PDCWolf

This I doubt we could do realistically, but there are many ways to at least solve the problem programmatically by having them on different layers or something like that, without doing something crazy like actually having 10 to 20 thousand point light sources at different brightness levels. me when It's off but not that far off: https://knarkowicz.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/automatic-exposure/ We can't normally see black spots, not with our eyes alone, unless you have a huge chunk of atmosphere magnifying and also attenuating the sun (i.e. only during sunrise or sunset, and yes, this damages the eye anyways). In any other condition, the brightness just overwhelms the spots. We can, however, see all the way down to zodiacal light when there's no pollution, that bit is correct. Finally, once outside the atmosphere, astronauts are able to see even more, since atmospheric extinction is no longer bringing everything down. Of course not, but as space engine shows, we can very well reproduce the effect in a credible way. Still, using a skybox instead of actual stars would require different trickery to reproduce the effect at such levels of detail. @SOXBLOX I see you've edited your comment. First off, YEAH, AMAZING, this is like the 5th or 6th most viewed thread in this subforum, and the most commented thread. Second off, any accusation of sloppy wording, or straight up incorrect expressions I'll take, but only because I'm not a native English speaker. Finally, yeah, I think the objective side of the thing is all cleared up as one follows the discussion, and what we're left with are technicalities and subjectivities. However, if I were to base myself on other suggestions, none of them have the super specific claim that would clear any discussion up as the center of the opening post. As for the alien sky thing, it's a game we could play: It's a fact that the sky is not different, but my point is reliant on references to find orientation, not constellation wandering via parallax. We could give each other small sectors of the sky, without reference, orientation data, or context, to actually see how much we can identify, if we can identify anything at all. At this point I'll still die on the hill that neither of us, or anyone in this thread, would correctly identify constellations in those circumstances.

Yeah, not with the genre limit. That's important, as there aren't that many games in the genre to begin with anyways., otherwise the list is as big as we want it to be, since every unity game has an option to natively implement full-scene-luminance-histogram based eye adaptation: https://docs.unity3d.com/560/Documentation/Manual/PostProcessing-EyeAdaptation.html This is also a feature available to every unreal 4 (and 5) game, and it works exactly on the same histogram method: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/PostProcessEffects/AutomaticExposure/

Whilst I agree that there are parts that need to bend, like aircraft wings, I think we can safely allow tank to tank joints to not bend at all, as the consequences of allowing it set off a domino of effects that end up in having again to disable part to part collision, and the implementation of magic "do not bend" buttons, as game friendly fixes like struts do not work well either. As for your solution, I remember the og devs saying something about not being able to work with multiple joints, since that violates their tree-like serialization of construction for saving craft. Also yeah, my signature is from a bygone era, even though the thread does still exist (the mod doesn't tho), it's just a pre forum software migration link.

Autostrutting exists because it was too late to change from Unity's default crappy joints. You could argue it's useless to include a mechanic if you're gonna include magic buttons to fix the problems it causes. Mods fixed this in three ways: welding the parts into a single one, changing all joints to be the max size ksp allows (bigger parts have stronger joints), and outright doing away with lego construction via procedural parts. However, KSP was way too late to fix this in the codebase, and struts have always been absolute crap, creating more problems than they solve, so they went with the magic fix my rocket button called autostrut. Speaking of hacky ways to fix stuff, let's remember that KSP had to disable part-to-part collisions on the same vessel, as that would also cause RUD, something which was only brought back to play around with robotics, again on a magic button. I don't think KSP2 needs to go through coding the same problem in the codebase again, just to add a magic button to fix it later on. Wet noodle rockets are just not a thing, they fail before bending visually, and due to lack of a better way to show realistic structural failures (which would be constant on a lego based construction model like we have, look at FAR), I'd prefer to not have bendy rockets at all. It solves the problem, stops the question from happening, avoids magic buttons to fix it later in the development cycle, and allows stuff relying on part to part collision to work intuitively.

+1, wet noodle rockets are unrealistic and need to go.

