[0.22] Universe Replacer v4.0

[Rareden]

Also: Rareden, I have someone who wants the starfield I'm using, with the rainbow nebula. But I built it off your 4K starfield. Am I allowed to pass it off to other people?

indeed you are

[Devo]

I take a serious performance hit with this installed. I go from a solid 60 (frame limited) in VAB to around 20 even with nothing loaded. I tried both the tex packs in the OP and also a plain black 128x128 square with the same results. Specs are win7 64, nvidia 660ti GTX, amd phenom II quad @3.8ghz, more ram than unity can address. Looks great though!

really? I can't say I noticed 1fps difference - still sitting around 58-60 for me and i run a quad core e6660 2.4gig and a $40 2gb cheap chips asian video card.

[White Owl]

Aha! I have the alignment figured out.

Relative to Kerbin's north pole, Skybox_PositiveY is down and Skybox_NegativeY is up. Exactly the opposite of what you'd think.

To get the images from Spacescape to line up correctly, I relabeled top as Skybox_NegativeY, then relabeled bottom as Skybox_PositiveY and rotated the image 180 degrees.

Edit: Here's the skybox I came up with. link

Edited August 5, 2013 by White Owl

[Stelith61]

Endymion I in low Ike oribit.

_{edit: wow imgur murdered the quality}

[The-Bean]

Aha! I have the alignment figured out.

Relative to Kerbin's north pole, Skybox_PositiveY is down and Skybox_NegativeY is up. Exactly the opposite of what you'd think.

To get the images from Spacescape to line up correctly, I relabeled top as Skybox_NegativeY, then relabeled bottom as Skybox_PositiveY and rotated the image 180 degrees.

Edit: Here's the skybox I came up with. link

Thanks! This looks great in-game but I noticed they 'twinkle', maybe it's just my resolution (1680x1050) but I noticed the other day when I was playing around with a Spacescape generated one that it flickered at 4k but not 2k. These ones appear to be 2k though so I'm not sure what's going on. :S I don't suppose you could create another one but with the blue nebulae a little more transparent?

[White Owl]

I play KSP at 1600x900 resolution. I made a 4k version first, but it twinkled and flickered so much I decided to go with 2k. Not sure what else I could do about the problem.

Edit: Here's an idea. I uploaded the save file for this skybox, so anybody can tinker around with the settings and tweak things to their liking. link

Edited August 5, 2013 by White Owl

[The-Bean]

I play KSP at 1600x900 resolution. I made a 4k version first, but it twinkled and flickered so much I decided to go with 2k. Not sure what else I could do about the problem.

Edit: Here's an idea. I uploaded the save file for this skybox, so anybody can tinker around with the settings and tweak things to their liking. link

Thanks. Lowering it to 1k stops the twinkling. What should I be renaming the output files to by the way? I can't seem to get them lined up correctly. Cheers

[Rareden]

Thanks. Lowering it to 1k stops the twinkling. What should I be renaming the output files to by the way? I can't seem to get them lined up correctly. Cheers

you could just blur the images by a few pixels.

also working on the kerbin retexture, havent done much on the spec map, thats why it looks a little weird

[ZRM]

I play KSP at 1600x900 resolution. I made a 4k version first, but it twinkled and flickered so much I decided to go with 2k. Not sure what else I could do about the problem.

Edit: Here's an idea. I uploaded the save file for this skybox, so anybody can tinker around with the settings and tweak things to their liking. link

That flickering/twinkling is due to inadequate filtering settings. You could try tweaking/overriding the settings via your graphics control panel, e.g. turn on anisotropic filtering, as KSP does not use it by default.

[El wonso]

Why? Because I can.

Adding specular map for Kerbin made things worse, dunno how it should look like.

Tried that for (almost) every planet and few moon but it didn't work (probably works for minmus) :<

[Tingle]

Why? Because I can.

Adding specular map for Kerbin made things worse, dunno how it should look like.

Tried that for (almost) every planet and few moon but it didn't work (probably works for minmus) :<

Hehe, yeah... that won't work. I will be adding a bunch of new replaceable things in the next update, so stay tuned.

[eRe4s3r]

This "mod" is epic Game looks so much better already.. but of course it would be nice to also be able to replace the sunglare/glow effect.. pretty please

Also, any chance we can edit the NAVBALL texture and the GUI elements? I'd really like them to fit with the way plugins like Mechjeb and Kethane look.... anyway lot's of weird requests. I am fine with what the plugin does now ;p (I am only talking about graphics of GUI elements, I don't wanna do anything crazy, just make them less bright grey)

Anyhows This is a must-have plugin already. Hope to see a great many texture packs ;P

[Tingle]

This "mod" is epic Game looks so much better already.. but of course it would be nice to also be able to replace the sunglare/glow effect.. pretty please

Also, any chance we can edit the NAVBALL texture and the GUI elements? I'd really like them to fit with the way plugins like Mechjeb and Kethane look.... anyway lot's of weird requests. I am fine with what the plugin does now ;p (I am only talking about graphics of GUI elements, I don't wanna do anything crazy, just make them less bright grey)

Anyhows This is a must-have plugin already. Hope to see a great many texture packs ;P

Sadly, this isn't possible. There are some textures I can't exchange, for example the sun's surface, sun glare and other textures that are used by the engine through a non-material fashion (only replaceable sun texture atm is the corona). I spent almost two days looking for ways to change them, but without success. I've exhausted everything from unsafe C# code to Reflection and Marshal. Only chance I could have of that working, is if a Dev told me exactly what class and variable stores the used reference to the texture.

