Map The Earth | A collaborative project designed to map the Earth with detailed terrain meshes.

[ballisticfox0]

Map The Earth / RSS

What is 'Map the Earth?'

Map The Earth is a collaborative project with a final goal of covering the entire Earth in high quality terrain meshes, which I've deemed 'Tiles'. The project is both a repository for these 'Tiles', packaged in 'Tile Sets' but also to provide instructions how to make your own 'Tiles' and contribute to the project.

Map The Earth also includes smaller 'Site' decals, with even higher resolution in areas that matter the most.

 

What is a 'Tile'?

A tile is a terrain mesh that is 1 degree latitude long (28km~) and 1 degree longitude wide (23km~).

These tiles are packaged into 'Tile Sets' as a way to eliminate the need for using a look up table for which tiles you would need for an area, while also not making the final download size 20gb.

Tile sets typically consist of a 2x2 area with a couple 'Site' decals.

While you download Tiles in Tile sets they are completely independent* from one another, meaning you can go into the file system and remove what you don't need.

 

What is a 'Site'?

Screenshot by @Adiri.

A 'Site' is a much smaller decal with a much higher resolution, allowing runways and launchpads to be in incredibly high detail, eventually KK statics can be added to these to make them fully functional. These areas also can feature colliders so you can actually land on the terrain (read drawbacks for more info)

Like tiles these are also independent from other sites and tiles, in fact you can remove these entirely and it'll run completely fine.

 

Locations?

Screenshot by @Adiri.

As you can see above in the tidbit about Tiles, this is not a global replacement for the KSP terrain, it's estimated it would be around 2TB of data for the entire Earth at this resolution and scale, and I just don't have a good way to automate this process for now.

 

 

The current locations are as follows:
- Edward's Air Force Base

Edward's Gallery:

Spoiler

Mojave Air and Space Port

Edward's Air Force Base

The following screenshots are by @Smallant55

 

- Vandenberg Space Force Base

Vandenberg Gallery:

Spoiler

Future US locations are as follows:

• White Sands Missile Range
• Cape Canaveral Space Force Base
• Wallops Flight Facility
• Boca Chica Starbase
• Kodiak Launch Facility
• Area 51 Testing Facility

 

Future International locations are as follows:

• Baikonur Cosmodrome
• Vostochny Cosmodrome
• Plesetsk Cosmodrome
• Wenchang Satellite Launch Center
• Satish Dhawan Space Centre
• Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center
• Xichang Satellite Launch Center
• Tanegashima Space Center
• Guiana Space Centre

 

 

Drawbacks?

When looking at ambitious projects like this I like to look at why hasn't this been done before?

The answer is fairly simple, it has been done before, this is the exact same method as STS Locations and Katniss Cape Canaveral, except on a larger scale, and I really owe it to both Katniss and SpaceODY for directly and mostly indirectly getting this project on the ground.

Performance is the main issue that comes to mind but I, and the couple of other people who have tested this so far, have found that after a couple minutes of flying around the performance is actually hit surprisingly lightly.

Storage is the second issue that comes to mind, as previously said it would be over 2TB for the entire Earth, but almost everyone has 16gb of RAM to load all of the textures at this point, a second point on this is VRAM, which loading 1GB of textures into VRAM just for these 4 tiles is surprisingly expensive, but I've tried  to counteract this by using LODs dropping the usage to 30mb of VRAM when over 60km away from a tile.

As listed above, the main issue here is colliders, currently .mu models only support convex models, which have a max vertex count of 256, which simply isn't enough. This is why I've opted for only having Sites have colliders for now.

Other issues are tiles not being aligned 1:1 and these are primarily due to the method I use for crushing stupidly high vertex models (8 mil tris) down to something actually usable, like 50k. While this method does try it's best to preserve areas with extremely high elevation changes like mountainous regions, the UV maps that are produced by this are iffy. This causes squiggly terrain which is luckily only seen occasionally on roads and airstrips, so uhh.. don't look too hard and remember the fact that this is a 10 year old game.

Because these areas are squiggly, borders between tiles don't like to match of the greatest, I've tried my best but there's only so much restarting my game that I can take before I just say 'It's good enough'.

