Better Texture for 2.5m parts

[Sirius K]

2.5m parts are commonly use as the most largest command pod outside the shuttle is the mk1-3 Command Pod, while the command pod itself is good looking enough, the fuel tank to attach with it isn't that well, most of them have stripes especially the Rockomax X200-16 Fuel Tank and Rockomax X200-8 Fuel Tank, which is medium size in length when combine together compare to the Rockomax X200-32 Fuel Tank, that two tanks combine with the Poodle has a relatively long range, I would like to recommend some plain white texture choice for these tanks. The Poodle is useful but the red double nozzle isn't that good looking compared to the old one I mean, have you ever seen a red colour nozzle?, for this engine, I suggest smaller and 4 nozzles like in the mod Restock. Maybe just add these new texture as choices for the parts in here.

Edited March 18, 2020 by Sirius K

[kspnerd122]

you can still get the old poodle engine if you go to 2.5 meter category it will appear

if you go to the size category non revamped parts will appear as well

so you can have some of the older parts back

such as the old terrier, poodle, and spark engines

you can also get the old probe cores and lander can

sadly the 1-2 command pod is not present in this menu if i am correct

i use this feature to build better looking rockets

[Sirius K]

On 2/27/2020 at 9:08 PM, kspnerd122 said:

you can still get the old poodle engine if you go to 2.5 meter category it will appear

if you go to the size category non revamped parts will appear as well

so you can have some of the older parts back

such as the old terrier, poodle, and spark engines

you can also get the old probe cores and lander can

sadly the 1-2 command pod is not present in this menu if i am correct

i use this feature to build better looking rockets

I know that, but I've seen better version of the Poodle. Still, old poodle is not the best texture but it's worth placing one on my rocket rather using the new texture.

[Mikenike]

On 2/27/2020 at 7:08 AM, kspnerd122 said:

sadly the 1-2 command pod is not present in this menu if i am correct

Mk1-2 pod? What? On what Kerbin?

[Bej Kerman]

Have you mentioned greebling yet? The new textures are really lacking in this, and the new parts are starting to look more like plastic models than actual rocket parts. Not to mention that Squad should've just increased the quality of the old parts, the new parts go against the jerry-rigged-looking style all the parts had before.

[kspnerd122]

i agree with this, also apparently restock tolerates the update so you can install it if you want it and also do you mean something like the corgi engine from kw rocketry(tolerates update) because if you want something like it just use that in conjunction with tweakscale, reason why 1.8.1 mods work is because this was mainly a bugfix, are we on 1.9.1 now?

however install mods at your own risk, on my computer it just lags the game when your ship is 250+ parts, and i'm using a laptop so it should be fine.

[panzer1b]

To be perfectly honest, ive all but given up on the stock revamp effort.  It was very promising back when porkjet was in charge of texturing as his style was consistent, fit the feel of the game (it was sorta real life authentic but had that hand painted feel, but also had good balance of details even when you zoomed in without making parts geometry eat 15000 tris), and well was just high quality.  Now some of the new revamps are amazing (even give restock a run for its money), but the vast majority are either just about acceptable or plain terrible.

I like some of the revamps like the tiny engines (while they are overkill on details, they do look beautiful and id say make restock's ones look like trash), the new lander can (its simple, but it gives us something new at least in its rover version, i like restock's somewhat better, but its far from a flat upgrade imo), mk-1 pod (not quite as crisp as restock's, but its really not far from restock quality and something id have no problems disabling with restock), and hell, even the lv-909 isnt bad despite lacking shiny shaders that the newer engines got (its got a nice glow texture, fits the game, and is different enough from the other engines to make it unique, something that i cannot say about restock with its rather unified everything looks identical style).  The new revamps are nice too, mailsail, skipper, srb texture and models are alright imo and teh textures are ok.

Parts that got revamps and i really dont like would be the following.  2.5m fuel tanks, aside from a texture bug on the 2nd smallest one that has a mapping issue and shows a black stripe on its orange variant, just plain suck, they are bland, look like plastic, and the textures are actually seamy (look closely at orange variants, you can actually see a break in the normal mapping on em).  Next goes to the mk1-3 pod, its got a bleh texture (not 1 scratch), and worst of all they didnt even fit the ONE biggest issue with that damn pod, the top hardpoint being the wrong physical size making it impossible to asthetically mount anything to the top aside from a docking port (main reason i never use that in any of my designs except in the rare case of when i know i want a docking port on the nose to be integral part of the ship design).

Dis is bery bery bad.

And this has been rediculous from day 1, i dont know why, but someone made the decision when the model got revamped to maintain backwards compatibility and in effect guaranteed that i would never use this part without restock installed as it looks like trash with like anything attached to the top node that isnt a docking port (which is actually too small radius to look right on many things for that matter itself.

