[1.12.x] Waterfall - a framework for continuous, mesh-driven engine effects (October 6)

[Constel4cion]

Hi guys!

I was trying to make a waterfall config for the rcs thruster on this engine, as you can see on the left side of the picture works great when i test it on the in game editor, but as soon as I do a manual input it comes back to the original plume, how can i fix this?

[darthvader15001]

Can you use this and realplume together?

[IAmTheRealBeef]

In theory, yes - at least as of several years ago. You can give it a go and let us know.

However, realplume is *much* more taxing on the system and Waterfall seems to work quite nicely so I'm not sure I would

[Starseeker]

5 hours ago, IAmTheRealBeef said:

In theory, yes - at least as of several years ago. You can give it a go and let us know.

However, realplume is *much* more taxing on the system and Waterfall seems to work quite nicely so I'm not sure I would

Realplume disables its patches to an engine if that engine also has Waterfall effects on it, so having Realplume w/ Waterfall only affects those engines that Waterfall doesn't touch (mostly SRBs).

[KeaKaka]

On 5/10/2024 at 8:01 AM, Constel4cion said:

Hi guys!

I was trying to make a waterfall config for the rcs thruster on this engine, as you can see on the left side of the picture works great when i test it on the in game editor, but as soon as I do a manual input it comes back to the original plume, how can i fix this?

It looks like your config is working, it's just not removing the original particle effect before adding the waterfall one

Try adding

!EFFECTS {}

before the waterfall effects in the config, that should remove the old plume so that just the waterfall one shows

[GamingHen]

This might be a bit of a long shot, but hopefully someone can help me because I just can't seem to figure this issue out.

With the current mod list I have, the engine light produced by Waterfall causes an insane stutter for a few seconds after launch. Someone on Reddit suggested that it's most likely an interaction between the engine lights and Parallax that causes this and they suggested that I disable the engine lights in waterfallsettings.cfg. That fixed the stutter, but obviously I want engine light because it just looks good.

So I wanted to try and replace the engine light effects using Engine Lighting Relit. The problem is that whenever I have any sort of Waterfall config installed, Engine Lighting Relit just doesn't do anything. If I have Waterfall and all it's dependencies installed, just without any configs that actually change anything, Engine Lighting Relit still works. But the moment I install any sort of config, it stops working.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me? I don't care whether it's a suggestion to get Engine Lighting Relit working or whether it's a solution to eliminate the stutter caused by Waterfall engine light.

[HB Stratos]

On 6/22/2024 at 11:07 AM, GamingHen said:

This might be a bit of a long shot, but hopefully someone can help me because I just can't seem to figure this issue out.

With the current mod list I have, the engine light produced by Waterfall causes an insane stutter for a few seconds after launch. Someone on Reddit suggested that it's most likely an interaction between the engine lights and Parallax that causes this and they suggested that I disable the engine lights in waterfallsettings.cfg. That fixed the stutter, but obviously I want engine light because it just looks good.

So I wanted to try and replace the engine light effects using Engine Lighting Relit. The problem is that whenever I have any sort of Waterfall config installed, Engine Lighting Relit just doesn't do anything. If I have Waterfall and all it's dependencies installed, just without any configs that actually change anything, Engine Lighting Relit still works. But the moment I install any sort of config, it stops working.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me? I don't care whether it's a suggestion to get Engine Lighting Relit working or whether it's a solution to eliminate the stutter caused by Waterfall engine light.

Lights in unity forward rendering are just expensive. No matter what mod you use, that will always be the same. Also regarding your issue, I would guess someone in the waterfall configs included a ModuleManager patch that removes the default configuration for engine lighting relit.

A possible solution that has recently become available is blackrack's deferred rendering mod. It is still in early beta, but it makes lights render a couple orders of magnitude faster. It has a few caveats, which you should read about on the release page. You can find it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/deferred-106557481. Don't mind the patreon for this one, it's freely accessible to anyone. 

[Knight of St John]

10 hours ago, HB Stratos said:

Also regarding your issue, I would guess someone in the waterfall configs included a ModuleManager patch that removes the default configuration for engine lighting relit.

True. I disable that mod so it doesn't interfere with my own lighting.
As HB said, try the deferred rendering mod.

[Lars Hansson]

On 2/3/2023 at 2:56 PM, Bulltoad said:

When used with Parralax and astronomers visual pack (plus eve and scatterer), I get huge frame drops on some planets - but ONLY when a waterfall effect, whether that be rcs or engine, is playing. Does anyone have a potential solution or fix for this? Any waterfall effect to disable?

I am noticing the same problem. With Parallax installed there is massive FPS drop for the first 5 -10 seconds of a launch from the Space Center. Uninstall Parallax and it is smooth sailing.

Edit: Interestingly, Real Plume does not have this problem. I am also already using the Deferred render.

Edited July 24 by Lars Hansson

[Lars Hansson]

In case anyone else comes here and have this problem: this is an issue with KSP, Parallax and lights. Nothing to do with Waterfall.

You can easily replicate this by driving a rover with many lights (stock Crater Crawler works well) around the space center and turning on the lights. With Parallax installed the FPS will immediately tank and then recover when you turn off the lights.

