[1.12.x] Near Future Technologies (September 6)

[Superluminal Gremlin]

53 minutes ago, Nertea said:

different, extremely large project

We did it boys, KSP 3 is confirmed

Good to see NFS and NFLV getting some love, I never felt like they where super high priority projects. 

[Svm420]

1 hour ago, Nertea said:

...I'm working on a different, extremely large project at the moment so it's not a priority...

I am eagerly awaiting that large project. Please ignore and do not feed the troll(s) and do you. Very excited by the in progress work so far  

[DeadJohn]

1 hour ago, Nertea said:

I guess more time for people to be offended is good

You should become a moderator just so you can edit replies in this thread

[funnelton]

I wonder what the new project is!

Edited February 13 by funnelton

[GuessingEveryDay]

1 hour ago, funnelton said:

...So anyways, i wonder what the new project is!

Kitten Space Agency, I'm guessing. They have some of the old team from KSP2, and blackrack. Nertea was working on KSP2, so it would make sense that he would also help with KSA.

 

[Iapetus7342]

14 hours ago, Nertea said:

...the deprecated assets will remain, but I'll do things to them to discourage use. 

Do what?

[Pxtseryu]

12 hours ago, funnelton said:

I wonder what the new project is!

Hyper-customizable repaint options for KSP. Been in development for a little while now

[GuessingEveryDay]

41 minutes ago, Pxtseryu said:

Hyper-customizable repaint options for KSP. Been in development for a little while now

What? There's TURD... They don't have a ReStock config yet, but this seems to be the only guy who's working on it.

 

[funnelton]

1 hour ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

What? There's TURD... They don't have a ReStock config yet, but this seems to be the only guy who's working on it.

 

I think they're talking about Resurfaced, maybe, I dunno
 

 

[Nertea]

So, there's something that will probably be happening in the next set of NF updates. I will likely be moving all parts to a PBR workflow, which results in a far higher fidelity than the currently existing parts. This will introduce a hard dependency on Resurfaced, and a soft dependency on Deferred (because it won't look quite as good without that). This update would not be backwards compatible, as it requires reauthoring new textures and using new shaders that will not work in the older shading model. This wouldn't break crafts, but would not work well without the new dependencies. The existing mods in their current versions would still exist but any new development will only happen in the new workflow. 

Thoughts welcome. 

Here's some examples of how parts look in that context.

[funnelton]

6 minutes ago, Nertea said:

So, there's something that will probably be happening in the next set of NF updates. I will likely be moving all parts to a PBR workflow, which results in a far higher fidelity than the currently existing parts. This will introduce a hard dependency on Resurfaced, and a soft dependency on Deferred (because it won't look quite as good without that). This update would not be backwards compatible, as it requires reauthoring new textures and using new shaders that will not work in the older shading model. This wouldn't break crafts, but would not work well without the new dependencies. The existing mods in their current versions would still exist but any new development will only happen in the new workflow. 

Thoughts welcome. 

Here's some examples of how parts look in that context.

SHINY

[arbsoup]

I'm in the probably-very-small group that would rather this not be a priority (over e.g. balancing, new parts, optimization), since I'm both (1) too concerned about performance on low-end machines with what seems to be this new preferred TUFX+Deferred+Resurfaced landscape I haven't touched, and (2) using a wide variety of parts packs that already look different enough in art style and am worried that introducing multiple entire rendering schemes will make mismatched craft look even worse. But I admit I don't really know anything about how rendering in this game works. If there's good reasons to believe that there's actually little to no performance hit, and that only partially-updated craft won't be, say, reflecting light in totally different ways, then this is pretty cool and I'd support it.

Edited February 14 by arbsoup

[Nertea]

1 minute ago, arbsoup said:

I'm in the probably-very-small group that would rather this not be a priority (over e.g. balancing, new parts, optimization), since I'm both (1) too concerned about performance on low-end machines with what seems to be this new preferred TUFX+Preferred+Resurfaced landscape I haven't touched, and (2) using a wide variety of parts packs that already look different enough in art style and am worried that introducing multiple entire rendering schemes will make mismatched craft look even worse. But I admit I don't really know anything about how rendering in this game works. If there's good reasons to believe that there's actually no performance hit, and that only partially-updated craft won't be, say, reflecting light in totally different ways, then this is pretty cool and I'd support it.

