JNSQ Collab Workshop [Current project: Custom biomes]

[JadeOfMaar]

Just as with GPP [Galileo's Planet Pack] this thread serves to gather community efforts and link all published contributions to JNSQ (without derailing or cluttering the release thread).

The current project is
Custom Biomes

The point of this project is to allow you, the player, to submit interesting new biomes for the worlds (whether the stock or added ones). What exactly we [Team Galileo] are looking for are new biomes based on:

• Interesting portions of terrain (such as the tiny but prominent white splotches on Edna or great places with names such as are given to mountains and canyons on Mars);
• Sites of eruptions or impacts (volcanoes, craters...);
  • Crater maps in particular would be desired for cratered bodies for adding to the ISRU experience. There are just so many on a given world and they need to be hand-drawn. Note that JNSQ Mun has many craters divided into 5 flavors for this reason. Can you spot its Exotic Craters?
• Regions not bound by altitude ranges (like Highlands, Midlands...) but based on other characteristics such as basins and vast dry seabeds. Existing examples are the Krenwich Sea on Kerbin and Laythe, the Joolward and Polward Seas on Laythe;

We're also looking for an alternate geo-political themed biome map for Kerbin: divide its surface into countries and nations for the #AlternateHistory crowd. (Well, I'm personally willing to facilitate this one.)

 

How to submit biomes

It should go without saying that you need to be able to use Photoshop or GIMP, and a DDS converter.

For longitude-based biomes (such as JNSQ's Krenwich Seas) take note that the left half of the map is the Western hemisphere and the midpoint within that half is the 0 longitude, GMT/UTC point, the initial rotation vector. (The Krenwich Seas are not perfectly centered on these by the way.) Also, be mindful that the textures are horizontally flipped due to being projected from the opposite way to what we would expect.

The KSC is marked on the Kerbin map, almost dead center there.

Laythe's Joolward and Polward Seas. The clearest divide.

Producing a submission

(Basic)

Submitting coordinates alone.

1. Find an interesting location in-game and save its coordinates. You must be using KER with the SURFACE panel open, the equivalent (if any) in MechJeb, or SCANsat or Waypoint Manager.
2. Describe at any length what is there that makes these coordinates interesting and worth making into its own biome.

(Advanced)

Image editing.

1. Download any of the image files from here on the JNSQ GitHub or copy them out of your install. It helps to also open the main color or heightmap textures (and vertically flip them) so you can see the terrain for what it is so your biome map is fully accurate.
2. Open them in your choice advanced image editor
3. Add a translucent layer over them
4. Draw in new layers over the translucent layer with any pixel-edged tool (I mean Photoshop's Pencil Tool, NOT its Brush Tool). Each distinct biome must have a distinct color. You have great liberty with color values but do try not to make them too similar. KSP has tolerance limits between two similar colors.
5. When you're done, make the translucent layer a fully opaque white layer. Save a PNG image with at least the resolution of the source JNSQ biome map.
6. Save it online and share both it and a table of the hex values for your colors and the associated biome names.

Edited July 2, 2019 by JadeOfMaar

[JadeOfMaar]

Reserved

[panarchist]

As far as a geopolitical map, this is the draft I'm personally working on for my fiction: (no country labels, just borders)

For my own "reality", it's probably going to end up with a variation of these nations from my old Kerbin map:

Edited January 8, 2021 by panarchist
flipped pic to orient correctly

[jefferyharrell]

I have nothing to contribute to this effort, but I just wanted to say I support it wholeheartedly and I hope it gets the attention it deserves.

[Nightside]

Is it possible to get a political map to show up as an overlay in game?

[JadeOfMaar]

19 hours ago, jefferyharrell said:

I have nothing to contribute to this effort, but I just wanted to say I support it wholeheartedly and I hope it gets the attention it deserves.

I added a "Simple" option to the OP. I was told that the current "Advanced" option is actually too hard for most people. I want to add an "Intermediate" submission option too but I'll need to produce an augmented form of nearly all 30 surface color textures.

42 minutes ago, Nightside said:

Is it possible to get a political map to show up as an overlay in game?

You can turn on the "Biomes Visible" cheat (only works in Map View) and you can use maybe the narrowband scanner and SCANsat's tiny map to see the biome based borders as you approach them in Flight View.

[CoriW]

On 7/2/2019 at 5:41 PM, JadeOfMaar said:

I added a "Simple" option to the OP. I was told that the current "Advanced" option is actually too hard for most people. I want to add an "Intermediate" submission option too but I'll need to produce an augmented form of nearly all 30 surface color textures.

Hey I'd be interested in helping out. I've dealt with biome maps in the past when I created the Arkas planet mod (which was subsequently adopted by @The White Guardian when I stepped out of modding.

Though being as that was almost 4 year ago I may need a slight refresher. Notably when you say horizontally flipped, that means I have to flip it left to right, correct? (I do remember flipping the Arkas biome map back in the day, but don't remember any of the details)

[JadeOfMaar]

@CoriW Horizontal flip is left-to-right, yes, but it's only necessary so that it makes sense when you try to look at it and the planet in KSP at the same time. It's horizontally flipped due to how the textures are projected onto the body in KSP and not important in the actual production of planet textures. That's all nice to know btw. I'm a fan of Arkas, though when I tried to use it, it was in KSP 1.3 or 1.4, where many visual features in older planet mods break or just get messy.

[CoriW]

42 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

@CoriW Horizontal flip is left-to-right, yes, but it's only necessary so that it makes sense when you try to look at it and the planet in KSP at the same time. It's horizontally flipped due to how the textures are projected onto the body in KSP and not important in the actual production of planet textures. That's all nice to know btw. I'm a fan of Arkas, though when I tried to use it, it was in KSP 1.3 or 1.4, where many visual features in older planet mods break or just get messy.

