SOL: High Fidelity Graphics for KSRSS - Wen Release?!?

[fleventeen]

3 minutes ago, G'th said:

Sure thing. I'm working on adjusting the main clouds atm so it'll be a hot minute. 

No problem, just curious.  

[OrbitalManeuvers]

1 hour ago, G'th said:

So I figured out a neat technique for getting more depth into the clouds. 

When you have a sec could you give some details about how you're taking screenshots and what else is contributing to the final image? I'm just hoping to compare apples to apples. Since there's no UI in your shots I'm guessing you're putting a craft on the pad then going to map view? Are these using TUFX at all? Thanks! 

[G'th]

19 minutes ago, OrbitalManeuvers said:

When you have a sec could you give some details about how you're taking screenshots and what else is contributing to the final image? I'm just hoping to compare apples to apples. Since there's no UI in your shots I'm guessing you're putting a craft on the pad then going to map view? Are these using TUFX at all? Thanks! 

These are taken from the game view (ie, where you can see your craft) but zoomed way out so the craft disappears.  Poor little pods been in space for like a year now lmao. 

And no TUFX atm. I plan on installing it eventually and creating the profile as I go, but lazy lol. 

Edited April 26, 2022 by G'th

[fleventeen]

4 minutes ago, G'th said:

And no TUFX atm. I plan on installing it eventually and creating the profile as I go, but lazy lol. 

Probably best to dial in the base visuals first before adding post FX. 

[G'th]

6 minutes ago, fleventeen said:

Probably best to dial in the base visuals first before adding post FX. 

Yeah that was a thought I had as well.  Plus I just realized I've been doing all of this with my screen set to night light sooo. now I'm waiting for my eyes to adjust to make sure I didn't royally screw up what I was going for lmao. 

And here's a GIF of the Typhoon. After watching it back it seems I'm just picking up on things that might not pop out to a user. That and it looks way more wonky at higher warp speeds, but then again so does everything else, and thats not exactly a time to be worried about what things look like. 

https://i.imgur.com/RVFrr6U.mp4

 

[fleventeen]

4 minutes ago, G'th said:

Yeah that was a thought I had as well.  Plus I just realized I've been doing all of this with my screen set to night light sooo. now I'm waiting for my eyes to adjust to make sure I didn't royally screw up what I was going for lmao. 

And here's a GIF of the Typhoon. After watching it back it seems I'm just picking up on things that might not pop out to a user. That and it looks way more wonky at higher warp speeds, but then again so does everything else, and thats not exactly a time to be worried about what things look like. 

https://i.imgur.com/RVFrr6U.mp4

The effect is quite striking. I can't recall another time where I've seen a rotating storm system in a cloud pack. It does look a little wonky, but could that be the size of it? I noticed that it is larger than Australia there. 

[G'th]

1 minute ago, fleventeen said:

The effect is quite striking. I can't recall another time where I've seen a rotating storm system in a cloud pack. It does look a little wonky, but could that be the size of it? I noticed that it is larger than Australia there. 

Yeah i've been shrinking it here and there. I want it to be pretty imposing though so its still gonna be a pretty beefy storm. 

And funnily enough wayyyyyyy back when SSRSS was a thing, that was the first time I got clued into the idea of a Hurricane being in KSP. And that one looked like this:

Don't remember if it rotated or not (seeing as that mod has long since disappeared so not like I can check) but I remember loving it for the brief time I played with it. 

[OrbitalManeuvers]

41 minutes ago, G'th said:

And no TUFX atm.

OK cool - just want to have a good baseline for what KSRSS looks like for me now, versus when you're ready to let us check out your stuff

[G'th]

We've got ourselves a wittle itty bitty baby typhoon

See it in motion. (Note, this is dramatically sped up)

Also lets ignore my desktop popping in on that GIF lmao

Edited April 26, 2022 by G'th

[MashAndBangers]

*Kerbals in space watch 400 typhoons rampage across Earth*

"... We're not getting that ice cream, are we?"

[AdrianDogmeat]

Looks awesome and all but does it have a huge impact on performance like EVO or PRVE?

[G'th]

26 minutes ago, AdrianDogmeat said:

Looks awesome and all but does it have a huge impact on performance like EVO or PRVE?

Nope. Most of the time EVE and Scatterer don't really affect performance all that much even with high res textures involved. As long as you have the memory for both it and the rest of the game + your other mods you'll be fine. 

The only real exception is for Volumetrics with EVE, but considering EVE is on the precipice of getting 3D clouds as a replacement, which are better in every way, I'm basically holding off on doing anything like that until those are standard. 

