(UNRELEASED) Komorfia : Eye candy in KSP! : Development Thread

[Heirloom]

On 5/3/2019 at 12:22 AM, lukslu5 said:

Any new updates?

Yeah I made new textures for all of the celestial objects, but haven't made any screenshots yet as I'm still working on the terrain/closeup textures. I also made new Scatterer configs meaning that all of the atmospheres are recolored but I'm not too happy with them at the moment since the sky is still blue at a relatively high altitude compared to the stock scatterer config. But I do have some screenshots of my favorite scenes so far.

https://imgur.com/a/meWtjLD

 

Edited May 4, 2019 by Heirloom

[lukslu5]

18 hours ago, Heirloom said:

Yeah I made new textures for all of the celestial objects, but haven't made any screenshots yet as I'm still working on the terrain/closeup textures. I also made new Scatterer configs meaning that all of the atmospheres are recolored but I'm not too happy with them at the moment since the sky is still blue at a relatively high altitude compared to the stock scatterer config. But I do have some screenshots of my favorite scenes so far.

https://imgur.com/a/meWtjLD

 

Ok nice!Really good work...What about the Skybox?Will u make any high resolution Skybox?

[Heirloom]

4 hours ago, lukslu5 said:

Ok nice!Really good work...What about the Skybox?Will u make any high resolution Skybox?

I might.

[themaster401]

Looking phenomenal! Can't wait to see this in action

[KSPFanatic102]

Same as well!, this looks very promising!!

[Heirloom]

 

[Heirloom]

Hey guys. I'm trying something interesting and I would like everyone's opinion. I was thinking that Laythe should have aurora throughout the whole body, given the fact it is in Jool's Van Allen belt which if you're not aware, is a "zone of energetic charged particles mostly from solar wind". Since aurora form when said particles collide with particles in the atmosphere emitting photons, it'd seem nice and make sense for Laythe to have unique aurora as it's in the Van Allen belt. It might look a tad bit unrealistic, but in my opinion looks pretty nice. Plus, you never see green gas giants.  

[lukslu5]

1 hour ago, Heirloom said:

Hey guys. I'm trying something interesting and I would like everyone's opinion. I was thinking that Laythe should have aurora throughout the whole body, given the fact it is in Jool's Van Allen belt which if you're not aware, is a "zone of energetic charged particles mostly from solar wind". Since aurora form when said particles collide with particles in the atmosphere emitting photons, it'd seem nice and make sense for Laythe to have unique aurora as it's in the Van Allen belt. It might look a tad bit unrealistic, but in my opinion looks pretty nice. Plus, you never see green gas giants.  

It looks cool and weird at the same time...Can't decide!

[Krzysztof z Bagien]

Maybe you should make auroras a little less obvious and in different color? Red or orange?

[lukslu5]

4 hours ago, Krzysztof z Bagien said:

Maybe you should make auroras a little less obvious and in different color? Red or orange?

Ya...make them more transparent

Edited May 7, 2019 by lukslu5

[Heirloom]

6 hours ago, Krzysztof z Bagien said:

Maybe you should make auroras a little less obvious and in different color? Red or orange?

Red or orange would look nice but because Laythes sunsets are now red due to the more turquoise atmosphere, it wouldn’t really look nice at the terminator. But i’ll try making it a bit more subtle by decreasing the transparency.

[PartiallyBurnt]

How did you add the kerbal footprint functionality?

[Heirloom]

Just now, PartiallyBurnt said:

How did you add the kerbal footprint functionality?

KopernicusExpansion + custom configs for the planets

[Red Stapler]

On 5/7/2019 at 3:57 AM, Heirloom said:

Hey guys. I'm trying something interesting and I would like everyone's opinion. I was thinking that Laythe should have aurora throughout the whole body, given the fact it is in Jool's Van Allen belt which if you're not aware, is a "zone of energetic charged particles mostly from solar wind". Since aurora form when said particles collide with particles in the atmosphere emitting photons, it'd seem nice and make sense for Laythe to have unique aurora as it's in the Van Allen belt. It might look a tad bit unrealistic, but in my opinion looks pretty nice. Plus, you never see green gas giants.  

