Dedicated Ocean Terrain Setting

[DMagic]

It is well known that KSP's method for rendering the ocean on Kerbin, Eve, and Laythe can have a significant impact on performance when using relatively low-end GPUs (anything above an AMD 7870 or GTX 660 seems to be able to handle max graphics at around 1080p without issues). There is a well known fix for this, but asking people to muck around in the settings.cfg file seems like it may not be the best way of addressing the issue.

The simplest solution that I can think of is just to put a dedicated terrain quality option in the settings menu. That way people could leave the regular terrain setting on high (and avoid some of the issues that occur when lowering this) and put the ocean terrain setting on low.

I know this issue has been brought up many times before, but I have yet to see this as an actual suggestion. It isn't in the list of things already suggested either. It seems like something that would be relatively simple to change and it would greatly improve the experience for a large segment of KSP's users.

[sal_vager]

It's not only the oceans though, many players raise the pixel light and shadow cascades values, and both of these come with large processor overhead.

[DMagic]

It's not only the oceans though, many players raise the pixel light and shadow cascades values, and both of these come with large processor overhead.

That's true, but there are dedicated sliders for both of those settings. If players raise them too high they have only themselves to blame.

Whereas with terrain, many people could run the game at default or high terrain settings if it weren't for the graphical overhead of rendering two planets when an ocean is in view. And the suggestion given over and over again, by players, moderators, and devs, is to dig into the settings.cfg file and change the ocean terrain values. A simple drop down box in the settings menu seems to be a far more intuitive solution, and one less likely to screw up game files (never underestimate people's ability to not follow simple instructions).

[sal_vager]

Yep you are right, a slider to make changing the seas complexity easy would be a great addition