Stuck with odd checkerboard planetary surface

[Gordon Fecyk]

In Team Galileo's JNSQ system I'm planning a Jool Five mission, including rovers and landers for each body.

All five Jool moons are exhibiting a checkerboard pattern that I've only seen once before on JNSQ Moho, in Kopernicus 1.8.1-1. That seemed to be fixed with a dev version Sigma88 let me try, at least until I cheated a craft out to Tylo:

This pattern seems more pronounced the brighter the daylight.

For the sake of troubleshooting I removed EVE and Scatterer. I still have Distant Object Enhancement but that's only supposed to affect the sky box. It's stock graphics and lighting at this point.

I've tried this on a couple different PCs, including a Gen4 Core i7 with a GTX 1080 card, a Gen8 Core i7 laptop with RTX graphics, and a potato laptop running an AMD Ryzen and discrete Radeon graphics. I get identical results, but this only starts happening past Dres. It was worse in KSP 1.8.1 / Kopernicus 1.8.1-1 as it occurred on Moho as well.

On a lark I swapped Tylo and Minmus thinking it might be the distance to the sun, but the above screen shot happens in orbit of Jool or Kerbin.

Any ideas where I should start to troubleshoot this? I could always go back to KSP 1.7.1 / Kopernicus 1.7 but I really like the 1.9.1 features too much.

[jimmymcgoochie]

I've had this on a near daily basis even at KSC itself. I'm sure I saw others posting about a similar issue but I can't find where 

I think I read that it was a kopernicus glitch of some kind, but there's no fix (that I know of) except restarting the game.

[DeadJohn]

There was some discussion of this in another thread. Someone who is usually correct said it was an interaction between KSP 1.8 and Kopernicus, and would be fixed no sooner (and maybe later) than the Kopernicus 1.9 update.

[jimmymcgoochie]

28 minutes ago, DeadJohn said:

There was some discussion of this in another thread. Someone who is usually correct said it was an interaction between KSP 1.8 and Kopernicus, and would be fixed no sooner (and maybe later) than the Kopernicus 1.9 update.

You wouldn't happen to know which thread that was? I suspect I read the same thread but can't find it anywhere. I often get checkerboard terrain and on some occasions I even get little hexagonal/triangular patterns in different shades of green inside some squares but not others- much like in the lower part of the OP image- and it even happens on the sea floor. Annoying, but not game-breaking as everything still works normally.

Edited May 11, 2020 by jimmymcgoochie

[Gordon Fecyk]

Perhaps the new surface shaders can be turned off in KSP 1.8 or 1.9 to work around this, to pre-1.8 shaders? 

[DeadJohn]

10 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

You wouldn't happen to know which thread that was? I suspect I read the same thread but can't find it anywhere. I often get checkerboard terrain and on some occasions I even get little hexagonal/triangular patterns in different shades of green inside some squares but not others- much like in the lower part of the OP image- and it even happens on the sea floor. Annoying, but not game-breaking as everything still works normally.

I think it was in the main JNSQ thread.

[jimmymcgoochie]

16 hours ago, Gordon Fecyk said:

Perhaps the new surface shaders can be turned off in KSP 1.8 or 1.9 to work around this, to pre-1.8 shaders? 

They can indeed, but the results are nowhere near as good looking.

In the settings.cfg file you need to change UNSUPPORTED_USE_LEGACY_SHADER from False to True. That was one way I found to stop graphics crashes, before I found the cause (outdated graphics driver) and fixed it.

[Gordon Fecyk]

On 5/12/2020 at 8:04 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

In the settings.cfg file you need to change UNSUPPORTED_USE_LEGACY_SHADER from False to True.

While that took the funny checkerboard patterns away, it also defaulted the surface textures to the same stock Mun-like texture, just in different colours. All of the surface textures, including the grass on Kerbin. So that's not really an option either.

I'll check my graphics driver again.

[Update] Well, whatever's going on appears to be restricted to Jool's moons only. After inspecting the surfaces of all other bodies beyond Dres, I'm not seeing the checkerboard behaviour. Maybe I'll just power through Jool's moons and then not worry about this graphics glitch afterward.

Edited May 13, 2020 by Gordon Fecyk
Inspected other celestial bodies in JNSQ

[R-T-B]

A lil bump with some potential work arounds from a team Kopernicus member:
As posted in our thread:

Unfortunately, I have no idea what this is...  have not seen it in my personal save either.  I feel it could actually be a stock 1.9 issue with shadow tiling (they reduced shadow precision in 1.9) and it relates to the new shadows distance clipping issues some have reported.  A few things you can try to fix:

1.)Install scatterer and use it's terrain shadow system in the interim (this is probably why I haven't seen it, I use scatterer).

or

2.)You could try turning off "celestial bodies cast shadows" in settings.

or

3.)  If it really is a stock bug, running in OpenGL mode (google how) will fix it by forcing the old shadow precision, albeit at a large performance cost.

 

Edited July 27, 2020 by R-T-B

[Motokid600]

Ill have to bump this as well. Experiencing the SAME exact checkered pattern on bodies in Beyond Home. I was wondering if the 2.5x resale was the culprit. Maybe not. I tried this fix mentioned by Hohmannson. " Temporary and unsupported fix is to go through all planet configs and change template = Laythe to template = Eve and template = Tylo to template = Minmus." That did solve the checkering issue, but it broke the surfaces where they didnt receive sunlight. Will try what R-T-B mentioned next change I get.

[R-T-B]

On 5/11/2020 at 9:47 AM, DeadJohn said:

There was some discussion of this in another thread. Someone who is usually correct said it was an interaction between KSP 1.8 and Kopernicus, and would be fixed no sooner (and maybe later) than the Kopernicus 1.9 update.

 

We don't really know what causes it other than maybe ksps shaders don't do so well with larger-than-stock worlds, but yes we are aware of this bug.

Unfortunately I now have seen it as well and my suggested fixes do nothing.  Sadness.

Edited August 26, 2020 by R-T-B