Planet Mod Maker- an easy way to make mods

[kspnerd122]

make a planet modding system to the game, this would first off, make it so anybody can make a planet mod rather than a select few.

makes modding much more fun.

[Miguelsgamingch]

It sounds like to be similiar to kerbal konstructs but

instead of building launchpads or base's, you will build planets.

A Very Interesting Idea.

[catloaf]

I think (never tried it myself) that Kopernicus planets are easy to add because they're config based. So you don't even have to be very good at coding. However, the real skill and time comes from making good textures, surface scatteres, eve and scatterer support, etc. This is why there are a few well known planet packs (Beyond Home, Extrasolar, JNSQ, GPP) and visual packs (Astronomers, KSPRC, Spectra, SVE) and too many terrible space engine packs /stolen assets. So what would be really useful would be a place to download working planets to use as a base, and tools designed for editing large scale textures spheres, and editing Kopernicus configs. So let's say I want to add a planet called Dres in between the orbits of Duna and Jool. First I would go grab a config to add a copy of the Mün to use as my base. I would put the config in the planet editor and I could see it's surface and stats, I could rotate my camera, just like the map view and edit the stats to my liking. The I could use tools to edit the heightmap, color-map, ocean height, etc. And I would see the model change. Then when I was done I could just export in and download a zip file with the working planet config and drop it in gamedata. And if squad added stock Kopernicus support, which is long overdue and is almost a requirement in ksp2. Adding a custom planet editor website / application would be incredible. And not to give squad ideas, but it's so good that I would pay 15$ for.it and be a lot happier then just getting a few poorly made mod clones for the money (cough cough BDB, making history.) Although it probably wouldn't be worth it without eve and scatterer support. So a free, open source community made one would be 10³ times better.

[kspnerd122]

that is what i meant, a way to make a copy of a stock planet, and edit it to your liking.

[DunaManiac]

there is something similar, KittopiaTech, Link below, but it's only for 1.8.1 and probably requires the original kopernius, I haven't tested it with the new one.

Anyways, it allows you to edit the stats of a planet in the game, such as mass, radius, orbit, PQS, even textures to a limited degree, and you can export it as a config file when you're done.

[Caps Lock]

On 7/31/2020 at 12:30 AM, kspnerd122 said:

that is what i meant, a way to make a copy of a stock planet, and edit it to your liking.

that is literally exactly word for word what you do when modding planets with kopernicus, the only problem is that nobody cares to explain how to use kopernicus

[Bej Kerman]

31 minutes ago, Gjaspar said:

On 7/30/2020 at 11:30 PM, kspnerd122 said:

that is what i meant, a way to make a copy of a stock planet, and edit it to your liking.

that is literally exactly word for word what you do when modding planets with kopernicus, the only problem is that nobody cares to explain how to use kopernicus

Except the comment they're referring to talks about an external graphical interface.

[R-T-B]

8 hours ago, Gjaspar said:

that is literally exactly word for word what you do when modding planets with kopernicus, the only problem is that nobody cares to explain how to use kopernicus

There is a wiki.  It's a little outdated, but mostly works.  It still assumes some knowledge.  We have an issue for documentation open:

https://kopernicus.github.io/wiki/

https://github.com/R-T-B/Kopernicus/issues/12

8 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Except the comment they're referring to talks about an external graphical interface.

Honestly it would be hard because there are so many options in Kopernicus.  I won't do it personally, but someone could make a basic one with the basic properties pretty easily if they cared too.  No need to reinvent the wheel.

[kspnerd122]

What I mean is start with a stock planet, and then in some form of editor, design it by adding terrain mountains biomes etc. essentially it lets you paint what the planet would look like instead of having to provide color, biome and sometimes hight maps. my idea is you create the planet from at template or a blank slate, then you can do what you please(there would be blank rocky planet with atmosphere, without an atmosphere, and gas giant and star templates, so you could make a basic mod in a few hours instead of months, also this would be supported by the devs so you would not need to wait for koperincus to update before you could play the next version(I'm still on 1.8.1 where my mods still work) this would mean that people who install mods would not be locked on old versions of the game, and instead, could freely move to the next version.

[JadeOfMaar]

Sorry for the necropost. I believe the ideal in-game planet editor would be one that resembles that of Universe Sandbox but also has granular tools for producing procedural planets or their textures, and is able to accept external textures and use them as a base for producing other procedural textures. 

