Shaders!

[stanz250]

What if KSP had Shaders. Sort of like the shaders mod for minecraft.

Example:

What if that was in KSP!

[Nuke]

ksp does have shaders.

[Red Iron Crown]

IIRC, the lighting model in Unity/KSP has trouble with the distances involved in KSP, making proper shadows and occlusion difficult to implement.

[pizzaoverhead]

IIRC, the lighting model in Unity/KSP has trouble with the distances involved in KSP, making proper shadows and occlusion difficult to implement.

KSP doesn't actually render at the distances it is simulating. What is actually rendered is a shrunk down "scaled space". Celestial bodies are a few hundred metres across and move with the camera. The interplay between the scaled space and everything else is one of the difficulties in making shaders for KSP.

[Sky_walker]

Can't they just add some simple shaders instead of playing with something more elaborate like occlusion mapping?

For example:

1. Add a proper water instead of just flat texture - flat texture works from an orbital distance, but the closer you get - the worse it becomes. At some distances you can clearly see tiling, which is... horrible. Feels like a cheap game from '90s. It'd basically require 2 shaders - one for distant water (say: 1000m+) which will be basically a flat surface with little bit of mirroring (reflective diffuse?), and another for up-close water.

2. Add some god-rays - cheap, quick, makes game look much better, though it will look unnatural once the ship gets in a low sun orbit. But it'll still be much better than nothing.

3. Add some normal map specular shaders for certain, selected elements of a ship. Most obvious one being solar panels and a glass on electric lights but it'd work with parts covered in a golden foil - for example LV-909 Liquid Fuel Engine. Pure specular shader can also be applied to all of the windows - it'll give you an illusion that they're reflective under certain angles.

Of course - all of these should be purely optional.

Keep in mind that these are just stock shaders included in Unity and ideas for changes that require minimal amount of work.

For something more time-taking they could go for implementing cube maps that would depend on an orbit and based on that - create proper reflective surfaces. Add on top of that normal maps to all of the elements and suddenly KSP would make a huge leap forward in terms of visuals.

[Explorator]

I agree with everyone, the shaders that work with models are really all that we need, personally if they do add it it should be last