Terrain deformation?

[Carson blake]

Not sure if you guys have implemented or plan on putting in terrain deformation but I think it would be a great addition to have rovers make ruts and for vehicles to possibly get stuck like the mars opportunity rover did. Excited to see what you guys put out!

[pandaman]

Suggested several times.

Actual terrain deformation is almost certainly not viable or practical.

Wheel tracks etc. could probably  be done graphically, but I doubt they would be persistent long enough to be worth the effort.

Both would need computational resources to do and maintain.  I (and I suspect most others) would prefer a smoother running game to having those unnecessary, but admittedly 'pretty', things slowing things down.

 

[Cytauri]

11 hours ago, pandaman said:

Suggested several times.

Actual terrain deformation is almost certainly not viable or practical.

Wheel tracks etc. could probably  be done graphically, but I doubt they would be persistent long enough to be worth the effort.

Both would need computational resources to do and maintain.  I (and I suspect most others) would prefer a smoother running game to having those unnecessary, but admittedly 'pretty', things slowing things down.

 

You know, you could have a blast texture underneath the explosion when it explodes. There could be different variations of the blast texture depending on the velocity or size of the object which then right after it explodes, the texture and ground around it could glow for a few seconds and then cool down leaving only the blast texture. Definitely wouldn’t be a crater, (which only could be truly possible in KSP 10 alongside with an Intel i30 and a RTX 9090) but it is as possible as tire tracks or Kerbal footprints, and the tracks and footprints have been done already in the Kopernicus Extras mod.

 

Edited February 9, 2023 by CytauriKerbal

[MarcAbaddon]

Agree that something like rover ruts easily can be done, e.g. by Shaders, especially if they are not persistent. Making it persistent would be more difficult but still possible, but you would probably get some weird results if you stack too many crossing and overlapping ruts. I am not sure I really want them to affect physics though (which is possible, see e.g. what the parallax mod does). Wheel physics was buggy enough in KSP 1 without it. And I think it is still Unity handling it, so while it is likely much improved I would not be surprised if it is not still weird in places.

Large scale deformation is computationally feasible (hell Magic Carpet did it back in 95, to just give a random example. But it's the kind of feature you need to pretty much built the rest of the engine around, so highly doubt we are going to get it - that's the kind of feature you brag about and also the kind of feature you can't really easily add at a later stage.