Zorg

Zorg's Screenshots and Customised Visual Set Up [Always a work in progress] I've been getting asked often enough about my visual set up that I thought it best to document it in one place where I can easily point to along with some samples. 1. Visual Pack I play with the JNSQ planet pack, a reimagining of the stock system by Team Galileo which comes with its own visuals. JNSQ is at 2.7x the scale of the stock system ie. roughly quarter the real world scale. More recently I've also been trying out KSRSSVE at 2.5x rescale. Mini rant unrelated to visuals: Most planet packs come with their own visuals. If you use the stock system then you could use Stock Visual Enhancements or Astronomers Visual Pack. There are others of course (this is what I used to use). 2. Primary visual mods JNSQ (and most other planet packs) comes with its own visual configs but they work via these mods 1. Scaterrer - Atmospheric scattering effects, lens flare, sunset/sunrise lighting, fancy oceans and lots more 2. Environmental Visual Enhancements - Clouds 3. Planetshine - reflects light from planetary bodies onto your craft 4. Distant object enhancement - Makes distant planets visible as glowing spots like real planets. More importantly has dynamic sky dimming (we'll get to this). 5. Kopernicus - Planetary system modifier. Needed for planet packs to work but also some stock visual packs like SVE use it optionally for planetary rings and such. 6. Parallax - the new hotness. Incredible custom ground shader that combines tessellation and displacement mapping to create realistic planetary surfaces. Not in the screens here because I've only just got it and havent been playing much but if you want the best visuals, you definitely want this now if your planet pack supports it. Parallax author Gameslinx does have a set of configs and textures for the stock system and their Beyond Home planet pack of course supports it. Downloads 3. The special sauce, TUFX 1. TUFX is a spiritual successor to KS3P. It enables the use of the unity post processing stack with its huge range of effects within KSP. Generally they have a low performance impact compared to Scaterrer and EVE despite how fancy some of the effects might look. 2. Download from here. Its officially supported for KSP 1.9 plus and is working fine in 1.12.2 3. Install my profiles. You can put this anywhere in your game data folder. I suggest creating a dedicated folder. There is no need to put them in the TUFX mod folder as they could be overwritten during updates. DOWNLOAD TUFX PROFILES 4. This file contains multiple colour profiles. Zorg-Neutral is the one I normally use and Zorg-Neutral-xtrabloom is the same just with more blooooom. Not all profiles are suitable for all situations so use them carefully, its easy to switch profiles in TUFX with a couple of clicks. PROFILES Zorg-Neutral Zorg-Neutral-xtrabloom Zorg-Colour-vintage1-OT - The shadows are VERY blue in this, suggest not using in night or other dark scenes. Zorg-Flight-BW1-Dark (I rarely use the bright profile but its there if you need it) 5. These profiles are still work in progress so they arent perfect you might find them a bit dark on the night side, but you can mess with in game ambient light and or planetshine vacuum ambient light settings to your taste. 6. Of course you can tweak and modify them to taste. You can learn how to customise, create and export your own from the instructions on the TUFX thread. 4. Additional Customisation 1. Kopernicus Sunlight boost (probably not neeeded) In addition to tone mapping applied byTUFX I actually boost the sunlight intensity via Kopernicus. Space has harsh lighting since there is no atmosphere and increasing the sunlight intensity can help with achieving this look. Im not entirely sure if this is still needed with the new controls we have with TUFX but for now I am using this patch. This works with JNSQ and can go anywhere in your gamedata. I suggest a personal patches folder. I'll post instructions for more general use when i have the time if you dont have JNSQ. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ogb1cc3kzpbmrkp/JNSQ_SUN_boost.cfg?dl=0 2. Increase Planetshine Intensity [WIP] 3. Distant Object Enhancement Settings [WIP] 5. Screenshot Tips and Techniques 1. Changing your field of view. Its quite easy to change your field of view. (on windows) press Atl and then scroll with your mouse wheel to make the FoV narrower or wider. Usually making it narrower produces pleasing results. A narrow field of view is like using a longer lens on a camera. You get less distortion on your subject for a similar framing (due to further distance the camera needs to be from the subject) and the background is magnified. This is what photographers called telephoto perspective compression. I use a narrow field of view most of the time. Making the field of view wider is also useful from time to time. The wider you go the more the image looks like it was taken with a wide angle lens. You will get some distortion, what photographers call keystone distortion. A wide field of view can give a sense of scale and I mostly use it on the launch pad or when landed for certain shots. Comparison 6. Other Recommendations There Is No Up (TINU) Fantastic mod that unlocks pitch controls for the camera. Might take some getting used to but it allows you to control the camera at any angle in any camera view mode. Also some of you might be aware that pressing pause and then F2 in KSP 1.9 gives you a screenshot mode essentially where you can control the camera. (at time of writing this post, 13 sep 2021, TINU does not seem to be working in KSP 1.12, perhaps this will change in the future, ) 1. Kerbal Konstructs - allows you to set up csutom statics (buildings like in the KSC). 2. KSC Extended - A Kerbal Konstructs based mod that gives you can awesome space center using KSC Extended and Omegas Stockalike structures. Not officially compatible with JNSQ yet but you can make it work with some effort. 3. Modular Launch pads - adds launch towers for epic launches. The best complement to KSC extended. 4. RealPlume with RealPlume-stock - Adds plumes which expand as you rise up the atmosphere. Also has epic smoke trails for SRBs. Can be performance intensive on your GPU. I am tooting my own horn here as I recently took over both mods I have added something like 25 new plumes built using Nertea's ReStock and Near Future effects and Jade Of Maars Plume party. 4.5 Waterfall with Waterfall-restock. Waterfall is IMO the new gold standard for KSP plumes. Using mesh based plumes it offers better looking plumes in most situations with better performance as well compared to realplume. RealPlume is still the best solution for SRBs but both mods can work together with Waterfall configs taking precedence over RealPlume if something is configured by both. 5. Parts mods - No point having your planets look awesome if your craft look like butt . Just a few recommendations by no means comprensive. ReStock - Comprehensive stock overhaul [essential!] Bluedog Design Bureau - 900 parts of american historical rockets and spacecraft ( I'm part of the team there so tooting our own horn a bit ) ReDirect - Shuttle derived launch vehicles Tantares - Russian stuff! Commonwealth Rocketry Establishment - British rockets Chrayol Design Org - Indian rockets Knes - French rockets including lots of cool never built concepts. Nertea's stuff - Everyone knows this right? Near Future, Kerbal Atomics, Cryoengines etc etc Probes plus - Lots of probes, Lots of cool science parts. Universal Storage 2 - Awesome service modules with truly universal series of modular "wedges" to fill them up. I hope this guide is useful to help you get started with a nice visual setup. When I wrote this guide originally there weren't any really good profiles out there at the time. I've been too busy with part modding to develop these further since then but in the meantime lots of people have produced excellent profiles, with far more creative flair. While I think my profiles are still useful I would encourage you to check out the more creative efforts such as the ones linked below. TUFX makes switching profiles trivial so the more to choose from the merrier.

