[1.12.x] Parallax - PBR Terrain and Surface Objects [2.0.7]

[Aelfhe1m]

8 hours ago, Superawesome4141 said:

Where do I need to put the patch to remove the bubbles/life on EVE?

Just unzip it and put the whole ParallaxLifelessEve folder into your GameData directory.

[Natso]

Parallax and Volumetric Cloud are two masterpieces that make the game more perfect in terms of graphics than ever. I will not switch to KSP 2 until "BDArmory" mods appear.

[Ker Ball One]

I have been trying to play with Parallax's Scatters with colliders enabled.  Although my Mun base WAS free of rocks, as I reload (especially after restarting the game), the scatters shift a bit.  I think the actual GPS lat/long of my base is constant, but the terrain scatters move a bit.  Maybe not shifting, but each grouping of Mun rock formations can rotate or move around.  This means that sometime the scene loads with my base on top of a rock that wasn't there before. 

Any way to fix this? 

I have been trying to decrease the density of Mun scatters, by adjusting things like  _Seed, _SpawnChance, _Range, but it does not appear to clear the area of rocks around my existing base.

 

[mateusviccari]

How do I get rid of this "ring" that forms when flying low over planets, or at least attenuate it somehow? It's the effect of the scatters disappearing instantaneously when reaching a certain distance. I think it would be less noticeable if they slowly changed their opacity as we approach/get farther. Can we do this?

[CubertFarnsworth]

Can someone explain to me what is going on here? is it a glitch...is that supposed to be the ocean floor, but sitting on the surface of the water? 

They are EVERYWHERE on the ocean surface throughout all of Kerbin.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled this game and mods twice and this is the second play through. They are ALWAYS there ALL over the ocean surface.

running the popular graphics mods: Planetshine, Parallax, Kerbalism, etc.

[Vphurple Izumi]

On 3/2/2024 at 1:57 PM, Aelfhe1m said:

Just unzip it and put the whole ParallaxLifelessEve folder into your GameData directory.

Were the no life on laythe :c

[Gameslinx]

12 minutes ago, CubertFarnsworth said:

They are EVERYWHERE on the ocean surface throughout all of Kerbin.

They should only be spawning at the poles of Kerbin, as they're icebergs. And they shouldn't be spawning like that either

Do you have any mods that might alter Kerbin's biomes?

[Kerb24]

2 hours ago, CubertFarnsworth said:

They are EVERYWHERE on the ocean surface throughout all of Kerbin.

Do you happen to be using JNSQ? In my experience, the Cold Ocean biome gets applied to the entirety of Kerbin and spawns Icebergs when using JNSQ and Parallax.

[Krakatoa]

Western Sea definitely isn't a stock biome, so I'm wondering what planet pack that must be.

[CubertFarnsworth]

On 4/7/2024 at 12:23 PM, Kerb24 said:

Do you happen to be using JNSQ? In my experience, the Cold Ocean biome gets applied to the entirety of Kerbin and spawns Icebergs when using JNSQ and Parallax.

Yes I am using JNSQ. Is there a way to fix that? 

On 4/8/2024 at 11:12 AM, Krakatoa said:

Western Sea definitely isn't a stock biome, so I'm wondering what planet pack that must be.

JNSQ 

[Kerb24]

8 minutes ago, CubertFarnsworth said:

Yes I am using JNSQ. Is there a way to fix that? 

There's this Parallax JNSQ config, which in my experience works fine: Link

[CubertFarnsworth]

53 minutes ago, Kerb24 said:

There's this Parallax JNSQ config, which in my experience works fine: Link

Thank you for the look out @Kerb24 but unfortunately i am getting the "I'm getting an infinite loading screen - the planets in the bottom right corner are moving freely and nothing is happening!"  after installing the  Parallax JNSQ config. 

The error is mentioned in the OP under troubleshooting. Tried the troubleshooting steps (reinstalling Kopernicus and also tried fresh ksp install) and still got the infinite loading screen. Also tried reinstalling Parallax and JNSQ...no dice.  

[Kamicast]

Hey there, I've installed this mod in my game but I don't know what's happening. Every time I switch orbits from one planet/satellite to another, the game freezes for a few seconds (long enough for me to eat the planet at x5 speed). I've been looking for solutions but can't find any. I'm not sure if it's intentional, but according to my game console, it seems to happen when it loads/unloads the scatters. Any solutions? I only have this mod installed along with the necessary ones, and it still happens. By the way, my game runs smoothly all the time except for this issue. I have a good computer. Thanks in advance. Cheers.