Ah okay, gotcha. I may have some time tomorrow to take a look and see if I can come up with some interesting biome ideas.

And yeah I stepped out all the way back in 1.0.4, I'm sure a lot has probably changed since then. Though I'd imagine a lot of it has changed for the better. (Or at least one would hope that's the case) lol

[JadeOfMaar]

@CoriW Since 1.0.4....Whoa. I'm gonna have to call you Captain America because for you, it's like 70 years has passed.

[CoriW]

So this may take a bit longer than anticipated.. I've been at it for over an hour now and am finding that the problem isn't creating the biome images.. That's the easy part, the hard part is actually finding areas worthy of their own biomes. I'm going to have to either get really creative, or really generic to come up with much of anything. Starting to wonder how on earth (or Kerbin) I came up with 17 biomes for Arkas.

Just looking through my computer I've discovered that I apparently still have all of the Arkas files. All of the biomes actually seem to be fairly generic lol. Lowland Dunes, Midland Dunes, Highland Dunes, Mountains, Crater, Volcano, Volcano Summit, Super Volcano, Super Volcano Summit, Central Dunes, Northern Dunes, Southern Dunes, Polar Lowlands, Polar Dunes, Polar Mountains, Polar Volcano, and Polar Volcano Summit. Most of those is based solely off geographical features, rather than interesting locations in particular. The only deviation from biomes based on geographical features are ones that are based on latitude.

I'm noticing that the existing biomes in the JNSQ biome maps are mostly based on a similar premise. Lowlands, Midlands, Highlands, Mountains, Shores, Craters, Deserts etc.

It's starting to come back to me just how hard it is to come up with biomes in KSP.. Explains why this thread is needed lol

[JadeOfMaar]

@CoriW Yeah. I remember Arkas being full of generic biomes. Sadly, at about KSP 1.2, all the stock planets were buffed to have on average 12 (mostly generic) biomes themselves. Instead of more biomes, science experiments should work differently, but that's a can of worms. In which case, it would be just fine for mostplanets to have few biomes... If we take the meaning of the word biome in exact or literal terms, most airless worlds would probably have none, as biomes are individual unique locations where there are conditions for life and where each is different from the next. Splitting biomes from geographic or geopolitical regions would be an okay-ish gameplay mechanic to exploit.

Yeah you'll need to get creative indeed (as far as you want to go). Moon and Mars have all those places that are named in Italian-ish or Latin-ish.

[Nightside]

@JadeOfMaar I love this concept but haven’t got around to contributing yet.

I would hazard that the term “biome” came about because SQUAD built Kerbin before other bodies and it was the correct term for that purpose. Of course it is inappropriate for a lifeless world,  maybe “Terrain” or “Geology”.

Regarding geopolitical regions, I’m curious what you have in mind. Kerbin is as void of politics as Mun is of life. I’ve always had the feeling that Kerbin was a sort of post post post apocalypse kinda place, the dust (and fallout) long buried. Are you planning on populating it somehow?

 

Edited July 9, 2019 by Nightside

[JadeOfMaar]

@Nightside You're most likely correct. There was a time where Kerbin alone (and maybe its moons) existed, then the other planets came along.

By Geopolitical I mean: You know when people who do war stories in KSP divide Kerbin into countries and territories; Using the biome map to do the same. My intention is not really to support the war games and actual combat, but to support fans of alternate history spaceflight stories, and rival space agencies racing to the Mun. The kind of people who play RSS/RO.

Edited July 9, 2019 by JadeOfMaar

[Superfluous J]

50 minutes ago, Nightside said:

I would hazard that the term “biome” came about because SQUAD built Kerbin before other bodies and it was the correct term for that purpose.

I would hazard they used it because Minecraft did

[CoriW]

Okay! So after quite a bit of fiddling around and figuring some stuff out and then contemplating the best planet to start out with, I've decided to start with Tam. I've picked Tam because it was small and quite easy to use as a sort of practice planet and after trying a few different techniques in the editor I was able to find a fairly effective method of mapping out most (hopefully all) of the craters on Tam and assigning them biomes.

This shall be my first submission, and most likely not my last. I'd like to propose 3 new biomes for Tam.

Biome Map

Biome Info, Hex Codes, and RGB Values

Spoiler

EDIT: Also I'm not sure how many biomes you guys are interested in having on each planet, as I'm aware my submission will effectively double Tam's number of biomes. The reason I chose to separate the smaller and larger craters and only refer to the smaller ones as potmarks is because I referenced the height map to get all of the crater locations and for many of the smaller ones I was unsure if they are actually craters or simply divets in the ground, which can't easily be determined via the height map alone (though now that I think about it I wonder if the color map may have helped a bit.)

That being said if you guys did want to keep Tam's biome count lower you could either merge the potmarks and craters all into a single biome type or remove the potmarks all together (as once again there isn't a guarantee that those are actually craters) but with all that being said, if I was forced to only choose one of the 3 biomes in my submission it would be the twin craters as they are unique to Tam as the only 2 craters on the body that are so physically connected. (There are others that are close or maybe the edges touch, but none that are actually partially interconnected like the twin craters are.)

Im not sure when this week I'll have time to take another go at KSP stuff (might not be until Friday) but next time I'm around I'll locally integrate my biome map into Tam and make sure everything looks good. In theory it should all check out based on the height map.

Edited July 9, 2019 by CoriW

[JadeOfMaar]

@CoriW Thanks for that. It's a great start. I'm currently splitting Eve's lakes and seas into several biomes, not so much for science but for adventure and the use of another very promising mod of mine that I should return to and finish.