[1.12.5] ExtraKerbin Moons

[Ralstemar]

With all these huge planet packs adding planets far beyons Eeloo and beyond, sometimes it's nice to focus on the closer things. My solution was devote my sanity to learning Kopernicus modding, and create these 4 moons. This is my first mod for KSP, so it might be a bit stinky and unpolished (especially the textures), but I am proud enough of it, and I will update it as I see fit.

Requires Kopernicus

download https://spacedock.info/mod/3273/ExtraKerbin#info

Body list:

Niermun: Small moon extremely close to kerbin, good pit-stop, or vacation spot, oddly green, the ground is NOT grass. It is theorized to be a chunk of Kerbin shot out from an asteroid impact long ago... (20Km radius)

Igor: Tiny moonlet orbiting on the outer reaches of Kerbin's gravity, its unusual shape, size, and orbit suggests it to be a slow and icy comet captured by Kerbin (3Km radius)

Ringer: Beautiful, large, rocky moon with a Beautiful ring, a true marvel, everyone is lucky to see it in the Kerbin system. (70Km radius)

Oleg: Often confused for space junk, Oleg is considered to be a sister (brother?) moon to Igor, and likely came to be in the same way as Igor. Despite being smaller than Igor, it strangely has a higher gravitational influence, this hints to a high density, magnetic core, possibly classifying it as more than an asteroid. (2.4Km radius)

Edited February 28, 2023 by Ralstemar
Title clarification

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

Congrats on your first mod! Welcome to the modding community!

Looking at your mod and the files, I have noticed several things that are quite off.. so.. here are some tips I can provide!
The issues and then the ways to solve them

1. there no normal maps for any of them
Bodies in KSP require normal maps to be properly pathed and in the mod itself, the normal kittopia generates gets desposited in kittopiatech>plugindata>(planets name)
Kittopia is a VERY useful tool for planet making and getting started on your first planets. The color of the terrain should match the scaledspace (Scaledspace is what is seen in space, PQS is the terrain)
There is also a missing heightmap for one of the bodies. 
Also, Niermun does not have its green color in scaledspace, probably an error with setting texture .
I did look in the config file, and you did specify a normal map for all of your bodies, the heightmap.. as well as the texture. Heightmap and Normalmap textures are supposed to be in different .dds formats. Heightmap should be no compression, L8 format. Texture should be DXT1 (DXT5 if there is transparency for stuff like oceans), and Normals should be DXT5nm

2. textures have polar stretching and seams.

The textures while I couldnt open them in GIMP to see how they are like, they appear to be squares, which do not match on the seam, and have no polar distortions. (I use GIMP to do textures) What I do to solve polar distortions is go to filters>distorts>polar coordinates. This will set the texture around the top edge or bottom edge, which are the poles, depending on if you do map from top or not. do the same distortion BUT unselect "to polar" to go back to normal. The seam is fixed by using Layer>Transform>Offset, and then click offset by width. Heal brush is typically used for fixing seams and such.

3. ring texture is.. its ok, but the moons have square texture shapes
For better ring textures, try to make them a bit more... transparent if you want some realism. There is nobody commanding you on what to do with rings, I think some wild rings are good from time to time! The shape of the files do not have to be perfect squares. Ring textures could be 10000 textures wide and just 1 texture tall and it would be fine! Also for the ring tiling, for some reason, I have found that it only takes the leftmost 500 pixels, where the left border is the inner edge and the right edge of that section in the texture is the outer edge.  Planet textures are best in 2x1 shape, where its twice as wide as it is tall.

4. heightcolormap set to same colors for every single class
This will cause no color variation in the terrain depending on height. I usually use this feature to color my planets (In fact, almost ALL of my bodies in my Estrela Dobre mod used it, some are getting custom textures based off of the output from heightcolormap)

5. all bodies in one config file
I have never seen this done before. I am mildly impressed that you managed to do it without breaking the game. However, this format is only probably ok with a pack with like.. two or three bodies, but this is an ineffecient way of doing things.
To make it easier to troubleshoot and declutter the config file itself (like.. the contents), you would want to get into the habit of making each body its own separate config. This does cause a large amount of config files with large planet packs, but you can quickly get to a planet if something breaks like a missing bracket causing the mod to not load and it not specifying where it broke. If you dont know whether the thing you are about to do will break the mod or not, always take it one step at a time, otherwise doing multiple things may cause confusion and make the body just not work anymore (This happened to Correlae in my mod, I just used another moon's config to fix the issue).