Some transatlantic cooperation here. Titan III core with Ariane 4 PAL boosters. quad vernier LR91 looks great when hotstaging. DCSS with Cryoengines RL10

Thanks for looking into this! I dont have astronomers and I've made sure there is only one profile per scene since multi profile handling doesnt seem to be working. With the steps I mentioned my profile seems to work although it would be nice to have with it work right out of the box. I dont know about ACES as so far I've only used Neutral with custom settings.

@clusta First of all thanks a lot for providing this fix. WhiteGuardian had identified a bunch of issues but he's clearly been busy so its very much appreciated that you've provided this fix in the meantime. Ive got a decent custom profile going but I have a few small issues. 1. Channel Mixer does not seem to import properly. In the in game GUI I made some changes and used the export function which spits out Mixer { red = (1.1, 0.0, 0.0) green = (0.0, 1.1, 0.0) blue = (0.0, 0.0, 0.9) } However if I export and save this into a cfg the values dont match, the red channel ends up with 0 and everything looks messed up. I have a workaround for this in that I manually enter the values each time I load 2. The grain node does not seem to be recognised. I exported my settings but KS3P does not seem to enable grain. Again I need to enter the values manually each time I load the game. the exported node looks like this: Grain_Model { colored = False intensity = 0.173 luminance_contribution = 0.588 size = 0.3 } I tried adding an enabled = True which did not work either. 3. The final issue was when exporting my tonemapping settings the white_clip value is not included. This messed things up a lot until I realised what happened and manually entered it into the cfg. So it works properly now but it can catch out people who may be trying to make their own profiles and export. Tonemapper { black_in = 0.0324 black_out = 0.0403 white_in = 6.54 white_level = 7.41 white_out = 18.53 } If you have the chance to take a look at these issues that would be great! But in any case your fix has made v6 usable for me with only minor workarounds needed so once again your efforts are greatly appreciated.

