[1.12.x] Parallax - PBR Terrain and Surface Objects [2.0.8]

[t_v]

Wow! I looked here to see if there were any new features or if displacement collisions were added back, and these new surfaces look stunning! I haven’t been following it though, so is there any chance you could tell me which celestial bodies you have already done? Your work on Kerbin, the Mun, Eve and Laythe looks really good!

[FasterThanFlourite]

Thank you for the elaborate answer, very interesting.

With AVP removed the scene that previously has 25 FPS with lights is now at 40 FPS.

Looks like those two are just too much at 3440 x 1440, haha.

Edited April 5, 2022 by FasterThanFlourite

[anothernormalplayer]

Can't wait for my next mission after i installed this.

[RyGuy_McFly]

Hate to bother, but I've now posted three times here with logs and a detailed explanation of my issues (no terrain deformation, only nice textures) and have never gotten a response. Is there something else I need to post to get help? It's okay if I just got missed, but I would really enjoy having Parallax working... I can link to my old posts if you can't find them as they're about a month old now.

Again, not trying to be an ass, just not sure what else to do...

If you want, I can post my entire KSP folder and world saves, if that'll help.

Edited April 6, 2022 by RyGuy_McFly

[OldMold]

On 3/25/2022 at 3:55 PM, FasterThanFlourite said:

Houston, we have a problem! The Mun is definitely not made out of cheese, but out of soft pudding!

@RyGuy_McFly

If you mean "no terrain deformation" to mean things like rovers sinking into the ground like in the above screenshot - that's due to terrain collision having been disabled in the latest version due to bugs. For now its just nice textures.

If you're referring to the mushroom things as the "scatter in the OP images" - those are all work in progress and has not been released yet, but look really neat in the last few of Gameslinx' update posts!

Edited April 6, 2022 by OldMold
clarified

[Gameslinx]

13 hours ago, RyGuy_McFly said:

Hate to bother, but I've now posted three times here with logs and a detailed explanation of my issues

Sorry for getting back to you so late, your reply missed me. 

I've just taken a few minutes to look few your KSP.log and I'm only finding 1 exception related to Parallax which occurs on entering flight in which it is trying to set a property on a material that hasn't been created yet. This won't affect anything, and if you are seeing the textures show up (but no displacement), everything should be working fine.

I am noticing a lot of exceptions which made it difficult to work through your log. Can you send your Settings.cfg file for me to look at? Also, while I look through it can you try loading up Parallax with no other mods installed except from its dependencies?

On 4/5/2022 at 8:02 PM, t_v said:

Wow! I looked here to see if there were any new features or if displacement collisions were added back, and these new surfaces look stunning! I haven’t been following it though, so is there any chance you could tell me which celestial bodies you have already done? Your work on Kerbin, the Mun, Eve and Laythe looks really good!

I have finished the Mun, Eve, Duna and Ike. I am most of the way through Kerbin, Laythe, Moho and Minmus. I'm finishing roughly 1 planet every 2 days at this rate, which leaves me with 8 bodies left to finish

I also want to move away from Parallax being a tessellation shader and instead perform the tessellation on the terrain itself which would theoretically result in a big performance gain.

The tessellation shader stage runs once per frame, which essentially means the extra mesh detail is being calculated and processed every time the stage is ran. Moving it to a compute shader would mean that this stage is performed once which would already be a big improvement, but it would also make rendering lights a lot faster.

The only obstacle is I don't yet have the knowledge to do this, so it might come in a later update

Edit: This would mean collisions would be making a return

Edited April 6, 2022 by Gameslinx

[FasterThanFlourite]

4 hours ago, OldMold said:

@RyGuy_McFly

If you mean "no terrain deformation" to mean things like rovers sinking into the ground like in the above screenshot - that's due to terrain collision having been disabled in the latest version due to bugs. For now its just nice textures.

Oh, have I misunderstood it? I thought no collision meant not colliding with rocks on the surface.

I presume the floating / sinking into the parallax ground was a bug?

[OldMold]

15 minutes ago, FasterThanFlourite said:

Oh, have I misunderstood it? I thought no collision meant not colliding with rocks on the surface.