[G'th]

Progress update. We have some rudimentary auroras and city lights going, as well as an adjustment to the atmosphere. 

City lights are pretty wonky, but I already have a keen solution for fixing that, and if that works, then that actually accelerates my plans as I'll ALSO be able to bring in some new terrain textures for Earth, which will be a pretty big leap. 

 

And heres a general look at how the Vibrance version of this might end up looking like. Basically, a bit more green, more saturation. Clouds will probably be brighter than this. 

 

[610yesnolovely]

G'th this is amazing stuff, given there's not even TUFX. I think you should try posting a real picture with eight from yours and then challenge us to spot the real one. 

So, for example, lets play "Is This NASA or is this G'th's work":

[G'th]

3 minutes ago, 610yesnolovely said:

G'th this is amazing stuff, given there's not even TUFX. I think you should try posting a real picture with eight from yours and then challenge us to spot the real one. 

So, for example, lets play "Is This NASA or is this G'th's work":

Ya'll aint seen nothing yet though. But to allude, these are going to be my primary references for Jupiter:

Im actually significantly more confident that this is going to become a reality now than I was three years ago when I concieved of doing Jupiter (and Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) like this when I figured out Lindor for Ad Astra. 

It'll be a righteous monster, no doubt, but I've had a lot of time to think about how to streamline it to get the visuals I want without just throwing performance or memory concerns to the wind. 

And with 3D clouds becoming a thing in the near future, that just makes the prospects all the more exciting.

 

[SpaceFace545]

Will  the ground textures get some love. KSRSS earth is looking a bit aged  

great work!

[Kuiper_Belt]

Watching this mod being developed has been fantastic. I really appreciate the frequent updates! The work you've been putting out has truly been stunning!

I do have a couple questions though,

• Are you designing this with KSRSS at 2.5x Kerbal Scale or normal Kerbal Scale?
• What are the clouds looking like at lower orbits?  I curious  because, generally fool around in LEO at 300 kilometers  above the surface with the Shuttle and ISS so this would be the regime where I would hang out the most.

19 hours ago, G'th said:

new terrain textures for Earth

• Is this going to be like the wild texture overhauls in PRVE like this or a more scaled down less intensive version? I've prefer the nutso realistic texture but completely understand if you bias toward performance. 

I'm not a modder and my lack of understanding of making a mods, makes watching this mod come alive all the more impressive. Can't wait to eventually play with this!

[G'th]

28 minutes ago, SpaceFace545 said:

Will  the ground textures get some love. KSRSS earth is looking a bit aged  

great work!

 

1 minute ago, Kuiper_Belt said:

Is this going to be like the wild texture overhauls in PRVE like this or a more scaled down less intensive version? I've prefer the nutso realistic texture but completely understand if you bias toward performance. 

I'm not a modder and my lack of understanding of making a mods, makes watching this mod come alive all the more impressive. Can't wait to eventually play with this!

To answer both of these questions. I'm hoping to do new terrain. Originally in the long long ago, I planned on just doing a full on planet pack like KSRSS, as back then KSRSS was only getting started and seemed stalled, but that proved to be a pain in the ass at the time and then the 2020s happened. But nowadays, KSRSS is in a pretty good spot so I don't see any reason to duplicate the effort in redoing the whole system insofar as Kopernicus is concerned. 

However, I have a hefty little folder thats been sitting on my desktop with all of the terrains (for most of the bodies) that I already went through and touched up. So I'm hoping with my new knowledge on why I was having so many problems back then, that I'll be able to finally get those textures in game and working. My city light solution is related to that, and that'll be what'll tell me if my suppositions are correct. Which I'm pretty sure they are, as the problem was apparently that my textures are offset 90 degrees from what they should be, so that should be an easy gimp fix to move everything around and then they should just work. 

Quality wise, they're not going to require any thing special. They're technically going to be at the same 16k res as KSRSS is supposed to be, but they should be much sharper as they're derived from some beefy 96k textures. While I wasn't at the time able to get them working like I wanted, I was able to note that I was successful at this, so hopefully I wasn't just delusional back then lmao. 
 

10 minutes ago, Kuiper_Belt said:

 

 do have a couple questions though,

• Are you designing this with KSRSS at 2.5x Kerbal Scale or normal Kerbal Scale?
• What are the clouds looking like at lower orbits?  I curious  because, generally fool around in LEO at 300 kilometers  above the surface with the Shuttle and ISS so this would be the regime where I would hang out the most.

This is at 2.5x scale. I've been a 2.5x stan for a while and that'd only change if RSS was more accessible, which I don't see happening any time soon. 