I'm not really interested in making new stuff right now, if there's something in the optimization or balancing landscape that needs to be changed please let me know so I can look at it. 

I don't notice much if any performance impact from the new things on the garbage laptop (6+ years old now) I do all development on, at least not compared to scatterer, vol clouds, parallax, etc. The different finishes are an issue for sure, but I'm being quite careful to make sure the color balances are tuned so that most untouched parts with default settings are similar. Hers's an example.

[funnelton]

9 minutes ago, arbsoup said:

I'm in the probably-very-small group that would rather this not be a priority (over e.g. balancing, new parts, optimization), since I'm both (1) too concerned about performance on low-end machines with what seems to be this new preferred TUFX+Deferred+Resurfaced landscape I haven't touched, and (2) using a wide variety of parts packs that already look different enough in art style and am worried that introducing multiple entire rendering schemes will make mismatched craft look even worse. But I admit I don't really know anything about how rendering in this game works. If there's good reasons to believe that there's actually little to no performance hit, and that only partially-updated craft won't be, say, reflecting light in totally different ways, then this is pretty cool and I'd support it.

Now that you mention it, what does it look like with old parts who dont use Resurfaced?

[Iapetus7342]

23 minutes ago, Nertea said:

So, there's something that will probably be happening in the next set of NF updates. I will likely be moving all parts to a PBR workflow, which results in a far higher fidelity than the currently existing parts. This will introduce a hard dependency on Resurfaced, and a soft dependency on Deferred (because it won't look quite as good without that). This update would not be backwards compatible, as it requires reauthoring new textures and using new shaders that will not work in the older shading model. This wouldn't break crafts, but would not work well without the new dependencies. The existing mods in their current versions would still exist but any new development will only happen in the new workflow. 

Thoughts welcome. 

Here's some examples of how parts look in that context.

Ate and left no crumbs, as the new generation would say.

[Svm420]

57 minutes ago, Nertea said:

So, there's something that will probably be happening in the next set of NF updates. I will likely be moving all parts to a PBR workflow, which results in a far higher fidelity than the currently existing parts. This will introduce a hard dependency on Resurfaced, and a soft dependency on Deferred (because it won't look quite as good without that). This update would not be backwards compatible, as it requires reauthoring new textures and using new shaders that will not work in the older shading model. This wouldn't break crafts, but would not work well without the new dependencies. The existing mods in their current versions would still exist but any new development will only happen in the new workflow. 

Thoughts welcome.

Please don't let the old mods hold you back from making your mods better. If people want to use mods with less fidelity that's their choice. Progress >>>> the past  

[Hank Kerman]

On 2/12/2025 at 8:37 PM, Nertea said:

I'm working on a different, extremely large project at the moment so it's not a priority, plus I guess more time for people to be offended is good. 

Knowing the stuff you put out, I am certain it will be a banger.

[DareMightyThingsJPL]

4 hours ago, Nertea said:

4 hours ago, arbsoup said:

I'm in the probably-very-small group that would rather this not be a priority (over e.g. balancing, new parts, optimization), since I'm both (1) too concerned about performance on low-end machines with what seems to be this new preferred TUFX+Preferred+Resurfaced landscape I haven't touched, and (2) using a wide variety of parts packs that already look different enough in art style and am worried that introducing multiple entire rendering schemes will make mismatched craft look even worse. But I admit I don't really know anything about how rendering in this game works. If there's good reasons to believe that there's actually no performance hit, and that only partially-updated craft won't be, say, reflecting light in totally different ways, then this is pretty cool and I'd support it.

I'm not really interested in making new stuff right now, if there's something in the optimization or balancing landscape that needs to be changed please let me know so I can look at it. 

