Zorg

Congrats on this major update @Nertea! Seeing one of my all time fav mods come up to the reStock standard is pure perfection! Difficult to pick a favourite but the new LE9/Fuji in particular is beastly (I'm talking about the looks even more than performance )

This is insane! I love it!

The Gemini lander might be awaiting some fixes but in the meantime its gotten itself a new plume . In fact all the lander engines, ie the Apollo Ascent, Descent as well as Block III and Block V service engines based on those now have this new plume. Its very thin and transparent, barely visible against a bright background. Requires the latest Smokescreen 2.8.5 to look right.

Hmm I have enabled both options on a handful of original RealPlume prefabs in my own install and things seemed fine. However on some of the custom plumes I was working on recently for cryoEngines, I found a few particles that behaved really badly with decluster. I don’t really understand how it all works I just play around with configs and see what works but my understanding is that emitOnUpdate helps pretty much everything when frame rates drop while declustering mostly helps make effects with high speed or energy look contiguous (although it does smooth out plumes under normal circumstances). Therefore based on my non comprehensive testing I think the most you should do is enable emit on update by default. And leave declustering on the config side for anyone who needs it.

@Drew Kerman sure thing, I have some screenshots on hand when I was testing out the fixed release. I only applied them globally here but they would usually be used in a curve. This here is a plume I have been working on for BDB as configured right now. Here I have used the saturationMult to turn down the colour. Goes both ways of course. I can see it being used globally when you just want to tweak the overall colour or against an atmosphere curve to make the plume less saturated in high altitudes. Here I used the alphaMult to make it more transparent. This can be very useful when you want to thin out a plume say at low atmo density or even low throttle as peviously your only option was to turn down particle emission. But sometimes that can create a weird look. Of course one should be careful not to abuse this and have hundreds of invisible particles emitting away impacting performance. But I might look into using alphaMult to fade out some "difficult" effects and then cut off emission after that. Here we have an unmodified version of the plume again, this time at sea level. Visually speaking at least, the turning down brightness and turning down alpha gives a very similar result. I cant tell the difference. But turning them up, differences become apparent. Alpha turned up. Brightness seems to introduce a bit of a colour shift at least with this effect. The alpha adjustment on the other produces a result similar to turning up particle emission. At least with some effects like the one seen here, you should be able to get a stronger looking plume by turning up brightness or alpha instead of particle emission. Fewer particles means better PC performance! 3 cheers to Sarbian for adding these very useful parameters!

Wow that looks fantastic. So much more readable. I hope someone at Squad sees this and takes some lessons on board.

Hi @sarbian super keen on the new parameters but I havent been able to get them working . Did I do a dumb or could there be a bug? Cheers. I've tried all 3 as global parameters and as curves against power or density.

I actually did that myself for a while but the problem here is that a shiny Atlas compelled me to also have matching Agena D and Vega. Things broke down at that point as the reflection config looks awful on the vega engine mount (due to the integrated RCS tanks) and even worse the Agena D has the engine mount and engine combined.

SLV-3X Fatlas is back! This time with the bigger all new H1D model I don't think I posted it earlier but there is also an all new Kerolox vernier realplume with a much smoother look. New H1 still fits nicely in the Atlas booster skirt. Just make sure to rotate it 45 degrees though!

Thanks! The design of this test vehicle was driven only by the consideration that I needed to get the first stage to over 40km in order to see the full range of plume expansion. The only purpose was to test it out with the new J2T model.

Testing the J2T plume with the all new aerospike model. The emissive is incredible on this engine!

Whats everyone flying today?

What a gift for BDB users on the Apollo 11 anniversary!

What's your frame rate like? My guess is the plume is breaking up due to low frame rate The development branch of BDB on github has a new dedicated plume for the F1 that should be much smoother even under lower frame rates. The one in the current full release has probably been stretched more than it should have been which might contribute to the issues. You could switch to the development branch but keep in mind that a lot of whats in the dev branch is work in progress and it is not really recommended for use in a serious career save. (Not that it stops some of us )

Hey @Nertea I think it would be nice to add support for EC consumption for ScanSat modules. *Doh should have read the post above sorry. Guess it would be supported via that system.

So the BDB dev branch already has all new custom "RealPlumes" built with PlumeParty effects for all liquid engines but the revamp is already getting a revamp of its own. As part of this ongoing effort, in addition to the new J2 aerospike plume being worked on, there is an all new LR87 plume for the LR87-5, LR87-11 and LR87-SL single coming very soon. Shout out to @Nessus_ who does the configs for Tundra for the guidance on how to do this. It uses 9 different particle effects but actually emits only around 300 particles per plume max (x2 for an LR87) which is lighter than most real plumes. This is close to final but a few small tweaks still needed. The shock diamonds will fade out as expansion begins and the expanded plume will be very translucent Vacuum shape. Which I guess is what you'll start with on the air started Titan IIIs and IVs.

The engines are the RL-10A4, they've been in the game a while. Since I watched the stream I wont say.. but dont look at any of the engines

Preview of the upcoming J2 aerospike plume. Currently testing with the old model. Its not quite final, a few things still need tweaking but its close.

So I just checked my craft, I didnt insert the SRBs all the way to the proper position, its just slightly above as you can see. Its the best solution for now I think. Thers also some clipping and rotation of the arms

I mean a 2 seater might be useful in game (if you can squeeze it in!!) but I personally would just use the more authentic 1 seater

I don’t recall exactly, but liberal use of the translation gizmo was required on the towers, arms, clamps, pretty much everything. I can try to dig up the craft file in a short while. I never had issues at lift off with it. Do keep in mind that Alphamensae has said he will update the pad to match the SOCK shuttle in the future too

Oh I missed this post before my above reply that's interesting. I had noticed the XRS 2200 looked suspiciously yellow as well so was quite intrigued

Yes the plume (which is still early WIP) is based off of the, well I wouldn't say iconic since its such an obscure thing, but lets say distinctive image of a test firing. Why it looks the way it does raised my curiosity as well as it kind of implies that something is ablating. However, I havent been able to find anything about such issues in the available documentation. The base appears to have been made out of inconel not any sort of ablator. The turbo exhaust is pumped out through perforations in it but that wouldnt necessarily explain this. I suppose its not completely out of the question that it may have been colourised... but it doesnt look very translucent to me regardless. In any case the decision was made after discussion with Cobalt to stick with the picture as inspiration and make a plume with an ablative appearance for the J2T, call it artistic license.

Those are custom RealPlumes . It only appears when RealPlume is installed but its built using dedicated FX provided by Jade rather than whats included in RealPlume by default. edit: The "stock" plumes will also use FX provided by Jade, they might look different on some engines and they wont expand like realplumes but they will look amazing too for those who dont use realplume.

Hi Sarbain, the NREs in the VAB are gone now but I am still able to reproduce the issue of some plumes disappearing after time warp that I outlined in the github. Do let me know if you need fresh logs with the new version or anything. Thanks