Graphical quirks

[kfsone]

Just returned to KSP after a long hiatus. First, let me say: All hail King @linuxgurugamer, for thou art great and full of mods. Second, the game has come along nicely.

One thing I don't remember from early KSP but I guess it was this way, was that everything seems to be in 8- or 12-bit color - there's a lot of what looks like visual dithering/banding, and while I remember there were a couple of places that could be seen (mostly in atmospheres) I don't remember it being so pervasive - e.g even on the loading screens?

I'm also noticing weird artifacts on what should be black screens, that seem like uncleared shader data or back buffers when the game stops rendering.

 

Spoiler

Screen transition:

Dithering, including loading screen (bottom right)

I'm running Win 10 (insiders slow branch build 19577), GeForce RTX 2080 8GB with current nvidia release drivers, and this is a raw fresh install of KSP with no configuration, as well as a fully modded version with settings tweaked for aa etc. 35in ultrawide 4k monitor, tried hdmi and dp - but it's only KSP that behaves like this.

Is there something I can do to fix this?

 

-- Aside:

While looking into this, the painfully slow loading of KSP got annoying, so I shaved about 1/3rd off load times by running this from wsl in my KSP gamedata directory:

# s://.*?([\r\n]+):$1: - removes comments but leaves end-of-line as is
# s:^[ \t]+::  - removes leading whitespaces
# s:[ \t]+([\r\n]+):$1: - removes trailing whitespaces but leaves end-of-line as is
find . -name \*.cfg -print0 | xargs -0 perl -i -pe 's://.*?([\r\n]+):$1:; s:^[ \t]+::; s:[ \t]+([\r\n]+):$1:'

 

[IncongruousGoat]

If you haven't taken a look at KSP's graphics settings yet, that's an obvious first step. They come set rather low out of the box and (to my knowledge) there's no graphical capability autodetect. I suspect you're already done this, but just in case, it's best to get this out of the way.

Also, could you upload some higher resolution non-cropped screenshots? It'll make diagnosing your problem easier for us, since we don't have direct access to your hardware.

[kfsone]

24 minutes ago, IncongruousGoat said:

If you haven't taken a look at KSP's graphics settings yet, that's an obvious first step. They come set rather low out of the box and (to my knowledge) there's no graphical capability autodetect. I suspect you're already done this, but just in case, it's best to get this out of the way.

Also, could you upload some higher resolution non-cropped screenshots? It'll make diagnosing your problem easier for us, since we don't have direct access to your hardware.

Yeah, I've tried adjusting graphics settings up and down, but I figured starting from clean was probably safest for diagnosis. I figured I'd save posting full size images until someone said it wasn't normal

Those were actual resolution images, just cropped to emphasize the banding/other issues.

These are images from my current modded game, so I acknowledge they're not showing default images, but I see the same dithering/banding issues in a stock clean install (I just don't want to interrupt this flight right now, I can post those a bit later if needed).

Log:

https://www.kfs.org/oliver/ksp/ksp.dithering-modded.log

Images (as links so they don't get resized/bloat the thread)

https://www.kfs.org/oliver/ksp/dithering1.jpg

https://www.kfs.org/oliver/ksp/dithering2.jpg

https://www.kfs.org/oliver/ksp/dithering-settings1.jpg

https://www.kfs.org/oliver/ksp/dithering-settings2.jpg

And this is exiting out of the tracking station, but it's pretty much every transition including from the menu where something like this happens

https://www.kfs.org/oliver/ksp/transition.png

 

 

Edited March 15, 2020 by kfsone

[RoninFrog]

I have noticed this too, the most common ones I have found are the kerbal headlamp texture and engine exhaust texture appearing when loading/recovering a vessel.

[kfsone]

"Duh", I thought; "Try your other PC", I thought.

So I tried installing KSP on my Surface.

"Beautiful!" I thought, until I looked more closely, and sure enough the dithering/banding is there too. It's most noticeable when you have adjacent, similar colors, so Kerbin's ocean, or the galactic skybox.

"Well", my wife said; "Does it run under Linux?", she stunned me with.

So the following are screenshots from the same machine but KSP running under an Ubuntu 19.04 install:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2023830668

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2023830617

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2023830693

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2023830652

That's a fresh 19.04 default install + steam + ksp. No config, no mods, no tweaks, and then I switched to full screen mode with full textures etc for the last one.

[IncongruousGoat]

Now I'm seeing it too, on Windows & Linux, on two separate machines. Looks like it's a bug in either KSP or Unity (though the former seems more likely than the latter).

Fascinating.

As a quick fix, for those willing to use mods, Scatterer (link) does (among many other things) a good job of masking the problem in atmospheres & sunflares. I'm not so sure about how to deal with it cropping up in skyboxes, though it might be worth a shot to swap out the skybox and see if the issue persists.