G'th

Pictureless Update on Spiffy Stuff: Mereor Showers - Done Ship Lines - Done Integrated Clouds and City Lights (cLOuD gL0w to some chuds) - Done Atmospheric tweaks- Perpetually ongoing --- Dust storms - being sourced Noctilucent clouds - partially sourced, won't interact with rockets obviously, but will be neat at towards the poles. Forest/Oil fires - Being sourced Maracaibo Bay - Partially done, duckweed dynamics being tweaked. -- Sediment and debris - pending Lava flows and Eruptions - Pending Atlantic and Pacific cyclones - tentative may be if I can get them to cooperate. I have them sourced and in-game, and I can get them where I want them but they refuse to spin properly due to what I had to do to get them there, so itll take more tweaking and I may be hitting a plain limitation in how EVE works. Have some ideas but I'll be putting them off for later. --- Once all of this spiffy stuff is done (tentatively by Tuesday) we'll be moving on to the Moon which won't take long. From there its just a few hours to get the Vibrance settings made and then the process of packaging a dev release and getting the Github set up, as well as creating the different resolutions. Will warn that installation will require some substantive modification to your KSRSS install (which will always be necessary due to how KSRSS is set up) and that the dev release will ONLY feature the Earth Moon system. The other planets and bodies won't be deleted, but they will fundamentally lack visuals. This is necessary because, again, of how KSRSS is set up and what is necessary to make SOL work without headaches and without eating all of a users memory on stuff that isn't being used.

Possibly. That'll be something for learning how to do planets surface stuff, which I'm not quite at just yet.

Been a hot minute since I updated, which makes sense as its also been a hot minute since I worked on the mod, having taken a break to actually play the game. But, we're back at it making some spiffy stuff. My very important question though for those following: What are your thoughts on leaving the spiffy stuff (most of my ideas for which are listed a couple posts earlier) as surprises? I'm thinking I might not show them off until we have a dev release, and treat them more or less as easter eggs, particularly considering many of them will be dynamic and won't be always on.

For the record, it worked. If you change the module name in the engine config to ModuleDeployableEngine it will work and allow retraction by shutting down the engine (or clicking Toggle in the VAB)

Yeah its both. They wont' retract in VAB or in flight. I wonder if replacing them with a more generic Deployable Engine module might work?

Is there any way to get certain engines like the RS-30 or the expandable RL-10s to retract after they've been deployed? I imagine I'd have to go in and tweak the configs, but I'm not sure what to change or if its even possible at all.

Okeedoke, we are in buckos. Apparently I lied and there was a further peak I could reach with city lights. I just had to meticulously paint them. By hand. For four hours. But, Earth's basic visuals are more or less in a good finalized state, so I'll be moving on the "Spiffy" stuff, which will be comparatively much more fun. .

Aha that explains why my usual avenues for this were coming up short. Thanks!

Query: Theres a J2 variant called the A2 which has an extendble nozzle. Was this a real thing? I can't seem to find any info on it.

Haven't shown these off, but the clouds now have a subtle flow animation to them which definitely makes them look better in motion, even at unrealistically fast speeds. This gif most clearly shows how the clouds grow and dissipate. And while I don't think anyones confused about what the idea is, generally you're not going to be watching the clouds like this on planets like Earth or Mars where the lack of realistic weather patterns can look janky. Instead you would be playing normally, and the benefit is that the vast majority of the time, the clouds in your background are not going to be exactly the same in any given situation. The gas giants won't have this issue, as gas giant weather patterns are more easily replicated in EVE than terrestrial ones are, which may or may not be possible. Right now its based on 3 large cloud pattern textures, which are repeated twice to give more fullness to the planet (Some areas will have exceptionally cloudless times, and some areas will be super heavily clouded). With smaller more micro-scale cloud patterns (and thus, much more individual cloud layers to govern them), you could achieve even greater control, as well as reduce the amount of repetition, but for my purposes having larger cloud patterns works fine and reduces the texture load. The only caveat is is that the quality that's achievable with this is fully dependent on the quality of your source images. AFAIK, the only really freely available cloud source that's of suitable quality for this NASA's Blue Marble images, which are the source for these, but even those still needed extensive retouching. Oh, and now we have a fully bespoke sunflare, based on my best attempt at recreating what the sun looks like for astronauts. This is based both on photos and on conversations I've had with actual astronauts regarding this. The sun realistically is just an impossibly bright white ball, and things like sun spikes and such are just artifacts from cameras or, in the case of actual people, our crappy liquid filled eyes. For instance, I see the "sun spikes" that are typical of sun flares on virtually any light in real life and much more so than most people due to how my eyes work, so if I was able to look at the sun and not melt my eyes, I'd probably see something like this. However, this is for True Sight (and my own personal install, as I will always prefer this look). For Vibrance, I intend on pushing the color on the sun to be a bit tinged towards either blue or yellow (undecided), and will include ghosts and other effects like we see on other mods sunflares.