6. no folders in the mod file?

For small packs like yours, it is fine to have all of the bodies in the same files, but if you want to make more and bigger packs, I highly reccommend you to put each type of files in their own folders (like normal maps in the 'normals' folder, heightmaps in the 'heightmaps' folder, etc, etc). This will help especially with large planet packs that add in entire new systems of moons, planets, or even stars.

7. High gravity?
I did notice that the moons have... unusually high gravity, especially the smallest ones.. 

 

Overall, This is an ok first try with planet modding! its good to be proud of your first planet! I was really happy when I made my first planet, even if it was just... a low quality blob lol.

Edited March 1, 2023 by JcoolTheShipbuilder

[Ralstemar]

On 2/28/2023 at 8:09 PM, JcoolTheShipbuilder said:

Congrats on your first mod! Welcom⁸e to the modding community!

Looking at your mod and the files, I have noticed several things that are quite off.. so.. here are some tips I can provide!
The issues and then the ways to solve them

1. there no normal maps for any of them
Bodies in KSP require normal maps to be properly pathed and in the mod itself, the normal kittopia generates gets desposited in kittopiatech>plugindata>(planets name)
Kittopia is a VERY useful tool for planet making and getting started on your first planets. The color of the terrain should match the scaledspace (Scaledspace is what is seen in space, PQS is the terrain)
There is also a missing heightmap for one of the bodies. 
Also, Niermun does not have its green color in scaledspace, probably an error with setting texture .
I did look in the config file, and you did specify a normal map for all of your bodies, the heightmap.. as well as the texture. Heightmap and Normalmap textures are supposed to be in different .dds formats. Heightmap should be no compression, L8 format. Texture should be DXT1 (DXT5 if there is transparency for stuff like oceans), and Normals should be DXT5nm

2. textures have polar stretching and seams.

The textures while I couldnt open them in GIMP to see how they are like, they appear to be squares, which do not match on the seam, and have no polar distortions. (I use GIMP to do textures) What I do to solve polar distortions is go to filters>distorts>polar coordinates. This will set the texture around the top edge or bottom edge, which are the poles, depending on if you do map from top or not. do the same distortion BUT unselect "to polar" to go back to normal. The seam is fixed by using Layer>Transform>Offset, and then click offset by width. Heal brush is typically used for fixing seams and such.

3. ring texture is.. its ok, but the moons have square texture shapes
For better ring textures, try to make them a bit more... transparent if you want some realism. There is nobody commanding you on what to do with rings, I think some wild rings are good from time to time! The shape of the files do not have to be perfect squares. Ring textures could be 10000 textures wide and just 1 texture tall and it would be fine! Also for the ring tiling, for some reason, I have found that it only takes the leftmost 500 pixels, where the left border is the inner edge and the right edge of that section in the texture is the outer edge.  Planet textures are best in 2x1 shape, where its twice as wide as it is tall.

4. heightcolormap set to same colors for every single class
This will cause no color variation in the terrain depending on height. I usually use this feature to color my planets (In fact, almost ALL of my bodies in my Estrela Dobre mod used it, some are getting custom textures based off of the output from heightcolormap)

5. all bodies in one config file
I have never seen this done before. I am mildly impressed that you managed to do it without breaking the game. However, this format is only probably ok with a pack with like.. two or three bodies, but this is an ineffecient way of doing things.
To make it easier to troubleshoot and declutter the config file itself (like.. the contents), you would want to get into the habit of making each body its own separate config. This does cause a large amount of config files with large planet packs, but you can quickly get to a planet if something breaks like a missing bracket causing the mod to not load and it not specifying where it broke. If you dont know whether the thing you are about to do will break the mod or not, always take it one step at a time, otherwise doing multiple things may cause confusion and make the body just not work anymore (This happened to Correlae in my mod, I just used another moon's config to fix the issue).

