visual pack [1.12.3] Spectra Visual Compilation 1.6.2 "Horizons" (26th July 2022)

[MrLivion]

10 hours ago, HafCoJoe said:

Aye, I designed it to be as performance optimized as possible for its bang  It's good to hear the same result from another user! Say, you say that they're almost a tie, but was one of them slightly better? I'm curious which

Spectra is slightly better, altough I am in a very heavily modded install it performes actually more or less playable now

Longer post: (fps and some other stuff)

Spoiler

Also, the version of AVP I was running was older and also in a older version (recently updated from 1.10.1 to 1.12.3) so that might have affected fps, since newest scatterer doenst run on my potato now (for some reason it stops responding at the main menu, and my gpu jumps to 99% usage, only happens with lastest version though)

(Prepear for some dreadful frames)

AVP (2k, TUFX, Planet Shine, DistantObject, EVE Redux and Scatterer, version of the game: 1.10.1, Mod version is 4.1.1 apparently):

3-5 fps at  launch pad, doenst change much with part count (same from 30 to about 350), a few times there were drops in performance to 1 fps

5 fps looking down to kerbin from low orbit, 10-17 fps looking from low kerbin orbit to sun

10-17 fps is the highest, anywhere without a atmosphere makes frames much better

Spectra (Game version: 1.12.3, mod version: 1.6.5, TUFX, PlanetShine, EVE Redux, no scatterer, the install changed a lot since I was using AVP and now is much heavier, so in reality the performance might be much better for whoever inst stuffing the game with mods, removed DistantObject since it didnt do much):

5-8 fps on launchpad, looking at ocean for some reason the frames decrease to 3-5, 4000-6000 meters up (bout where volumetrics appear I think) fps also decrease to 3-5, but as altitude increase, it goes away

As for in deep space, I havent had time to test that very well, and Principia tanks performance a lot principally in interplanetary missions, but the highest FPS I saw was about 10-17, same as AVP

From low kerbin orbit, looking anywhere: 5-8, idk from mun or minmus yet

Performance decreases and game becomes more unstable after hours of playing as my laptop heats up in both cases, but only after some 6 hours

Since most people dont run a very bad laptop and stuff the game with mods, performance might be might be much better, and my install inst exactly stable since it has lots of mods, older versions, newer versions and all, so that also really affects performance

Also, with the mod, it's amazing! beautiful yet the performance is better

Sorry for the very long post, I gave as much informatio as possible so it's actually useful and you can know what's going on

 

Edited September 26, 2022 by MrLivion
Figured out how to add spoiler, the post should be smaller now.

[HafCoJoe]

9 hours ago, Forked Camphor said:

In my experience, I agree with MrLivion in terms of performance, comparing AVP with 8k textures and Spectra with all it's addons is a tie in terms of FPS. But, Spectra is a little heavier on the RAM side, around 1-1.5 GB more

Curious that it's more RAM intensive. Are you using the 64k Kerbin cloud add-on? That might explain a lot of it if so.

Thanks for the info!

Edited September 26, 2022 by HafCoJoe

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, HafCoJoe said:

Curious that it's more RAM intensive. Are you using the 64k Kerbin cloud add-on? That might explain a lot of it if so.

Thanks for the info!

That's probably the reason. Will try to do another more cleaner test when I reinstall Spectra (I went back to AVP due to OPM support), probably in a couple of weeks

[HafCoJoe]

5 hours ago, Forked Camphor said:

That's probably the reason. Will try to do another more cleaner test when I reinstall Spectra (I went back to AVP due to OPM support), probably in a couple of weeks

The 64k clouds are... *very* heavy on RAM... ha. I haven't found it to be a problem though with my games thankfully but it's always something you can remove if you find it to be

[Guest]

18 minutes ago, HafCoJoe said:

The 64k clouds are... *very* heavy on RAM... ha. I haven't found it to be a problem though with my games thankfully but it's always something you can remove if you find it to be

Oh, but they look so good! Maybe I can do without some part mods to make space for them... I think that with 16gb of RAM and 8gb of VRAM if I'm near the limit maybe I use too many mods

[HafCoJoe]

Bah, nonesense

[Motokid600]

Sorry if this sounds odd, but is there anyway to make this visual pack less... teal?

Edited October 1, 2022 by Motokid600

[HafCoJoe]

14 minutes ago, Motokid600 said:

Sorry if this sounds odd, but is there anyway to make this visual pack less... teal?

