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KSP Loading... Preview: Breaking Ground - Moho Wrinkle Ridge


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5 minutes ago, Ahres said:

Thanks to @RealKerbal3x on this. I'm a genu-wine forums dude now. Here's a quick look at what I'm talking about, assuming I did this right.

https://imgur.com/a/TkOf4AC

Thanks. I get it, but those formations dont exist as a solitary island. Even in the pic you shared you can see that the formation is part of a larger chain or field. So... if squad wants to emulate your great example they too will need to create giant fields or chains of these, not just a single 30(ish) meter long pimple sitting on an otherwise blank plain that runs to the horizon.

 

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33 minutes ago, Tyko said:

Oh nice  we apparently haven’t. please send some real life pics that look like what you’re talking about

I can’t imagine a spot where a stand-alone feature like this exists which doesn’t have any of the same colors or textures as the surrounding terrain and exists all by itself on a giant plain without any similar features nearby. 

Im excited to see examples, thanks!

 

Fill your boots.

https://images.app.goo.gl/GvN7wUT6Vq5JwiVp9

Took all of 30 seconds searching Google for ‘fissure vent’ and skimming the first page of images. I picked this one for the fairly featureless dark brown plain forming the backdrop to the grey ash around the fissure.

I believe that colour combo is vaguely relevant to this thread?

Edit. It’s a bit more complex than the Moho fissure but it does also appear to be one feature with no other similar  nearby features. Good enough?

Edited by KSK
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Thanks @KSK, that's a good example. And I can show more from southern ID if need be. I just wanted to address the steep sides and contrast to existing terrain as they seemed to be the bigger complaints.

Edited by Ahres
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Guys, terrain blending does not mean it has to look the same as the terrain. It can stand out as much as you want and in many cases should. Terrain blending is about making the transition between the end of the model and the start of the surrounding terrain look smooth, sensible and not have a massive janky step down in resolution. Brown dust and rocks should be piled up around the edge of the fissure where Moho's surface has been rent apart, just a small layer transitioning to the underlying black or glowing magma is all that's needed.

Look closer at the edges of all the fissure pictures posted so far, you'll see even despite their contrast they don't just magically go from lava to grass or dirt without any intermediary stage, which is what the KSP version looks like. We're trying to blend features here, not overwrite one with the other.

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5 minutes ago, Loskene said:

Look closer at the edges of all the fissure pictures posted so far, you'll see even despite their contrast they don't just magically go from lava to grass or dirt without any intermediary stage, which is what the KSP version looks like.

They don't? It sure looks to me like they do. At some point folks have to wonder if people are dissatisfied just for the sake of being dissatisfied.

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15 minutes ago, Ahres said:

They don't? It sure looks to me like they do. At some point folks have to wonder if people are dissatisfied just for the sake of being dissatisfied.

Look closer then. Do you see a perfectly rigid edge between terrain and feature with no crossover of material from either side? No, such perfect boundaries don't exist in nature, which is why they stand out like a sore thumb when we see them in simulations of nature. There will always be a boulder, a pebble, a grain of dust that finds its way across whatever perceived boundary we use to delineate natural features, how sharp or loosely defined it is depends on the feature. A fissure may be a more stark example of one which needs less blending than others, since it's dirt piling out on top of the dirt around it, but it still needs some degree of it and that's just one feature of many. How will this approach work for natural rock and crystal formations which are supposed to have been growing or eroding for millennia undisturbed? From the previews we've seen they might as well be in a different universe to KSP's planets, or someone gave them a spit and polish before the screenshots were taken.

Also I want to emphasise from my previous post that the biggest eyesore of all of this is not specifically the blending but the change in resolution from terrain to scatter objects. Everything else would be far less harshly juxtaposed if that wasn't an issue. Even some localised special terrain textures for a few kilometres around the feature sites, smoothly transitioning to the standard planet texture would help a lot.

Edited by Loskene
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56 minutes ago, Tyko said:

Well cool! Thanks :)

No worries. Sorry if my post came across a bit snarky.

 

Edited by KSK
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1 hour ago, Tyko said:

So... if squad wants to emulate your great example they too will need to create giant fields or chains of these, not just a single 30(ish) meter long pimple

I definitely concur. If they add this clustering then it could help with other things as well. In a thread I made I suggested introducing a neighbourhood scatter that could be clustered in the way you described, so it's not like this mechanic would only ever be used  in this situation. 

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I'm wondering if these will be placed randomly or in selected spots.  Also, will one instance of a feature provide all the science, or will each one have unique science available?

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14 minutes ago, razark said:

I'm wondering if these will be placed randomly or in selected spots.  Also, will one instance of a feature provide all the science, or will each one have unique science available?