6. no folders in the mod file?

For small packs like yours, it is fine to have all of the bodies in the same files, but if you want to make more and bigger packs, I highly reccommend you to put each type of files in their own folders (like normal maps in the 'normals' folder, heightmaps in the 'heightmaps' folder, etc, etc). This will help especially with large planet packs that add in entire new systems of moons, planets, or even stars.

7. High gravity?
I did notice that the moons have... unusually high gravity, especially the smallest ones.. 

 

Overall, This is an ok first try with planet modding! its good to be proud of your first planet! I was really happy when I made my first planet, even if it was just... a low quality blob lol.

Thank you for taking a look into this and for the, really quite detailed advice and pointers on this!

1. Yes I do seem to be having a bit of a tough time fully grasping the way the texture/normals/heightmap system works. Kittopiatech I also cant seem to get working for the life of me (maybe it's a linux incompatibility thing?). As for the rings, that's good to know, for some reason I guess I thought ksp textures needed to be squares (I guess all the examples I looked at were square, assumptions on my part I guess) simple enough for the rings then, I knew there was something off about them!

As for file/folder structure, I'm aware of the downsides. I just probably cant seem to set it up, because it either causes my pc to overheat and restart or just not load the planets, logs dont show any oddities (again, linux incompatibility??)

 

And you are 100% right on the gravity. In hindsight I realize that the only one that should have high G is ringer (maybe Oleg given the description...) ,(also with the benefit of hindsight, I should increase niermun orbit to maybe about 800km, that way it's a bit realistic, but still close enough to almost be considered an extension of kerbin)

 

All try and start working on how I can fix these later on today for textures/heightmaps I found a noise generator which works decent enough, still gotta figure out normals and all though

 

 

 

[Professor K]

Greetings!

Love this little mod, It's my first time using Kopernicus in a playthrough and something that didn't alter the stock system is exactly what I wanted.

I tracked down this thread to report a few issues I had noticed, but @JcoolTheShipbuilderappears to have covered almost all of them already!

The one thing Jcool didn't cover... I'm not sure if it's possible/practical to do anything about this. I'm also using Scansat for the first time in this playthrough and the low altitude scanners state an optimal orbit of Niermun for scanning as >34km , however Niermun's SOI appears to be somewhere between 33 and 34km. Is it possible to alter the SOI or is it computed by the game engine based on the body's stats?

-K

Edited March 8, 2023 by Professor K

[Ralstemar]

3 hours ago, Professor K said:

Greetings!

Love this little mod, It's my first time using Kopernicus in a playthrough and something that didn't alter the stock system is exactly what I wanted.

I tracked down this thread to report a few issues I had noticed, but @JcoolTheShipbuilderappears to have covered almost all of them already!

The one thing Jcool didn't cover... I'm not sure if it's possible/practical to do anything about this. I'm also using Scansat for the first time in this playthrough and the low altitude scanners state an optimal orbit of Niermun for scanning as >34km , however Niermun's SOI appears to be somewhere between 33 and 34km. Is it possible to alter the SOI or is it computed by the game engine based on the body's stats?

-K

 

Ah, yes! I am trying to work out that as well. Like I say, my attention is with the textures at the moment, but the SOI/gravity is a fairly simple edit to make.

At this point where im playing around with it I'm just trying to strike a good balance between "Holy hell this will blast my Geostationary fleet out of orbit the SOI is so large!" and "this SOI is kinda tiny"

Luckily Kopernicus has a very handly little SphereOfInfluence paramter that i can just change, but not sure where exactly I should place it at.
If you have any input to this let me know! Keep in mind im also planning on making the orbit of Niermun a bit larger (appx. halfway between mun and kerbin)

[Ralstemar]

ExtraKerbin update 1.1 is out!

Mostly minor fixes, but I figured until I can recoop enough time to sort out everything else, its worth sending it for now.