Scale on site decals is a bit borked and the colors are slightly off at the moment, hopefully these are temporary as I progress through better ways of creating them.

Because KSRSS is 1/4th real scale, a runway 60m wide and 4.5km long runway is now 15 meters wide and 1.13km long! This tends to look rather goofy with larger aircraft and I'm trying to figure out a good way around it. (FIXED)

 

 

Future Plans?

Currently the plan is to complete Vandenberg SFB and the tutorial on how to make tiles for yourself, then going back to Edwards and adding KK static and potentially building models for northern LA.

I also have a few friends that are playing with creating the entire Edward's campus in blender, which then can be imported into KSP using City2.

Lite versions are planned eventually featuring a half quality normal map, which will most likely look exactly the same for a much smaller file size and VRAM cost.

Come up with a better method of doing all of this, allowing extremely high quality meshes to be used.

 

Download Tiles Here: https://github.com/ballisticfox/MapTheEarth-KSP/releases or Scroll up to the Locations section and click on the area you want.

Read the Wiki Here (WIP):  https://github.com/ballisticfox/MapTheEarth-KSP/wiki

 

Licensing and Credits:

The Map the Earth is under: CC BY-NC-SA

The DTM data is derived from the 3DEP 1/3 Arc Second Database and the SRTM Database.

The Color data is derived from Google Earth and the NAIP Database.

Since this a collaborative project sources may vary, but any sources that deviate from these will be added to the list.

Lastly I need to thank the following people, who have helped directly and/or indirectly with this project:

@Katniss218 for Katniss Cape Canaveral and just for some random tidbits along the way.

@SpaceODY for STS Locations which originally inspired me to make this project.

@Adiri for screenshots and testing.

@Smallant55 for screenshots and testing.

And a couple others including Niako, Linx, GotMachine, Aviation365,  Pr0xima and many others for both help on specific questions and moral support.

 

Edited May 29, 2023 by ballisticfox0

[Aviation365]

Congrats on starting a new era of Kerbal and Real Solar System scenery! Will be following all the way.

[Smallant55]

 

So awesome! Just got re-inspired in Ksp all over again with this epic mod. Thanks @ballisticfox0 for keeping KSRSS alive and well!

[Adiri]

Glad to help with testing (and maybe some inspiration?)

[SpaceODY]

Glad to inspire! This certainly has reinstalled the magic for me again.

[rockettime03]

We goin

[ballisticfox0]

WIP Vandenberg Space Force Base 

[kspbutitscursed]

8 hours ago, ballisticfox0 said:

WIP Vandenberg Space Force Base 

wow that is amazing @ballisticfox0 's vandenburg also where SLC 4E and SLC 6

[Royalswissarmyknife]

Amazing how far the community is pushing the game

Edited May 20, 2023 by Royalswissarmyknife

[ballisticfox0]

Vandenberg v1.0 has been released!

 

https://github.com/ballisticfox/MapTheEarth-KSP/wiki/Vandenberg-SFB

 

[Nightside]

Hey this is great! I’ve had a similar project in mind myself, but never quite got it off the ground.

 

for scaling- 2.5x is challenging - I recommend scaling buildings and interactive features to the Kerbal and vessels, so about 5/8ths scale. That means stuff will look good when you get close. But you will have conflicts with aerial photography layers.

 

[TheOrios]

very cool!

[ballisticfox0]

3 hours ago, Nightside said:

Hey this is great! I’ve had a similar project in mind myself, but never quite got it off the ground.

 

for scaling- 2.5x is challenging - I recommend scaling buildings and interactive features to the Kerbal and vessels, so about 5/8ths scale. That means stuff will look good when you get close. But you will have conflicts with aerial photography layers.

 

Yeah that’s going to conflict with the aerial photography and the underlying topography, I’ll let the KK statics at the end of the pipeline be resized vs doing things on my end 

[Nightside]

are you accepting contributions? I built the Mahia launch site back in the day and would like to try your modeling method to sharpen the terrain.

[ballisticfox0]

1 hour ago, Nightside said:

are you accepting contributions? I built the Mahia launch site back in the day and would like to try your modeling method to sharpen the terrain.

