Local Water levels

[mattinoz]

15 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Just a little critique: It should be a symetrical oval, not egg shaped. Normally, tides should come nearly twice per day. It may seem counter intuitive, but there is a bulge toward the moon AND AWAY FROM the moon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide#Principal_lunar_semi-diurnal_constituent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide

 

Is a tidal Ocean and a set of planetary rings versions of the same feature?

Visual Rings are confirmed on the feature list use the same code to create a body of water that is the right shape and period.

Doesn't do highland lakes or such but still but gets someway. If that does work could be used for lava on the twins, rings of various planets, even layers within gas giants.

[KerikBalm]

6 hours ago, mattinoz said:

Is a tidal Ocean and a set of planetary rings versions of the same feature?

Visual Rings are confirmed on the feature list use the same code to create a body of water that is the right shape and period.

Ummm, I see visual rings and buoyant water as very different features... can you elaborate?

[K^2]

On 2/14/2021 at 3:21 PM, The Doodling Astronaut said:

I don't know if this is already planned. But it would be a shame if KSP 2 didn't have local water levels. I think it would be nice to have lakes in mountains and such.

It's not too difficult to add a few discrete locations with elevated water level. But these would just be set pieces. In order to have significant impact on look and feel of planets, you really would need a way to generate river systems, and that's an entirely separate class of a problem. Convincing river systems are hard to generate, and while I've seen some tech demos that can produce decent results with some artist input, I've never seen anything that would let you cover entire planet - even a toy-sized one, like Kerbin -  in realistic waterways.  There is just so much connection between paths water takes, erosion, and overall terrain that you have to have it be considered as part of your world generation.

But set pieces would be nice too. Maybe a lake in a crater of a large volcano? That'd be easy enough.

[starcaptain]

Question: 

What about strange liquid phases? (Thallassophobes be warned.)

It's been conjected before that on fully liquid planets,  at depths of over 80km water will begin forming exotic ices because of the intense pressure. Seeing as JATO-assisted rocket submarines are a totally sensible for Kerbal players,  i think these sorts of strange atmospheres (hydrospheres) should be just as explorable as deep portions of gas or ice giant planets.

Edited February 17, 2021 by starcaptain

[KerikBalm]

@starcaptain I think that is a different discussion. There have already been discussions about undersea exploration in KSP2, so different phases of liquid to explore would fit those threads, but I don't think it fits so much about simly having water at different/differing elevations.

Quote

i think these sorts of strange atmospheres (hydrospheres) should be just as explorable as deep portions of gas or ice giant planets.

Well, I'd argue that they are more explorable in KSP 1 than Jool's atmosphere.

Going down to 0 meters on Jool and coming up again is.... rough to say the least, its been made easier with robotics (using electric rotors to ascend to lower pressures), but robotics have opened up all the oceans in the game to exploration (Eve, Kerbin, Laythe, mod worl'd with oceans like Tekto, or my own duna with seas and Mars-derivative with seas mods).

My custom system (3 or 4x ... I decided on 4x too later after I was heavily comitted to a 3x playthrough) has Jool's surface gravity at 2.5G like that of Jupiter... There's no getting out of the lower atmosphere of that Jool with stock parts (except using exploits such as kraken drives). Any hovering base dies as soon as it is put on rails...

[mattinoz]

11 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Ummm, I see visual rings and buoyant water as very different features... can you elaborate?

To me both are torus like objects in the scene orbiting the planet that apply a visual effect and kick in additional physics when the craft is inside them. 

[KerikBalm]

11 hours ago, mattinoz said:

To me both are torus like objects

I'll grant rings being torus-like, but oceans are not, and are currently modelled as spheres. We can hope they allow for oblate spheroids in KSP2.

11 hours ago, mattinoz said:

in the scene orbiting the planet

Rings orbit a planet, oceans most certainly do not. 

11 hours ago, mattinoz said:

 that apply a visual effect

fine

11 hours ago, mattinoz said:

and kick in additional physics when the craft is inside them. 

Oceans apply one uniform physics effect (water simulation, with resistance, buoyancy, and pressure), whereas rings seem to cause the procedural generation of orbiting debris - likely similar to ground scatter (which already in KSP can be made collidable)

To me, they are quite different

[mattinoz]

4 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

I'll grant rings being torus-like, but oceans are not, and are currently modelled as spheres. We can hope they allow for oblate spheroids in KSP2.

