Rubber Ducky

Ack, forgot to mirror it! Reuploaded it and updated the OP. License changed as well. You're pretty much welcome to do whatever you want with it, as long as you share it under a similar license and give proper attribution. And just an FYI, I won't be updating this mod any further (though I'd love to), and I'll be out of contact after July for other life pursuits.

Yeah, I can usually get the planets to render if I switch the GUI on and off, but that may not work for every one. Also, just gauging interest here, but what are your thoughts on making the gyroscopes/reaction wheels deteriorate over time? They're very overpowered at the moment compared to the stock parts, and it would also add more incentive to continue servicing the telescope after all the tech is maxed out.

Do you have Toolbar installed? It's a hard dependency at the moment.

It's not what I'm planning currently - the idea is that asteroid discoveries are incredibly rare initially (1/128), until you send a few telescopes to orbit and you can build it back up to the stock rate (1/2). But as far as I can tell, it's incredibly easy to change how untracked objects are handled - just swap a few variables - so maybe I'll add some config options or something. This is delving a little past CactEye, but it'd be pretty cool to see large impacting asteroids actually have devastating effects on the game's economy coming in 0.24, and then it'd be critical gameplay-wise to divert them away from Kerbin. I don't know if that's been suggested to Squad, but I'd love to see it in game.

Hey everyone, just letting you guys know that I'm actually working on another update for this... after a three month hiatus. It'll be mostly just plugin-side, but I'm essentially redoing most of the code. - Basic bugfixes, of course, chiefly the KAS bug and I'm stealing the occultation code from DOE because it actually works correctly - Overhauling the science system. It'll no longer be dependent on where the observations are coming from. - Experiment modules are going out - experiments will instead be part of the processors - When you leave telescopes with special asteroid processors running in orbit, it will actively affect the rate at which asteroids are discovered around Kerbin (this is tested and working so far). - Much less restriction on how the telescope is structured - as long as an optics part and a processor part is onboard with sufficient electricity, it'll work. - Processors will now be in these categories: Wide Field Camera - just like it is now, available in high, medium and low, but now they are all tied to one experiment (so high-tech experiment will get all of the available science) Asteroid experiment - point it at a tracked asteroid, get science. Star Occultation - this experiment will automatically generate a time and date to observe a specific body when it is occulting a 'star.' Hopefully integration with KAC. - Overhauling the GUI, I'd like to ditch Hullcam for a fancier GUI window for the display - Possibly a basic 1.25m optics system, if I have time I'm not making any promises here - this is not an exhaustive list, and anything could easily get axed for one reason or another. Note that this update will probably be incompatible with old saves, and it'll be incompatible with DOE until I get around to doing a major update on that as well. Also note that this will probably be the last update to this mod (at least from me) for a long time, due to some things in my personal life. Also, since the Star Occultation will randomly generate star names for each experiment, if anybody has some suggestions for Kerbal stars feel free to post them!

Ships on rails should be visible up to 750km - check the settings screen in the Space Center to make sure Distant Vessel Rendering is enabled It shouldn't be very memory intensive at all, but it sucks up quite a bit of CPU atm. I'd love to go back and optimize the code at some point, but who knows if I'll ever get around to it.

GavinZac posted a fix, the link is three posts above yours.

It should work with any custom skybox as well. It also has an overall sky brightness slider, which was made pretty much entirely for custom skyboxes (all the good ones are wayyy too bright IMO).

It's a bit more complicated, as at farther distances, the terrain around it is lower detail and might obscure it. Besides, the only time bases would be brighter than the surrounding surface is if they have the lights on during the night, and I'm not sure how bright that'd look from far away.

Yeah, just an issue with how the flares are rendered. That will hopefully be rehauled next update.

Yeah, that was 100% an aesthetic decision. My justification is that the ground crew kept dropping their wrenches down the optical assembly. Either that, or there's such a thick haze of spent solid rocket fuel around Kerbin that the lens is needed. Maybe once I can get around to modelling some more parts for this I can make them without a lens. Also, as far as KAS incompatibilities, it's going to take me a while to fix everything and get out a patch, but hopefully the next update will be worth it.

Try going into Settings.cfg and set changeSkybox to False, and maxBrightness to 1.0 Also make sure you've installed it correctly

In the settings GUI in the space center (make sure you have Toolbar installed), toggle Dynamic Sky Dimming and set Max Sky Brightness to 100%, then apply.

Ah, will add some indicators in the GUI for the next update. Thanks!

Could you enable debug mode in the settings menu (and apply it) and load a flight, and then send me the output_log.txt?

Thanks! I absolutely love Visual Enhancements, and I'd be more than happy to combine or work together.

Version 1.3 released! See the OP for details. Should fix the vessel rendering bugs, and adds a few new features.

I don't mind if you use it in videos, but I'd recommend either using GavinZac's ModuleManager config (just stick that bit of code in a cfg somewhere in the GameData folder AFAIK) or wait a couple of weeks for a lot of the bugs to be fixed.

Currently the size of the satellite is approximated by vessel mass -- I think I might have a better way to quickly approximate vessel size using bounding boxes, but I haven't looked too far into it yet.

The problem is that it might take several builds to actually fix the problem, and I don't think I can support a turnover rate like that with public tests. It's much, much easier to do private testing, as I can have one-on-one correspondence, and everybody knows for sure that these builds are unstable. Again, feel totally free to send me a PM if you want to help test the build, the more testers the better.

Are those hexagonal clouds around Jool's pole? Nice touch! Something I've always wanted in a texture pack. Also, and this is just my opinion, but I think Eve would probably be the best place for a prominent ring system in the Kerbol system. Jool already has an extensive moon system going for it, and a ring around Eve would look very striking.

There's a patch coming soon (couple of days maybe?), which will fix a lot of stuff. That said, the current build is stable enough, unless you go into the settings file and enable distant vessel rendering. Also, are there some people here that wouldn't mind helping me test the next build? I think I've fixed the ship-eating error for good, but I can't really know for sure. There's also some cool new features that I'm rather excited about -- I'll get more specific on that later. Feel free to PM me if you're interested!

This is a bug with vessel rendering, which should be disabled by default if you have a clean install of the latest version (v1.2).

That bug will be fixed in the next update, as I've found a much better way to calculate occlusion in working on Distant Object Enhancement.

Just so everybody knows, the next update might not be for a while (at least a couple of weeks). I've still got a few things to implement and fix with my other plugin, and I'd like to model some new parts for this pack so the selection is a bit less limited -- hopefully more optical tubes, mounts, maybe 1.25m parts, I haven't decided yet. I realize there's some bugs that I really need to go through and fix; I just want to hold off on an update release so I don't lose motivation. Also, @a__gun, ground observatories are something I'd like as well further down the pipeline. I've been thinking of a manned module that can be operated in IVA -- it'd be a ton of work though. And @GavinZac, I'll add that to that change list for the next update. The tech-exclusivity was done purely for a modular tech system that could be easily extended in future updates, but now that I have a bit more experience with C# I think I could easily add multiple tech types to one processor.