Some quick other quick notes about the visuals, none of these are all that important, just my opinion.
1. Planets with an atmosphere are really bright.
The game currently has a set exposure, which causes places with an atmosphere like Kerbin and Eve to be obscenely bright near the surface. I like the high exposure, it makes space look more "spacey" but i feel like there should be a way of the exposure automatically turning down as you get closer to the surface.
2. The game looks blurry.
Far away objects appear blurry and aliased, even some nearby object have this problem. I'm not sure why this is, but the main thing i noticed when i first booted up the game was how crazy blurry everything is.
3. Terrain looks bad. Really bad.
I understand this is not a priority for devs at the moment, but i hope this is resolved later. In some places the terrain can look worse than KSP1, even without mods. Surfaces have sharp edges, or will look too flat, more bumpmapping could easily solve this, although it would probably reduce performance, maybe this could be implemented after the game is properly optimized, and could be available under a certain graphics setting or preset.
4. Terrain scattering is disappointing.
If you decide to build a plane or a lander, as most people do, you'll immediately notice that trees will just pop into existence as you get closer. I understand that things have to be this way for performance's sake, however the effect is very jarring, and tree will also have a very noticable color shift in between LOD's. This could be fixed by, adjusting the colors on the LOD's so that the shift is less apparent, Adding more LOD's that draw further away making the tress disappearing less noticeable, and adjusting the color of the terrain further away to more closely match the color of the trees, since the main reason the scattering effects seem so jarring is due to the contrast between the trees and the ground making where the trees and and the ground starts very noticable.
5. Planet textures are in a rough state.
I love the way the planets look in this game, they look crazy good and they managed to make every single planet in the game look like a work of art.
...As long as you're looking at them from 600km away. Any closer and you'll notice how low res the textures are close up. This is especially noticeable in orbit, which happens to be where a lot of player will be spending their time. This is why i think this is a big issue. The LOD system they implemented for rendering planet textures does not seem to hold up. Near the terminator of the planets, where light fades into darkness, many of the craters you'll see looks increasingly low res. And when your orbiting over light, the textures look blurry, and you cant make out any detail. This could be fixed by having a second, high res texture for the planets that renders between 500-100km altitude, and then an even higher res one for 100-50km, and so on. I believe this is what they are already doing, but it doesn't seem to look very good. For orbiting in direct sunlight, i understand that there isn't much that can be one, and with straight down sunlight most features of the mun will be washed out due to a lack of shadows. Again, i understand that the main reason for the low res textures is performance, which is why i desperately hope that things like this will be added in a "visual update" after optimisation.
6. The surface is flat as hell.
In the original game this was also the case, and mods like Parallax 2.0 simply brute forced the problem with a billion scatters. however i believe that KSP2 would benefit from a more elegant solution; Procedural mesh generation. I believe that by using Perlin, Worley or any other type of mathematical noise, you could use that to generate a mesh, similar to the terrain generation used in Minecraft, that is layered into the surface. of the planets. This is essentially how they created the planets in KSP1, however i thing doing it at a smaller scale for the surface, and layering these meshes on top of each other as you get closer will create very good looking terrain. Blah blah blah optimisation performance, add this once they 7090ti Super releases.
7. Clouds.
Clouds. They look bad, idk maybe take the new eve redux mod and shove it into KSP2. They both run on unity right? Ahh who cares about the framrate most of the stuff ive suggested would tank performance.
Closing remarks:
I play ksp for the visuals. I hope the moderators read this and then ban me from the fourm. Ive been writing this for 2 houts now and i dont know what else to say.