And most of the pictures thus far have been at 250km in altitude, so if you're typically at 300km you'll be overjoyed   But even dropping down to around 100km its still really good looking, which will only be helped by the terrain improvements. 
 

[SpaceFace545]

22 minutes ago, G'th said:

 

To answer both of these questions. I'm hoping to do new terrain. Originally in the long long ago, I planned on just doing a full on planet pack like KSRSS, as back then KSRSS was only getting started and seemed stalled, but that proved to be a pain in the ass at the time and then the 2020s happened. But nowadays, KSRSS is in a pretty good spot so I don't see any reason to duplicate the effort in redoing the whole system insofar as Kopernicus is concerned. 

However, I have a hefty little folder thats been sitting on my desktop with all of the terrains (for most of the bodies) that I already went through and touched up. So I'm hoping with my new knowledge on why I was having so many problems back then, that I'll be able to finally get those textures in game and working. My city light solution is related to that, and that'll be what'll tell me if my suppositions are correct. Which I'm pretty sure they are, as the problem was apparently that my textures are offset 90 degrees from what they should be, so that should be an easy gimp fix to move everything around and then they should just work. 

Quality wise, they're not going to require any thing special. They're technically going to be at the same 16k res as KSRSS is supposed to be, but they should be much sharper as they're derived from some beefy 96k textures. While I wasn't at the time able to get them working like I wanted, I was able to note that I was successful at this, so hopefully I wasn't just delusional back then lmao. 
 

This is at 2.5x scale. I've been a 2.5x stan for a while and that'd only change if RSS was more accessible, which I don't see happening any time soon. 

And most of the pictures thus far have been at 250km in altitude, so if you're typically at 300km you'll be overjoyed   But even dropping down to around 100km its still really good looking, which will only be helped by the terrain improvements. 
 

That sounds awesome!! The grass textures in the ocean has been bugging me for a while lol

[G'th]

Welp, I've had pretty much all motivation to do anything for this community completely killed.

This may or may not continue idk. I can't deal with the toxicity and I can't motivate myself past it at this point.

Sorry for wasting everyones time.. 

[MashAndBangers]

6 hours ago, G'th said:

Welp, I've had pretty much all motivation to do anything for this community completely killed.

This may or may not continue idk. I can't deal with the toxicity and I can't motivate myself past it at this point.

Sorry for wasting everyones time.. 

Trust me, you did not waist our time.  I'm real sorry this community hasn't treated you well.  I hope you can share with us what happened, maybe in DMs. 

For now, take a break from KSP.  We'll miss you.

[G'th]

I can deal with petty toxic dumbasses trashing my mod, thats whatever. 

What I can't deal with is random ass users on reddit and discord accosting me about being a thief over excrements that happened three years ago, that I myself not only completely forgot even happened, but had also thought to be a relatively private incident. It was over two textures, one of which was a complete accident and the other which I had no reason to suspect violated anything given what I was doing with it, and both were rectified within an hour of a moderator here messaging me about it. 

So the fact that more than a few people even know about this at all tells me certain people have been saying a lot of nasty and unfair excrements about me in my absence, and as a result Im being harrassed, which after everything Ive been through Im just finding difficult to handle. 

I left discords of very popular modders over excrements like this and I had hoped a couple years to grow up would have cleared this but I guess not. 

Like I said, this may or may not continue. We will see.

[Kwebib]

Sorry to hear this. I feel like the community on this forum is always nice, but I don't really use Reddit or discord. Probably for the benefit of my mental health.

[SpaceFace545]

2 hours ago, G'th said:

What I can't deal with is random ass users on reddit and discord accosting me about being a thief over excrements that happened three years ago, that I myself not only completely forgot even happened, but had also thought to be a relatively private incident. It was over two textures, one of which was a complete accident and the other which I had no reason to suspect violated anything given what I was doing with it, and both were rectified within an hour of a moderator here messaging me about it. 

It's reddit and discord, all I can say is that stuff like that happen to everyone and you just let it be. At least on this forum everyone is pretty much supportive and there aren't any mob mentalities.

 

If you stop here then you let those freaks win, just keep on pushing and show them that your could care less about what they say.

Edited May 2, 2022 by SpaceFace545

[G'th]

So I feel considerably better now, particularly after getting inspired by certain things, so we're back on.

But with that, I want to get some feedback on what Im going to be doing.

 

Now, the main idea that inspired the mod was to eventually culminate in my vision for a dynamic Jupiter that recreates, to what extent EVE and Scatterer allows, how the real Jupiter looks and behaves, as seen in the video and pictures linked a few posts ago. 

