G'th

So they are my own creations, and aren't a part of the original OPM. They will be included in Ad Astra however, as the idea is for the entire system to be more analogous to the real Solar System while maintaining the Kerbalized aesthetic. Hence the silly puns in "Mic" and "Ike", aka Mike and Ike, and Knut and Wal, or, "Wal Knut". And yeah, Gilly and Bop were relocated to further that. As Venus has no real moons of consequence, neither will Eve, and so on.

So my life did a topsyturvy all over again recently, but actually for the absurdly better for a change (like so much better I got motivated to care about my physical health, sooo yeah). The plan as of now is just focusing on getting a new, working computer going which I should have roughly around June or July. From there I'll be recovering my old data and this mod should start seeing some updates not too long after that (though Im also making the leap into VR, and will even be able to play DCS again after so long, so that will be taking up time too. Im going to have a healthy amount of free time so I don't see any issues there). For the mod, my plan is to first get over the hurdle I originally ran into when I stalled out originally, which had to do with getting Kerbin to work as I wanted it to. Essentially as I wanted to go all out and support detailed underwater topography, the height maps and their related settings have to be set just right and that was a fickle thing to get right. (Otherwise the land topography gets wack) But push comes to shove, I can table that particular feature and just get the actual surface working as a stopgap. From there I'll be going through each world and just tuning them up essentially, cleaning up anything I no longer like and ensuring the basic visuals are all in place. As volumetrics are a thing I'll be looking at that too and seeing what all it can do. At that stage, whenever that will be, I will be moving the mod into an ongoing, public testing phase. The goal there will be for you fine folks to help me tune each worlds topography to cull any wackiness; on-orbit visuals are pretty simple for me to deal with solo but I'll definitely want the help when it comes to the surface, particularly down the line when I want to start doing scatters, launch sites, and whatever else. And yes I don't see any reason why this can't be set up with Ckan at some point. Probably not during testing, but with releases yes. So ultimately just bear with me. Time is the enemy now and I just have to hurry up and kill a whole lot of it lol.

