I have stopped maintaining this mod, which is now being continued by @Papa_Joe on this thread:
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P L A N E T S H I N E
Why PlanetShine?
After trying some mods to improve visuals and get something more realistic looking, I transformed KSP into something really good looking, but I was really happy with the result, but I felt that something was still missing.
When in low orbit of a planet, the side of my ship which was facing the planet was completely dark, which was not realistic! It should have been illuminated a bit by the planet's own reflective light!
I decided to fix that with this mod, by making planets and moons to reflect their own (colored) light to your vessel.
This phenomenon is called in real life albedo or planetshine :
What does this mod actually do? (Summary)
When you are close to a planet or moon, its bright side reflects (colored) light to your vessel.
More realistic ambient light in vacuum, very dark by default, can be customized.
More realistic ambient light on the ground and atmosphere of planets/moons, tinted by the surface color.
Very lightweight: almost no RAM used, and your FPS should not change.
Additional features
Settings menu to customize many parameters, as well as several quality/performance settings.
Support for the Toolbar mod.
Planet and moons light configuration supports Module Manager and loading across GameData folder, and can be easily customized by players or other mods.
Conflicts with the mod "Ambient Light Adjustment" because it has exactly the same feature: custom ambient light settings with a slider.
When close to the sun, the sunlight becomes dramatically intense.
Screenshots
You can see the subtle red light over Duna, green over Jool, and blue over Kerbin:
http://imgur.com/a/4MODI
Before / After Screenshots by CaptRobau:
http://imgur.com/a/Nekay
Recommended mods for the best experience
Environmental Visual Enhancements for clouds and city lights.
A good galaxy skybox (using Texture Replacer):
Oinker's Skybox
Teflon's Skybox
Chatterer for adding ambient sounds that really improve the immersion.
An atmospheric sky enhancing mod:
SkyTonemapper (Stable) makes the sky look better by smoothing it (removes the banding effect)
Scatterer (Experimental - many bugs) makes the sky and atmosphere looking really great and much more realistic, sunsets become amazing.
Engine lighting for adding realistic lighting to engines thrust.
Surface Lights to illuminate the ship when it gets really dark.
Additional information
I would appreciate feedback on this mod a lot!
I spent a lot of time trying to make this reflected light to behave as consistent as possible, and I think it's pretty well tuned by now.
Planet and moons colors are all editable in "CelestialBodies.cfg", and you can change a few other settings in "Settings.cfg", such as the vacuum light level (quite low by default), and the reflection light intensity.
Compatible with all game versions from 0.25 to 1.0, and probably older versions as well.
This mod includes version checking using MiniAVC. If you opt-in, it will use the internet to check whether there is a new version available. Data is only read from the internet and no personal information is sent. For a more comprehensive version checking experience, please download the KSP-AVC Plugin.
Changelog
Known issues
Conflicts with other mods that change ambient light, such as Ambient Light Adjustment and AmbientLightShifter
Not tested much on x64, might cause issues
Might have minor issues with Kopernicus, which optionally provides custom atmospheric and vacuum ambient lights.
Planned features
Automatic detection of planet colors and atmosphere, no more need for CelestialBodies.cfg (working on it right now)
Actual planetshine (reflected lights between two planet/moon)
Different reflected light color depending on the biome (land/sea/poles)
Sunset/sunrise lights
More performance tweaks, such as reducing the number of light depending on the situation, or using a diffuse wrapping shader
Choice between presets for ambient light (realistic or stock) and other settings
Better (future) compatibility with other mods
Credits
I copied the planets/moons color list from the Distant Object Enhancement mod
Thanks to TheSexiestofClowns on Reddit for his screenshot that I used at the beginning
A lot of thanks to the people who helped me over IRC, such as Thomas, Rbray89, and a few others
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Support the author
If you like this plugin, please consider donating, it will be greatly appreciated:
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Download standard versions:
0.2.5.2 for KSP 1.2
0.2.5 for KSP 1.1
0.2.4.2 for KSP 1.0.5 or older
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Download experimental version 0.5 for KSP 1.0.5 or older: details in this spoiler:
Copyright 2014, Valerian Gaudeau, Apache license 2.0
Thank you all for your comments! It replaces it in fact, because it manages the ambient light to make it almost black in vacuum, and changes it to the planet's ambient light when close to the ground (approximately under 20km on Kerbin). You can change the vacuum darkness in the Settings.cfg file. I did not update to 0.25 either, this plugin was developed for 0.24, but I think it should work fine on 0.25. (I updated the title accordingly) I do believe that none of the moons in KSP are close enough to their planets for any coloured light changing effects to occur. That does raise an interesting question though for custom planet packs... No it does not, but I could do it. However currently I set it so that reflective lights fade to zero beyond 2x the radius of the planet/moon, meaning that a Kerbin altitude of more than 1,200,000 m will not have a reflective light.
