Is there any evidence that we will have soem celestial bodies with enough water to explore under it?

[tstein]

First, sorry if  there was some other topic about it, but my fast search with the keywords I came with did not find anything.

 

I was wondering if there is any chance of  we having the opportunity of explore under the surface of some planet ( with some nice  science prize of course since underwater woudl make any space biologist salivate).

[Pthigrivi]

We do know that a lot of planets and moons will have big liquid oceans, but we don't know much about whether we'll be able to do submarine exploration. The devs have said they're interested but we haven't seen submarine specific parts and I'd personally guess they won't be included right way, but perhaps down the road as part of an update or expansion. 

[Drakenred65]

Also, the odds are good someone will mod it.

[Strawberry]

I wouldn't bet anything relating to underground stuff, the ksp terrain system had issues with it and I dont think ksp2 wouldve changed that, not to mention that you cant really properly modify the terrain as well. However, considering that its been confirmed that for resource extraction youll need to go to specific parts, and Puf has a massive water filled impact crater, Id be shocked if we dont get you having to dive underwater to mine crashed asteroids.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Strawberry said:

I wouldn't bet anything relating to underground stuff, the ksp terrain system had issues with it and I dont think ksp2 wouldve changed that, not to mention that you cant really properly modify the terrain as well.

It's definitely still height map based. There are simple techniques to introduce "holes" for cave or underground structure entrances, but these will have to be 100% mesh, and that gets expensive really fast on the planetary scale. So yeah, an ocean under the ice of some planet/moon seems unlikely. It would require some very special tech to handle effectively three boundary layers (top surface of the ice, bottom surface of the ice, and the actual ocean bottom) as individual height maps, which would only be useful for this particular case. Sounds like a lot of work for little gain.

[Vl3d]

14 hours ago, K^2 said:

It would require some very special tech to handle effectively three boundary layers (top surface of the ice, bottom surface of the ice, and the actual ocean bottom) as individual height maps, which would only be useful for this particular case. Sounds like a lot of work for little gain.

What do you mean "little gain"? Most of the moon's of Jupiter and Saturn probably have underground oceans. Not to mention the caves, underground lakes and lava tubes on Earth, Mars etc. And who even knows what we'll find on Titan! Maybe it's not an Early Access feature, but underground and underwater exploration should definitely be a later update or DLC. It's as important as weather!

PS: We should take a look again at the graphics technology in modern games. We're going into voxel territory.. and still we don't want at least some caves for KSP2? Come on...

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Vl3d said:

What do you mean "little gain"? Most of the moon's of Jupiter and Saturn probably have underground oceans. Not to mention the caves, underground lakes and lava tubes on Earth, Mars etc. And who even knows what we'll find on Titan!

And the gameplay value of having an empty, dark underground ocean or featureless caves would be?

[Vl3d]

49 minutes ago, K^2 said:

And the gameplay value of having an empty, dark underground ocean or featureless caves would be?

Imagine a very tall vertical cliff face. High above there's a small cave entrance which leads to a network of tunnels that take you to a huge cavern which has a deep underground lake. And there at the bottom you discover...

You see what I mean? Gameplay value.

@Ghostii_Spacecould you pass this idea along?

Edited December 13, 2022 by Vl3d

[GoldForest]

2 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

Imagine a very tall vertical cliff face. High above there's a small cave entrance which leads to a network of tunnels that take you to a huge cavern which has a deep underground lake. And there at the bottom you discover...

You see what I mean? Gameplay value.

@Ghostii_Spacecould you pass this idea along?

Again, what is the point of exploring a cave? One or two of them might hide an easter egg, but really, caves are just a resource hog for other things that could need it. 

I admit, caves would be nice, but the cons are not worth the pros.

[Nirgal]

I definitely want this in future, understandably not on launch.

Sub-surface oceans are extremely common in our solar system, not having any representation of them in a space 'simulation' would be unfortunate considering KSP2 is about flying rockets and exploration of celestial bodies (hence the need for rovers, planes, boats and submarines).

In terms of gameplay, we'd be able to perform the mission NASA has planned to explore the ocean of Europa, melting down through the ice and exploring geo-thermal vents, how can you not be excited by this??

Building a sea-floor colony and extracting local resources to orbit and beyond would be immensely rewarding from a gameplay challenge perspective.

[tstein]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

And the gameplay value of having an empty, dark underground ocean or featureless caves would be?

About the same as an empty dark rock floating in space....

