Should SQUAD make parts shiny and reflective?

[Triop]

Kod, no . . .

I remember racegames with "shiny" cars....brrrrrrr

Edit: did you ever see a kerbal wash his craft ?

Edited March 4, 2016 by Triop

[Azimech]

12 hours ago, Stone Blue said:

Absolutely NOT!!... Shiny would no fit in with the aesthetics & feel of the game

You mean in your idea of how the game should look & feel.

[Mastikator]

12 hours ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

...Are rockets normally shiny? I think it'd be cool to have things like cockpit windows glimmer in the sun, but not stuff like reflections and the like.

Spoiler

I don't know if rockets are shiny but the payload usually has shiny parts.

[regex]

I'd prefer a matte finish but am not opposed to old-school Atlas shiny.  Dirty and rusty?  No, you don't send that sort of hardware into space.

Edited March 4, 2016 by regex

[HDxC]

Unity 5 has a PBR system. How it works? You give it the object's physical properties (how metallic and smooth it is) and it gives you an in-game version of that thing in real world. So if that part is shiny irl, it should be shiny in KSP, and doing it in Unity 5 is easy as pie.

[Atlas2342]

I say no except for solar panels and windows...

[nobodyhasthis2]

KSP 1.2 will bring eye candy. Although ironically we used to have a mod for this 

[Azimech]

During four decades, it was pretty common for US craft to have a polished aluminium skin.

And even today some parts are still being polished.

"Most maintenance shops will never get asked to polish an entire airframe, but there is a good chance you will need to polish leading edges and inlets on a business jet. This is not just for looks, said Ricky Waldrup, owner of Great Lakes Aircraft Detailing. "The high temperatures achieved by heated leading edges can promote corrosion. So while metal polishing may seem purely cosmetic, it is really a valuable part of preventative maintenance.""

Personally ... I feel there's nothing more beautiful than a properly done bird with the light-blueish mirror-like reflection of aluminium. And would I want my entire space & flight program like that?

Yes!

Anything better than white, gray and black.

 

[Motokid600]

To things like windows, solar panels and tanks with mylar insulation? Absolutely.

[Joonatan1998]

I think some parts already are reflective. (MK 2 lander can?)

Making things like windows reflective would be nice, but please don't make everything shiny.

Making it depend on the graphics settings would also be nice.

[Wolfdog]

As long as there is an option to toggle old graphics, I support the idea.

Edited March 8, 2016 by Wolfdog
opinion change

[Daeridanii]

What I would love would be shiny engine parts and stuff, a bit like KSPRC adds, but hopefully without the RAM chomping.

 

[Tex]

I support glare off of windows, possibly some visor reflections too as being stock, but having a large shiny part like that Mk1-2 command pod would definitely be a strain on graphics.

[mattinoz]

On 3/3/2016 at 5:50 AM, KerBlammo said:

Shiny good.  Explosions bad.

Explosions?

Do the reflecting parts lose the will to live and spontaneously combust.

[AlamoVampire]

shiney parts? reflective parts? i say YES, where it would be appropriate of course. windows, metal bits and bobs, solar arrays etc.

[nobodyhasthis2]

Still not many FASA players posting here 

The capability for shiney parts have been around for quite a while. As far as I know only FASA has the reflections mod as a dependency. For an important historical reason. The Mercury Atlas. The actual mod is found here  http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/63612-reflection-plugin-continued-0242/&page=9

Apart from the FASA build. I don't think the mod was ever given much use. It is something that will probably be revisited in the proposal for the KSP 1.2 update. 