Rings orbit a planet, oceans most certainly do not. 

fine

Oceans apply one uniform physics effect (water simulation, with resistance, buoyancy, and pressure), whereas rings seem to cause the procedural generation of orbiting debris - likely similar to ground scatter (which already in KSP can be made collidable)

To me, they are quite different

High and low tide do orbit the planet, ok fine circle the planet in response to a gravity rich object orbiting the planet. 
 

hey I didn’t say they kick off the same additional physics just some additional physics That is the beauty of it. One system expands as the game get more complicated and system to run them get better. 

[KerikBalm]

20 minutes ago, mattinoz said:

High and low tide do orbit the planet, ok fine circle the planet in response to a gravity rich object orbiting the planet. 

Those are not the same thing

[Wubslin]

Guys I just want to say that we all need to take a step back and look at the scope of this (game about flying spaceships). Tides are probably not going to be a part of the game, they don't need to be. I say we should be grateful if the game even ends up allowing for the existence of bodies of water not at the sea level.

Also,

42 minutes ago, mattinoz said:

High and low tide do orbit the planet, ok fine circle the planet in response to a gravity rich object orbiting the planet. 
 

hey I didn’t say they kick off the same additional physics just some additional physics That is the beauty of it. One system expands as the game get more complicated and system to run them get better. 

Your mamma's a gravity rich object lol

[pandaman]

On 2/18/2021 at 9:57 AM, Wubslin said:

...Tides are probably not going to be a part of the game, they don't need to be. I say we should be grateful if the game even ends up allowing for the existence of bodies of water not at the sea level.

I would tend to agree with this.

However, I do think that tides would be a nice extra feature to have on appropriate bodies.  Currently only Kerbin, Eve (as Gilly is so small probably too little effect though) and Laythe (which could be quite complex if the other Joolian moons have an effect as well as Jool.  But who knows what delights await us in the new star systems.  Tidal molten lava seas anyone ? (don't set up your base on the beach) or the ocean world from Interstellar?

But, yes, overall tides etc. would be a fairly low priority feature.  And quite possibly a disproportionate amount of work to implement.

Edited February 20, 2021 by pandaman

[Wubslin]

1 hour ago, pandaman said:

I would tend to agree with this, and expect it to be the case.

However, I do think that tides would be a nice extra feature to have on appropriate bodies.  Currently only Kerbin, Eve (as Gilly is so small probably too little effect though) and Laythe (which could be quite complex if the other Joolian moons have an effect as well as Jool.  But who knows what delights await us in the new star systems.  Tidal molten lava seas anyone ? (don't set up your base on the beach) or the ocean world from Interstellar?

 

The most we could realistically hope for is an extension of the Rask and Rusk situation - being some static difference on the inward and outward- facing surfaces of planetary bodies that exhibit tidal locking. Could that take the form of prolate spheroidal sea level datums? Maybe. But I still don't see it.

[K^2]

On 2/17/2021 at 7:23 AM, starcaptain said:

What about strange liquid phases? (Thallassophobes be warned.)

It's been conjected before that on fully liquid planets,  at depths of over 80km water will begin forming exotic ices because of the intense pressure.

I don't know much about ice phases, but it shouldn't be too different from other phase transitions, and based on what I recall of physical chemistry, unless you have absolutely pure water, you'll end up with a sort of a slush layer. In terms of physical properties, I don't imagine it will be too different from silt and organic slime that forms at the bottom of some ponds. Lower bellow, it will compact into something a bit more solid, but more like packed snow than solid sheet of ice until you get to a depth where this formation is more or less permanent. All in all, not too different, physically, from a bottom of a deep lake or even sea bed. From perspective of a game like KSP, I don't think this warrants any special treatment compared to a rocky body with water on it. You just treat this layer as the "terrain".

[mattinoz]

14 hours ago, Wubslin said:

Guys I just want to say that we all need to take a step back and look at the scope of this (game about flying spaceships). Tides are probably not going to be a part of the game, they don't need to be. I say we should be grateful if the game even ends up allowing for the existence of bodies of water not at the sea level.