And Im pretty confident in my ability to do this efficiently. Unlike conventional cloud packs, that use a single texture to depict the entire atmosphere and cloud bands, my method would involve using a number of textures, dedicated to each individual element that run independently from one another. While that sounds like a lot, nature is on our side given that much of Jupiter, and the other giants that are done in the same way, often have densely repeated features. One set of cloud band textures (there would be two for each element) could easily cover almost every band in Jupiter, with EVE settings enabling the necessary variations in those bands. The ones not repeated meanwhile, would only represent just the additional sets added, like the Red Spot or the polar hexagonal storms. 

So while a planet like Jupiter could nominally have, lets say, 20 individual elements, the number of textures required is may be half of that, if not less. So more than the typical method, but thats the trade off for the dynamics that I'm shooting for. 

Now, I explained all that to contexualize what Im actually asking for feedback on: Extending this concept to Earth, Mars, Venus, and Titan. 

Obviously my efforts thus far have been on Earth, and through my experimenting and tweaking something Im fundamentally taking issue with is the clarity and consistency of the clouds. While my source map for the Earth clouds hits these marks adequately, when scaled down, the consistency drops dramatically with some parts looking fantastic while others are rather disappointing. 

 

Ive noted before that I dont want to go nuts with 64k textures and all that other stuff that has to sacrifice gameplay fidelity to accomplish, and given I can't even process textures that big anyway, the solution for me is, as said, in using the same method Im intending for the gas giants to govern the other cloudy worlds. 

How it would work, to use Earth as an example, is more or less similarly to how the typhoon does. Cloud patterns will be isolated into smaller individual textures and will populate the body, and will fade in and out and change shapes as they cross the world. 

The benefits are rather obvious even beyond the dynamic clouds. Each individual cloud pattern (which could be one giant system, individual spurts, or some mix) would be easier to control for both clarity and consistency, and in turn it allows for me as the modder to actually make use of the source texture I have that my computer just simply refuses to break down, which is understandable and I don't blame it, shes trying her best. And naturally, having clouds that are no longer static and fixed across the entire world meets a personal want for me, as while I enjoy the first time seeing a specifically nice section of clouds, I kind of don't like it when Ive seen the exact same thing for the 193785th time.

The cons, though, are that each texture level (from 2k to 16k) will be progressively more punishing to a users memory requirements beyond that of cloud packs of a similar resolution. 

My philosophy is is that I don't like single serving visuals that only function in one specific scene in the game. This is why I'm not a fan of hyper exposed nonsense that are so common with TUFX profiles, and why when I did Ad Astra that getting good looking volumetrics (within reasonable performance) was so important, because the transition from launchpad, to flight, to orbit, to deep space for me all too often loses a lot of consistency, even if in a few places it looks really really good.

Thats why when I post screenshots I try to pick ones from a variety of orbits and situations, as that reflects what Im trying to synchronize and going for in general. 

So with all that said, does this sound like the right direction? I dont actually need reassurance per say, as I'm not the self-doubting type even in the throes of depression and toxicity induced defeatism, but even so, I think Id like to just hear some opinions. 

While it would be a heavier memory footprint, the alternatives just don't sit right. Higher res maps are difficult to work with, static, and ultimately the variation tools just don't work as well on global maps as they do on smaller ones without distorting them in unpleasant ways, nullifying the point of higher res. 

And plus, as part of what inspired me today, I believe I have a good method to enable something that the above technically loses me out on. Dynamic clouds in EVE all revolve around the detail texture setting, which basically takes a second texture and overlays it on top of the main texture, literally texturing the first one. 

This has the benefit of making clouds appear to have more depth to them, and is half of what makes the clouds as they are now look like they do. But, to do dynamics, you lose this. 

However, I've found that this doesn't necessarily mean you lose the depth, and the typhoon is an example of that. The detail texture for it is essentially just the exact same texture, but what makes it look good even while next to the other clouds is the quality of the texture itself. It isn't flat and while I still think I could do with a second pass at isolating it, the textures own quality shines through.

So, taking that knowledge, I think we can get the best of both worlds if I front load the texturing that EVE does on the fly into the detail texture itself, allowing for much of the same visual effect, but while also still allowing for dynamic clouds.

I don't know what all EVE does as part of detail textures work, but if it works as a relatively simple overlay then if anything I should actually be able to get even better quality out of it, just because I can leverage gimp to do a more comprehensive job at it, and directly touch up where it falls short.

 

But anyways, thats my long rant. Let me know what you think, and I appreciate the words of encouragement from you all. It was definitely needed and I have since all but abandoned discord, and I'll just have to deal if any more garbage tries to filter through Reddit.