Looks very cool and exotic!  I do agree with the other's who responded...change the color to a burn orange and make the aurora a bit more transparent (just a bit though).  Also, maybe lower the elevation of the aurora a bit?  When it's at the north/south pole it's elevation is not as noticeable, but when all over the planet, it looks a little out of place...but that could just be me being me.    Of course, cloud layers/heights may limit what you can do.   Wonder what it would look like below a cloud layer (or in between if you have a few)?

If I can help test configs/effects/images, let me know.   I usually have time in the eves once the kiddo's are off to sleepyland.

Edited May 8, 2019 by Red Stapler

[A Random Kerbonaut]

Bootiful

[Heirloom]

5 hours ago, Red Stapler said:

Looks very cool and exotic!  I do agree with the other's who responded...change the color to a burn orange and make the aurora a bit more transparent (just a bit though).  Also, maybe lower the elevation of the aurora a bit?  When it's at the north/south pole it's elevation is not as noticeable, but when all over the planet, it looks a little out of place...but that could just be me being me.    Of course, cloud layers/heights may limit what you can do.   Wonder what it would look like below a cloud layer (or in between if you have a few)?

If I can help test configs/effects/images, let me know.   I usually have time in the eves once the kiddo's are off to sleepyland.

Thanks, I’ll take that into consideration. I’ll need some testers soon anyways to test performance and stuff, but not at the moment as I’m still working on the terrain (kopernicus hates me , trying to eliminate the fading between space and terrain but i’m not liking what i’m getting). If anyone is interesting in testing Komorfia give me a PM.

[dxeh]

i....

need....

this....

[Gameslinx]

On 5/7/2019 at 11:57 AM, Heirloom said:

I'm trying something interesting and I would like everyone's opinion. I was thinking that Laythe should have aurora throughout the whole body, given the fact it is in Jool's Van Allen belt which if you're not aware, is a "zone of energetic charged particles mostly from solar wind"

I already do this on Laythe in Beyond Home and Eden in Before Kerbin but go ahead. If the effect looks nice i'll give it a pass

 

Also, the swirly-laythe-clouds cliche is here. I really hope those clouds on Kerbin aren't the ones from the visible earth website, AKA, the earth clouds that almost everyone uses in their visual mods...

Finally, 64k clouds are completely unnecessary. Rest in piece everyone's memory. You only need 8k tops. The extra detail comes from an EVE detail texture, which significantly reduces the memory usage over using 64k clouds to achieve the same effect.

I don't want to slam this visual mod without playing it myself, but there are a lot of the same elements as others and a lack of originality. Does this offer something the others don't? I am not seeing anything new being tried here.

I look forward to seeing what happens with this mod but please do consider what i've said because so many people make the same mistakes and get nowhere.

[Heirloom]

@Gameslinx thanks for your feedback.

 

The swirly clouds, in my opinion, are the only decent-looking clouds which work well for Laythe. If I used generic or stable clouds, it would look rather boring. The swirly clouds make Laythe look more dramatic and different from Kerbin. Since Kerbin is akin to Earth in many of its properties other than size, it would be appropriate to use Earth-style clouds for Kerbin. Those clouds, in my opinion, look the best for a terrestrial planet with lots of water. I've also had some people saying that these are one of the best clouds for Kerbin they've ever seen. As to the 64K clouds...

 

When reduced to 32K, the performance and memory impact of the clouds were very minimal. With Komorfia installed, only 4GB of RAM was used and performance was very smooth on my rig. Given that the average PC nowadays has more RAM than this, I believe that any modern PC should be able to run this. Many people that play games also have a decent PC, meaning that performance would improve more. One of the problems with 8K is that although it looks nice from the surface, pixelation is evident from the surface and low orbit.

 

Putting a detail texture doesn't help that much; it's like getting a low poly model and slapping ultra-high res textures on it. You have blocky clouds and then inside that, you have tiled up smaller clouds which are cut off on the edge. Plus detail textures aren't that realistic in my opinion and make volumetrics look weird. That's why I used a super subtle detail texture in Komorfia. Plus many of the beta testers have noted that the performance impact was very minimal after removing the planet textures.

 

There are also various features I have never seen in other visual packs which I plan on including.