 

Also worth mentioning is that alot of the "new" revamps have unoptimized and broken textures.  There are missing mipmaps on a handful of them (orange variant of fairing, all the new nose cones, 3.75m fuel tanks, ect), and many of the new revamps (3.75m fuel tank comes to mind and its nose cones) are using .PNG textures!!!  I thought the game went away from .PNGs for optimization reasons, and seeing new parts come out using the older style .PNG textures (with no mipmapping for that matter) makes my cringe.

And in case anyone else in wondering, the 3.75m tanks, 2.5m new service bays, and probably a few other parts i havent even noticed yet and using outdated .PNG textures (use .dds plz) and have broken mipmaps (not even sure if .PNG supports mipmapping, but if it doesnt you shouldnt be using it as a format especially given most unity games ive played use .dds internally as its more efficient).

 

Also another huge annoyance i have with one of the stock parts (which has driven me nuts enough to disable normal maps on that part in particular) is the fairing normal map bug where the direction of the normal map seems to randomly flip itself depending on how you orient the ship.  Essentially when you flip a ship around the parts of the normal map that are supposed to stick out (as in the effect makes the feature appear to be convex) then changes and becomes concave or sticks in like a valley.  This is show in the screenshots below, i made a very dead basic ship (just a pod with a fairing atop it).

This bug just drives me nuts, and used to be present also on the 2.5m tanks (that appear to have been fixed lateron).  Basically in this screenshot the arrows point to features that are clearly either sticking out or sticking in (based on the sun's lighting).  A feature that sticks out (such as the long seam going lengthwise down the fairing (labels 1 and 2 which point to the same thing just diufferent spot on model it continues) would be expected to both either stick out (like the yellow arrows), or stick in (cyan), but of all things they should not be altering themselves from one going in and one going out (breaks any sort of immersion to see this in game). 

Theres 1 more blatant example of what i mean...

 

Anyways, while it isnt quite a "revamped" part, it is new enough, and i might as well show what i mean by broken mipmaps since im discussing the fairing issues:

Note how the part looks pixelated texture wise near the seams (due to lacking mipmaps which make teh game render the full res texture always and not switch to a smaller lew high res texture as you move the camera away from it like every other game does as it should since super high res far away becomes overly sharp and pixelated that even antialiasing wont compensate for properly).

And thats it with one of the 2 non broken textures, notice that it looks cleaner (you may need to zoom in to see details).  Both this and above screenshot have been taken with the same camera i just changed part texture variant).  @SQUAD, any chance this will ever be fixed given that its present on this fairing (some textures missing normals, some dont).  Specifically, the files missing normals at least for this part (fixed with 2 minutes in any image editor that can save .dds files provided you check the generate mippmaps feature): FairingBaseNormals, fairings_diff_orange, fairings_grey_normals, fairings_orange_normals, fairingsCap.  All the rest are ok out of the box.

 

 

 

Now this is coming from someone who really doesnt care all that much (ive been using restock since like 1.7ish and havent gone back except to see what a bone stock new release looks like when i get a new update), but im getting the feeling that the whole revamping effort (while a good idea and hugely demanded by many people in the community including myself back b4 i used restock at least) is starting to be backburner focus with little regard given to quality of stuff coming out of it.  No offense to the artists (its a new style that not everyone may like) who seem to be trying hard to improve the game slowly as it is patched, but you guys should really focus on quality control and stop releasing broken textures that make some of the old terrible parts from back in 0.90 look better then the new ones from a texture and quality perspective (even if they were terrible 3d models and had styles that didnt fit any uniform theme).  The desire to improve is there, but for whatever reason (i suspect the constant push to release updates on the new release every so and so months schedule), quite a few oversights are getting past the QC team and it really makes it feel rushed despite being such a nice game in like every way otherwise...

[Bej Kerman]

On 3/17/2020 at 6:25 PM, panzer1b said:

To be perfectly honest, ive all but given up on the stock revamp effort.  It was very promising back when porkjet was in charge of texturing as his style was consistent, fit the feel of the game (it was sorta real life authentic but had that hand painted feel, but also had good balance of details even when you zoomed in without making parts geometry eat 15000 tris), and well was just high quality.  Now some of the new revamps are amazing (even give restock a run for its money), but the vast majority are either just about acceptable or plain terrible.

I like some of the revamps like the tiny engines (while they are overkill on details, they do look beautiful and id say make restock's ones look like trash), the new lander can (its simple, but it gives us something new at least in its rover version, i like restock's somewhat better, but its far from a flat upgrade imo), mk-1 pod (not quite as crisp as restock's, but its really not far from restock quality and something id have no problems disabling with restock), and hell, even the lv-909 isnt bad despite lacking shiny shaders that the newer engines got (its got a nice glow texture, fits the game, and is different enough from the other engines to make it unique, something that i cannot say about restock with its rather unified everything looks identical style).  The new revamps are nice too, mailsail, skipper, srb texture and models are alright imo and teh textures are ok.