Also,

Your mamma's a gravity rich object lol

State aim of developers - is 10 years or more of continued, paid, profitable development. Whos to say what that will include over time, or what it'll include version 1 to make ground work for things over time.

She is indeed - everyone wants to hug her.

[Bej Kerman]

On 2/17/2021 at 9:00 PM, mattinoz said:

To me both are torus like objects in the scene orbiting the planet that apply a visual effect and kick in additional physics when the craft is inside them. 

I dunno, the very oblate-spheroid form of an ocean doesn't look much like a torus.

[Guest]

23 hours ago, mattinoz said:

High and low tide do orbit the planet, ok fine circle the planet in response to a gravity rich object orbiting the planet. 
 

hey I didn’t say they kick off the same additional physics just some additional physics That is the beauty of it. One system expands as the game get more complicated and system to run them get better.

That's not how games work. 

[Wubslin]

11 hours ago, mattinoz said:

State aim of developers - is 10 years or more of continued, paid, profitable development. Whos to say what that will include over time, or what it'll include version 1 to make ground work for things over time.

She is indeed - everyone wants to hug her.

I dunno, I've seen like three episodes of Extra Credits on youtube and so that makes me an expert in game development  But in all seriousness, adding tides is unrelated enough to spaceflight that I'd be tempted to call such a to-do item as project creep at best. I think the way we should view the value of things being added is from the perspective of how much enjoyment we'd be likely to get out of it.

Adding tides would take a lot of work and for the vast majority players it wouldn't enhance the game all that much.  As for many of the updates provided with KSP 1, well let's just say they're so useful I basically have no idea what I saw in the game when I bought it back in 2013, lol. They've since added giant rocket parts to cater to ambitious players, friggin' FAIRINGS... I don't even know if I would still play regularly if not for the Room to Maneuver update. My point is, any game with gameplay as complicated as KSP will inevitably launch with a giant list of possible features that would take it to the next level.

To me at least, I see ocean tides about on the same level as adding trains. Why do that, when you could be adding black holes or Mesklin planets or a massive multiplayer mode with space trading elements and combat? The possibilities are so endless with the game that I can't see tides being anywhere above cool idea #293.

[paul_c]

Agree, the pragmatic gameplay effect would be marginal anyway. Visually there would be no difference, or maybe a different shade for the area of biome which is the foreshore. Timewarping or waiting a long time would see a craft in that zone be beached, then refloated etc. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Wubslin said:

adding tides is unrelated enough to spaceflight that I'd be tempted to call such a to-do item as project creep at best

Very much this.

I would only consider adding something like this if it somehow turns out that whatever system you're using for dealing with water permits it just by adding a few lines of code... and even then I'd probably end up not doing it because it could still have unforeseen consequences. I would certainly not want to write an entire subsystem. It just doesn't have much gameplay value, and as you point out it's super easy to come up with a looong list of cool stuff that would add that. 

Hey, I'd even prioritise some pure flavour stuff over tides. Having more expressive kerbals would likely add more value.

[starcaptain]

15 hours ago, K^2 said:

From perspective of a game like KSP, I don't think this warrants any special treatment compared to a rocky body with water on it. You just treat this layer as the "terrain".

Well I think there's a couple of perfectly kaizo-block surface features that could exist in KSP2: slimey/oozy surfaces which behave sort of like liquid, and thin ice, both of which are almost indistinguishable from solid ground. 

 

[K^2]

8 hours ago, starcaptain said:

Well I think there's a couple of perfectly kaizo-block surface features that could exist in KSP2: slimey/oozy surfaces which behave sort of like liquid, and thin ice, both of which are almost indistinguishable from solid ground. 

There are definitely things you can do with surface properties, but it's a bit of a can of worms. Like, if you want a muddy sort of surface, you probably want rovers to leave tracks in these. Now you need to do local terrain deformations, even if just for the visuals. There are several good ways to do this that aren't too expensive, and if this was a custom engine, it'd probably be a no-brainer, but under Unity it's a bit awkward. They are adding some features that should make it easier to do stuff like that, but I don't know the state of it and whether it'd be stable enough for Intercept to use with KSP2. Whether it's based on Unity's tech or they roll their own, though, I would very much like to see Intercept implement something like this. It goes beyond just tracks. There are a lot of ways you can greatly improve fidelity of terrain using these techniques. Especially, if Intercept implements virtual textures for terrain.

