SOL: State of the Project and Release?!#??

[Rutabaga22]

4 minutes ago, G'th said:

That clear and present danger has...resolved itself.

Still touch and go, but good god it cannot be understated the sheer  relief it is to have all of that anxiety and rage just wash away. 

I'm glad that this is getting better for you!

Edited October 9, 2022 by Rutabaga22
New page!

[G'th]

Finalized Aurora Borealis:



Aurora Australis is going to have an independent texture, and that is ongoing. We are close.

Very Close.

[G'th]

[Rutabaga22]

This is loooking really cool.

[G'th]

[Rutabaga22]

Beautiful

Edited October 10, 2022 by Rutabaga22
caps

[KeaKaka]

19 hours ago, G'th said:

Finalized Aurora Borealis:



Aurora Australis is going to have an independent texture, and that is ongoing. We are close.

Very Close.

Aurora Borealis? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your computer!?

Looking absolutely stunning, I can't wait for release!

[G'th]

1 minute ago, KeaKaka said:

Aurora Borealis? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your computer!?

Looking absolutely stunning, I can't wait for release!

Its coming sooner than you think.

[G'th]

[G'th]

As I slam my head into Kopernicus I decided to take a break and use what I learned to experiment with some jacked normals. 

[G'th]

Guess what I found out how to do?  Special thanks to @Poodmundand @rbray89for figuring this out 8 years ago lmao. 

It also works with dynamics, so it'll dissipate and reappear at random.

Edited October 18, 2022 by G'th

[G'th]

Also today I have greatly refined my normal making process, so we're gonna see some pretty big leaps in the next release, which is also going to come with brand spanking new heightmaps (that are actually accurate).

 

[G'th]

[G'th]

While its still a rough draft, Venus is likely going to be the most accurate representation of it ever put to a video game. The above coloring is what Venus' surface should actually look like without its oppressive atmosphere, at least in theory. We obviously don't know what its entire surface is like in terms of visual variety (as obviously despite the planet being similar in composition to Earth that means precisely diddly and squat for our purposes), so instead I extrapolated the above based on color corrected photographs from the Venera landers, which presented a gradient of colors not too dissimilar from the Moon.

The gross yellowy orange nonsense we typically see in Venus recreations is not true to life; after all, we don't exactly throw in Earth's atmosphere (and thus the global bluish haze) into its surface texture do we? So why do we do that for Venus? Lazy!

The normal here is overly exaggerated (i'm still finetuning and cleaning up the height map itself), but should give a rough idea of the terrain, which is derived from actual topography data which has had its missing bits either filled in with adjacent features, where practical, or simply had the already existing features extended into them. While not 100% accurate, its also unlikely based on the radar maps that the actual terrain in these missing sections are in actuality all that different from what one will see here. 

[Rutabaga22]

This is looking amazing. Venus will be beautiful and the fact that the surface is surface color is nice. Will you try to add lava to Venus's surface??

[G'th]

3 minutes ago, Rutabaga22 said:

This is looking amazing. Venus will be beautiful and the fact that the surface is surface color is nice. Will you try to add lava to Venus's surface??

I am tempted actually; now that I'm learning about Kopernicus I'm starting to get ideas for my own fully original planet pack so it may well be worth it to practice

Especially because I have something very very special and also never-been-done-by-anyone-ever planned for this mod, so at some point I'll need to pick up the relevant skills

[Rutabaga22]

Just now, G'th said:

never-been-done-by-anyone-ever planned for this mod, so at some point I'll need to pick up the relevant skills

OH MY KRAKEN there are so many things you could do with a real world planet pack visual mod. 

[G'th]

2 minutes ago, Rutabaga22 said:

OH MY KRAKEN there are so many things you could do with a real world planet pack visual mod. 

Indeed

[G'th]

Daddy government came through and granted me a 64k map of Venus' surface. 

Very happy things are happening in the Gth house tonight

[G'th]

Behold, what I did instead of sleep, something I should hope will be extremely apparent in the jump in quality from my first draft:

This was quite the process. After getting the 64k data I had to go through the task of extrapolating for the missing data, which was tedious as all get out, but was well worth it in the end. Thankfully, once that was done and in-game, it was pretty easy to mock up the initial cloud set (which I promise is actually really awesome when it isn't washed out like it is in real life):

The general idea for Venus, as you're unlikely to plunge anything down to its surface, is going to be to aim for something akin to this:

Already done is the simple idea of there being a sort of "sandwich" region in the atmosphere where you could have a thick cloud deck below and a more earth-like cloudy sky above. I'm not 100% certain if that is true to life, but even if it ultimately isn't, I'm going to permit True Sight some artistic liberty because this is just too good to pass up. As such, I'm also going to introduce dynamics to that lower cloud deck. Now that cyclonic storms are in fact a possibility, one could arguably recreate this exact picture. (even more so once we get the new Volumetrics). 