You could go into the configs and edit the colors manually if you want? They're located in GameData/Spectra/Spectra_Configs/Spectra_Configs.cfg, it shouldn't be too hard to find the color lines for each planet. Lmk if you have any troubles. Don't use the in game GUI though or what it might break some modulemanager files

[MrLivion]

Hey, dumb question but, where is the Spectra_Scatterer supposed to go? I might have screwed something up somewhere since atmospheres dont show up, I put it in the Spectra folder

Edit: nevermind Scatterer 838 just refuses to load that was the problem

Edited October 2, 2022 by MrLivion

[Motokid600]

17 hours ago, HafCoJoe said:

You could go into the configs and edit the colors manually if you want? They're located in GameData/Spectra/Spectra_Configs/Spectra_Configs.cfg, it shouldn't be too hard to find the color lines for each planet. Lmk if you have any troubles. Don't use the in game GUI though or what it might break some modulemanager files

I dont seem to have a Spectra_Configs in my installation. Just Spectra_EVE and Spectra_Scatterer. Seems to be working okay.  Edit: This it?

Edit2: I had the thought to copy AVP's color profile, but when I opened the atmo file it was the same as Spectra. Lol. So I suppose that might not be it.

Edited October 2, 2022 by Motokid600

[HafCoJoe]

On 10/1/2022 at 6:34 PM, Motokid600 said:

I dont seem to have a Spectra_Configs in my installation. Just Spectra_EVE and Spectra_Scatterer. Seems to be working okay.  Edit: This it?

Edit2: I had the thought to copy AVP's color profile, but when I opened the atmo file it was the same as Spectra. Lol. So I suppose that might not be it.

Oh shoot, Spectra_EVE* is the folder name. GameData\Spectra\Spectra_EVE\EVE_Main.cfg — I forgot I changed the folder name in the most recent mod iterations to create one folder for each parent mod; EVE, and Scatterer

[Spartan Nat]

Hey, so I've been trying to fix this for the past few days to no avail. I seem to have an old Gumdrop Eclipse glitch in my 1.12.3 install. I've disabled Scatterer eclipses and what seems to "fix" it is disabling EVE shadows, though I still want to have eclipses on bodies since my save is significantly beautified. The glitch is present whenever looking at a body with a glow but no stock atmosphere and is being eclipsed by a larger body.

 

Link to full and partial eclipse: https://imgur.com/a/OTf7s6d

 

KSP Log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sn32o0xx30xfc4g/Player.log?dl=0

[HafCoJoe]

Hm, I've not experienced this before, but I also didn't do any tests with eclipses before. It could be due to you having disabled Scatterer eclipses. Could you try installing fresh versions of Scatterer and Spectra, making sure that you have default settings?

Thanks for the KSP log too, though it isn't helpful in this case since it's a visual glitch, and not a unity/engine error (unless you see NullRef being spammed) — your log file is uh... *really* big so searching for anything special in it isn't going to be useful either really

[Spartan Nat]

1 hour ago, HafCoJoe said:

Could you try installing fresh versions of Scatterer and Spectra, making sure that you have default settings?

I actually did this yesterday in hopes it would work! I deleted the Spectra, Scatterer, and EVE folders and reinstalled the most recent of each. It "did" work for a moment in that until I loaded a craft around the Mun, it didn't show the "Gumball Eclipse" glitch as I'll coin it. Since posting I possibly have whittled it down to a lack of a compatible EVE_Shadows config file.

Edited October 8, 2022 by Spartan-B312

[Spartan Nat]

Update: I don't know what happened but it seems to have fixed itself!

[HafCoJoe]

Yay! Glad to hear it's worked itself out

[Superluminal Gremlin]

Will a GTX 960 be able to run this?

Is this mod more GPU limited or RAM limited?

[HafCoJoe]

2 hours ago, TKMK said:

Will a GTX 960 be able to run this?

Greetings! I don't have a GTX 960 so I can't say with certainty how well it would perform, but I would recommend giving it a test to see yourself. Typically speaking, the Scatterer mod has the greatest impact to game performance of all visual mods, so if you're having issues with performance I recommend trying to remove that first. Spectra runs fine without it, albeit less pretty

2 hours ago, TKMK said:

Is this mod more GPU limited or RAM limited?