Parts that got revamps and i really dont like would be the following.  2.5m fuel tanks, aside from a texture bug on the 2nd smallest one that has a mapping issue and shows a black stripe on its orange variant, just plain suck, they are bland, look like plastic, and the textures are actually seamy (look closely at orange variants, you can actually see a break in the normal mapping on em).  Next goes to the mk1-3 pod, its got a bleh texture (not 1 scratch), and worst of all they didnt even fit the ONE biggest issue with that damn pod, the top hardpoint being the wrong physical size making it impossible to asthetically mount anything to the top aside from a docking port (main reason i never use that in any of my designs except in the rare case of when i know i want a docking port on the nose to be integral part of the ship design).

Dis is bery bery bad.

And this has been rediculous from day 1, i dont know why, but someone made the decision when the model got revamped to maintain backwards compatibility and in effect guaranteed that i would never use this part without restock installed as it looks like trash with like anything attached to the top node that isnt a docking port (which is actually too small radius to look right on many things for that matter itself.

 

Also worth mentioning is that alot of the "new" revamps have unoptimized and broken textures.  There are missing mipmaps on a handful of them (orange variant of fairing, all the new nose cones, 3.75m fuel tanks, ect), and many of the new revamps (3.75m fuel tank comes to mind and its nose cones) are using .PNG textures!!!  I thought the game went away from .PNGs for optimization reasons, and seeing new parts come out using the older style .PNG textures (with no mipmapping for that matter) makes my cringe.

And in case anyone else in wondering, the 3.75m tanks, 2.5m new service bays, and probably a few other parts i havent even noticed yet and using outdated .PNG textures (use .dds plz) and have broken mipmaps (not even sure if .PNG supports mipmapping, but if it doesnt you shouldnt be using it as a format especially given most unity games ive played use .dds internally as its more efficient).

 

Also another huge annoyance i have with one of the stock parts (which has driven me nuts enough to disable normal maps on that part in particular) is the fairing normal map bug where the direction of the normal map seems to randomly flip itself depending on how you orient the ship.  Essentially when you flip a ship around the parts of the normal map that are supposed to stick out (as in the effect makes the feature appear to be convex) then changes and becomes concave or sticks in like a valley.  This is show in the screenshots below, i made a very dead basic ship (just a pod with a fairing atop it).

This bug just drives me nuts, and used to be present also on the 2.5m tanks (that appear to have been fixed lateron).  Basically in this screenshot the arrows point to features that are clearly either sticking out or sticking in (based on the sun's lighting).  A feature that sticks out (such as the long seam going lengthwise down the fairing (labels 1 and 2 which point to the same thing just diufferent spot on model it continues) would be expected to both either stick out (like the yellow arrows), or stick in (cyan), but of all things they should not be altering themselves from one going in and one going out (breaks any sort of immersion to see this in game). 

Theres 1 more blatant example of what i mean...

 

Anyways, while it isnt quite a "revamped" part, it is new enough, and i might as well show what i mean by broken mipmaps since im discussing the fairing issues:

Note how the part looks pixelated texture wise near the seams (due to lacking mipmaps which make teh game render the full res texture always and not switch to a smaller lew high res texture as you move the camera away from it like every other game does as it should since super high res far away becomes overly sharp and pixelated that even antialiasing wont compensate for properly).

And thats it with one of the 2 non broken textures, notice that it looks cleaner (you may need to zoom in to see details).  Both this and above screenshot have been taken with the same camera i just changed part texture variant).  @SQUAD, any chance this will ever be fixed given that its present on this fairing (some textures missing normals, some dont).  Specifically, the files missing normals at least for this part (fixed with 2 minutes in any image editor that can save .dds files provided you check the generate mippmaps feature): FairingBaseNormals, fairings_diff_orange, fairings_grey_normals, fairings_orange_normals, fairingsCap.  All the rest are ok out of the box.

 

 

 

Now this is coming from someone who really doesnt care all that much (ive been using restock since like 1.7ish and havent gone back except to see what a bone stock new release looks like when i get a new update), but im getting the feeling that the whole revamping effort (while a good idea and hugely demanded by many people in the community including myself back b4 i used restock at least) is starting to be backburner focus with little regard given to quality of stuff coming out of it.  No offense to the artists (its a new style that not everyone may like) who seem to be trying hard to improve the game slowly as it is patched, but you guys should really focus on quality control and stop releasing broken textures that make some of the old terrible parts from back in 0.90 look better then the new ones from a texture and quality perspective (even if they were terrible 3d models and had styles that didnt fit any uniform theme).  The desire to improve is there, but for whatever reason (i suspect the constant push to release updates on the new release every so and so months schedule), quite a few oversights are getting past the QC team and it really makes it feel rushed despite being such a nice game in like every way otherwise...

Finally, someone analysing the new parts. I agree with you all the way, I don't see why they're replacing the 'placeholder' textures other than them being 'placeholders'.If you look at all the teasers and trailers (other than the KSP 2 ones), all the kerbals look like plastic and the environments just look dull, bland and empty. The people doing the 'art' seriously need to start doing a better job, because so far there's many modders doing a better job at revamping the art than the developers of all people. I can see another 'out-pizza'd the hut' meme incoming, and that's a bad thing.