" point.

For some reason I can't figure out, my ground scatter isn't working on Eki/Vot/Pact... and whatever program I used to make the normal files from those heightmaps is doing strange things... in map view it seems the planet is Illuminated 90 degrees from where its actually illuminated...

 

Quote

 

...in completely different news, I had a go at adding Rald to Galileo's Planet Pack, and got a really odd behaviour. GPP's moons are (much) further out than stock so I put Rald where Mun is, merged the scatterer configs and...

...yeah, oddness. Only when Rald is in orbit of the homeworld (Gael, though still referenceBody = Kerbin due to reasons) and when Rald's entry is present in the scatterer config. Without the scatterer config entry, it's totally fine.

Obviously that's not your fault nor responsibility, but I did wonder if you might have seen the same effect at any time during Rald development and if you might know how to fix it?  

I've never seen that happen, but maybe try deleting any eclipse caster entry for Rald? I don't know if they are related... but eclipses involve putting a black texture on a planet, and you've got a black wall there... I dunno...

*** the grass isn't necessarily grass... it could be the spore dispersal structure/"fruiting body" of the green slime. We have many examples in our biology of free living "single celled" organisms that will aggregate and form multicellular structures to disperse themselves... myxobacteria for a bacterial example, dictyostelium discoidium for a Eukaryotic example

Edited November 5, 2016 by KerikBalm

[eddiew]

Raldshrooms... I think I prefer grass  

Although... these zosterophyllopsida were apparently some of the first land plants on Earth and could be quite interesting.

...if I understood how Kopernicus is specifying what to load as the scatter, I'd be tempted to have a play with it myself. The grass looks like it could be a flat texture... or maybe it's more than that, in which case I definitely don't have time to learn proper 3d modelling xD 

 

As for the wall o' blackness, alas, nothing to do with eclipses :/  Tis a mystery. I shall have to consider either not having Rald around the homeworld, or not having it configured with scatterer...

[KerikBalm]

i think the grass is a flat texture. I doesn't specify a mesh, and its got an "AerialCutout" material type as opposed to a "DffuseWrapped"

So I guess one is just a cutout of a texture, and the other has a textruew wrapped around a 3d model.

I guess it wouldn't be too hard to draw some new textrues for the "life" (whatever it may be, use your imagination) textures... but a simple 3d model would be nice... just a branched structure like cooksonia

because flat textures can look quite bad when looking at them from an angle. Just a wire model with green lines could be good

[eddiew]

Yer, I see your point - flat textures will look worse and worse as you approach them too. Unfortunately I have neither the tools nor experience to do anything with 3d modelling ^^;  Might look into it some time, but I wouldn't wait on me cos I'll be starting from scratch 

 

In other news, I resolved the black-wall issue by knocking a zero off the loadDistance in Rald's Scatterer config. There's something that it finds upsetting when the range overlaps with the homeworld. Not sure why there aren't problems when Rald is in low orbit around Kerbin, but I'll take any fix that works /shrug

Just an FYI in case you wanted to give Rald your own GPP config file some time  

 

[KerikBalm]

Well, I finally got around to trying that Rald space program I talked about... it has some issues but is playable.

I'm currently using the biggest variant of Rald with Duna as its moon... but without scatterer the KSC screen is black, and with it, its mostly just atmosphere haze, but at times I see stars or duna, or some sort of surface.

Anyway, I can navigate the space center with the buttons on the left, and everything is fine-ish once a craft is launched.

At first, none of the scatters I had gotten working for the "normal" version were working, but I got scatters in some form working... but Rald has trees in addition to the grass and rocks (not sure if its all kerbin ground scatter, or a mixture).

Also, some atmosphere issues, I also played with base textures, and level of detail settings...

pics if interested

Spoiler

Like with the version orbiting kerbin, the title screen seems to show Duna much closer than it actually is

The monolith is there... I wonder if all the kerbin easter eggs are here...

I have since dimmed the textures for KSC so they arent so bright green

A little plot in there?

the title screen is inaccurate, as you can see

Some atmosphere issues:

Spoiler

Zoom out a lot, and there doesn't seem to be much scatterer effect:

but then zoom out a little more, and its back!

 

While I kind of like the texture change, the lack of ground scatter initially wasn't so nice:

Spoiler

 

 

Maybe I shouldn't be so opposed to trees on Rald, it does look nice:

Spoiler

also... did some work on 3 other bodies... two derived from RSS data for callisto and mercury, the other uses Vesta height and color maps derived from a non-KSP source (RSS doesnt have vesta).

I went a little overboard with ground scatter at first (now partially replaced by a procedural terrain noise overlain on vesta that makes the terrain quite rough):

Spoiler

 

 

Edited November 16, 2016 by KerikBalm

[KerikBalm]

Well, I think these are my most recent files... I've tried playing with the textures for rald and level of detail terrain stuff to get rid of the pixellation appearance... but I'm not quite happy with the look.