I think random would be better. Otherwise someone will find them all about 5 minutes after the DLC is released and it will be in a Wiki 5 minutes later. 

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One thing I should mention is that the developers of Elite: Dangerous did exactly this kind of thing when they went to add procedurally generated points of interest on planets throughout their galaxy. Things like fields of crystal formations, geysers and small cryovolcanoes on gas giant moons, etc.

It didn't start off well. Like the KSP previews they didn't do a good job blending the scatter models to the surrounding terrain, and they looked like playdough anthills someone dropped out the back of a moving space van, though to their credit they did have more than one of them per PoI. This was made all the worse by Elite's visual photorealism making the discrepancies stand out even more, though Squad still doesn't get a free pass for the cartoony art style here. Low-res aesthetic does not excuse ugly bad resolution gradients.

Eventually (many months and excuses later, knowing Frontier Developments) they gave the terrain scatter an art pass and they fit much better now, so it might be worth getting out in front of the headaches on this one, plus there's the bonus of being fired into space by an ice vent if you drive your moon buggy over it. You guys might want to look into that one, just sayin'

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17 minutes ago, Foxster said:

I think random would be better.

So do I.  Having to look for them each save would make it more interesting, and take you to places you might not normally go.

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Not to fancy, I dolike that they made it high ress instead of low ress making it blend in with the rest of the planet. ;)
That makes a needed art pass for the planets even more visible and in my opinion, viable.
I'm pretty confident we'll get that it in the base game one day because Take2 needs to keep selling copies of KSP to new players, and the planets are getting real old, even for todays low end machines.

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1 hour ago, razark said:

So do I.  Having to look for them each save would make it more interesting, and take you to places you might not normally go.

Yeah I mean I guess we don't yet know what they have planned but it might be cool if there were different types of features at different scales. Smaller ones might be random, bigger ones that required more landscape integration might have to be stationary (Im just guessing a cryovolcano would be pretty big in comparison?) Stationary doesn't seem like too big a deal to me either--all of the existing anomalies have known coordinates online but still very few folks seem to track them down. What makes any of these things widely accessible is the ability to map them from orbit in-game, otherwise they're just too small over such large areas. 

Smaller features on the scale of what we've seen so far could be scattered over some biomes or clustered in some other way. If they were even one or two km apart players would be more likely to bump into them if they landed close or were tooling around with a rover. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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Since so many people seem to agree that making it bigger would help matters, I decided to try to make a mockup of how the lava ridge would look like when made bigger

mohoterrain.png

Bad quality, i know, I took a screenshot of the video. Kerbal included for scale.

If someone can make a better photoshop I'd be happy, but do give your thoughts on making it bigger.

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9 minutes ago, Xurkitree said:

Since so many people seem to agree that making it bigger would help matters, I decided to try to make a mockup of how the lava ridge would look like when made bigger

mohoterrain.png

Bad quality, i know, I took a screenshot of the video. Kerbal included for scale.

If someone can make a better photoshop I'd be happy, but do give your thoughts on making it bigger.

Looks better, a crack needs to extend and look like a crack in the ground, like yours does. Wheras the smaller ones may look better as a low 'mini volcano' type pool with lava spilling out more radially.

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I'm not usually one for realism, but, Volcanic rock should be completely visually distinct from non-volcanic rock, and there shouldn't be "blending" because that's not how volcanic rock propagates. Compare Idaho's Craters of the Moon lava flows with the surrounding landscape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craters_of_the_Moon_National_Monument_and_Preserve .

If this is essentially a dormant shield volcano then the areas the lava doesn't touch, shouldn't get the same color treatment, the contrast should be stark, they're completely different rocks.

I'm all for some scatter, and better res terrain though.

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48 minutes ago, Xurkitree said:

Since so many people seem to agree that making it bigger would help matters, I decided to try to make a mockup of how the lava ridge would look like when made bigger

mohoterrain.png

Bad quality, i know, I took a screenshot of the video. Kerbal included for scale.

If someone can make a better photoshop I'd be happy, but do give your thoughts on making it bigger.

I do think this is better, but I'd probably prefer like 8 times as long as the original, 4 times as wide and twice as tall to improve the proportions? Somewhere in that range.

Edited by Pthigrivi
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7 hours ago, Ahres said:

Thanks to @RealKerbal3x on this. I'm a genu-wine forums dude now. Here's a quick look at what I'm talking about, assuming I did this right.

https://imgur.com/a/TkOf4AC

See all the noise at the edges of the flow, the small stones and debris that soften the edge? That's what I'm talking about.

It also appears thay Idaho's texture resolution is fairly constant... And free of ugly stretching, tiling, and obvious polygons.

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