Essential beautification mods

[Goody1981]

Hi everyone....so, I'm an idiot. Around 6 months ago I took my PC into the high school where I work (physics teacher) to use it to teach orbital mechanics to my class. Worked a treat, had the PC there for about 1-2 weeks, kids loved it, then brought it home. When I put it back together in its usual place, KSP performance had dropped noticeably. I tried uninstalling/reinstalling, removing mods, nothing seemed to fix it. I assumed there had been an auto-update, and that KSP had finally progressed beyond the capabilities of my old(ish) PC. I've got thousands of hours in the game, and I tend to dip in and out, so I just shrugged my shoulders and went surfing for 6 months.

Then, yesterday, my brother was installing a wireless card and casually mentioned that I had my monitor plugged into my motherboard instead of the graphics card ... safe to say I'm no computer genius.

ANYWAY...Now that I know my computer can run it, I'm jumping back in. My style of KSP is playing with as much prettiness as possible. My PC had no issues running SVE + scatterer 6 months ago. But I've been away a little while, and possibly the beautification landscape has changed?

My standards were (and hopefully will be again):

• Distant Object Enhancement
• Planetshine
• Stock Visual Enhancements
• Scatterer
• Real Plume (so much love for this mod)
• Texture replacer
• Windowshine

Am I missing anything amazing? I've heard of Spectra, but not sure how that fits with SVE. And also confused as to the current state of EVE vs SVE (my vague memory is that SVE = EVE + scatterer?). Also on the lookout for the best skybox out there.

 

Thanks!!

 

[Starman4308]

2 hours ago, Goody1981 said:

Then, yesterday, my brother was installing a wireless card and casually mentioned that I had my monitor plugged into my motherboard instead of the graphics card ... safe to say I'm no computer genius.
 

This reminds me of when I bought a new gaming laptop and proceeded to press the button forcing it to stay on the CPU integrated graphics instead of its GTX 660M dedicated graphics.

You might also try Ven's Stock Part Revamp for revamped stock part textures (YMMV), and there's this KS3P thing that adds Unity post-processing effects:

 

[Goody1981]

9 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

This reminds me of when I bought a new gaming laptop and proceeded to press the button forcing it to stay on the CPU integrated graphics instead of its GTX 660M dedicated graphics.

You might also try Ven's Stock Part Revamp for revamped stock part textures (YMMV), and there's this KS3P thing that adds Unity post-processing effects:

 

Thanks very much - will check this mod out! I’ve used Ven’s Stock Revamp before, and it’s amazing (hard to go back to stock Mk I pod after his version)