[CubertFarnsworth]

On 4/10/2024 at 3:52 PM, CubertFarnsworth said:

Thank you for the look out @Kerb24 but unfortunately i am getting the "I'm getting an infinite loading screen - the planets in the bottom right corner are moving freely and nothing is happening!"  after installing the  Parallax JNSQ config. 

The error is mentioned in the OP under troubleshooting. Tried the troubleshooting steps (reinstalling Kopernicus and also tried fresh ksp install) and still got the infinite loading screen. Also tried reinstalling Parallax and JNSQ...no dice.  

Aside from this config file is there any other file that i should be adding or editing on the initial mod install?

 

[Kamicast]

On 4/7/2024 at 4:44 PM, CubertFarnsworth said:

Can someone explain to me what is going on here? is it a glitch...is that supposed to be the ocean floor, but sitting on the surface of the water? 

They are EVERYWHERE on the ocean surface throughout all of Kerbin.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled this game and mods twice and this is the second play through. They are ALWAYS there ALL over the ocean surface.

running the popular graphics mods: Planetshine, Parallax, Kerbalism, etc.

This form is familiar https://ibb.co/DwTVyQ0

[NaviG]

Do you know which setting do i have to change to load scatters from higher distance? I think they could load a little lately so the pop-in shouldn't be so visible.

Edited April 20 by NaviG

[123sderhy1]

someone can tell me how to change the number of objects on the surface being inside the game I know that there is a special menu for this but I could not find it.

[HereComesTheBoom]

@Gameslinx I have this issue where at around 8500 meters during a launch, the parallax trees from around the KSC seem to glitch and teleport to my rocket's elevation and stay with it as it ascends. Then in groups they disappear until they're all gone by about 11,000 meters. 

 

Edited May 6 by HereComesTheBoom

[prod.CLOUD]

 Hey!

Can someone help me out? Maybe im missing something or idk. 
 

Installed a fresh instance of the game, (thats the onlyone atm) I wanna play rp1 again, so I installed the rp1 express install etc, and somehow I managed to install RSS Reborn w/ parallax and scatterer. My problem is that I cranked up pretty much every settings in the game, but I dont have any trees, grass, bushes, nothing, but the terrain is from parallax. At the loading screen it says all parallax stuff is enabled. Colliders too, wich I wanted, but again, theres nothing, just like in stock. 
I hope you guys will understand my problem, I know my english is bad. 

Thank you for your time!

[Gameslinx]

Parallax Development Update

It's been a while since I've posted progress on my projects, so this is quite a meaty one!

What am I working on?

Over the last few months, I've been rewriting the entire mod from scratch including the shaders and architecture with the goal of massively improving performance, memory usage and eliminating annoying bugs. I've been successful so far with all of these to the point where I feel like I can share my progress. I can't provide any detailed analysis just yet as the mod is still evolving, but here are some of the key changes that are coming.

Performance - Terrain Shader

Performance is key with Parallax. Its original goal was to provide a terrain shader that was more flexible than and outperformed the stock shader. On some systems this is true, but we can do better than that! With the upcoming rewrite, both tessellation performance and texture performance are hugely improved. Not only does the current public version of Parallax use too much GPU bandwidth (something the KSP 2 terrain shader is notoriously terrible for), but it also does far too much in the wrong shader stages which worsens performance, more so on systems running OpenGL because of its awful vertex performance. Expect some major improvements to the terrain shader which will free up performance for things that matter more!

Not only that, but the CPU usage for functions that support the terrain shader have already been massively optimized. Because KSP is so dated, its terrain is not detailed enough to support tessellation at a high enough density that looks good. I've written two mesh subdivision methods over the years to try and counter this, but they have been limited. None of the previous methods have satisfied all of these requirements:

1. Gapless mesh (no T junctions)
2. Fast / efficient
3. High mesh detail
4. Multithreaded

But now after a month of two of experimenting, I've written a multithreaded subdivision scheme using the Unity Jobs system which achieves all four of these requirements. It's also entirely asynchronous which means aside from rendering the mesh at higher detail, there's zero performance loss from the subdivision itself! And it runs in realtime. Here's a gif:

Note that the framerate of this video is low because it's a gif. Here's the link to a video that shows this more smoothly: https://i.imgur.com/96HPeBE.mp4

Performance - Scatter System

The scatter system is where most of my time is being spent right now, and there are already a number of optimizations and improvements on the way!