I don't notice much if any performance impact from the new things on the garbage laptop (6+ years old now) I do all development on, at least not compared to scatterer, vol clouds, parallax, etc. The different finishes are an issue for sure, but I'm being quite careful to make sure the color balances are tuned so that most untouched parts with default settings are similar. Hers's an example.

I think that the ideal outcome would be an optional patch (idk, something  with a name like 'Near Future Repolish') that adds the TUFX+Preferred+Resurfaced texture upgrades. It'd probably have to be it's own mod.

[Pxtseryu]

5 hours ago, Iapetus7342 said:

Ate and left no crumbs, as the new generation would say.

Close, we'd say it was skibidi sigma ohio rizz.

[arbsoup]

2 hours ago, DareMightyThingsJPL said:

I think that the ideal outcome would be an optional patch (idk, something  with a name like 'Near Future Repolish') that adds the TUFX+Preferred+Resurfaced texture upgrades. It'd probably have to be it's own mod.

That would mean having to maintain both sets for any visual bugs that come up, so I can see why it wouldn't be done. Ideal, sure, but maybe not optimal.

[SpudNutimus]

On 2/3/2025 at 2:41 PM, Nertea said:

I've kept this one around for vague(?) reasons - I can just swap the raptors out, the outer frame there wasn't based on anything in particular. So once the Raptor replacement comes in (trying to decide between a couple options) it's a drop in replacement. But if people prefer I'll cut that one out, easy enough. 

Small suggestion: if you want, you could replace the Deinonychus engine textures on the Tyrannosaur with the Vesuvius (without actually changing the engine stats) as an interim until the new engine parts are ready. I personally don't feel that strongly about the overall mod change either way, but it seems weird on an aesthetic level to leave a texture and part description in place which reference a no-longer-available engine. The Vesuvius is hydrolox, yes, but there have been proposed methalox variants of hydrolox engines IRL, so it's not the biggest stretch. Part name could be temporarily changed to "Krakatoa" or "Toba" or something to keep  with the volcano theme.

[NiL]

On 2/14/2025 at 10:47 PM, arbsoup said:

'm in the probably-very-small group that would rather this not be a priority (over e.g. balancing, new parts, optimization), since I'm both (1) too concerned about performance on low-end machines with what seems to be this new preferred TUFX+Deferred+Resurfaced landscape I haven't touched, and (2) using a wide variety of parts packs that already look different enough in art style and am worried that introducing multiple entire rendering schemes will make mismatched craft look even worse. But I admit I don't really know anything about how rendering in this game works. If there's good reasons to believe that there's actually little to no performance hit, and that only partially-updated craft won't be, say, reflecting light in totally different ways, then this is pretty cool and I'd support it.

Deferred doesn't work well on my machine, and Resurfaced causes texture issues with some mods on some settings (blankets on Boring Crew Services capsule, notably), but my problems are fairly specific, and I don't believe those problems would actually be fixed (Deferred seems to be a weird hardware/drivers issue). TUFX I do use but it's not something critical and would go first if I need optimisation. So I'm also not too stoked for this, as you defined it, new landscape, and with modded KSP moving towards higher required specs, more dependencies (remember when you only needed module manager to install tweakscale, pheh) and less stability in general. The growth of mod memory consumption is also a concern, basic Near Future pack already runs at, if memory serves me right, 3 gb or so, and if you want to have a planetpack or a couple more mods the GameData grows yet larger, not to mention graphics mods (which I would assume you just won't use at this point if you're concerned about performance). In something like 2017 I remember using a PC with 4 gb RAM for heavily modded KSP 1.3 and it was running fine (maybe not amazing but like, it worked), nowadays even 8 gb can feel constrained without a pagefile. Granted 4 gb is very much not a lot for a modern game, and most people have 8-16, but stock KSP on low settings runs on an abacus. Adding post-processing effects, shaders, etc doesn't make the situation better. 

I guess it would look cool at least, and if anything not updating to the PBR version is always an option...

[NiL]

On 2/15/2025 at 3:08 AM, DareMightyThingsJPL said:

I think that the ideal outcome would be an optional patch (idk, something  with a name like 'Near Future Repolish') that adds the TUFX+Preferred+Resurfaced texture upgrades. It'd probably have to be it's own mod.

