Show and Tell - Pol terrain work

[Nate Simpson]

42 minutes ago, PlutoISaPlanet said:

It is! I forgot the name of the guy doing the music, but they said it before!

Yep! Howard Mostrom is our resident music and sound genius. I hope at some point he gets to do a dev blog, because... I don't think I'm allowed to explain the cool thing he's doing yet. So yeah. Watch this space.

[TLTay]

43 minutes ago, PlutoISaPlanet said:

It is! I forgot the name of the guy doing the music, but they said it before!

This track has a Battlestar Gallactica vibe. I'm pretty religious about turning music off when launching a game, doesn't matter what kind... But I think I'll be leaving it on to try it out for KSP2.

[PlutoISaPlanet]

14 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

Yep! Howard Mostrom is our resident music and sound genius. I hope at some point he gets to do a dev blog, because... I don't think I'm allowed to explain the cool thing he's doing yet. So yeah. Watch this space.

I for one would love to hear about some of the cool things he is doing with the music. So far, I dig it!

[Iamsodarncool]

Looks amazing. Pol has been my favorite celestial body since I started playing KSP in 2014, and I can't wait to re-explore it in glorious high fidelity.

I hope that the pointy triangular boulders are coming back! They are my favorite feature of KSP1 Pol.

[jastrone]

what is the red shiny stuff in the beginning. red ice or rock

[The Aziz]

It was always a tiny moon

How the hell does it look 5 times larger

I need to update the repository, like right now

[Terminal Velocity]

20 hours ago, KSPStar said:

Welcome to Pol, Jool's patchwork moon. The Mun may be made of cheese, but Pol is made of at least four kinds of cheese, some of which may no longer be edible. Courtesy of environment artists Jordan Pack and Sung Campbell.
 

Parallax is stock now @Gameslinx! Anyways @Nate Simpsonwhat about other planets will you show and tell them as well?

18 hours ago, Abducted_Cow said:

Why is it so wet lookin?

Because parallax looks like that and parallax is now stock in ksp2 lol (at least I looks like it)

19 hours ago, KSPStar said:

We do actually, we just post them on the forum and subreddit first. Twitter/Facebook/Instagram goes up a few days later. 

The search the forums for news that is REAL TIME relevant not a few days ago

Edited April 17, 2021 by Rocketry101

[boolybooly]

Looks good, I like the way you have the craters on the rocky highlands and glacial material filling the valleys.

 

[Gameslinx]

5 hours ago, Rocketry101 said:

Parallax is stock now @Gameslinx!

Nah, don't let the bloom fool you. From what I can see, it's a better version of the terrain shader used in KSP 1. There's much better colour variation. I can't see any shadows being cast, even when in some shots the sun is at the right angle to cast them. Maybe they're not implemented yet. We don't know if they're using displacement mapping / tessellation, or whether the surface is flat (which is what Parallax does). It's a very good step in the right direction, though, but the specular reflection and bloom is well overdone!

I'm excited to see the other planets, for example Kerbin has grass now  

 

Edited April 17, 2021 by Gameslinx

[TLTay]

5 hours ago, Gameslinx said:

Nah, don't let the bloom fool you. From what I can see, it's a better version of the terrain shader used in KSP 1. There's much better colour variation. I can't see any shadows being cast, even when in some shots the sun is at the right angle to cast them. Maybe they're not implemented yet. We don't know if they're using displacement mapping / tessellation, or whether the surface is flat (which is what Parallax does). It's a very good step in the right direction, though, but the specular reflection and bloom is well overdone!

I'm excited to see the other planets, for example Kerbin has grass now  

 

I haven't tried this person's mod yet, and I know what we are seeing is not 100% complete, but I really hope we get terrain that is a challenge to navigate (at the kerbal level) and not flat surfaces with a textured look for landing/building convenience. For example, from the above poster's mod, see below:

 

Edited April 17, 2021 by TLTay
edit

[PlutoISaPlanet]

I believe the terrain here is very glaciated, either way I think the terrain appears to be rugged and smooth. I think it looks perfectly balanced, but thats just me.

[TLTay]

8 minutes ago, PlutoISaPlanet said:

I believe the terrain here is very glaciated, either way I think the terrain appears to be rugged and smooth. I think it looks perfectly balanced, but thats just me.