The changes included in the Update are as follows:

-Seperated body CFGs

-Fixed Niermun's scaledSpace texture (known issue remains: disappears at high altitude zoom out??? can anyone confirm?)

-Gave Niermun a 70km SOI

-Gave Ringer a 100km SOI

-Lowered the gravity of all Moons to be a bit more in-line relative to Minmus and Mun

-Raised Niermun's orbit to be more realistic orbit (KSP wiki names the hill sphere of kerbin at 136 185 km, Niermin is now beyond this, but still very close.)

-Updated Ringer's ring texture (Known Issue: ringer scaledSpace is abnormaly bright in contrast to PQS)

-Updated Ringer's description

[Professor K]

Ran a few quick tests on the update:

22 hours ago, Ralstemar said:

-Seperated body CFGs

This seems to be working.

22 hours ago, Ralstemar said:

Fixed Niermun's scaledSpace texture (known issue remains: disappears at high altitude zoom out??? can anyone confirm?)

I'm not seeing any issues with this now, it seems to be visible right up until it's obscured by the dot that the system puts over all bodies at long zooms.

22 hours ago, Ralstemar said:

-Gave Niermun a 70km SOI

-Gave Ringer a 100km SOI

These are not working. Ringer has an SOI of 30km now.  It's own ring is outside it's SOI   I think I see the issue though. It looks like the SOI is measured from the center of the planet, so Ringer with a radius parameter  of 70000 and a sphereOfInfluence parameter of 100000 = a functional SOI of 30000. I believe the sphereOfInfluence setting would need to 170000 to give a functional SOI of 100000. I'll alter the cfg file and test next time I restart the game.

EDIT: Yup, that did the trick. You need to add the Radius to whatever you want the functional SOI to be. to get the number for the sphereOfInfluence parameter.

22 hours ago, Ralstemar said:

-Updated Ringer's ring texture (Known Issue: ringer scaledSpace is abnormaly bright in contrast to PQS)

I think something went wrong with this. Ringer is visible in the map view (although very bright) but in flight view it's completely black. In the screenshots below, the first is in orbit, the black area behind the craft with the faint white edge is Ringer, from the daylight side. The second shot is landed, again on the daylight side, you can see a slice of ring in the background but none of the surface.

Another strange thing I've noticed is some odd behavior with altitude when landing. I'm seeing this on Niermun and Ringer, the screenshots below are from Niermun.

When landing the altitude will be deceasing seemingly normally but will reach 0 (ASL or Terrain) while still several hundred meters above the surface, then will suddenly jump up several hundred meters (the gauge, not the craft itself) while the altimeter in Kerbal Flight Engineer will start counting down into the negative numbers. This makes landing somewhat tricky (and gives the MechJeb lander module absolute fits).

This was occurring before the update. I was hoping the new Normals would fix it, but no such luck. I'm not certain what the game engine bases the altitude on though.

 

 

Edited March 10, 2023 by Professor K
added info

[spacegamer7]

not much of a problem, but it annoys me... why are the light directions on the new bodies pointing towards nothing?

[JcoolTheShipbuilder]

1 hour ago, spacegamer7 said:

not much of a problem, but it annoys me... why are the light directions on the new bodies pointing towards nothing?

This means that the normals are broken or incorrect.

[RevanX_LSR]

Congratulations on releasing your first mod. It definitely needs some refining but you'll get there!

[kspkat]

Thanks for the mod, this mod along with the navigation lights mod are two mods I refuse to uninstall to fix the game. Luckily I fixed it uninstalling other mods (lol)

It would be nice to have more information on these new planets, such as how many biomes, or what a good low orbit height is. Considering these planets are for noobs, it would be nice to have such information.

Thanks again for an awesome mod  I love Niermun because it is green 

Update: Ringer gravity seems bugged, I have my maneuvers set and did them perfect, but on the escape the gravity changes all wonky and instead of going towards Kerbin you end up going away from Kerbin for escape. It was randomly changing my orbits with my engines and RCS thrusters at zero. I might have to cancel mission

Edited March 2 by kspkat