If you want to use both Parallax and Waterfall you can disable the per pixel lighting in Waterfall and the FPS will no longer drop on launch. You'll probably still have issues if you turn on any other lights when on the surface though.

Edited July 26 by Lars Hansson

[dylsh]

Im having an issue that I hope someone can help me with. I am using Unkerballed Start, which provides two resized engines from the stock game. I also have Rocket Sound Enhancement. These play fine together, until I install Waterfall. With Waterfall, there is zero sound from these two engines. Any known work arounds?

 

In my testing save I am using:

Unkerballed Start, ReStock, ReStock Plus, Rocket Sound Enhancement, Waterfall, Waterfall ReStock.

[mindseyemodels]

i need a bit of info regarding the color types in this mod. are they rendered in HDR or SDR? asking because MirageDev is making a reentry VFX mod and it is built for HDR. i'm just needing to know if his mod needs to be completely rebuilt or not

[Kimera Industries]

I've tried disabling heat refraction in the Waterfall settings config, as it is quite taxing on my computer. However, whenever I launch a craft, the distortion effects are still active and I have to disable them one by one for every single launch. Any way around this?

[JadeOfMaar]

On 7/29/2024 at 7:46 PM, dylsh said:

With Waterfall, there is zero sound from these two engines. Any known work arounds?

I've seen Waterfall configs (or configs from another engine effects mod) make the mistake of purging the whole EFFECTS node when, since these configs must manually target individual engine configs, they can do the proper thing and only purge the particle nodes, leaving alone the AUDIO nodes within EFFECTS. To fix this, you'd have to confirm that the Waterfall configs do this then get the attention of their makers and ask them to make this (obviously tedious) adjustment. Or more likely, make these changes yourself and send them to the mod maker.

What the changes look like:

// don't do this
@PART[engine1234]
{
	!EFFECTS {}
}

// do this
@PART[engine1234]
{
	@EFFECTS
	{
		!MODEL_MULTI_PARTICLE,* {}
		!PREFAB_PARTICLE,* {} // used for trailing smoke in atmo
	}
}

 

[HB Stratos]

StockWaterfallEffects does this, nuke the entire effects node and re-add the sounds again manually, destroying any edits a mod before waterfall made to it. I did mean to send a PR fixing this issue with a much more precise and surgical MM patch that only removes the particle effects specifically without nuking the entire effect node.

[Nertea]

Waterfall 0.10.0 has been released. 

Special thanks to @JonnyOThan for doing a ton of work on this for performance. He saw a problem, fixed a problem and then fixed a dozen more. 

Check out this comparison - it's nuts.

Detailed changelog:

• Updated bundled ModuleManger to 4.2.3
• Large swathe of performance updates thanks to JohnnyOThan, including:
  • Effects on inactive versions of parts (e.g. multiple part variants) are no longer evaluated
  • Effects that use controllers that don't exist on a part won't be evaluated
  • Effects only update if one of their controller values changed or they have random inputs
  • Effect modifiers don't re-evaluate curves if the controller value didn't change
  • Integrated gotmachine's faster FloatCurve implementation
  • Many minor optimizations and cleanups that add up to large improvements
  • Some memory leaks fixed
• Fixed engine light layers targeting IVA layers (#130)
• Thrust and Throttle controllers can now have their EngineID set in the UI (#125)
• Added a UI option for Perlin noise to have its seed to an option that will randomize it on effect startup (#127)
• It is now possible to set Engine ID in Engine Event Controllers, and those controllers will only fire on events asocaited with that engine ID (#126)
• Fixed Enable Distortion setting actually doing nothing
• Added a setting toggle to treat random controllers as unchanging, which improves performance at the cost of randomness
• Various logging cleanups and improvements
• Reworked most Editor window UIs to look cleaner and work better, including a lot of UI code cleanup for more coherency
• Added the ability to load arbitrary particle assets from assetbundles and control them
  • Controllability is limited

[Sanchez_1]

So using the new branch I've run into this problem with the TE Haddock thrusters
https://imgur.com/a/kJg20Pc

The effect is on until you press the RCS hotkey then it acts like normal for the rest of the flight, otherwise the plumes are just always showing like in the image.

[Lisias]

Hi.

I installed the newest Waterfall and started to get this weird magenta thingy instead of the plumes:

This is an absolutely vanilla KSP 1.12.5 installment, with only:

• Module Manager 4.2.3
• Waterfall 0.10.1
• StockWaterfallEffects 0.8

The craft is a Stock AeroEquus - I just load it on Editor and launched it. The engine involved is the LV-T45 Swivel .

KSP.log: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Mh2OoO8o7O1oRi4cvar7KEZQxny-RQ4E?usp=drive_link

 

[dok_377]

I'm also seeing problems. When I decrease atmosphere pressure in the UI, the plume gets duplicated and only the duplicate seems to change. This is with Stock Waterfall Effects and no other mods on KSP 1.12.4.



Log: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wgYVn5HiVcWqPPxFrSUriyA-6QFAIH3T

Edited 3 hours ago by dok_377