[Pthigrivi]

I think the "what is actually there" question goes for any game with huge planetary surfaces. There's always going to be a hard balance between procedural topography generation and hand-crafted special surface features. They've been hinting pretty heavily at the latter so it'll be fun to see whats going on there, but any way you look at it there are going to be these relatively small events spread over huge expanses that are much more uniform. What K^2 is saying is to make huge sections of a planet's surface into a mesh could cause performance issues. If we're exploring a sub-ice ocean like Europa has there may be a clever way to model the 3 boundary conditions, Im not a programmer, but the issue remains once you punch through you're in a very dark, opaque environment. Its not going to look like "Ooohh look at this vast crystalline cave!", your lights are going to penetrate maybe 30 meters in a 10km deep sub-ice ocean and it will be utterly black and featureless. That means just to navigate you'll need like a sonar overlay to see whats around you plus of course specialized parts to manage ocean propulsion, buoyancy, and some kind of terrain deformation system so that you can melt a hole through kilometers of ice. Once you do all that maybe there are sub-surface thermal vents or other cool surface features but just like the other anomalies in the game these are going to be very small events in a huge, largely featureless environment.  

So, don't get me wrong, it could all be cool its just a lot of programming for a fairly niche experience. Maybe we'd see something like that as part of an expansion down the road. 

Edited December 13, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Vl3d]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

to navigate you'll need like a sonar overlay to see whats around you plus of course specialized parts to manage ocean propulsion, buoyancy, and some kind of terrain deformation system so that you can melt a hole through kilometers of ice

That's an amazing idea! There are oceans on the planets anyway, I don't hear anyone complaining. As for the technical aspects about how to do it, that's for the devs to decide. It can be done, at least underground lakes.

[Drakenred65]

Someone reacently figured out how to put tunnels in a train sim game ive played. And it kind of works,but it’s heavy on the rendering engine for some unknown reason, and having 2 in the same map section dropped my frame rate from 90-120 to 30-40, but no similar drop when it was used to create a snowshed type tunnel over the map instead of underground. Granted different game, different issues, 

[t_v]

6 hours ago, Vl3d said:

We should take a look again at the graphics technology in modern games. We're going into voxel territory.. and still we don't want at least some caves for KSP2? Come on...

I would like to start by pointing out that KSP 2 is not a voxel-based game, it’s terrain is stored as a 2D texture. @K^2 outlined how having multiple heightmaps could produce large-scale underground terrain, but these are more limited than voxel terrain maps. I probably shouldn’t have to explain how transitioning the entire planetary terrain system to voxels would add several years of dedicated development, so I’ll just say that the easiest option is likely to involve a lot of work to make procedural terrain create workable cave walls. 
 

With technical concerns aside, I’d love for oceans (sub-surface or not) to have parts that interact with them. Especially on lifeless worlds, however much interesting stuff there is to find on the surface, there is just as much to find in the oceans. Adding more environments diversifies mission profiles, and oceans can bring about new craft architectures, which just puts more “build and fly” into “build and fly.” My personal preference is to go deep, adding in sonar scanners, air tanks and pressure-capable hulls for ships and submarines, as well as underwater-specific modules like geothermal power (which would be very effective in underground oceans), pressure locks (for transferring kerbals to/from the surface) and underwater-specific “launch pads.” Adding the whole pressure mechanic would probably be too much work for that gameplay as it would have to be set-and-forget, but who knows what directions are taken for updates and DLCs. Overall, I think a “buoyancy update” encompassing anything floating in a fluid would be a good candidate for adding new mechanics down the line. 

[KerikBalm]

Well, other games with height maps may have 1 single height vertex depressed to make a hole, and then a 3d object fills the hole.

We could make have a cave system/lavatube network object to fill a steep terrain depression

 

[K^2]

3 hours ago, tstein said:

About the same as an empty dark rock floating in space....

The gameplay is getting to the rock. Imagine if KSP had you just start on a rock and explore. Rovers, to explore these rocks, were a low-hanging fruit. This isn't.

[Bej Kerman]

5 hours ago, K^2 said:

And the gameplay value of having an empty, dark underground ocean or featureless caves would be?

Can say that about anything. What's the gameplay value of floating in space? All you do is a bunch of maneuvers to land on some rock. What's the gameplay value of aircraft? All you do is fly around, rockets can do that and much quicker.

If you don't understand what makes underground oceans and caves exciting, that isn't necessarily going to apply to everyone.

[K^2]

21 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

What's the gameplay value of floating in space?

I just addressed that above. KSP's core loop is building vehicles that overcome the challenge of getting from A to B. If you were just floating in space, that'd be terrible. What's your equivalent of fighting gravitational wells when exploring an ocean? Are you still making KSP or should you be making another game if you add these challenges? And again, what are you getting for what sort of an investment?

