Real World

[VITAS]

Hi,

would it be possible to have a mod that imports MS flightsim worlddata or even $maps satilite images and 3d buildings into ksp to have some sort of realistic Earth to fly over?

[DrLicor]

Hey, you mean while playing the stock solar system? If you want to replace kerbin with earth you need to install one of the following mods:

• Real Solar System (10x bigger)
• Stock Real Solar Stystem (10x smaller that in real life, so the size of kerbin etc.)

I'm not sure about the 3d buildings, no-ever made a mod for that, only kerbin cities, but thats not as large as you meant. Also notice that KSP runs on unity and MS flightsim not. (as far as I know, correct me when I'm wrong)

[VITAS]

Not only stock solar system but having real in depth hight data,  sat images as textures, real airports to land on and at leqast some landmark 3d buildings. Im baiscly imagineing mircosoft flight sim with kerbal vessels and the ability to go into space if desired

[Streetwind]

There are a few mods that can theoretically do what you want to do: Kopernicus for the terrain, Texture Replacer for the textures, Kerbal Konstructs for the buildings.

Theoretically.

In practical application, it's not going to work - or at least, it's not going to be playable. You see, when MS Flight Simulator renders its high detail terrain, it does so by only loading and working with the general area around where your plane is. That way, it can dedicate all of its resources into making it high fidelity. It gets away with doing this because the view distance and achievable altitude are limited. KSP's engine, meanwhile, needs to render the entire planet at once - because it is possible to go so high up that you can literally see all of it at once. Even though it does some distance-based level of detail scaling for the PQS system (the stuff which is used to shape terrain), the sheer size required for a planet-wide texture on a real scale Earth to display anywhere near the same fidelity as found in Flight Simulator would be crippling. As in, you would need a video card with 64 GB VRAM or more, just to work on it without swapping to system memory (or worse, to disk). Today's most absurdly excessive video cards, which cost well above $1000, have 12 GB.

Not to mention that you'd have to increase the PQS fidelity by an order of magnitude to accurately represent realworld terrain structures. Not sure that part is even moddable. And if it was, you could expect a major performance hit.

Which also applies for large amounts of buildings. I mean, KerbinSide gets pretty close to having a town-sized KSC area if you really go for it, and I think I previously saw a cityscape with real skyscrapers implemented in some video, but you want more than one. You want them all over the place, and some metropolitan areas are huge. Like, the greater Tokyo area is larger than Wales, and it is full of buildings.

Add that to the heightened PQS detail and the absurd planet texture size required, and you can probably guess where the framerate would be going in the process...

 

And even IF, a big if, your computer could handle it (which it cannot)... you'd have to build it all yourself. PQS is not something you can just import an arbitrary dataset about terrain elevations into. You have to sculpt it. And those buildings and city scapes? You better believe that at bare minimum you'd need to manually arrange imported assets in the correct positions on the planet surface. Flight Simulator was built by a team of people, over years of development. Repeating the feat alone, even if the terrain work is only a small subset of the total effort, won't be quick or easy. You're asking for something that would take a normal person probably at least a month of full-time job investment.

Edited November 3, 2016 by Streetwind

[wasml]

I would think there would also be licensing issues ripping MS data and using in a non MS program.

[VITAS]

Hello thank you for your input (and a detailed one at that).

Ive some Points:

1.) It shouldnt load all the fine details no matter what the altitude or distance (LOD)

2.) Neither the RAM nor the VRAM has to hold all data at all times (how fast can you reach the opposite side of the earth and therfore need its most detailed textures and objects?)

3.) its not about ripping data out of MS flight sim its only an example. You COULD use bing/google maps as live source for images and models (you would need an internet connection for that)

4.) all computer and especialy game models of real life enviroments have to sacrefice detail so i would be happy with non realistic distribution of houses, trees and some blurryness here and there.

5.) you cant model every fine dietail (even ms couldnt) so you would need algorythemns for that (e.g. its a redential area so scatter arround some houses out of a finite pool of buildings and only add important landmarks at their propper locations)

6.) things like openstreetmap could provide a basic street layout and the areas mentioned above (they even map powerlines)

but all of those idears are just suggestions and because ive no time to make this happen i can only offer these suggestions to anyone wanting to attempt such a thing.

p.s. ive enough of a background to know that no home computer today could handle rendering all the earthes features/vegitation/objects at once

[rkman]

2 hours ago, VITAS said:

4.) all computer and especialy game models of real life enviroments have to sacrefice detail so i would be happy with non realistic distribution of houses, trees and some blurryness here and there.

For it to be playable, details need to be reduced to KSP level which is quite low compared to just about any flightsim or satellite data. I don't think it would end up with more detail than current 'real solar system' mods that exist for KSP.

 

Edited November 3, 2016 by rkman

[Thomas P.]

7 hours ago, VITAS said:

1.) It shouldnt load all the fine details no matter what the altitude or distance (LOD)

2.) Neither the RAM nor the VRAM has to hold all data at all times (how fast can you reach the opposite side of the earth and therfore need its most detailed textures and objects?)

The problem is that the PQS builds the whole planet at the same time, and rebuilding it dynamically is a pain.

[VITAS]

ah ok because the planet is treated as some object in a scene. so you are saying that if im close to the surface  is keept in memory?

what a waste!

[Sharpy]

@VITAS:

You might think it a waste, but that means if you're doing a 10km/s flyby 50 meters above Tylo surface, you're getting the actual surface at max detail with no hiccups. That if you create a neutron star in Copernicus, with low orbit period of 15 seconds, you're getting all the details all along the orbit.

The alternative is No Man's Sky. Wherever you go is generated in high detail in real time - but before you go there, the game locks you up in 'warp' to load the data, restricts your speed, switches scenes between orbit and surface, treats physics like a cheap prostitute, and gets boring after four hours of gameplay.

Try modding Microsoft Flight Simulator, with a plane that can do Mach 23 (LEO orbital speed), and see how well it performs details-wise.

[VITAS]

I would have thought it switches to some different model depending on the hight

e.g. skybox like plane on the ground and then load a more lowres sphere the future you move away from it.