It is. My computer did the not alive (which wasn't surprising) and it'll be a longwhile before Im up to getting a replacement. Fortunately, as this isn't the first time this has happened, I do have the data backed up so nothing is lost. That said, I do keep thinking on it and while I have other things Im focused on, I probably will come back around to it. Particularly because now I have a pretty well developed eye for game design, and I think I could come up with some clever stuff given that. But that'd have to come after I get another computer, and that'll be a while as I have other priorities that require my money atm. Like having functional eyesight and personal transportation Fortunately, at least barring some horrible disaster coming out of nowhere, I don't suspect it'll be too long. This has been the longest I've been stable in nearly a decade, and thats saying something. Pretty well. The game is called Labyrinthian, and I've had a heck of a time working on it. Its still in a proto stage, as its a pretty big game by rpg standards, but its coming along. In terms of a game pitch, its a game about shaping your character's legend. In other games you'd find cool lore about these wild characters that did things way cooler than what you can do in the game; in Labyrinthian, you get to be those wild characters other games use as background lore. You see that dragon over there, by that mountain? You can suplex that dragon, and break the mountain with it. But it goes farther than that, as the game seeks to deliver a truly reactive, living world where, even if you and your party decide to just be fantasy Bakers (and they can, its fully supported!), the world will change and develop around them as they play. And if they do decide to get involved, then they can start forging a legacy that will persist even past their own lifetimes. Your character's great grandchildren could very well still be dealing with the fallout of your original choices. Feature wise, we got: Tactical, fast-paced combat that scales cleanly, and effortlessly, from the grit of 1v1 Duels to the dire slaying of complex boss monsters, to epic slug fests between the tens of thousands amongst the forces of Good and Evil. You will witness the reality of warfare in a world of high magic. Featuring a core system revolving around the Combat Grid, inspired by the Tactical Grid of the upcoming game Hollows and featuring a hybrid of Position and Zone play, Combat is an intricate tactics game thats easy to learn and effortlessly fun. An expansive and wide open character building system that hybridizes classic Class systems with an Elder Scrolls style Skill+Perk system. Make a character in minutes, and realize their potential in how you play. 20 Base Classes and 80 Subclasses, all of which can be mix and matched and built up in any order you choose. You want to take all the subclasses at once? Go for it, its balanced. Crafting - Inspired by Tears of the Kingdom, the game will feature an elaborate, and relatively realistic, crafting and gathering system, allowing you an unprecedented amount of expression in what your character will make of the things they find in the world. A sword is no mere combination of a couple ingots and some leather strips, but of potentially many different metals, leathers, woods, and oils, all of which will provide unique and emergent properties as you combine them. The cost of your creations is that they won't last forever, but this is a good thing; as your equipment degrades, you'll be able to repair them and add new materials to gain temporary abilities, and if you let your weapons break (or, with the right Skill, do so deliberately), you can add these new abilities permanently. Sprinkle some Springhorn into your sword as you sharpen it, and it'll gain the Boomerang property, and will fly back to your hand after being thrown at a target a few times. Reforge your broken sword with it, and you'll be able to do it forever. And all this before we even start talking about Magic! A True Exploration System - Exploring the world is the bread and butter of an adventure in Labyrinthian, and as you learn more about the world, your characters will find Inspiration in their knowledge, and will be able to leverage what they've learned not just to succeed in the challenges they find out there, but in the greater schemes of play. Seek out and discover new places to build, to gather, and to explore, or don't! Exploring is about more than just striking out into the wilderness; its about learning. Find out that big bad evil guy is weak to bananas? You're Exploring! A Systemic Living World - Building out from very simple mechanics governing the passage of Time, the gameworld will come alive as play continues, and narratives begin to emerge. Entire Cultures could rise and fall and change, and heroes and villains will come forth to inevitably face each other. Your characters Reputations will invite challengers and pleas for help, and as you affect others they'll affect you back, whether they be Rivals or Allies. Full Integration of Improv - Its an open secret that much of whats enjoyable about RPGs is just improv; we call it roleplaying, but there's a whole lot more we can do than just pretend to be elves. Improvisation is useful and supported in nearly every sector of the game, from Combat to Exploration to Questing. Easy Set Up - The game only needs a World map and the Combat Grid, and new characters can be drawn up in minutes. World Keepers, the Game Masters, will need a bit more, but the game has your back, with innovative tools to get you in the game. The Quantum Statblocks and Quantum Quest Blocks will help you improvise enemies and entire questlines all on the fly, and the gameworld is designed to be easily managed with nothing more than a Calendar and a handful of Region Sheets. Easy Integration with all Playstyles - Don't want to just play with an abstract grid and some tokens? The game's got you; you can build as elaborate a set up as you want and the Combat Grid is easily applied to it. Don't want to engage with this elaborate living world? Thats fine too; the game will only break if you stop playing it. Want to play without a World Keeper? Co-op is easy. Want to just play by yourself? Go solo! ===== But anyway, yeah lol. I'm under no delusion that I'll perfectly nail all of this, but so far I've nailed a hell of a lot of it, and when its ready to be playtested publically, I'm confident I'll be able to refine it to a fine sheen, so to speak. I also didn't even elaborate on everything that's going into the game, but I'm always happy to talk about my ideas if anyones curious.