Surface oceans are easy. Keeping bottom of the ocean as part of the terrain as well. So throwing in some submarine parts: sure. Building completely new terrain tech that handles something multiple times more complex than what it does now for an under-ice ocean? Not worth it.

Edited December 13, 2022 by K^2

[KerikBalm]

Having made submarines for laythe and mod worlds with Oceans, the challenge has always been in getting the craft down in one piece.

I additionally took up the challenge of making subs that could deploy from and re-dock with seaplanes, for long distance travel across the water.

The subs generally just go nearly straight down, try to find a surface feature that had been modded to be at the bottom of the sea, scan it for science points, and then return to the seaplane

Beyond that, I have made diving bells to allow mining of the seafloor at locations where the surface isn't too far above the seafloor -underwater mining without direct connection to the surface is a pain, subs can't transfer much ore to the surface without becoming too buoyant

[Vl3d]

31 minutes ago, K^2 said:

building vehicles that overcome the challenge of getting from A to B

For the new generation of KSP players that is not the core loop. We are interested in designing planetary exploration vehicles also, not just space / atmospheric travel vehicles. Not to mention KSP2 will transition to actually building colonies and useful space stations.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Vl3d said:

For the new generation of KSP players that is not the core loop. We are interested in designing planetary exploration vehicles also, not just space / atmospheric travel vehicles. Not to mention KSP2 will transition to actually building colonies and useful space stations.

Yup. And instead of having rovers and colonies, you're proposing having a pitch black ocean devoid of any features beyond randomly generated rocks, because that's about the scale of the development cost here.

The question isn't in whether some portion of the player base will find interesting things to do with it. The question in game development is always what are you giving up for it. And at the same technical scale, the list of features that are going to be ten times more exciting and Intercept already doesn't have time to work on is a very long one indeed. Have a little bit of a perspective.

[Vl3d]

24 minutes ago, K^2 said:

instead of having rovers and colonies, you're proposing having a pitch black ocean devoid of any features beyond randomly generated rocks

Look, I don't care if they only make a big lake under the ice that you can access through a crevasse instead of a planet wide subsurface ocean. You're missing the point insisting on the "technical debt". What the OP is talking about is underground / underwater exploration and finding interesting stuff. I don't care about discussing HOW. We just want the experience in the game some time in the future. I am not arguing against you.

Edited December 13, 2022 by Vl3d

[Strawberry]

12 hours ago, K^2 said:

And the gameplay value of having an empty, dark underground ocean or featureless caves would be?

Honestly, having it dark and open with ambience would be sick. The fact that the ocean would be cold and its an ocean means that thermal conduction would be high, and also due to being a dark ocean with limited geothermal vents means that energy production is low. This would make colony building require tight energy management and heat management. Not to mention, open and empty spaces are terrifying, and if you add in the fact frost quakes are terrifying, you can easily give this place barotrauma vibes. The lack of modifying terrain would mean to be you'd have to have lakes that just open up to this massive ocean, which would promote the construction of interesting port cities which seems cool. Could also have terrain features like brincicles (underwater ice spikes) towards the poles that make it hard to navigate. 

That being said, if this gameplay value would be worth the coding headache I dont know. This is one of those things to where I dont think the devs will do this, nor do I expect them to, but if they do end up doing this I'll be happy with it. I think theres a unique atmosphere you can go with here and itd recontextualize a lot of gameplay mechanics in a great way.

[KerikBalm]

There are two things to discuss here:

1)Do we want underwater exploration, and

2)Do we want subsurface oceans?

For 1) - definitely yes for me. We should have have Kerbin, Laythe, Eve, Puff, Merbal, and Lapat that should have liquid oceans. That is quite a lot. I would also hope for a more proper titan analogue.

I don't see how exploring the seafloor should be any less important than exploring any other planetary surface.

Such exploration is already workable in KSP1 (particularly with robotics), and simple modding to add ore and surface features from breaking ground already adds a lot to the incentive for underwater exploration

Throw in the parallax mod, with it's much more interesting scatter, and it is even better 

For 2)

If the planets/moons we've seen, this would only seem to apply to the ice shelves of Kerbin, the small ice caps of Laythe, and the massive ice sheets or Merbal (dunno about Lapat)

Looking at the parallax mod here, it may be feasible for ice shelves. I haven't tried parallax yet (it's on my to do list, but I have very little time right now), but IIRC I saw a video that showed it added Ice sheets to the surface of Laythe, in the form of collidable procedurally generated scatters that covereed the ocean surface, with some openings.

Something like that may be possible, but is not ideal: the planet would fundamentally change depending on scatter settings

I think we can pass on 2