Thin ice is one that I'd probably vote to scrap all together. One of the key assumptions that a lot of systems are going to make is that terrain height-mapped. So at any given point, there is one unique elevation that remains constant. If you have ice that breaks, you have two levels of terrain. Granted, ice can be a collision mesh instead, like the buildings at KSC, but this doesn't work too well over large distances, and breaking just section of ice introduces challenges with LoDs.

But then things like low friction on thick ice? That's very doable with what Unity already does for you. You can get physics material from any collision surface and use that to adjust how stuff interacts with it. You can make surfaces that are "harder" or "softer" on impact as well as being more or less slippery very easily. So maybe things impacting snow and mud don't bounce as much and when you are driving on either of these surfaces you drift a lot. Intercept would need a way to assign materials, but what people usually do is associate it with texture. So anything with snow texture would get snow physics properties, etc.

[mattinoz]

10 hours ago, Wubslin said:

I dunno, I've seen like three episodes of Extra Credits on youtube and so that makes me an expert in game development  But in all seriousness, adding tides is unrelated enough to spaceflight that I'd be tempted to call such a to-do item as project creep at best. I think the way we should view the value of things being added is from the perspective of how much enjoyment we'd be likely to get out of it.

Adding tides would take a lot of work and for the vast majority players it wouldn't enhance the game all that much.  As for many of the updates provided with KSP 1, well let's just say they're so useful I basically have no idea what I saw in the game when I bought it back in 2013, lol. They've since added giant rocket parts to cater to ambitious players, friggin' FAIRINGS... I don't even know if I would still play regularly if not for the Room to Maneuver update. My point is, any game with gameplay as complicated as KSP will inevitably launch with a giant list of possible features that would take it to the next level.

To me at least, I see ocean tides about on the same level as adding trains. Why do that, when you could be adding black holes or Mesklin planets or a massive multiplayer mode with space trading elements and combat? The possibilities are so endless with the game that I can't see tides being anywhere above cool idea #293.

Gravity causes tides surely anything directly linked to gravity is in scope of a game about fairly realise rockets in gravity.

 

disagree that it doesn’t create gameplay aspects.

https://www.quora.com/How-did-such-gigantic-waves-get-generated-in-such-shallow-water-in-the-Interstellar-2014-movie

[Incarnation of Chaos]

2 hours ago, mattinoz said:

Gravity causes tides surely anything directly linked to gravity is in scope of a game about fairly realise rockets in gravity.

 

disagree that it doesn’t create gameplay aspects.

https://www.quora.com/How-did-such-gigantic-waves-get-generated-in-such-shallow-water-in-the-Interstellar-2014-movie

It's in scope, but in order of priorities it's so far down the queue that it's effectively approaching 0 importance

Think about it, before tides we'd want Wind, Clouds, Weather, oh and N-Body because you'd have to have an actual simulation of gravitation at this point. Then you might as well implement a more accurate approximation of Aerodynamics al la FAR, and so on.

That's what he means by feature creep, this isn't a feature that would come on it's own. It's packaged with a whole assortment of other things that would be required to make it convincing, and many of them the community would be heavily split on as well.

So why spend development time on it? In the best case you get a interesting gimmick that if you REALLY wanted for a specific world you could probably hack your way around it, while isolating a large part of your customer base. In the worst case it becomes a massive parasitic drain on development time, resources, and takes away from those people working on more important features or squashing bugs, all while the timeline keeps getting kicked back and back until years later it's realized they can't deliver and have to scrap it and clean up the mess.

Edited February 20, 2021 by Incarnation of Chaos
Finishing?

[wpetula]

Hopefully the water in KSP 2 will be more exciting. Scatterer for KSP 1 adds interactable and adjustable waves to the game, which is really cool. Imagine flying through Eve's haze layer to be greeted  by an ocean of huge, crashing waves. The player would be forced to either find land or have their ship destroyed. On an ocean planet, the player would need to build a strong, boat-like ship to explore the surface without getting torn apart.