astronutkhillips

I have more or less retired. But don't worry, I turned the code over to someone and he should post something about the project soon. So long everyone! AK

I haven't tried the Kethane plugin, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. I have tried Mapsat and it works as expected on the rocky planets I have made.

Pretty good. I think I have the scale issues fixed. Now I am tinkering with things like orbits and SOI.

You should reread the post. No one was called an idiot. Quite the opposite in fact. I found the hypothetical planet stuff interesting.

Very nice! Good sense of scale.

As the topic creator I think we should close this thread. It has served its purpose. Another thread should be opened to discuss whether or not plugins should be able to make planets. And if I get anywhere I will open a new thread in a more appropriate location.

I am sorry to say that is incorrect. That is practically the definition of decompiling. I doubt you could get much by looking at the assemblies in a text editor. And Squad has no way of locking down access to classes/variables short of disallowing plugins. I haven't needed to decompile anything to get this far. Most of the info comes from ISA mapsat, hyperedit, these forums, Unity docs and VisualStudio Intellisense. What I might be doing is accessing classes that Squad would rather I didn't. I am not sure where that line is. I know almost nothing about the PQS system at this point. I haven't had the time to really look at it. As I pointed out in the original post the problem is to get it right in scaled space. Without that you might as well just put a giant mesh part in orbit somewhere and call it a planet.

So there are some good points raised here. Is it good that you can make new planets? Does Squad care if users make new planets? How easy should it be? I think its good, assuming Squad doesn't mind. I have yet to hear anything. But if they said "hold off" I would without hesitation. As to how easy it should be... Well, who cares what you do inside your own game. And nobody can make you install a crap plugin. But from my poking around I have realized that it is much harder to make a good planet than you would think. And to make something that isnt a complete mess you need need to get the orbit right and the mass and the SOI all the other little things that seem minor until thing go boom. Assuming I get it working I would probably release a simple proof of concept planet and the code. If you want to make a new planet you could look at the code and figure it out. If you wanted to write a fancy gui planet editor you would look at the code and figure it out. Let the market decide. And I hope I didn't violate my EULA somehow. Didn't actually read it. Who does?

Yup, the atmosphere is very thin but it its 99.8 nitrous oxide.

You would think that after making a whole freaking planet making the map would be easy. But it turns out nothing in the Kerbal universe is easy. Having a good scaled version of the planet turns out to be a very crucial element. Even in the regular space view those scaled planets are used to fill in the blanks behind the high detail view. Very clever! But also very hard to replicate in a plugin. But progress is being made. Here are a few fun shots I made while trying to fix the map issue. I needed an easy to see, high contrast planet for debugging. So I plugged in some crazy color values and Joker was born. More screens from the first (evar!) landing on Joker here: http://imgur.com/a/jCoLg He is in the same orbit as Bogy at the moment. But I am going to put him into wildly eccentric orbit around Kerbin to help figure out the map LOD issues. He is apt named as he has already proved to be a pain in the ass. I look forward to eventually deorbiting him into the sun.

Oooh. That sounds promising! I'll have it a go tonight.

First, don't get too exited about this. There is still a long way to go and I am not at all sure it is going to actually work. But here are a few screen shots: Bogy. Ain't she cute! Kerbin rising over Mun rising over Bogy. Bogy stubbornly refusing to appear in the map window. Grrr. The capsule is on the surface giving you an idea how big it is. I spent 45min getting this shot. Time I could have spent coding. No more screen shots for a while. Its too much fun.

Which one?

Its an entire universe to explore. Its so good I stopped playing Kerbal for a few weeks when I discovered it. http://en.spaceengine.org/

VertexPlanets are nice because you don't need textures. Minmus will show you how to assemble a VertexPlanet.