Likely won't happen, but yeah, this would be the ideal outcome for a lot of people, I think. Besides performance there is visual compatability with other mods, though the whole restock aesthetic thing (which is awesome and must-have, don't get me wrong) kinda broke it anyway. On the topic of visual style btw, this all also raises the bar for beginner modders and makes the learning curve steeper. Not sure what to think on that last point, just an observation, I guess.  

[Nertea]

On 2/14/2025 at 5:08 PM, DareMightyThingsJPL said:

I think that the ideal outcome would be an optional patch (idk, something  with a name like 'Near Future Repolish') that adds the TUFX+Preferred+Resurfaced texture upgrades. It'd probably have to be it's own mod.

Yeah I definitely won't do both. Every asset needing to authored in 2 different workflows is a killer and just won't happen. 

18 hours ago, NiL said:

Deferred doesn't work well on my machine, and Resurfaced causes texture issues with some mods on some settings (blankets on Boring Crew Services capsule, notably), but my problems are fairly specific, and I don't believe those problems would actually be fixed (Deferred seems to be a weird hardware/drivers issue). TUFX I do use but it's not something critical and would go first if I need optimisation. So I'm also not too stoked for this, as you defined it, new landscape, and with modded KSP moving towards higher required specs, more dependencies (remember when you only needed module manager to install tweakscale, pheh) and less stability in general. The growth of mod memory consumption is also a concern, basic Near Future pack already runs at, if memory serves me right, 3 gb or so, and if you want to have a planetpack or a couple more mods the GameData grows yet larger, not to mention graphics mods (which I would assume you just won't use at this point if you're concerned about performance). In something like 2017 I remember using a PC with 4 gb RAM for heavily modded KSP 1.3 and it was running fine (maybe not amazing but like, it worked), nowadays even 8 gb can feel constrained without a pagefile. Granted 4 gb is very much not a lot for a modern game, and most people have 8-16, but stock KSP on low settings runs on an abacus. Adding post-processing effects, shaders, etc doesn't make the situation better. 

I can't disagree with some of that. I'd throw a couple notes on this.

•  Older mod versions would always continue to be fine. I don't actually make a lot of new content these days so by staying on those you're just... staying on those. 
•  In some cases, by doing this I'm actually decreasing RAM usage, by reducing the number of variant textures for different colours and finishes. For example, if this stuff was applied to SSPX we would delete a whole set of texture variants (probably a couple hundred MBs) as you wouldn't need one set anymore. That should help offset additional teamcolor/metalness maps. Otherwise, mod memory consumption directly scales to the number of parts (in a part mod context). If you want more content there, you get more memory use, sadly, regardless of the assset pipeline 
•  Anyone who can match my textures in blinn-phong can match them in PBR no trouble :D. 
•  My somewhat radical opinion about KSP stability these days is that it's driven by planet mods and the somewhat chaotic framework around those. There's so many planet mods that have different compatability needs with the collection of scatterer, EVE, EVEFancyPantsClouds, Kopernicus, Parallax1/2/3, ultra-high res texture packs, that I honestly can't keep it straight. This isn't a knock against all those mods, just there hasn't been a stable framework baseline for the planet content to work against. I'd love to get a community project together to build up and stabilize all that but it won't really work until the core authors actually stop delivering key new content

TUFX is not required at all in this set, by the way. 

 

[Squirrel Slapper]

On 2/12/2025 at 8:23 PM, Ryaja said:

I'm just pointing out an inconsistency between his expressed opinions and actions taken

You're screaming the Pledge of Allegiance at us out of a sense of duty to avenge some game files that still exist for free and have not been taken from you.

On 2/14/2025 at 8:47 PM, arbsoup said:

this new preferred TUFX+Deferred+Resurfaced landscape I haven't touched

Tried Deferred last night, only worked for a few minutes on my potato laptop but by god, it's the visual mod to end all visual mods, it makes things look like they're made of actual materials instead of code.