I presume the floating / sinking into the parallax ground was a bug?

Its a bit confusing - surface scatter (rocks) that comes with stock KSP has it's own collision settings you can enable/disable in the options. This is independent from Parallax, though surface scatters are not recommended with Parallax installed as far as I know.

Parallax terrain collisions that previously allowed the craft to interact with the newly "bumpy" ground textures have been disabled in the latest Parallax version, and sometimes that does result in crafts sinking below the surface or floating above the surface.

[t_v]

3 hours ago, Gameslinx said:

I have finished the Mun, Eve, Duna and Ike. I am most of the way through Kerbin, Laythe, Moho and Minmus. I'm finishing roughly 1 planet every 2 days at this rate, which leaves me with 8 bodies left to finish

Wow, I can't wait to see how these celestial bodies turn out! Good luck on the rest!

3 hours ago, Gameslinx said:

The tessellation shader stage runs once per frame, which essentially means the extra mesh detail is being calculated and processed every time the stage is ran. Moving it to a compute shader would mean that this stage is performed once which would already be a big improvement, but it would also make rendering lights a lot faster.

The only obstacle is I don't yet have the knowledge to do this, so it might come in a later update

Edit: This would mean collisions would be making a return

That all sounds amazing. This will be pretty much as close to KSP 2 as we are going to get in terms of planetary surfaces at least...

[darkplasmaray]

Gonna start a new ksp campaign when this works with the latest version

[Benzo Kerman]

6 hours ago, darkplasmaray said:

Gonna start a new ksp campaign when this works with the latest version

This mod works fine in the current version. Go ahead and give it a try, it's pretty cool!

[darkplasmaray]

6 hours ago, Benzo Kerman said:

This mod works fine in the current version. Go ahead and give it a try, it's pretty cool!

I did, I don't think its working for me. All the textures are flat and 2d instead of 3d. I think those are just the stock textures of the game. Not sure why it's not working, as if its turned off.  I set the terrain textures to ultra, but dont notice parralax. Perhaps its to do with my version of kopernicus? (the most recent one.)

[Benzo Kerman]

Just now, darkplasmaray said:

I did, I don't think its working for me. All the textures are flat and 2d instead of 3d. I think those are just the stock textures of the game. Not sure why it's not working, as if its turned off.  I set the terrain textures to ultra, but dont notice parralax. Perhaps its to do with my version of kopernicus? (the most recent one.)

Do you have Modular Flight integrator (found in Kopernicus download), the Parallax base, and the Parallax Stock Textures?

[Gameslinx]

Kerbin is almost done. I've made some huge optimizations to how the geometry is rendered and now I've managed to get a much better density of objects. Technical stuff below, but the picture first!

Ironically, I was limited by draw calls which this scatter system is supposed to reduce. Before the above optimizations, foliage was being rendered on a per-quad basis - each quad being its own draw call. Now I've rewritten part of the compute shader responsible for culling so that it combines every object's position from every quad and writes them to a single buffer which is used to render from. This took a scene with much less foliage than the one above from ~110 FPS to 160+ with a significant CPU usage reduction. Safe to say, it was worth the effort!

[koimeiji]

1 hour ago, Gameslinx said:

Kerbin is almost done. I've made some huge optimizations to how the geometry is rendered and now I've managed to get a much better density of objects. Technical stuff below, but the picture first!

Ironically, I was limited by draw calls which this scatter system is supposed to reduce. Before the above optimizations, foliage was being rendered on a per-quad basis - each quad being its own draw call. Now I've rewritten part of the compute shader responsible for culling so that it combines every object's position from every quad and writes them to a single buffer which is used to render from. This took a scene with much less foliage than the one above from ~110 FPS to 160+ with a significant CPU usage reduction. Safe to say, it was worth the effort!

Please tell me that this screenshot is edited.

There is absolutely no way this is an ingame screenshot. I refuse to believe it.

 

 

god, ksp and (eventually) beyond home are going to look so absurd once this is all done

[Spaceman.Spiff]

2 hours ago, Gameslinx said:

Kerbin is almost done. I've made some huge optimizations to how the geometry is rendered and now I've managed to get a much better density of objects. Technical stuff below, but the picture first!