As previously mentioned, this is not in the current official release of TantaresLV. You need to get the github master or if you're not comfortable installing from github, then you need to wait for the next official release. AlternateSizes.cfg is the old patch for the old soyuz. It doesnt use B9PartSwitch, it straight up changes the models. You can also grab the file directly from here. https://github.com/Tantares/TantaresLV/tree/master/GameData/TantaresLV/Patches

There's something vaguely insectoid about this station, I love it The rads look nice btw. I think the contrast works.

Please use tweakscale responsibly No further comment

Its not in the current release, only on the TantaresLV github. You need to go to TantaresLV/Patches find the file called "Soyuz_B9_Rescale.cfg.disabled" and change the name to "Soyuz_B9_Rescale.cfg"

Fatlas is in the dev branch already! @Marcelo Silveira by the way if you've been away from KSP for a while I suppose you missed out on a few things. All the BDB upgrades are now done via switchable B9 subtypes so even after an upgrade is applied you can select the old variant (like LR89-5/LR89-7/RS56). If/when you get to doing the Atlas II-AS payload performance charts note that in the dev branch the Castor IV (Discouri 4 radial) has updated base stats and a switchable upgrade to Castor IV-A stats which is the model used on Atlas II. Thanks for doing those graphs by the way, always found them very useful

@Beale you were asking about balance suggestions and I just had the thought that its not really possible to hot stage the N1 properly currently. Would it be possible to increase the temp limit to allow like 2-3 seconds of hot staging lead time without it exploding? I like the staging plates you made for Soyuz but I dont think such a solution would look right on N1.

Actually the problem was simpler than I thought. Benjee AJ10 engine doesnt like offset curves being used. Fixed for the next release and also now in the dev branch https://github.com/KSP-RO/RealPlume-StockConfigs/tree/development

I was sure I fixed this issue in the last update. Will investigate tomorrow.

All too happy to do this @Beale, 1.5m Soyuz R7 just looks too good Couple of notes for anyone looking to try this out. This is not a proper mesh switch, this is swapping full models. As such the models overlap with the original 1.25m model when switched to 1.5m. This is not noticeable except at the endcaps of the fuel tanks The 1.25m upper stage tanks are now switchable to 1.5m. and each of the conical 1.875m to 1.25m adapter tank is now switchable so that the narrow end terminates at 1.5m. Switching is cosmetic only for now. Fuel quantity and mass does not change currently. Thus the performance will be the same as the 1.25m Soyuz. I think I've got an idea how to do it without having to create a full fledged set of B9 tank definitions and such but it may or may not interfere with fuel switcher mods like CryoTanks. Will test and update the patch if it goes well. 1.5m upper stage engine, decoupler and staging plate are added as new parts since overlapping models make switching problematic. I didnt want to change the models directly like the old e-scale patch since people might still have a use for 1.25m parts. Plus this way crafts wont break.

Hmm doesnt look like too many parts. I might be able to squeeze it in myself if no one else submits a config. Bit busy right now though since I am currently redoing all the Tantares plumes

If you mean this one "Real_Names_Old_patch_DEPRECATED" then yes you should get rid of that.

It should be in its own folder like so: Gamedata/BDB_RealNames

I've always been a big fan of the interesting shapes of the Tantares panels but they were looking a bit out of place next to the restock panel style. You have no idea how glad I am to see this update!

Successor to the kit-bashed Stereo MOL I built earlier this time with real KH10 cameras.

I personally dont think standard fairing bases need to be all that stand out. The boat tail type fairings benefit from a bit of flair but standard flat fairings just need to look ok. I think every fairing base you added from the previous update onwards has been very nice and a notable improvement over the old bases.

RealPlume stock has actually supported ReDirect since before I took it over The configs are all on that side. The OMS issue should have been fixed since v1.5.0. Current version is v1.6.0

Those screenshots are pretty dark so I cant tell which engines you're using. If the plumes are expanding and changing that means its working. I have added several new plumes to RealPlume some of which use effects from ReStock or nertea's other mods except they will dynamically expand as you ascend.

The new clouds for Kerbin look amazing! Havent seen the other new stuff yet

Will be included in Knes as an optional extra (disabled by default) once its done. Will need CryoTanks and its dependencies. I will be sending it to Well quite soon.

I also just configured a Saturn V real quick. The SII should have a TWR of 0.93 with the LES jettisoned and a fully loaded apollo mission. Again using original J2 rather than an upgrade. Dont need to loft/pitch up as high as the SIV-B on Saturn I, treat it almost like an Atlas ascent and it should make orbit without issues.

I just tried a lofted trajectory for the Saturn I with the H1s in the original config (not 1973). I was at around 45 degrees pitch at 40km altitude and was around 20 degrees pitch when I reached space. Set an apoapsis of 140km and entered into 140km x 90km with 300 m/s spare. (In JNSQ)