If it's a glacial area, it makes sense that it would be pretty flat at the kerbal level. I'm already blown away and it's more awesome than I ever expected, I'm just putting in my beg for the surface being rough in rough areas instead of a texture that is actually fairly smooth. I'm not sure why I'm even concerned at this point... It's clearly in the best hands possible and the work so far has been KSP3 grade, as far as I have seen.

[SOXBLOX]

This just looks so beautiful. Way better than any mod I've seen. And, yeah, great music!

[LHACK4142]

On 4/16/2021 at 9:16 AM, Spaceman.Spiff said:

oh wait this is for KSP2 not KSP1. still cool

But isn't Minmus going to be in KSP2?

[PlutoISaPlanet]

22 minutes ago, LHACK4142 said:

But isn't Minmus going to be in KSP2?

Yes it is. The Kerbol system is in Ksp 2

[Minmus Taster]

It's *Sniff Beautifal!

[PlutoISaPlanet]

1 minute ago, Minmus Taster said:

It's *Sniff Beautifal!

You can let the tears out, we all have

[K^2]

21 hours ago, TLTay said:

I haven't tried this person's mod yet, and I know what we are seeing is not 100% complete, but I really hope we get terrain that is a challenge to navigate (at the kerbal level) and not flat surfaces with a textured look for landing/building convenience. For example, from the above poster's mod, see below:

Spoiler

 

Yeah, Parallax looks amazing. I think, the way the mod achieves this look is pretty expensive and has very limited impact on physics, but it's all very doable to have in stock KSP2 with minimal overhead if Intercept goes with virtual texturing, dynamic tessellation, and compute for wheel and leg collision probes to allow for these small bumps to actually have effect on physics. I've seen something similar run on PS4 at very good performance, and it's no trouble at all for gen 9 consoles and most remotely modern PCs.

[DJDoesKSP]

On 4/16/2021 at 1:27 PM, KSPStar said:

Show and Tell videos will be publicly listed on YouTube at a later date. For now these individual clips need to remain unlisted. (There's some additional legal steps involved in order for the Show and Tell videos to go up publicly.)

Will youtubers be able to use these videos in KSP news round up videos, or do they still need to wait for them to go public?

[PlutoISaPlanet]

16 hours ago, K^2 said:

Yeah, Parallax looks amazing. I think, the way the mod achieves this look is pretty expensive and has very limited impact on physics, but it's all very doable to have in stock KSP2 with minimal overhead if Intercept goes with virtual texturing, dynamic tessellation, and compute for wheel and leg collision probes to allow for these small bumps to actually have effect on physics. I've seen something similar run on PS4 at very good performance, and it's no trouble at all for gen 9 consoles and most remotely modern PCs.

So do you think that ksp 2 will run well on console? 

[K^2]

4 hours ago, PlutoISaPlanet said:

So do you think that ksp 2 will run well on console? 

I think they have a good opportunity to make it run well on gen 9 consoles (PS5/XBS) and it's possible to optimize to run just fine on gen 8 (PS4/XB1), but none of it is going to be "for free" or "out of the box" with Unity. It kind of depends on how much optimization Intercept manages to do. Realistically, I think PS5/XBSX are going to be target platforms, and Intercept will make all effort to make the game run well on these two consoles. This is why I have been using PS5 CPU as a benchmark for what sort of min spec the game will have on PC. But whether Intercept will be fully successful on this remains to be seen. It's a small and young studio, so it's possible they'll try and fail.

I don't think we should be taking it for granted that the game will even ship on other platforms at this point, despite initial claims that it will, but if it does, I would realistically expect to have either some cuts or serious performance issues on PS4 and XB1. As I said above, it's possible to optimize the game for these consoles, because there isn't, ultimately, that much going on, but it's going to be a lot of ad-hoc work, so I don't know if the studio has resources for this kind of thing. Basically, I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for good performance on gen 8, if it ships at all, or PCs of comparable age. You'll very likely need a bit more horse power there.