Literally a matter of perspective. It's pretty common to completely eclipse the sun with your craft in KSP. That's on me for not remembering KSP2 was gonna include interstellar travel. Multiple star systems were confirmed long ago. I've personaly witnessed a total solar eclipse, stars are visible. Obviously nothing like watching the sky at night, but if you happen to have a good spot and the stars are (pun intended) on your side, you might see the brightest ones. In preparation for that eclipse on July 2 2019, I checked articles like these: https://www.space.com/36721-stars-planets-visible-during-solar-eclipse.html I can tell you too that if you're purposefully trying to photograph the corona, it's so very dim that you won't see stars, but that's a matter of what you can actually see with your eyes (both corona and stars) vs balancing exposure on a camera.

Hey, where's the rest of my list lmao. If you look away from the possible halo, or at least shielded your eyes from it, you'd see stars too. That's how astronauts see a excrementston of stars at night on the ISS, and also auroras.

Except you try to look at the sky and turn on a light and suddenly there's less stars. Insisting on trying to be snarky, I see. It's been like 15 posts and you're still trying to misrepresent the idea to have an argument at all. You'd have stars during night time, during the dark side when orbiting a planet (if you're not looking at anything else that's bright enough), when an eclipse happens, when your own craft or another passes in front of the sun, when in interstellar space, when looking from inside a capsule in the shade, etc. Plus I never locked the method to dirty skybox tricks, and they could do it in other ways, not sure why you keep bringing up skybox tricks when that's just one possible method.

I differentiated graphics from mechanics when the "bad game design" was brought up, as the video used for exemplifying talked about mechanical bad game design. You're now saying that increasing the realism of the visual systems and bringing them up to gaming industry standard doesn't add or substract anything. It adds realism, substracts unintuitive behavior (remember how the stars not being in the Apollo pictures were a big part of the conspiracy theory?). On top of that, you still keep referring to it as "removing stars", when that's clearly not how it works, and you definitely know that, having played with DOE. Stars will be there, you'll see them come and go exactly as you do in real life when lighting conditions change.

Except they've now learned from what the community did, and we have stock implementations of effects that mods had to bring to the table: RealPlume, Scatterer, Clouds, PlanetShine, Engine Light, etc.

That goes way beyond simple stargazing and recognition of constellations, and is exactly what it took to reconstruct the position of Cassini in Celestia. If this was an actual argument, and people didn't care about products evolving to include new features, anything but a flat procedural surface and christmas rockets would be a mod and we'd still be at 0.1.

Point taken, yet we still we ended up needing the help of an orrery software and overblown exposure to correctly identify stars. Whilst you're right that there's negligible change in the shape of the constellations, if I handed you an image with 17 random dots, taken from an unknown position, in an unknown point in time, with unknown field of view data, I'd really find it fantastic and laughable again that you'd come pointing out stars and constellations with such certainty as it was done. The picture, with all that missing data taken into account, and with what very little data it presents., represents an alien sky, both in dictionary definition and concept.

If you limit yourself to the space genre, then yeah, but also most games in the space genre definitely do not qualify as modern. Elite came out 8 years ago, with Horizons & Odyssey barely making the graphics better. Space Engine is the one that definitely tries the hardest save for some very big oversights, but at least gives you the option to fix it, even then Space Engine originally came out almost 12 years ago, though it is continually being evolved.

Fact is that the general public loved KSP to the point the devs decided to evolve the product and support it for 10 years, selling it to one of the biggest gaming companies. It's also one top rated games on Steam, and has been for a while, which is reflected as well on it's metacritic score and global critical acclaim from almost all gaming sources and networks. Let's not diminish KSP's accolades just to have a point, not to mention again how this is not a gameplay mechanic, but rather a visual effect, which is also present on almost all modern games nowadays, even across genres, in the form of eye adaptation. I don't mind it being an option and I've said this before, but yet again, we don't know if they've arrived to where they are right now following artistic vision or being ignorant of the principle, heck, it's been 10 years and we still don't know this of the original KSP either. What you like is completely up to you, and I don't disagree with your tastes, I disagree with some of the arguments you're using. Once the lighting issue is settled, what'd be hard is adjusting exposure, indeed, yet almost every modern game having some form of "eye adaptation" kinda tip the scales against how hard it could possibly be.

