Configurable or togglable 'Blackbody Glow'

[Gkirmathal]

Hey folks,

After a long time staying with 1.0.4 I decided to update last week.

While playing around I noticed something that for me is very immersion breaking in KSP, that is the newly introduced blackbody glow. For those who don't know what it is, it is that 'reddish shader/overlay' (not the heatmap texture!) for all parts when they start overheating.

Currently the shader effect starts even when an engine like the LVN is still 1500K away from it's max temperature, around 900K. From that to 2500K it glows, overlaying the models org engine heatmap. Which is tbh rather not a good looking combination.

 

My suggestion is to:

• make this effect configurable to a % of the max temp of a part
• make toggle-able like the F10/F11 overlay
• or to be able to completely disable it

 

 

On a personal note, to be honest the feeling is rather extreme, I find it so immersion breaking I'm contemplating to go back 1.0.4 and sadly miss out on all the good mods being released atm.

Edited February 5, 2016 by Gkirmathal
typo's

[hoojiwana]

There looks to be a couple of settings in the physics.cfg file that may be what you're after;

blackBodyRadiationMin = 798 // Temperature at which a part's thermal radiation becomes visibile
blackBodyRadiationMax = 7000 // Temperature at which the black body radiation gradient ends

If you wanted to increase the temperature where it appears just increase the first one, if you wanted to make it hide completely I suppose you could set the minimum to be the same as the maximum.

A setting in ModuleAnimateHeat for those parts that do use it to control emissives would be nice.

Edited February 5, 2016 by hoojiwana

[Gkirmathal]

You may have saved my 2 wasted day searching for a solution! Going to test it as I type. If it indeed works, I think it should become documented.

Yes, this indeed works like a charm. Good intermittent solution!

Setting it per part as you mention would be the best solution. Do you think this possibly can be done with a custom written plugin?

 

Edited February 5, 2016 by Gkirmathal

[John FX]

We could have a slider in options to say what percentage of the maximum heat you want to see visual heat effects. I would support that.

Myself I would set it at 75% or more.

Might go through some parts and see if I can cobble together a MM patch...

Shame you can`t have functions like `set min to 75% of max` unless you can of course. If you can I`d love to know.

[hoojiwana]

I'm not a plugin writer so I haven't the foggiest idea.

[Wjolcz]

The shader thing looks pretty bad IMO. At least for me. It looks as if someone suddenly covered the part with red, hot and still glowing melted glass.

Would rather see the emissives for all the parts. Not sure how RAM intensive that would be tho.

Edited February 5, 2016 by Veeltch

[Captain Sierra]

2 hours ago, Veeltch said:

The shader thing looks pretty bad IMO. At least for me. It looks as if someone suddenly covered the part with red, hot and still glowing melted glass.

Would rather see the emissives for all the parts. Not sure how RAM intensive that would be tho.

I find it decent for parts that dont have elegantly done custom emmissives. However, parts that do have well done emmissives get their eye candy ruined by this.

[Majorjim!]

On 02/05/2016 at 11:04 AM, Gkirmathal said:

Hey folks,

After a long time staying with 1.0.4 I decided to update last week.

While playing around I noticed something that for me is very immersion breaking in KSP, that is the newly introduced blackbody glow. For those who don't know what it is, it is that 'reddish shader/overlay' (not the heatmap texture!) for all parts when they start overheating.

Currently the shader effect starts even when an engine like the LVN is still 1500K away from it's max temperature, around 900K. From that to 2500K it glows, overlaying the models org engine heatmap. Which is tbh rather not a good looking combination.

 

My suggestion is to:

• make this effect configurable to a % of the max temp of a part
• make toggle-able like the F10/F11 overlay
• or to be able to completely disable it

 

 

On a personal note, to be honest the feeling is rather extreme, I find it so immersion breaking I'm contemplating to go back 1.0.4 and sadly miss out on all the good mods being released atm.

100% agree with you there. I really dislike that glowing texture. I would love to be able to adjust it or remove it entirely.

[Gkirmathal]

On 7-2-2016 at 3:15 AM, Majorjim said:

100% agree with you there. I really dislike that glowing texture. I would love to be able to adjust it or remove it entirely.

Take a look at Hoojiwana's post.

I adjusted the blackBodyRadiationMin to 1600 and blackBodyRadiationMax to 14000 in Physics.cfg. The effect is very nice and it results in hot running Nuclear engine's getting a much more subtitle glow effect.

Only con is that as this is a global variable, it effect all parts the same way. And if I am not mistaken this was introduce to give parts which have no heat map textures a heat-a-like effect. So changing blackBodyRadiationmin to a higher temp, makes parts which have a lower max temp not to glow at all.

What I really wonder is if this variable can be modded via a plugin?

[Majorjim!]

47 minutes ago, Gkirmathal said:

Take a look at Hoojiwana's post.

I adjusted the blackBodyRadiationMin to 1600 and blackBodyRadiationMax to 14000 in Physics.cfg. The effect is very nice and it results in hot running Nuclear engine's getting a much more subtitle glow effect.

Only con is that as this is a global variable, it effect all parts the same way. And if I am not mistaken this was introduce to give parts which have no heat map textures a heat-a-like effect. So changing blackBodyRadiationmin to a higher temp, makes parts which have a lower max temp not to glow at all.

What I really wonder is if this variable can be modded via a plugin?

I would rather have it off completely than have a cockpit glowing red hot.. It looks totally ridiculous. there must be a better way @SQUAD

[Gkirmathal]

3 hours ago, Majorjim said:

I would rather have it off completely than have a cockpit glowing red hot.. It looks totally ridiculous. there must be a better way @SQUAD

Be able to switch it "off" would be nice.

But as intermediate solution for now, to turn it "off" would be: set min/max temp to 14000.

There is nothing in KSP which can get that how anyway.

[Shadowmage]

Will second the ability to turn off black-body glow;  I had to hack around this when implementing a custom heatshield in my command pods (why would the whole pod glow when only the heat-shield was getting warm?).

For reference, this can be disabled quite easily through plugin code:

https://github.com/shadowmage45/SSTULabs/blob/master/Source/Module/SSTUHeatShield.cs#L141-L150

This merely comes in behind the stock material color updater (which runs in Update and/or FixedUpdate), and resets the color during the LateUpdate tick.  Hacky and inefficient, but does not effect any other parts that you might still want to glow.

 

[NathanKell]

Yep, difficulty noted.

[Whirligig Girl]

On 2/5/2016 at 8:23 AM, Veeltch said:

The shader thing looks pretty bad IMO. At least for me. It looks as if someone suddenly covered the part with red, hot and still glowing melted glass.

Would rather see the emissives for all the parts. Not sure how RAM intensive that would be tho.

Most importantly, yellow or white hot parts do not glow extremely brightly. The brightness of the glow seems to peak out at the point when the red starts becoming orange. In reality, the colors higher on the thermal spectrum glow much much brighter, not just a different color. Not to mention that sometimes a part that already has emmisives that would look great (like the LV-N Nuclear Thermal Rocket) gets the full-body red glow anyway! Additionally, a lot of emmissive textures never get to nice hit colors. The Space Shuttle Main Engine's inside gets white hot while it's burning, but the Vector has only a calm red glow at max thrust for several minutes. Even the Skipper and the Terrier get white hot if used long enough! (Even though they probably shouldn't, and neither should the Vector due to the fact that they're burning lower efficiency fuels than the liquid hydrogen we sometimes imagine it to be. Nonetheless they should all get nice and hot while running, especially the higher Isp ones.)