 

Edited March 7, 2016 by nobodyhasthis2

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

I would like anyone to name a shiny rocket (not a sounding rocket) that has been made, besides the Mercury Atlas launcher

[StarManta]

Right now, KSP is still using the older shaders/materials, and probably will for a while. Unity 5 introduces new Physically Based Rendering materials, which have "shininess" builtin - you could literally write a slider to make a part more matte-finished and less shiny, and vice versa. With reflection probes*, these would properly reflect the world around them, at least in terms of planets and the cosmos. (self-reflection is still a pipe dream for realtime graphics) Even better, even matte-finish parts would benefit - they would reflect Jool's green or Duna's red without the need for a PlanetShine-like workaround, and they would even correctly (and subtly) reflect greenish or blueish as you fly over grassland or ocean on Kerbin. And it does all of that pretty darn efficiently - it's definitely slower than the classical shader model, but overall you probably wouldn't be looking at more than 10-30% more work per frame for the GPU. (And GPU's are almost never the bottleneck for KSP performance anyway.) At worst, I'd expect that your 30fps game would drop to 25fps, but if you have a good video card, you probably wouldn't notice any change in framerate. Every part could be a seamless blend or matte and shiny bits and everything in between. Your solar panels could have shiny blueish glass bits, metallic bits, and matte plastic bits, all rendered in a single material. Same for capsules. Also, Unity's material supports masking out a smaller repeating texture/bump map in specific areas, so you could have e.g. a highly detailed wrinkly aluminum foil look (yes, including the gold tint) integrated seamlessly into the broader texture map.

And it would look incredible. There's no two ways about this. It's probably one of the few aesthetic choices that universally looks better, with the only possible exceptions being cartoon-like games. (And even then, a lot of modern cartoony games have realistic aesthetics that would look great with PBR, so "but Kerbals are cartoony" does not qualify as a reason not to use PBR - the Kerbals would look better with PBR, too.)

* Reflection probes aren't cheap to render, but on this scale reflections don't change very often - Squad could set reflection probe re-renders to happen at any interval they like, and might even be able to spread the work over several frames.

"So flip the switch already, Squad!" I can hear you saying. But, there is a catch. PBR materials use none of the same input textures as the classical shader model. The normal maps are almost the same, but even they would undoubtedly require tweaking. In order to take advantage of PBR, Squad would have to redraw every texture in the game. (Technically they could do it piecewise, but that would look pretty darn awkward to combine the two aesthetics.) This would probably occupy one artist for years, so in order to get this done without crippling other visual tasks, my guess is they'd have to hire more artists just for this (I don't think Squad has multiple texture artists on staff, but I could be wrong).

Squad have probably considered all of this, and I'm sure they've made their own decision on whether the improved look would be worth the design time. I can only guess - I suspect it'll be something they do as part of a larger graphics pass on the game as a whole... eventually.

[fireblade274]

You should have just made a poll for this

 

I would like to say I think the windows should be transparent and we should be able to see inside the cockpit

Edited March 7, 2016 by fireblade274

[StarManta]

2 minutes ago, TheCanadianVendingMachine said:

I would like anyone to name a shiny rocket (not a sounding rocket) that has been made, besides the Mercury Atlas launcher

Rockets? I got nothing. But KSP is far more than just rockets: Solar panels. The foil on the LEM. The skin of the Command Module, as posted earlier in the thread. Spacesuit helmets. Windows on every module and capsule.

[tater]

24 minutes ago, TheCanadianVendingMachine said:

I would like anyone to name a shiny rocket (not a sounding rocket) that has been made, besides the Mercury Atlas launcher

Shiny doesn't mean "polished metal." It merely means smooth, and polished. I don't need to name specific rockets, I would simply name nearly ALL rockets as "shiny." They are polished. 

This is shiny:

 

Also shiny:

 

Guess what? Shiny.

[Ten Key]

37 minutes ago, TheCanadianVendingMachine said:

I would like anyone to name a shiny rocket (not a sounding rocket) that has been made, besides the Mercury Atlas launcher

The Titan II had some fairly reflective sections in it. 

[Nothalogh]

On 3/3/2016 at 1:41 PM, Joco223 said:

As the thread name says. Should SQUAD implement shine and reflections to parts like Texture Replacer allows you to?

Yes

[NoMrBond]

7 hours ago, TheCanadianVendingMachine said:

I would like anyone to name a shiny rocket (not a sounding rocket) that has been made, besides the Mercury Atlas launcher

Zenit (YDB - Russia)

PSLV (ISRO)

Electron (New Zealand - Rocket Lab)

Angara (KBKhA - Russia)

 

[TeeGee]

How about see through windows? Can we have that instead?