Typically speaking computers are what you call component limited and not external programs  Speaking generally though, KSP is a CPU limited game (due to all the maths), adding visual mods makes it GPU limited (due to all the geometries/particles), and adding lots of mods can make it RAM limited (due to all the things it has to keep loaded).

Spectra itself is what you can consider a 'config' mod. It doesn't have any actual code in it, but adds configs and textures which the EVE mod uses to add clouds and other effects to the game. In tests Spectra has a smaller RAM impact and a slightly better GPU performance when compared to other EVE config mods, like Astronomer's Visual Pack or Stock Visual Enhancements. Spectra does have a number of optional features which you can enable during install to give your game some extra enhancements, and many of these have negative impacts to performance however, hence why they are optional and not included by default. The Geysers are very GPU intensive, and the 64k Kerbin Clouds are very RAM intensive.

I hope this info helps?

Edited October 13, 2022 by HafCoJoe

[Superluminal Gremlin]

That helps a lot.

Ive always noticed with EVE that my RAM really started struggling. 

Hopefully it works on my life-support potato 

 

[HafCoJoe]

How much RAM is in your computer?

[Superluminal Gremlin]

8GB

Its on life support most of the time

 

[HafCoJoe]

4 hours ago, TKMK said:

8GB

Its on life support most of the time

 

Hm gotcha  yeah 8GB is... not much at all. It shouldn't be too expensive to buy another 8GB, and that would probably have the biggest impact on performance at your stage, considering how little you have. I regularly reach 12-16GB of RAM usage, just with my visual mods and no part mods (I have 32GB)

Edited October 14, 2022 by HafCoJoe

[Superluminal Gremlin]

Gotcha

I normally only play with

Restock 

Restock +

Waterfall

Waterfall for restock

And EVE (clouds at minimum)

Thanks for your help

 

[Guest]

So, I did some clean tests to compare Spectra (All addons except 64k clouds) and AVP (8k Textures, Scatterer sunflare). Tested in a Ryzen 5 1600 3.7 Ghz OC, 16gb 3200mhz of RAM, and a Sapphire RX590 8gb machine running Windows 10

What I found was that Spectra is around 5-10 fps faster and it's VRAM usage is 700-900 mb lower than AVP, but AVP is slightly better in terms of RAM usage (Around 300-400 mb less). So it really depends on what you want to sacrifice and what style you like the most. For me Spectra is all-around my favorite pack, performance is really good for the visuals that you get and visually is a middle ground between realistic and scifi wich really fits the overall aesthetics of KSP, the only thing that's missing IMO is OPM support but, well, you can't have it all :P. So thank's again @HafCoJoe for you all your work!

And here some screenshots that I took in the last weeks using Spectra

Spoiler

 

 

[HafCoJoe]

54 minutes ago, Forked Camphor said:

So, I did some clean tests to compare Spectra (All addons except 64k clouds) and AVP (8k Textures, Scatterer sunflare). Tested in a Ryzen 5 1600 3.7 Ghz OC, 16gb 3200mhz of RAM, and a Sapphire RX590 8gb machine running Windows 10

What I found was that Spectra is around 5-10 fps faster and it's VRAM usage is 700-900 mb lower than AVP, but AVP is slightly better in terms of RAM usage (Around 300-400 mb less). So it really depends on what you want to sacrifice and what style you like the most. For me Spectra is all-around my favorite pack, performance is really good for the visuals that you get and visually is a middle ground between realistic and scifi wich really fits the overall aesthetics of KSP, the only thing that's missing IMO is OPM support but, well, you can't have it all :P. So thank's again @HafCoJoe for you all your work!

And here some screenshots that I took in the last weeks using Spectra

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Nice! I'm surprised your framerate is that good when using the snow addon; the particles it adds *severely* tank your FPS, so I don't even run them myself unless explicitly doing things at the poles. They tank your framerate globally if you're on a planet with them (or at least they did at the time of their conception, before EVE-Redux existed)

Thank you for the compliments  if you want, could I use one or two of your screenshots in the original post? I love adding people's personal pictures.

Regarding OPM support... the only reason I've not added it, is because I've not had the time/energy to do so yet. If I do end up adding support for a planet pack, it would be OPM. I just lack the motivation/energy since my time is being spent away from KSP (and less gaming in general) of late. Sorry  

Edited October 15, 2022 by HafCoJoe