Biome maps will remain a tall hurdle on their own to jump, to make, because there are a few unique ways to approach a given biome and its unique purpose. 

 

[kspnerd122]

Its fine, but what I mean is that there is a graphical interface for this, then you can set biomes and name them(there would be a biome view which shows you the biomes, then, just paint on the biomes as you please(auto biomes would exist too, it would put highlands, midlands, lowlands, oceans(if any), then, you can rename them as well as add your own, textures would be easier as well, also, maybe there could be an ocean color editor, as well as the ability to make them any temp/density, so for example, I wanted to make a planet closer than moho that has lava oceans on the side facing the sun, and has no atmosphere, well change the color and temp of the oceans, as well as design the rest of the planet(and its orbit, which you can actually see, unlike in kopernicus, you can also raise and lower terrain, as well as alter size, and gravity.

[DunaManiac]

4 hours ago, kspnerd122 said:

Its fine, but what I mean is that there is a graphical interface for this, then you can set biomes and name them(there would be a biome view which shows you the biomes, then, just paint on the biomes as you please(auto biomes would exist too, it would put highlands, midlands, lowlands, oceans(if any), then, you can rename them as well as add your own, textures would be easier as well, also, maybe there could be an ocean color editor, as well as the ability to make them any temp/density, so for example, I wanted to make a planet closer than moho that has lava oceans on the side facing the sun, and has no atmosphere, well change the color and temp of the oceans, as well as design the rest of the planet(and its orbit, which you can actually see, unlike in kopernicus, you can also raise and lower terrain, as well as alter size, and gravity.

I mean, that's fine and dandy, but when it comes to actually making textures, it takes a lot of practice.

It's a long road from this:

To this:

[kerbiloid]

(Anyway nobody will do this, like always, but) maybe a hex mosaic editor?

Split the sphere into hexes (like in Kethane but with larger tiles,  say 500 km to contain the Olympus Mons).

Make several (tens) standard types of hexes like "plains 1", "plains 2", "crater 1", "crater 2", etc.
Make them flat and autogenerated. The textures, too. So, you can edit them not on a sphere, but on a plane.

Tile the planet with random hex tiles (no ocean, just ground).
(Now the hexes get curved but this doesn't matter for you.)

Make the neighboring tiles proportionally autoadjust their vertices heights.

Let the user select any hex and rotate it by 60° steps or replace with any other type of tiles.
The operation should readjust the vertices of the edited and neighboring tiles.

Set the ocean level. Make the underwater places underwater.

Apply climatic modifier to the ground regions to make the textures be snowy, sandy, muddy, grassy, etc.
So, technical monocolored textures"substance 1", "substance 2" get replaced with actual textures.

Join the hexes in one texture. The audoadjusted tile meshes, too.

Export the joined texture and the planet definition to Kopernicus.

Edited November 13, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Clamp-o-Tron]

12 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

(Anyway nobody will do this, like always, but) maybe a hex mosaic editor?

Split the sphere into hexes (like in Kethane but with larger tiles,  say 500 km to contain the Olympus Mons).

Make several (tens) standard types of hexes like "plains 1", "plains 2", "crater 1", "crater 2", etc.
Make them flat and autogenerated. The textures, too. So, you can edit them not on a sphere, but on a plane.

Tile the planet with random hex tiles (no ocean, just ground).
(Now the hexes get curved but this doesn't matter for you.)

Make the neighboring tiles proportionally autoadjust their vertices heights.

Let the user select any hex and rotate it by 60° steps or replace with any other type of tiles.
The operation should readjust the vertices of the edited and neighboring tiles.

Set the ocean level. Make the underwater places underwater.

Apply climatic modifier to the ground regions to make the textures be snowy, sandy, muddy, grassy, etc.
So, technical monocolored textures"substance 1", "substance 2" get replaced with actual textures.

Join the hexes in one texture. The audoadjusted tile meshes, too.

Export the joined texture and the planet definition to Kopernicus.

Civ 5?

[kerbiloid]

13 minutes ago, Clamp-o-Tron said:

Civ 5?

Idk, didn't play Civ since DOS.