"The excuse offered is always the vulgarity of the vast majority of the public. I insist that this is absolutely false. The public is infinitely superior to the rubbish that is fed to them daily." -TDTC If it was about what the og devs thought the general public wanted and could handle, KSP would still be a game about throwing green men up and seeing how far up can you go. Let's not fall so low in the search for an argument. Some amazing shots, they really highlight the problem and the solution, though the KSP1 skybox doesn't help at all with constricted FOV shots. There's also some details here and there that could be nitpicked like engine light or ship interior lights not affecting the view, but that's so small it'll be a waste, specially since the point is already proven. This is a programmatically implemented limitation, and I believe it is easier to not implement it than to bother doing what KSP seems to do. If it was a single static light, obviously light levels as distance increases would change accordingly, yet KSP's anthropocentric planetarium implements its very own light source/solution that seems to almost always be at the same distance to the player.

I understand subjectivity, but subjectivity is also something that can be discussed. We're having a great artistic look in movies discussion with @Jack Mcslay, where he's found examples of movies showing stars, and I've found examples of movies not showing stars on bright scenes. The discussion might turn into arguments when generalizations and false equivalences such as "that's bad game design" or "artistic vs realistic" are thrown around. Notice how I have not responded to folks like @Bej Kerman that simply mention they just don't like it, or find it disorienting, because that's indeed their personal taste and experience. Opinions are not facts, indeed, but they might be presented in a way that makes them seem to be, or used to push arguments about things that can actually be discussed. I don't mind the whole thing being an option, either, and you can clearly see (since you've seem to read all my posts here) that I didn't discuss that matter either.

I meant that it seemed fantastic and laughable to me, that someone would be quickly able to recognize a couple stars on a place that is not Earth, from a single, almost reference-less picture. It was relevant as a response to the user's post in that moment, since he was using his magic stargazer powers ("i saw this and that and that other constellation over there!") to justify being able to see, which he clearly wasn't since not a single one of his calls was right. You're looking at a reference-less sky from a place that is not even on your same world, no human has ever seen that sky directly, nor is a single human accustomed to search for stars there, nor do we know the FOV of the camera to justify how much sky is actually visible, or any other useful data. Whilst literally not being Earth makes it fit the extraterrestrial sky definition, what I just described makes it fit the idea that the picture shows an enough different sky (from what we see every day) that trying to play stargazer is, again, laughable and fantastic.

Ofxord does, also lists it. https://www.lexico.com/synonyms/alien

Works for the adjective as well, as Wiktionary would also repeatedly tell you.

Bro, I'm not the one that joined a thread to make a tangential post about a sub-topic, also, somehow you didn't realize extraterrestrial and alien are synonyms, pretty big oversight:

It falls under the definition of extraterrestrial sky, as much as you might wanna twist it any other way.

Funny cause it ended up being a totally wrong guess, as pointed out by

I think it's disingenuous to test on a system that's below the minimum specs of KSP1 specially when we're talking about KSP2 here. There's almost 10 years of evolution for the minimum spec the game could require. Also, it's not like we even know their performance target, we don't have anything for that outside of guesswork. And I never mentioned to know *exactly* how it works . However being in the software industry, and a modder, you'd easily be able to at least blackbox the thing.

You can both know the size of the skybox images (this is pretty much publicly accesible lmao) AND infer what GalaxyCubeControl does (specially thanks to the API docs & many other modders using it) without violating item 9. Now, you're suggesting DOE uses hacky code, and you'd know since you maintain it, yet use that same allegedly hacky code to argue that you'd require double the resources just to dim the skybox. Since we'd be dealing with a stock implementation, going as deep as shaders themselves rather than duplication and operation, we could do away with that argument easily. You can't have both sides.

Output from solar panels is programmatically changed with a mathematical formula, not by relative brightness, apples to oranges. Brightness doesn't seem to decrease, or increase, with distance, as suggested by this being a requested feature: The code DOE uses for it's basic implementation is freely available to be performance tested by whoever whishes to challenge the claim in actual measurable terms, both in performance and implementation time: https://github.com/TheDarkBadger/DistantObject/blob/master/Source-Code/DarkenSky.cs The images are not specially tailored, as there's no "images". The skybox is actuated on based on simple RGB manipulation.