It took the greater part of 12 hours and an entire pizza, but this is basically as perfect as I can get the city lights to be short of jacking up the bloom to unplayable levels. They're not too pretty to zoom in on, but that just...isn't fixable. I tried

Well, I don't really want to use it for clouds per say. But, what I would want is the ability to apply UV Noise (texture, strength, animation) as well as allow the detailtex to have a speed setting as the cloud layers do. And if minlight can be applied to just the nightside, that'd also be a neat setting to have. What this would basically enable is a more clear cut way of making city lights that...don't suck? lol. City lights currently all hinge on the quality of the textures used, which becomes a problem when it comes to the night side, as the textures can often become unpleasantly distorted when we have to jack up the exposure and colors to get sufficiently bright lights. A working minlight setting in tandem with UV noise would allow a cleaner texture to have the necessary glow, but also a more realistic flicker to the lights. We'd still want to have the day/night detail texture dichotomy, but I think EVE's functions work better for enabling what we have to instead rely on gimp/photoshop skills for. But there's also other things this can be used for such as surface features like lava flows, fires, etc that would be particularly bright on the nightside. These are already possible with the current implementation, but the actual control we have over the textures is very limited.

Query: In the future would it be possible to enable the same kind of layer control for citylights that we have for cloud layers? Having just scale to tweak is kind of disappointing and honestly if I could apply the city light functionality (ie, changes depending on day or night side) while also having more control over it, that would just be swell.

Alrighty. Did some final passes at the clouds. Do still need some touchups and rescaling done to fix the unintentional warping (didnt occur to me that not scaling something down isn't always the best choice for quality purposes), but they're in a pretty good state. Also nailed the atmosphere I think. I think Im going up the shine on it a bit so that effect is more obvious, but the color balance is more or less perfectly set for me to go for either version. (Ie, teal and over saturated for Vibrance and then the typical blue for True Sight) Also did some work on the auroras and city lights, though they're still wip, and over the weekend the terrain is going to get a third pass. And I also have spontaneously conceptualized yet another trick I may experiment with regarding terrain, so stay tuned for how that turns out. But basically one these big parts are more or less finalized, Im going to start on the spiffy stuff and looking at Luna, and by the time both are done we'll be looking at a dev release.

Open the game and hit Alt + 0. Navigate to clouds and take a screenshot.

Hmm, so something I think might be in play here is whatever map you used to define the cloud shapes. Would this map basically be the same thing as a 2d cloud map like EVE typically uses? Id imagine that if your examples were handpainted, that may be using some actual clouds might be better? It might also be that, from what I can see, the clouds you have thus far are basically just dot spatters. Clouds can appear like that, but most big cloud formations, like in the Star Citizen shot, aren't just a series of dots or spatters. But I also don't know the specifics in what went into those shapes so I could be offbase. Plus something else I think is happening here is that the clouds don't seem to be "in" the atmosphere. Both the Star Citizen screenshots and the picture Poodmund posted don't have this issue, and you can tell that even in the whitest part of the clouds that theres still a subtle blue tinge to them. Thats even something Ive faced more than once with regular EVE, in that forcing the clouds to be too starkly white makes them not feel like they're actually part of the atmosphere. (And inversely, that taking away too much or the scattering also does the same thing) They look right when youre down below them, but then it seems like the scattering just doesn't apply to them as you climb in altitude.

Hard to say. Without being able to go in and dink with them its hard to know what I can do and what emergent properties I might be able to squeeze out of them. I do know what Id like to do them, so its more a matter of what I can do, and I won't know that until I have settings to experiment with.

Todays actual progress. None of the spiffy stuff quite yet, but Im doing a second pass at the main clouds using a much better method... And just for clarity, the resolution here is at 16k. So, high, but not some janky 64k monstrosity, and of course the clouds are still dynamic. And as Ive liked to do to illustrate exactly what an ingame view is actually like, these photos are at 150km altitude, with one zoomed back in on the pod. I'll also add that these clouds are now effectively "hand-made", which here means I went through a painstaking effort of extracting these patterns while eliminating artifacts and touching up certain elements, as well as some light enhancement to the overall textures. So, no longer merely the conversion of untouched satellite imagery.

This was 100% unintentional and is now 100% canon. Hopefully it still looks this amusing in-game.

Mkay, here's some ideas I'm thinking of, in no particular order, all for Earth: Periodic algae blooms Volcanic eruptions, including rarely visible lava flows. Forest Fires; Oil Fires Ship trails Recurring sediment and debris stains along certain bodies of water Lake Maralcabo And a tentative maybes just because I think I might be crazy enough to get it to look good: Meteor shower A lot of this is going to be necessary to get practice on the things i'm going to need to be able to do for Mars and the Gas giants, but it also helps serve a goal of mine to make actually looking down at Earth more interesting. Dynamic clouds already paved the way for that, so pushing it with additional and basically never depicted realities of our little blue marble is whats going to be the apex of that.

The Saturn 1 and 1b are already scaled to 2.5x, they just need a lofted trajectory to make it to orbit. Basically, they don't put enough vertical speed into the upper stage by the time the first stage burns out, so when you go to your next stage, it should be pointed at like a 45 to 60 degree angle towards space for most of its burn time.

Not out of the box, no, as altitudes and such will be all wrong, and scatterer will probably need to be completely redone.

Indeed. The final look is going to vary by a lot depending on whatever post processing you have. A page back or so I posted a series of screenshots of what the worlds look like, and that was without any TUFX applied, so as long as they look like those screenshots then nothing should be broken.

To demonstrate the pretty insane quality we're getting here, in addition to the dynamics shown in the GIF, here's a series of shots taken at 150km in altitude with no zoom other than what you'd be at for actually playing the game.