I only have the config for the big duna version, but its just text editing to put stuff elsewhere.

Dont have a lot of time now to work on it... but here are some files:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3kcxg0fp5982flg/AACyAs6J_8pp_jVuTF_P6fCGa?dl=0

[eddiew]

When I play KSP again (sometime...) I shall certainly be giving it a go  

[KerikBalm]

Fixed the KSC screen problems, it should now work fin for career. For scatterer... take the stuff from the other "release" and modify it accordingly.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k4mdad1msgv8uhx/RSP.zip?dl=0

Also made the air a bit thinner.

To summarize, this version has 0.5 Gs, and the air density is such that you land 50% faster than on Kerbin.

Science values for Rald, Duna, Ike, Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus have been changed so that career science progression is similar to stock.

However, its in many ways a lot easier, since you need much less dV to get to orbit and do a flyby of the moons. Also worth noting: Your first landing on a moon (Duna most likely) can be done with parachutes. Total dV for the lander isn't so different because of the dV saved on descent. Escaping Duna's gravity takes more dV, but it takes less dV to get the duna intercepts...

Also, launchpad TWR of all rockets is >2x what it is on kerbin thanks to the 0.5 G and higher (closer to vacuum) Isp. The LV-909 functions Ok as a first stage engine for launching small payloads.

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

So, please can you share the tropical-planet-between-Kerbin-and-Eve config that I asked for a while back @KerikBalm?

[eddiew]

Hey @KerikBalm,

So I've been wondering how to include Rald in with the Galilean Planet Pack... I think it looks rather good around Tellumo, the big-daddy oxygen world of the system   Should make a nice staging ground for late-game missions to the boss, but since Rald in itself is a relatively soft target with plenty of biomes, it'll make sure I end up hanging around here for a while quite early on.

Only down side... I still get that weird blackout thing happening if I put Rald in the scatterer config :<  I can live without it, it's just an odd annoyance that I can't seem to track down. 

[Darkness]

i have found a glitch or something KSP 1.2. it shows some grids that make it look a "alien basket ball Habitable" i need some serious help here ! plez  ;-;

Edited January 9, 2017 by Darkness
weird glitch

[NISSKEPCSIM]

On 1/9/2017 at 8:01 AM, Darkness said:

i have found a glitch or something KSP 1.2. it shows some grids that make it look a "alien basket ball Habitable" i need some serious help here ! plez  ;-;

This happened to me when I installed Rald a couple of days ago. I promptly uninstalled it because my kerbals were having seizures as they looked at it from Olympus Space Station.

[CatastrophicFailure]

On 1/8/2017 at 9:34 AM, eddiew said:

Hey @KerikBalm,

So I've been wondering how to include Rald in with the Galilean Planet Pack... I think it looks rather good around Tellumo, the big-daddy oxygen world of the system   Should make a nice staging ground for late-game missions to the boss, but since Rald in itself is a relatively soft target with plenty of biomes, it'll make sure I end up hanging around here for a while quite early on.

Only down side... I still get that weird blackout thing happening if I put Rald in the scatterer config :<  I can live without it, it's just an odd annoyance that I can't seem to track down. 

Just curious, how, specifically did you add this in? I'm curious about giving Gael a near-binary companion...

[eddiew]

Just now, CatastrophicFailure said:

Just curious, how, specifically did you add this in? I'm curious about giving Gael a near-binary companion...

Basically took the Rald config file for being a moon of Kerbin, changed the parent body to Tellumo, then tweaked the orbital radius. It's not a big file, most things are obvious.

But... there is distinctly an issue with having scatterer for Rald when it's in GPP. Never did track it down, just had to leave it on stock atmosphere rendering, so it'll be less pretty than it should  

[CatastrophicFailure]

5 hours ago, eddiew said:

Basically took the Rald config file for being a moon of Kerbin, changed the parent body to Tellumo, then tweaked the orbital radius. It's not a big file, most things are obvious.

But... there is distinctly an issue with having scatterer for Rald when it's in GPP. Never did track it down, just had to leave it on stock atmosphere rendering, so it'll be less pretty than it should  

Hmm... think I'll go play with it then. How about in an upscaled system? Any idea if I need to tweak things with Sigma?

ETA Nope, just answered my own question. Now to flarp about getting the tidal locking right...

Edited February 2, 2017 by CatastrophicFailure

[CatastrophicFailure]

16 hours ago, eddiew said:

But... there is distinctly an issue with having scatterer for Rald when it's in GPP. Never did track it down, just had to leave it on stock atmosphere rendering, so it'll be less pretty than it should  

Wow, that was... strange. Pity. Any idea on how to set up some basic SVE clouds? Something simple like pilfering a cloud texture from another GPP world?