Trying to add a fictional island in RSS but it is invisible from space

[Pipcard]

So Real Solar System Earth map uses several textures: EarthHeight.dds, EarthColor.dds, and EarthSurface.dds. (there's also the normal map EarthNRM.dds as well as EarthBiomes.png, but those are not important right now)

I am testing modifications to this with an obvious circle/disk in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

EarthHeight.dds (note that the actual texture is upside down compared to this) - you can plainly see the perfect circle

(I save this to a png and convert to .dds using TexConvGUI with the R16_NORM format)

The actual color of the planet (oceans and land) are split into two textures:

EarthColor.dds, in which there are blue oceans and transparency where land should be - I removed a chunk where the circular island would be

(exported to .dds using GIMP with the DXT5 setting)

and EarthSurface.dds, which shows land and the sea floor.

The heightmap works at the ground level (PQS) - the circular island (top right corner of image) is visible east of Omelek

But it doesn't work at the space (ScaledSpace) level - instead, there is some sort of "invisible" hole that only shows blue ocean underneath, not land.

It should look like this:

Does anybody know what the problem is here?

Edit: the issue is that the "transparent" areas in EarthColor.dds still contain RGB color information (same as EarthSurface.dds), but the circular hole I cut out does not. Still trying to figure out how to do that.

Edited September 3, 2020 by Pipcard

[Pipcard]

Okay, I've tried a method to make a selected area fully transparent while preserving color data.

1. You need to have three layers: first is EarthColor (oceans and some bits of land)

2. Second is EarthSurface (all the land and ocean floor)

3. Third is EarthColor+Surface (the previous two layers merged with Ctrl+M, then copy, undo, and paste onto a new layer)

4.  Select the "Select by Color Tool" (select transparent areas)

5. On the EarthColor layer, click on the transparent part

6. Then switch to the EarthColor+Surface layer while the transparent area is still selected (note that it is not made visible right now)

7. Select Layer -> Transparency -> Threshold Alpha

8. Set to 255

9. The final product looks like this (it's got more stuff than in the original EarthColor, but I think that's because I set the color select threshold to 0.0 in Step 4). You can tell it worked if you use the color picker tool and click on the "transparent area" and it still has the original color (like light brown for desert, green for forest, etc.)

10. Turn the image upside-down, export to .dds (with DXT5), then replace the EarthColor.dds in your KSP folder (not without making a backup first). Now it works.

 

 

[Pipcard]

Finished product (Hatsunia)

Map made with GIMP and Inkscape

Heightmap made with World Machine

Terrain textures used deepart.io

Edited September 22, 2020 by Pipcard

[Cattette]

It's quite astounding that i never seem to be able to escape that particular Hatsune Miku map no matter the community im active in. 

[Pipcard]

A significant problem I just noticed: I imported a 16-bit grayscale heightmap (up to 65536 levels of brightness/height) to edit in GIMP, but it was converted to 8-bit (256 levels of brightness/height from 0 to 255) in the process.

This meant that when I exported it to a .png and converted it back into a .dds, Hatsunia was fine but significant parts of the world (including Kennedy Space Center in Florida) were flooded due to the loss in precision.

I'm still trying to figure out how to edit the 16-bit .dds without converting it into 8-bit. I installed the latest version of GIMP (2.10) which apparently supports 16-bit but it still converts imported .dds files to 8-bit.

Florida and the Caribbean at 142/255 (the Florida Keys and the Bahamas have too much land)

Florida and the Caribbean at 143/255 (a lot of it is gone)

Edited September 24, 2020 by Pipcard

[Pipcard]

I did a quick and dirty fix. It involved taking the old 8-bit EarthHeight.dds (before the 16-bit textures in RSS-Textures v18.2 and above) and adding the missing land, although it is not as precise anymore.

1. The old EarthHeight.dds (RSS-Textures v18.1 and below)

2. Threshold from 24/255

3. Select by Color for the oceans

4. Oceans removed

5. In this image, there are two layers. On top is the new EarthHeight.dds (16 bit grayscale but converted into 8 bit when imported) with a 143/255 threshold (oceans also removed like in step 4). Below is the old EarthHeight.dds (8 bit) with a 24/255 threshold.

I color select the white in the new EarthHeight, then switch to the old EarthHeight layer to remove.

6. The white here represents the missing land.

7. I change the color from white (255/255) to 143/255 and fill in the area.

8. Keep in mind, this was a quick and dirty fix for myself, and until I can figure out how to edit this without the 16-bit grayscale converting into 8-bit.

Florida is basically entirely flat at this point.

(turn it upside down, export to .png and convert to.dds)

Edited September 25, 2020 by Pipcard

[coyotesfrontier]

On 9/21/2020 at 11:34 PM, Cattette said:

It's quite astounding that i never seem to be able to escape that particular Hatsune Miku map no matter the community im active in. 

He's obssessed

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 9/22/2020 at 1:34 AM, Cattette said:

It's quite astounding that i never seem to be able to escape that particular map no matter the community im active in. 

Spoiler

WHY?

I JUST THOUGHT IT WAS A MIRRORED JAPAN AT FIRST! WHY DID YOU HAVE TO POINT IT OUT!!

Back to the OP though

"Significant Portions of the world were flooded due to a loss of precision" is one of the most hysterical entries Iv'e ever seen in a development thread.