Enhancing the World Terrains

[Jatwaa]

Since the game is in Unity, I wonder how much effort it would take to enable such as the below in the worlds

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/ultimate-terrains-voxel-terrain-engine-31100

With the vegetation and possibilities of adding caves, destructible terrain, and randomization this could be a fun and unique way to put a spin on the existing game. 

Imagine starting with a default Seed and then offering random seeded worlds which can be shared and explored in the community. Infinite adventures and places to see and still with the vanilla terrain available just a seed away

Edited February 1, 2019 by Jatwaa

[The Aziz]

A lot. All of those examples are made on flat world. Thus, due to the way the planets in KSP are created, caves and anything that has "ground" below ground is not possible to make.
Besides, this game already needs enough resources to work (though most of them are RAM and CPU), adding even more for GPU to process would end badly.

[panzer1b]

Personally id be perfectly happy if they did a minor detail pass on the current terrains to make them a bit more vairable as with some exceptions, planets lack detail on the small scale.  We have large mountains and valleys and a good mix between hilly and flat terrain, but almost all of these details are on a scale that can be seen from orbit, and when it comes to landing on the surface the detail seen nearby the tanks/bunkers is very lacking.  The ground debris help this issue a bit, but its no replacement for properly done small scale details like dips and raises in terrain that cannot be realistically spotted from orbit but would make land warfare err roving around less monotonous.

Another thing (on kerbin) that could be fixed is the broken ice shelf which both looks like garbage from the air, and breaks any sort of immersion up close.  Its so aliased on the edge (just fly north of KSC  along coast and you will see what i mean when you near the pole) that is looks absolutely disgusting.  Again, not expecting miracles, but at the least something needs to be done to break up that square edge issue.

Finally, the planets are in major need or some texture overhauls, given how much blatantly obvious tiling is present on many worlds.  Specifically looking at the ocean of laythe is just miserable.  I have scatterer so it doesnt affect me per say, but it does for those that play stock, and if the tiley oceans werent a thing id be able to save some frames by disabling that part of scatterer.

 

Asking for a land overhaul like in the OP is just not feaseable without a major engine change/overhaul, and given how far along in development KSP has come, i seriously doubt the devs are even willing to consider such an undertaking (which would probably take more then a year of purely working on it).  That said, minor things like improving micro details of planet surfaces while giving planets half decent textures that arent super tiley while flying above the land would go a really long way to making KSP vastly better then it is now...

[Fraktal]

1 hour ago, panzer1b said:

Another thing (on kerbin) that could be fixed is the broken ice shelf which both looks like garbage from the air, and breaks any sort of immersion up close.  Its so aliased on the edge (just fly north of KSC  along coast and you will see what i mean when you near the pole) that is looks absolutely disgusting.  Again, not expecting miracles, but at the least something needs to be done to break up that square edge issue.

Don't forget how you can be standing a hundred meters away from the edge of the shelf, yet the game still says you are standing on the ocean. The biome border does not line up with the edge of the shelf whatsoever.

[Duck McFuddle]

This would make the game much slower, but I would love it if this happened. Destructible terrain would be fun.

[KerikBalm]

Well, right now the game sort of supports 2-3 "surfaces" on a planet: an atmosphere, an ocean, and the ground. If we could have 3 terrain layers, maybe we could make simple underground caverns...

Something like: surface, cave roof, cave floor terrains.

But changing the planets to voxel terrain would require redoing the game all over again, as far as I understand