Procedually Generated Textures for Scientific Imagery on Celestial Bodies using Ingame Photography.

[KerbalEssences]

(lol at the title)

Hi, what I always missed in KSP was the ability to take pictures for science reasons like they do in reality. I think it's actually one of the biggest parts in space exploration. Just think about Hubble and rovers who send their imagery daily. The main problem I see in KSP is such a "screenshot" ability would be pretty redundant and taking pictures of rather low res textures is probably not the greatest experience.

That could be however solved. Unity 5.2 comes with a new feature to procedurally generate textures puzzling them together in runtime using some small assets. I picture it like so: You take your camera as a kerbal and point it towards the ground. You press a button and it does not simply take a screenshot but procedurally generate the image based on your location and biome. Here a very basic example (manually made) taking a picture from Dunas soil.

The white part you see would be some rare special mineral you had to hunt for. It would apear randomly with a certain chance. The more you catch with a single frame the more science you would get. That's just an idea I had and I thought why not simply share it.

Another issue is the library you need to store all of this. The more snaps you take the bigger the impact on the RAM which is allready quite frustrating. To overcome this we either needed an external archive, and I don't know if that is possible, or simply neclect storing them. If somebody finds a super nice one he wants to share he could simply press another button to save it in a screenshot folder and the rest would get turned into science instead.

Unity 5.2 Procedural Materials: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ProceduralMaterials.html

PS. I hope you don't think that I think you have not allready enough to do. I just wanted to throw it in before I forget about it.

Edited November 9, 2015 by KerbalEssences