Its mostly GIMP work actually. The main hurdle is coming to grips with how heightmaps work, and once you know that then you can make some really great normals, which is the main secret to why mine look as good in a 3d space, and then its just having a good eye for textures and knowing how to paint with them. (Every planet you've seen me do in this thread was effectively painted by hand) But its also a lot of iteration and learning how different manipulations extrapolate out into the final look. Beyond that, its also having the best source material you can get your hands on. Actual DEMS (digital elevation models; basically another term for heightmaps) in the highest resolution you can find work best. You can get those at astrogeology.usgs.gov for most of the planets/moons in our system. Not all of them are complete (Venus is notoriously incomplete despite being super high res) and some aren't at a very high res, but they're still useful if you play with them. If you do some googlefu you can find others; I can't for the life of me tell you where I found it but I even found for Halleys Comet of all things. Tangrams heightmapper is also a really useful project. It lets you zoom into a super high res DEM of earth and pull shots out of it directly. Very useful for pulling out different shapes of mountains. From there its just a matter of getting your heightmap together (its a whole process to cover how to make one out of nothing) and then extrapolating the color map from it. If you're doing a real planet its a similar rigmarole to find a really good one that covers the whole planet and isn't already manipulated, but its dead easy once you have it. Just line up the maps and you're good to go. If you're making up stuff though, then its a bit more involved. The technique I used is to first set up a GIMP file with the heightmap as one layer, and then copy it twice. The original layer I just leave alone as a clean copy. The second layer is what I used for the painting process, and then on the third layer, I generate a really strong normal map for it; way stronger than it should be for the game. I then desaturate it and set it to soft light. What this does is set it up so that you'll get a sense of how its going to look once you bring it into the game. Once you starting bringing in colors and textures, its going to really pop. From there, how you paint in the land depends. If you want to go cartoony you can just use solid colors, but for me I like textures, and more than that I like making my own. That involves, again, having good source images. I usually pulled from one of either Earth, Luna, Mars, or one of the bigger Jovian moons, as those had the best truecolor maps I could find, and then its just a matter if finding an interesting looking spot and making a seamless texture out of it. Once you have that, add a layer filled with that new texture and add a layer mask. Copy/paste your heightmap layer into that mask. What will happen is that the texture will fade in and out according to the opacity generated by the height map (ie whites will have full opacity, blacks will be transparent, greys in the middle). By then going in and tweaking the mask (inverting it, messing with the Levels, and even erasing chunks of it) then you can start doing all kinds of wonderful things. Main thing to keep in mind, especially with really complex planets with lots of interwoven colors going on, is to keep a heirarchy of colors going so you know how to layer them properly. For example on an Earth like, I could have upwards of 16-20 different layers covering different elements. Usually at the bottom I have a "bedrock" texture that mostly shows up under the ocean, then I build up different biomes, then add snow, and then at the very top is the ocean which should cover everything below it. Oh, and yeah, oceans and rivers are a pain in the ass. I was lucky in finding a map of earth that already plucked out all the waterways (sooo many rivers) and Kerbin/Laythe were all easy too as you can just use the already made color maps to make a mask. So if you're going to do waterheavy planets you want to try and find a way to make pulling out the water easy. Sometimes though it can come down to just having to do it by hand. So yeah this isn't the best tutorial or what have you but it should give an idea of the process. Beyond the artwork is just learning how Kopernicus works which is all config work. A pain but the devs there are friendly enough.

I am indeed. Im still pretty focused on my TTRPG, though the temptation to crack open this old chestnut is starting to grow. If only just so I can take a break lol. Like you I got pretty burnt out on KSP in general but it has been a sufficiently ling while... Id also say it's less that it was never born and more that I locked it in the basement like a red headed stepchild.

Somewhat recent events in the TTRPG world culminated in me starting to write my own game and thats been sucking up all my creative willpower. The mod isn't necessarily dead, and I can honestly pick right back up where I left off whenever, it just isn't what Im wanting to focus on atm. Plus I like to think it'll be a good thing in the end. When I come back inspired to work on it more it'll be the better for it, particularly considering only one planet needs "hard" terrain work put into it, and the rest is just making it beautiful which is the comparatively easier part for me.

It will have icecaps, by there will be underlying continents/islands under them. In stock the caps are actually just straight ice; no real land under them. I'm changing that primarily because for how I'm generating the new height map I needed the poles to be empty. And its being designed natively at 2.5/2.7x scale, and I think we're still going to do a patch to squeeze it down to stock for those that want it.

Yep. This mod will be completely standalone so no need for any other mods other than the basic dependencies.