Edit: Things like navbal and other GUI elements seem to be replaceable. Also stock parts and the sort will be supported in future versions.

Edited August 5, 2013 by Tingle

[KerbMav]

It is only the 5th but I think we found our mod of the month!

@eRe4s3r

A higher resolution NAVball would be nice, but I would rather see MJ use KSP standard UI design.

[eRe4s3r]

Well I was more thinking of "less solid grey blocks on my screen" If you set the flight GUI to large (to be able to see the NAV-BALL indicators correctly) you end up with so much wasted screen estate for useless stuff that it isn't funny.... we can't replace or move clickable areas, but we CAN replace what is visible and what isn't and how solid it is. And that's all I really would want. ;p

Anyhow, if sunglare can't be changed then that's how it is ,)

[HeadHunter67]

go to ksp_win/gamedata/universereplacer/textures/skybox just drag the files in there.

Thank you. This is what I needed. I suppose I should have made it clear that I was looking to install a texture, not create one.

It's a little different than the earlier releases in that it doesn't come with a skybox. I can imagine that some users who don't look into the issue would think "it doesn't work", but I understand now. Thank you.

[Tingle]

Updated the Customization section on the first post with new important information. Taking that new information into account, I updated Rareden's Texture Pack with optimized textures.

Also, v2.2 will be out soon, supporting new replaceable things .

[Selgald]

With the updated 4k texture pack the game crashes with "out of memory", the old 4k pack works fine.

[Tingle]

-snip- wrote abit of BS, correcting my statement in a new post.

Edited August 5, 2013 by Tingle

[RicolasX]

Hi guys

How does a distant planet texture, (let's say Kerbin) does blend with the close textures and tessellated geometry?

I'm wondering that because of the empty folders reserved for planet textures in this mod and i would like to make one.

Thanks

[eRe4s3r]

You can also convert the 4k tga's to jpg with quality setting 12 (max) at progressive (3) compression and it loads fine even with 512mb worth of mods... Unity supports basically anything you can throw at it in terms of filetypes. But generally speaking, TGA's are a REALLY bad idea. PNG's will still be huge, jpg will not be much faster to load, but since unity converts all textures to it's own format internally you'll want as small a initial filesize as possible for the thing you do here (ie, injecting textures)

JPG does not support transparency though but for skyboxes it's perfect.

Edited August 5, 2013 by eRe4s3r

[Tingle]

I'm currently doing some benchmarks to determine the best format and compression methods to handle textures. Once loaded into the memory all have the same size considering they are unity's internal format, so a 4k texture will occupy 4k worth of VRAM no matter what the file size was before.

TGA non-compressed is the best choice for fast loading speeds but the file size is very big, which is why I recommended using RLE compression - but I'm still trying to decide on what is more acceptable, a bigger file size or faster loading speeds, so to compress or not compress. The loading and decompression algorithms that Unity uses for the other formats are very slow compared to TGA considering it is the most raw format.

@Selglad, the reason you are getting a out of memory error is because of the bigger file sizes which get loaded into your RAM first for decompression. I'm not sure how much RAM you have, but you might want to upgrade or just use the 2k version.

Edited August 5, 2013 by Tingle

[whatisthisidonteven]

Do you have a way to let us change the bump map? I tried adding clouds to Kerbin and the bump map really messes it up. If I could make a new bumpmap for it that would be really nice.

[Tingle]

A Celestial body material contains 2 textures - which textures are named like <objectname>1 and <objectname>2, for example Kerbin1 and Kerbin2.

Kerbin1 consist of the DiffuseMap which is on the RGB channels and a SpecularMapClipper which is stored on the ALPHA channel. In the case of Kerbin, Laythe and Eve - bodies with water, the ALPHA channel is where you define the areas of water that the Specular map should be applied to, which will result in a reflection effect only on the oceans.

Kerbin2 consist of the SpecularMap which I think is stored on the RGB channels and the BumpMap which I also think is stored on the ALPHA channel, but it might be the other way around.

Here are example files I quickly made with some random earth images I found. In both PNG and TGA format, make sure to look at the ALPHA channels.

Edited August 9, 2013 by Tingle

[Selgald]

I have 16GB ram, so i dont think that is the problem.

I converted the skybox to jpg, now the 4k pack works fine.

Iam using 25 mods, loadtime is about 5 min when loading in background, and 2 min with active window. Loading time of universe replacer with jpg is 5 seconds.