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SOL: State of the Project and Release?!#??


G'th

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31 minutes ago, Rutabaga22 said:

Would you mind explaining what this mods is? I can't seem to find a description.

Sure. SOL is in the same vein as my other mod Ad Astra. That is, it is a mod of another mod that adds better visuals to the planet pack its associated with. 

SOL is a modification of KSRSS, and through SOL (and to a lesser extent Ad Astra before it), I was able to develop a number of techniques for utilizing EVE and Scatterer in ways that result in very gorgeous visuals. 

As one can see from the screenshots above of Earth, not only are the clouds high fidelity, borderline 3D even, but they're also dynamic, meaning that they change shapes and disappate and reappear at random similarly to how real life clouds work. This means that, compared to other cloud packs, SOL's Earth never looks the same more than once. 

Seeing it in motion explains it better than I can, though be aware this is an older version:

https://i.imgur.com/EWkUuJM.mp4

 

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9 minutes ago, G'th said:

Sure. SOL is in the same vein as my other mod Ad Astra. That is, it is a mod of another mod that adds better visuals to the planet pack its associated with. 

SOL is a modification of KSRSS, and through SOL (and to a lesser extent Ad Astra before it), I was able to develop a number of techniques for utilizing EVE and Scatterer in ways that result in very gorgeous visuals. 

As one can see from the screenshots above of Earth, not only are the clouds high fidelity, borderline 3D even, but they're also dynamic, meaning that they change shapes and disappate and reappear at random similarly to how real life clouds work. This means that, compared to other cloud packs, SOL's Earth never looks the same more than once. 

Seeing it in motion explains it better than I can, though be aware this is an older version:

https://i.imgur.com/EWkUuJM.mp4

 

As a ksrss player, I am glad you are making this.

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20 hours ago, Rutabaga22 said:

As a ksrss player, I am glad you are making this.

I've been following this mod since near the beginning of it,. I got my hands on the first version of it before it was taken down leme tell you, you will be in for a treat with this mod. (as long as your pc is not a potato)

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
4 hours ago, Paul19 said:

Amazing views! I wonder if it is possible to make an uneven distribution of clouds? Somewhere more, somewhere less

That actually is already the case as part of the Dynamics techniques I devised, so cloud coverage will change at random intervals. Very few places on the surface, even at the poles, will have consistent cloud coverage. 

There's still tweaks to be had to get the average coverage right (as well as some tweaks to the textures themselves to remove some cruddiness that creeps in), but as you've seen, it looks great and is even better in motion. 

 

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@G'th Do you have any plans on improving the terrain scatter? Like maybe trees in the relevant areas and snows on tall mountains(like Himalayas) etc. I think you've done this in Ad Astra(maybe I'm wrong, been a while since I played JNSQ)

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  • 4 weeks later...

So doublepost but here's the plans for this long weekend:

1. Reintegrating the mod to work with KSRSS Reborn as the basis (which has conveniently fixed a huge bug I was having when I stopped, so yay!). While most of the assets will be replaced outright, there's little reason to try and stay connected to a now deprecated version of KSRSS. Incidentally, I'll also note that the plan is still to push for that total replacement. While I am very happy to see KSRSS continuing, I think I have a specific style and goal in mind that is beyond the scope of what that mod should be focusing on, but as it was in the beginning I see zero reason to redo the base Kopernicus work that has already been done just to basically end up with the same files in the end. 

1.5 Integration with KSRSS Reborn was apparently pretty easy and is already done. So now I'm going to get myself organized and start knocking some stuff out. The new Earth Clouds need some touchup work done, and Mars was pretty finalized terrain and atmosphere wise, so we'll be doing the clouds for that too, and Luna needs its new height map fixed IIRC, so those'll be the first things to chew on. 

2. Beginning work on the Ad Astra revamp to update concurrently with SOL. I think initially we're going to just copy the SOL cloud assets and other  settings in wholesale first, but I do want to source and extract a whole set of new clouds for that one. I'm also going to have to inquire about how or even if I'm going to be touching terrain in that mod. I would like to, but I've had (I believe unreasonable non-game related) problems in the past with it so we shall see. 

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2 hours ago, G'th said:

Artemis may be scrubbed again

 

but this mod ain't. 

What a  serendipitous surprise! Was just checking out the thread earlier today wondering if it had died and it seems that my question has been answered! Can’t wait to see the following updates!

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It just keeps getting better. Vibrance Earth+Moon and an early look at nuMars. You may notice some...off things in the clouds but don't fret I'm aware. I'm making use of new techniques (IE, I found better ways to do things by experimenting at random for hours on end) so it'll take a few revisions to nail down all the oddities. 



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Still working on getting it right up close (and I'm really close), but I think we peaked on it looking right from afar.  Pictures here with much brighter clouds to illustrate the for some reason coveted cloud glow effect that will be about this apparent up close. 

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9 minutes ago, Rutabaga22 said:

This is looking really nice, G'th. Will you city lights have the annoying yellow lines on the surface, or will they just appear?

I assume you're referring to how they look on the day side? There's a companion texture for this that I admittedly haven't even looked at yet that should reduce the, uh, awfulness that usually results from that. Won't look as good as basically everyone wants, but we're also just dealing with a rather limited tool in EVE's City Lights implementation. I also intend on essentially reducing the city lights within a certain radius around the most common launch sites (Kennedy, Kourou, Baikonur, etc) so that way at least when you're launching you'd have to get up to altitude before any of the textures become apparent, which should help in that regard. 

HOWEVER, in explaining all that I just had an inspirational spark. I'm not going to explain what I just thought, but I will say that this is the same sort of spark that has led to all of the things in this mod...

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