Difficult yes, worth it? Double yes.

ahhhhh

I'm still alive folks, just to give an update lol. I started a new job and thats been eating up my time, but its also because Kerbin is just proving to be a righteous pain in the ass, but I have some idea of how we can get around this hurdle. What that will involve, in the most visible sense, is not adhering to being an exact recreation of Kerbin. Instead, I'm going to remove the ice caps as we know them (which are just huge sheets of ice in both instances, similar to Earth's North Pole), and replace them with new continents. This will kill one of the biggest issues I was having, and also just be nice for a refreshed Kerbin. In the same vein, we're also going to break up the supercontinent that is Kerbin's landmass. There will be two of them in addition to the north and south polar regions. The next big thing that will change is that KSC's location will change. It will still be along the equator, but it may not be in the exact same spot on that particular landmass. This is because in changing what Kerbin looks like, its just proven extraordinarily difficult to adhere to where the original location was without killing the new terrain, SO, we're going to move it to a new location. That might be as simple as simply picking the whole thing up and moving it more inland, or it might move to somewhere else entirely. We shall see. And the big benefit of going through this rigmarole is primarily going to be for the people who like to build submarines. I'm pretty adamant on getting interesting ocean terrain for Kerbin, and thats also been central to why i've had so many issues.

I may return to that idea when we get to Pol. I'm not confident in my ability to do it right at the moment but Pol is going to necessitate it, so thats what we'll look forward to. Eve for me simply isn't the right place to experiment with it as I'm going to want that to be a lot more subtle than it will be on Pol, and I'm going to want to approach Eve with a better idea of how far I can stretch the idea.

Alrighty friendos, here's the new Eve. The terrain was completely redone and is now a more direct recreation of the original topography, and I brought it back to be a bit more purple forward. There's still a healthy amount of blue in there (and some green), but its much less Vaporwave planet now. But the real shining star here is the EVE effects. Featured are, obviously, counter rotating clouds, but also 3 polar vortexes, two smaller ones in the north pole, and a much larger one in the south pole. Also, my imagining of what Venusian auroras would look like, though modestly exaggerated. I'm going to be toying with the vortexes a bit to make them look less like just plain ol' hurricanes (and I also need to adjust the aurora texture as we have some polar pinching in there), but otherwise I think we can call Eve more or less finalized for this stage. And with EVE: While unintentional, the Auroras actually "shine" when you change camera positions, so that's a super neat thing I managed to make happen.

While its not quite ready just yet, I believe you're going to be very happy with the work I've done on Eve today.

Annnnd Moho again, now with solar wind bashing into it. This was inspired by Astronomer's Visual Pack which did a similar effect, though mine is a bit more subtle and takes cues off of the scene from For All Mankind when a solar storm hits the Moon, causing weird waves to crest across the surface. (If you have trouble spotting it, watch the reddish areas in the bottom left, as thats where it was most visible in this particular instance)

Some naked Pics of Kerbin in preparation for its eventual Touchy Feely time

Update First, here's an update for Moho. A wee bit different but it better illustrates that its close to Kerbol and is getting hella blasted. Up next I'm going to add some subtle effects to show this off as well (Still exaggerated from real life but we can do that :D) I will note though that the experiments I alluded to regarding planetary rings did not pan out, so we won't have anything particularly neat there, but even so. And on the note of Kerbol, here is Kerbol itself from various points from Moho to Duna to Eeloo, updated and at the proper resolution. I'm inclined to keep it this color for now, but that may change down the line to be a bit more golden yellow than red-orange. It really depends on what it turns out to look like on Kerbin.

It will indeed. The standard will be 16k but there will also be 8k and 4k versions available.

You'll find reading through the topic that I learn quickly

Ignore this post lol

New Sunflare. Slightly too transparent so i'll be adjusting that.

We have indeed. (ingore what Duna looks like) Possibly. Its also possible I may go a different direction; just depends.

If you look back you'll find that Mic and Ike have long since been in Dunatian orbit And while I haven't thought on it much so far, I'm inclined towards keeping Eve more Venus than alien.

It does indeed.

Thats actually what I intended it to be lol. In a similar orbit and everything.