Ironically, I was limited by draw calls which this scatter system is supposed to reduce. Before the above optimizations, foliage was being rendered on a per-quad basis - each quad being its own draw call. Now I've rewritten part of the compute shader responsible for culling so that it combines every object's position from every quad and writes them to a single buffer which is used to render from. This took a scene with much less foliage than the one above from ~110 FPS to 160+ with a significant CPU usage reduction. Safe to say, it was worth the effort!

Can this handle different scatter types for each biome?

[Gameslinx]

7 hours ago, Spaceman.Spiff said:

Can this handle different scatter types for each biome?

Not at the moment but it's something I can definitely do but I'm putting that off until after the first release so that the scope isn't too big

[Minmus Taster]

10 hours ago, Gameslinx said:

Kerbin is almost done. I've made some huge optimizations to how the geometry is rendered and now I've managed to get a much better density of objects. Technical stuff below, but the picture first!

Ironically, I was limited by draw calls which this scatter system is supposed to reduce. Before the above optimizations, foliage was being rendered on a per-quad basis - each quad being its own draw call. Now I've rewritten part of the compute shader responsible for culling so that it combines every object's position from every quad and writes them to a single buffer which is used to render from. This took a scene with much less foliage than the one above from ~110 FPS to 160+ with a significant CPU usage reduction. Safe to say, it was worth the effort!

My PC's fan went faster just from looking at this, it looks stunning.

[darkplasmaray]

18 hours ago, Benzo Kerman said:

Do you have Modular Flight integrator (found in Kopernicus download), the Parallax base, and the Parallax Stock Textures?

Yeah, here's a screenshot of my mod folder: https://imgur.com/a/BKyxrGx

I assumed it just wasn't working with the current version, but if it is then I don't know whats going on : (

[t_v]

Just wondering if you plan to add life to Duna and scatters to Jool. I guess we’ll be seeing once the new update comes out and of course the mod is up to your artistic vision, but for Duna I feel like saving life for the less accessible reaches of the universe would be good, and for Jool I’m just wondering if scatters are even possible without a surface. 

[Spartwo]

On 4/12/2022 at 11:46 AM, Gameslinx said:

Not at the moment but it's something I can definitely do but I'm putting that off until after the first release so that the scope isn't too big

Screenshot looks absolutely stunning,  and I would love to see biome terrain scatters down the line given how much time I spend on the surface.

Edited April 13, 2022 by Spartwo

[darkplasmaray]

21 hours ago, darkplasmaray said:

Yeah, here's a screenshot of my mod folder: https://imgur.com/a/BKyxrGx

I assumed it just wasn't working with the current version, but if it is then I don't know whats going on : (

Just for reference: https://imgur.com/a/e0uhVQR

I don't think it does work on the most recent version (1.12.3), as it states in the screenshot. Would appreciate to know which is the latest version is works on. Otherwise I'll just wait for the new update to the mod. Thanks.

[Gameslinx]

10 minutes ago, darkplasmaray said:

I don't think it does work on the most recent version (1.12.3), as it states in the screenshot. Would appreciate to know which is the latest version is works on. Otherwise I'll just wait for the new update to the mod. Thanks.

Odd, I'll start looking into it. It works fine for me but too many people have started reporting problems for my comfort 

[darkplasmaray]

5 minutes ago, Gameslinx said:

Odd, I'll start looking into it. It works fine for me but too many people have started reporting problems for my comfort 

Quick update, once I restarted the game on ultra settings, the mod started working, but the error message on the loading screen saying its not made for this version still appears.

So if anyone has that problem that I just had, set the terrain settings to ultra in your game, then close and re-open the game, and it should work fine. Looking forward to your next big update. Major terrain additions that I saw in your screenshot update look amazing, could definitely add more to barren planets with assets like that.

[Gameslinx]

3 minutes ago, darkplasmaray said:

the error message on the loading screen saying its not made for this version still appears.

Lol this is just my mistake forgetting to update the version number