 

 

[Gameslinx]

3 hours ago, Heirloom said:

Putting a detail texture doesn't help that much; it's like getting a low poly model and slapping ultra-high res textures on it. You have blocky clouds and then inside that, you have tiled up smaller clouds which are cut off on the edge. Plus detail textures aren't that realistic in my opinion and make volumetrics look weird

Not if done correctly. RE: Stock Visual Enhancements, and my visuals in Beyond Home.

And no, the mod doesn't use 4GB of RAM, it uses 8. You said so on the forum thread, which means people will need more than 8GB of ram, and that is not particularly common amongst ksp players. KSP is really not a very graphically demanding game, so there are a lot of people who don't have an amazing rig to play it. 

The mod looks good, but the swirly clouds on Laythe are cliche and also look like a space engine export, I can't tell if it's been edited or not. 

I just hope there's gonna be new stuff. The planet wide aurora are my signature thing in 2 of my mods, and one of them is on Laythe already. So nothing new there. There's no motivation for me to choose this mod over AVP or Spectra or SVE or GEA or KSPRC or... You get what I mean, there's so many of these out there already. I just hope there's something new being tried here.

[Heirloom]

@Gameslinx

 

8 hours ago, Heirloom said:

When reduced to 32K, the performance and memory impact of the clouds were very minimal.

When I compressed the textures to 32K and removed some useless textures, the performance was instantly improved and RAM usage was cut in half. Most people have at least 4GB of RAM. Before Kerbin uses more RAM than this.

 

The Laythe clouds are a modified cloud map from some photoshop plugin (LunarCell I believe). I added some extra clouds and reduced the original amount of swirly clouds.

 

I respect your opinion, but that is your opinion. There are people out there who are excited for my mod, just like how there are people excited for your mod(s). All of the textures in Komorfia are unique by the way; all of the textures are mine and aren't present in any other packs. Now I don't want to sound hostile, but by your logic, why should I play your planet pack when there are probably a hundred other packs which I can download?  I mean like sure, whole planet aurorae are cool. But visuals shouldn't be the selling point for a mod which is designed to change gameplay. Again, not trying to be hostile, but I'm just sharing my opinion.

 

 

[Poodmund]

9 hours ago, Heirloom said:

@Gameslinx (sorry mobile sucks and cannot delete the ping from a quote... @ManeTI please fix this! This WYSIWYG editor is garbage! Why can I not delete a tag on Android?) - Poodmund

-- ACTUAL QUOTE BELOW--

Putting a detail texture doesn't help that much; it's like getting a low poly model and slapping ultra-high res textures on it.

So you've never heard of the concept 'level of detail'... this is exactly what all games do do. Take some of the best looking mods out there for KSP for example, Nertea's work, they all use more simplified meshes then utilise normal maps to infer more geometric detail.

The same is done via the detail texture system with EVE. Have a large, tillable, highly detailed detail texture and let that render on a much lower resolution main texture mask. If you believe that this method doesn't function properly then you probably have your fade values badly set up and the detail textures are not rendering in from far enough away.

Edited May 23, 2019 by Poodmund

[KerbalKore]

@Gameslinx maybe form an opinion after you play it once it's out. I've seen your criticisms of kottabos reviewing planet packs, you're behaving exactly like him.

[Gameslinx]

14 hours ago, Bill the Kerbal said:

@Gameslinx maybe form an opinion after you play it once it's out. I've seen your criticisms of kottabos reviewing planet packs, you're behaving exactly like him.

That is why I said I'd "I don't want to slam this visual mod without playing it" and then "I do look forward to seeing what happens with this mod". I also provided some criticism and solutions, because a lot of people fall into the same pitfalls and I don't want to see someone else make the same mistake.

And yes, perhaps I'm not seeing the full picture having not played it, but from what I've seen I'm seeing a lot of familiar stuff. My opinion may change once it's released.

Also, my criticism of kottabos' reviews are because there's more to planets than just looking at them. There's gameplay behind them and there's surface features. That's why I specifically did not mention anything to do with the surface here, because I've not played the mod not really seen the surface, but I have seen the cloud maps that look the same as the 5 mods before this. 

[KerbalKore]

What I mean is that, just like he forms his opinions regarding planets without interacting and exploring, you formed your opinion only be looking at very early development images.