[The Aziz]

On 11/13/2020 at 10:41 AM, kerbiloid said:

(Anyway nobody will do this, like always, but) maybe a hex mosaic editor?

Why do the hexes and convert them into rectangles (that's how the surface in the game works) if you can start with rectangles.

[kerbiloid]

10 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Why do the hexes and convert them into rectangles (that's how the surface in the game works) if you can start with rectangles.

Hexes of same size can cover a sphere without gaps, unlike the rectangles.

See Kethane mod as example of such hex grid.

[JadeOfMaar]

@kerbiloid A hexagon-based terrain generator really seems like it would introduce a whole new breed of planet designs and could quickly get awkward being used in parallel with/beside KSP's existing convention for choosing and lying out geological features. There's the new issue of having terrain features compartmentalized like this could get stale fast unless someone first belches out a very, very wide repository of preset tiles for things. And that too would be a huge task like:

• Mountain range
• Mountains with desert plains and dunes
• Mountains with surrounding hills
• Mountains with an intersecting canyon (and how many way the canyon intersects them)
• Mountains with a crater
• Mountains with a river
• Mountains with a valley

And that's just mountains. And each of these options would need to magically blend into each other after being placed as there's no way to build them to lego together perfectly in absolutely every combination.

I think I can see other issues but this would be a very interesting and welcome thing to have, once done properly.

[kerbiloid]

38 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

And that's just mountains.

Heroes Of Might and Magic were solving this even with sprites.

Merging the height maps of neighboring hexes look solvable from my amateur pov.

Also there are games with procedural 3d maps looking not worse than KSP.
(Let alone the voxel From Dust.)

Edited November 15, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Incarnation of Chaos]

23 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Heroes Of Might and Magic were solving this even with sprites.

Merging the height maps of neighboring hexes look solvable from my amateur pov.

Also there are games with procedural 3d maps looking not worse than KSP.
(Let alone the voxel From Dust.)

You've been asking about KSP's texture formats, how it handles planets, and etc for a while (for at least a week from my lurking).

As the saying goes ~Just do it~

Even if you fail; you'll learn quite a bit in the process.

[kerbiloid]

11 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

As the saying goes ~Just do it~

Even if you fail; you'll learn quite a bit in the process.

?

I'm not the game developer, I have my own work to do.

[Pds314]

One thing that isn't addressed much here is that MOST of the stuff on a stock planet is procedural. There's no way you could store, much less load into ram, a texture with the height values of every point on Kerbin. The largest map I personally have access to of Kerbin is 8192 by 16384, which is certainly big enough to break all sorts of image editors but for example there are some structures you can find on Kerbin that are too small for that map resolution (about 240 meters at the equator and more precise at the poles). And many others that just look incorrect.

This lake and the small satellite lake near it, about 700 meters and 20 meters in maximum dimension, respectively, which I have nicknamed Lac Eve and Lac Gilly, appear in said 134 Megapixel image as a blurry smudge a bit over 4 pixels wide and 2 pixels tall, with zero indication that a separate lake exists.

 

Or take this natural, 1.5 km runway-shaped island facing perfectly east-west?

You can feel free to search Kerbalmaps for it all day. You won't find it. The only indication it exists at all is ingame and my documentation that it exists in this and other threads. It's sufficiently narrow and close to other terrain that even 240 meter resolution isn't good enough to show even a trace of it.

 

So this is one thing I would love to be able to control in planet mapping  is fine tuning noise generation. Not having a zillion pixels to make multigigabyte height maps for a planet but being able to precisely control what type of chaos happens on a small scale. The stuff that isn't visible from space even on a 4k monitor.

 

So if the actual spatial resolution of Kerbin is, say, 10 meters at the equator (pure guess here), a static image that size would be some 600 times larger in area than the one I have. That's like 100 Gigapixels. There is absolutely no way that's stored anywhere in your game files. Instead, a set of rules called LibNoise is stored there and it makes Kerbin procedurally with a fairly low resolution manual modification heightmap stacked on top of it to for example make Easter egg terrain, the big crater, some stuff that looks like miss-clicks or brush errors, and more.

Edited November 17, 2020 by Pds314

[kspnerd122]

Procedural would be fine, just set the colors and tell it the types of features you want and how much of the planet you want to cover with them, then clean it up and do things like, e.g add oceans, atmosphere, etc.