Trying to find maximum elivation of a planet.

[Trueborn]

I think the title is pretty self explanatory. I'm trying to find the maximum terrain elevation on (airless) planets and moons, in-game. I know I could just check the object's name and compare against the altitudes off the wiki, but I was hoping to avoid hard-coding the information. Any insights? Thanks.

[JDP]

The only way I can think of to get that value would be to load up the detailed mesh of the attached transform, iterate through all vertices and find the one with the largest magnitude, then apply whatever scale applies to the mesh (if you're lucky, the transform scale will do).

Suffice to say, this would be very much overkill.

[Trueborn]

Yeah, I was also hoping to avoid something like that If it does come down to something like that, I'll probably just hard code the values.

[Greys]

As it's not something that should change outside of KSP updates, you should be able to do it once for every planet and perhaps graphics level, terrain detail is known to move the coast by a kilometer in some places, then store the results for use.

[Majiir]

A middle ground between hardcoding and detection is to use a config file. That way, users can at least update config files without rebuilding the whole DLL.

You can use PQS to find the terrain height at a given point. There are also some max altitude properties, but I'm not sure they're trustworthy. Experimentation is the name of the game.

[Trueborn]

Good idea, I'll probably end up putting them into the config file. It does kind of beg for something way overkill though...like a simulated annealing pass every time the game starts up...oh well. Static values it is!

[Greys]

Side thought, given the hopefully quickly oncoming future of custom planets, you may want to do a first-boot scan, and save the determined values to a cfg file, it'll be slow once, but it promotes compatibility.

[draeath]

If the values are not present in the file (eg a new planet, fresh install etc) perhaps then you should do the expensive "scan" and save that into the file.

I'd also recommend seeing if you can figure out of the planet has changed on you - perhaps there's a way to hash the planet's object or something and store that with the elevation figure? Then, when you load, you:

1. See if there are values. If yes, continue, if no, branch off to the code to figure the values out and store them.

2. See if the 'hash' matches. If yes, continue, if no, drop the values and loop back to #1.

3. Use the values for great success.

(maybe you can serialize the planet's definition, then hash that. or something along those lines.)