There was a bit of a discussion in another thread on whether it can be made to run on Nintendo Switch, and I think even that is doable with the right team, but for Intercept to even attempt that it would require a number of highly specialized hires on a short term, all rather senior, and so it would be very expensive to even attempt. So this one I'm confident isn't on the budget for KSP2. Maybe if it explodes in popularity beyond everyone's expectation, they'll find resources to try and do the port later. It would have to be guaranteed to sell millions of copies to be worth it. (Yeah, we're talking that expensive of a port, given people you'd have to hire.) Or maybe Nintendo releases a beefier version of Switch to stay within reach of gen 5 systems. Either way, I wouldn't hold my breath for this one.

Realistically, if you'll want to play KSP2 portable, you'll probably want to stream it, or maybe invest in a handheld PC. Both GPD WIN3 and AYA NEO fall considerably short of PS5 CPU, but primarily on core counts. Single thread performance is comparable, and I expect that will still matter a lot for KSP2. So these handhelds might just hit the mark for min spec of PC version of KSP2, and hopefully, better handheld gaming PCs will start showing up in the next year or so. Of course, I suspect prices will stay decisively in PC-gaming ranges.

[PlutoISaPlanet]

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

I think they have a good opportunity to make it run well on gen 9 consoles (PS5/XBS) and it's possible to optimize to run just fine on gen 8 (PS4/XB1), but none of it is going to be "for free" or "out of the box" with Unity. It kind of depends on how much optimization Intercept manages to do. Realistically, I think PS5/XBSX are going to be target platforms, and Intercept will make all effort to make the game run well on these two consoles. This is why I have been using PS5 CPU as a benchmark for what sort of min spec the game will have on PC. But whether Intercept will be fully successful on this remains to be seen. It's a small and young studio, so it's possible they'll try and fail.

I don't think we should be taking it for granted that the game will even ship on other platforms at this point, despite initial claims that it will, but if it does, I would realistically expect to have either some cuts or serious performance issues on PS4 and XB1. As I said above, it's possible to optimize the game for these consoles, because there isn't, ultimately, that much going on, but it's going to be a lot of ad-hoc work, so I don't know if the studio has resources for this kind of thing. Basically, I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for good performance on gen 8, if it ships at all, or PCs of comparable age. You'll very likely need a bit more horse power there.

There was a bit of a discussion in another thread on whether it can be made to run on Nintendo Switch, and I think even that is doable with the right team, but for Intercept to even attempt that it would require a number of highly specialized hires on a short term, all rather senior, and so it would be very expensive to even attempt. So this one I'm confident isn't on the budget for KSP2. Maybe if it explodes in popularity beyond everyone's expectation, they'll find resources to try and do the port later. It would have to be guaranteed to sell millions of copies to be worth it. (Yeah, we're talking that expensive of a port, given people you'd have to hire.) Or maybe Nintendo releases a beefier version of Switch to stay within reach of gen 5 systems. Either way, I wouldn't hold my breath for this one.

Realistically, if you'll want to play KSP2 portable, you'll probably want to stream it, or maybe invest in a handheld PC. Both GPD WIN3 and AYA NEO fall considerably short of PS5 CPU, but primarily on core counts. Single thread performance is comparable, and I expect that will still matter a lot for KSP2. So these handhelds might just hit the mark for min spec of PC version of KSP2, and hopefully, better handheld gaming PCs will start showing up in the next year or so. Of course, I suspect prices will stay decisively in PC-gaming ranges.

Thanks! I will probably have series X by then. Ksp 1 is only 3.6 gb on x box. I guess it is doable, thanks again!

[determinationmaster]

Ah- AH - 

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!1!!!!!!!one!!!!!!!!11!1!

[Hellenic]

On 4/16/2021 at 7:58 PM, PlutoISaPlanet said:

I for one would love to hear about some of the cool things he is doing with the music. So far, I dig it!

Late reply but I brought this up to a friend who said that they think this cool thing could be related to the music changing depending on what you're doing in game, which was a really fun system in Portal 2. Only speculation but its fun to think about!

[PlutoISaPlanet]

3 hours ago, Hellenic said:

Late reply but I brought this up to a friend who said that they think this cool thing could be related to the music changing depending on what you're doing in game, which was a really fun system in Portal 2. Only speculation but its fun to think about!

Adaptive music, kinda like in the Doom games. It could totaly fit for ksp 2.