For Vibrance, it will be a pretty simple take, and Venus will be going blueish, mimicking the Ultraviolet false color imagery of Venus.  For the surface, though, I'm thinking of going in a different direction and introducing a sort of "hybrid", between my more accurate to life colors and the bog standard Cheetoh landscape. What that means? If you're familiar with gemstones, think Gold and Blue Sandstone

Now, I'm still learning about Venus, so additional features for the planet are pretty scant atm. I do know I want to recreate the S-shaped polar vortices, and I plan on introducing the theorized aurora formation to the planet as well (which is similar to Mars in that they supposedly could appear anywhere, but are much more dispersed and "loosely" structured than even Martian auroras are).  

As I learn about Venus, I'll look into providing more little things.  

Down the line I do want to go ahead and do lava flows on the surface; that along with pretty much everything else to do with the surfaces of these worlds will come in time. 

[Vovical]

On 10/20/2022 at 4:18 AM, G'th said:

Behold, what I did instead of sleep, something I should hope will be extremely apparent in the jump in quality from my first draft:

This was quite the process. After getting the 64k data I had to go through the task of extrapolating for the missing data, which was tedious as all get out, but was well worth it in the end. Thankfully, once that was done and in-game, it was pretty easy to mock up the initial cloud set (which I promise is actually really awesome when it isn't washed out like it is in real life):

The general idea for Venus, as you're unlikely to plunge anything down to its surface, is going to be to aim for something akin to this:

Already done is the simple idea of there being a sort of "sandwich" region in the atmosphere where you could have a thick cloud deck below and a more earth-like cloudy sky above. I'm not 100% certain if that is true to life, but even if it ultimately isn't, I'm going to permit True Sight some artistic liberty because this is just too good to pass up. As such, I'm also going to introduce dynamics to that lower cloud deck. Now that cyclonic storms are in fact a possibility, one could arguably recreate this exact picture. (even more so once we get the new Volumetrics). 

For Vibrance, it will be a pretty simple take, and Venus will be going blueish, mimicking the Ultraviolet false color imagery of Venus.  For the surface, though, I'm thinking of going in a different direction and introducing a sort of "hybrid", between my more accurate to life colors and the bog standard Cheetoh landscape. What that means? If you're familiar with gemstones, think Gold and Blue Sandstone

Now, I'm still learning about Venus, so additional features for the planet are pretty scant atm. I do know I want to recreate the S-shaped polar vortices, and I plan on introducing the theorized aurora formation to the planet as well (which is similar to Mars in that they supposedly could appear anywhere, but are much more dispersed and "loosely" structured than even Martian auroras are).  

As I learn about Venus, I'll look into providing more little things.  

Down the line I do want to go ahead and do lava flows on the surface; that along with pretty much everything else to do with the surfaces of these worlds will come in time. 

Snip

Edited May 25 by Vovical
.

[Iodyne]

On 6/25/2022 at 7:43 PM, G'th said:

Really want to figure out how to get a blue sunset. It almost goes there but isn't quite as blue as it should be, but atmosphers still WIP anyway soo

Not sure if you figured this out already, but in my efforts to adjust and combine SVE/AVP/Spectra clouds, I noticed the "glow" objects seem to work. Here is what I have for Duna and it managed to make a nice blue hue for sunset (also slight blue lighting on clouds at night): 

OBJECT
	{
		name = Duna-glow
		body = Duna
		altitude = 8500
		speed = 0,0,0
		settings
		{
			_DetailDist = 1E-05
			_Color = 10,0,45,50
			_MainTex
			{
				value = StockVisualEnhancements/Textures/blank
			}
			_DetailTex
			{
				value = StockVisualEnhancements/Textures/clear
			}
		}
		layer2D
		{
			macroCloudMaterial
			{
				_MinLight = 1
				_RimDistSub = 1E-05
			}
		}
	}

You can play around with the RGBA values of course but that's what seemed to work for me. You can probably grab the same textures from any visual pack or CTTP.

[TT213]

This looks absolutely goergous, you are insanely talented. I can't wait to play with that mod !

[AstroRangerBeans]

Amazing and stunning but is it likely that upon the release of the mod, will there be any more bases/launch sites for the mod?

[infinite_monkey]

Technical question: where do huge textures go? VRAM or RAM?