Firstly, instead of doing everything in 'world space' coordinates (which is bad, really bad), the scatter data generation is now entirely in mesh-space. This means that the days of the scatters becoming disconnected from the ground are gone! I've also managed to significantly reduce the VRAM usage of the scatter system by changing how the scatters are applied, which now only apply to visible quads. With the previous implementation this wasn't possible and you were actually generating and storing scatter information for quads that weren't even visible, but thanks to Harmony and some guidance from @Gotmachine this isn't the case anymore.

The scatter shaders themselves have also been rewritten from the ground up. These include a much more streamlined process without the baggage that the previous shaders had - and there was quite a bit, especially since a lot of calculations were done to get around working in world space coordinates all the time. There are further improvements to VRAM usage here by reducing the memory required for each individual scatter object by around 88%. Before, an object's position, rotation and scale were stored as a 4x4 matrix using 64 bytes. This is absolutely unacceptable but sadly a byproduct of using the wrong coordinate system - this has now been reduced to just 8 bytes to store a float3 position, a float rotation and an unsigned integer index (for some internal processing needed elsewhere for aligning objects with the terrain). Combined with the VRAM usage I mentioned earlier, this will be a major part in improving performance and supporting lower tier hardware!

Quality Improvements

With the changes coming to the terrain mesh subdivision, the quality of the terrain tessellation is much better. The current public Parallax version also has a mistake in the biplanar texturing coordinates used for sampling mipmaps which results in slightly blurrier textures. This has been fixed, so expect a noticeable quality bump in the textures themselves. I've also added (cheap) reflection support to the shader which will massively improve the colouration of the terrain on atmospheric bodies which will be more noticeable when Scatterer is not installed.

On the scatter system side of things I've rewritten the procedural noise system and moved it from relying on the terrain system to generating it on the GPU. Not only is this much faster, but the improved implementation allows for much finer detail that isn't tied to the number of vertices in the terrain. This is big news for RSS players but applies to stock scales too. Check out the detail we can get now!

Ignore the cubes - as you can see, things are still very WIP. You can see here there is this weird pixelation of the procedural noise - this is a result of precision errors given the scales we are working at but there is a very nifty workaround for this too. On the technical side, I pass the 'direction to the planet center' to the GPU and it generates the noise from these spherical directions. Since these can be stored CPU-side as doubles, we can define a minimum procedural noise 'frequency' (which is really how large or small the noise appears) and multiply it before the lossy conversion to floats on the GPU. This means we'll have a minimum frequency which we can most likely safely set to 100 (larger for larger planets) which will make these precision errors much, much less prevalent. So, long story short - the pixelation can be largely ignored here. Again, WIP!

However this improvement to how the noise is generated (and the types of noise available) is huge for modders who right now are very limited in how scatter placement and dynamics can vary.

There are 5 noise types that will be available on release and I'm considering adding more if they're required:

There are most likely things that I've forgotten here, since there are seriously a whole bunch of improvements on the way! I'm looking forward to being able to share more in the future and excited to release it when it's ready.

As for when it releases, I'm aiming for within a few months at most if all goes well - but there's a lot going on in my life at the moment, so I can't promise anything!

o7 

Edited May 5 by Gameslinx

[MARL_Mk1]

KSP will live on as long as people as talented as you (and multiple others) continue breathing life into it. Can't wait for this

[Well]

Many thanks for your work and this detailed post, I've sadly never could play with Parallax due to performance issue with my hardware, so that's a good news, looking forward to your improvement. Thanks for trying to improve to allow more players to discover your wonderful work.

[mindseyemodels]

how do i use this mod with RSS? are there any configs for that?

[JebTheDestroyer]

1 hour ago, mindseyemodels said:

how do i use this mod with RSS? are there any configs for that?

I believe Parallax configs are built into RSS ^{but don't quote me on that}, the new features that have come out since 2.0 don't have configs yet AFAIK, so you won't see stuff like surface features yet. 

[NaviG]

nvm, i tried with parallax alone and it works fine, it should me another mod

Edited May 6 by NaviG