Of course, this is a collaborative project after all. 
Instructions are here: https://github.com/ballisticfox/MapTheEarth-KSP/wiki/Creating-a-usable-heightmap-|-3DEP-Dataset-(US)

(Tutorial for the SRTM dataset will be up soon)

 

Edited May 27, 2023 by ballisticfox0

[ballisticfox0]

Well, the Cape won by a fairly slim margin, so here's progress so far:

 

Going to fix that coastline and remove some of the blatant watermarks, but I can't really get rid of them.

I'm thinking 6 tiles for the cape, one north, one south of this one, then moving west so +3.

[ballisticfox0]

---

Okay so something has been brought to my attention.

Stock Vessel sizes are 62.5% real scale while KSRSS is 25% real scale, meaning a pad meant for vessels will be 62.5% while the terrain underneath is 25%.

Just before I start this, here's definition of the terms

Tile - The large 1 degree x 1 degree meshes.

Site - Smaller area at a higher resolution that fits onto the Tile.

Pad - A pad placed with KK that a rocket launches from.

Now that that's out of the way, the solutions

 

Current: Tiles 25%, Sites 25%, Pads 25%

pros- accurate to the original terrain, no seams (roughly),

cons- rockets are too big for pads, everything looks small.

 

Solution 1: Leave tiles 25%, make Sites 65%, Pads 65%

pros - large areas aren't edited, still sort of fits albeit, very badly, to the surrounding tile, pads and rockets fit now.

cons - massive seams between Tiles and Sites, just won't look right.

 

Solution 2: make Tiles 65%, make Sites 65%, Pads 65%

pros - won't look wrong unless you zoom out, rockets fit now

cons - matching tiles just isn't going to work without severe overlapping

 

Solution 3: Leave tiles 25%, leave Sites 25%, make Pads 65%

pros- everything between tiles and sites still fits, rockets fit now

cons- pads won't match the surrounding area and will look comically big

 

My current solution is most likely going to add two download options, one using the correct scale and one with solution 1.

[ballisticfox0]

Well my solution is to create a new branch of MapTheEarth specifically for those who care about launching rockets more than flying around.

https://github.com/ballisticfox/MapTheEarth-KSP/releases/tag/v0.1-VesselScale

Only Vandenberg is out right now as I really do want to finish the Cape before moving forward with that side of the project.

[ballisticfox0]

2 hours ago, ballisticfox0 said:

Well my solution is to create a new branch of MapTheEarth specifically for those who care about launching rockets more than flying around.

https://github.com/ballisticfox/MapTheEarth-KSP/releases/tag/v0.1-VesselScale

Only Vandenberg is out right now as I really do want to finish the Cape before moving forward with that side of the project.

Well, this is really going to slow me down, so I've created a new poll on whether to keep this on KSRSS or move to RSS where I don't have to worry about these scaling issues and just reuse the assets I need to for KSRSS or stay on KSRSS and have development drastically slowed.

 

[ballisticfox0]

 

Cape is nearing completion

 

[Zoeille]

Insane!! Really a great work and thanks for the documentation for developers. I will definitely contribute on this one as I already tried multiple times to do VAFB by myself! 

[Zoeille]

For People that want a comparaison between this mod and Katniss..  

[ballisticfox0]

1 hour ago, Zoeille said:

For People that want a comparaison between this mod and Katniss..  

According to the RSS devs the scaling of Katniss’s cape is off slightly, Katniss did give me permission to use their assets for this project (thank you so much) so custom KK configs will come soon™.

Additionally working on even higher res textures for launchsite areas.

(don’t worry the SLF will be included)

Upper texture is old, lower is new.

[Zoeille]

24 minutes ago, ballisticfox0 said:

According to the RSS devs the scaling of Katniss’s cape is off slightly, Katniss did give me permission to use their assets for this project (thank you so much) so custom KK configs will come soon™.

Additionally working on even higher res textures for launchsite areas.

(don’t worry the SLF will be included)

Upper texture is old, lower is new.

Awesome, I'm working right now on KK configs for VAFB

[ballisticfox0]

I'd personally say this works pretty well.

Spoiler