[1.0.0] Firefly - Revamped Atmospheric Effects

[Reverse Equa]

Do you know how to fix this, the re-entry effect is not loading

[stupid dumb idiot]

does this work with restock

[Kevin_kerman]

3 minutes ago, stupid dumb idiot said:

does this work with restock

it should work with restock, it just alters the atmospheric effects

[StarCrusher96]

Great mod! adds a lot of immersion to re-entry 

KSS2 Firefly configs will be up very soon. (currently under testing)

Edited Friday at 11:11 PM by StarCrusher96

[stupid dumb idiot]

44 minutes ago, Kevin_kerman said:

it should work with restock, it just alters the atmospheric effects

for me it doesnt work

and whats the name of it on ckan because im having the same problem reverse had

[OrbitalManeuvers]

Hiya! So glad you stuck with this project and we finally get to see (legit) usages!! Thanks for your work and for sharing it with us!

I brought back the Starliner capsule from LEO with no issues - looked amazing. I brought back the Apollo capsule from lunar velocities (KSRSS 2.x) and mucho exploto ensued. Lemme show you a couple screen captures from two videos I took that I am way too lazy to edit into one but if you want to see them, I can upload both of them.

Anyway - here's Firefly obviously. This is moments before ka-boom. I know this isn't normal for my install - it's only 5k/s and I've done this lots of times. So I created this save to test it, and saved just prior to re-entry so I could test both with FF and with RPER. Pertinent numbers here are 61.9k altitude, 5185m/s

(By the way, the "+" icon in the staging list (the one that overheats) is the CM itself - the staging icon is for the capsule's RCS)

Screencap from the RPER video. All I did was remove Firefly, and copy over RPER, then loaded the same save point, and tried to grab a frame with the same numbers. With RPER the heating bar stays right at the halfway point until it goes away completely.

That's all the info I have! Err, of course this is the latest BDB, standard Apollo capsule build. 

Thanks for any thoughts you might have on my lunar velocity sadness

[TwoCalories]

Should I remove Reentry Particle Effects before installing this mod?

[Ryaja]

On 2/6/2025 at 8:20 AM, MirageDev said:

Firefly [1.0.0]

for KSP 1.12.x

Image by Truthful

Hello! For the past few months, me and @mindseyemodels have been working on Firefly, a complete replacement for KSP's reentry and aerodynamic effects, and this is the post for it.

This mod, as said above, completely replaces the stock effects with it's own system. It features:

• A smoother double-layered plasma trail
• Bowshock in front of the ship
• New particle effects
• In-game effect editor
• Many configuration options

Firefly can have a minor FPS impact, but in some cases it can have the same performance or better than stock. It's mostly on the GPU, due to the amount of triangles generated every frame for the trail.

Enjoy!

 

Media

  Reveal hidden contents

Image by Kuiper_Belt

Image by Kuiper_Belt

Image by Kuiper_Belt

Image by MirageDev

 

Review video by PicoSpace Industries:
https://youtu.be/jSn1UNigxCc

 

See the entire album

 

Wiki

The mod has a wiki! Check it out here.

 

Compatibility

Firefly currently has full compatibility with the entire stock system, RSS and KSRSS. If you make configs for a planet pack and want them bundled with Firefly, then please let me know!

If a planet/moon is unconfigured, then the mod will default to the same config as Kerbin.

 

Credits

The mod's icon and particle sprites were created by @mindseyemodels, who has also made incredible concept arts for the mod and helped shape it the way it is now. The effects would definitely not look as good as they do now without him.

Massive thanks to @JonnyOThan for making some really awesome optimizations and fixes to the mod's plugin, and other support.

The core shader was based on Leah Lindner's paper describing a method of creating promising reentry VFX. Without the paper, this mod would definitely not be possible.

Massive thanks to all the people mentioned above, as well as everyone from the early testing groups, and all the Patrons - without you the mod would probably be much different than it is now, or wouldn't exist at all

 

Licensing

This mod and it's source is licensed under GPL 3.0.

All model and texture assets (.mu, .png, .dds etc.) are All Rights Reserved.

 

Dependencies

This mod's only required dependency is ModuleManager.

It is NOT bundled with the mod, which means that you will have to install it yourself, if you aren't using CKAN.

 

Downloads

We highly recommend installing the mod with CKAN, but here are the downloads if you're installing manually:

1. SpaceDock

2. GitHub

This mod is absolutely awesome! I was just messing around with it yesterday!

[stupid dumb idiot]

wait can 1.12.5 work on this mod?

7 hours ago, Kevin_kerman said:

it should work with restock, it just alters the atmospheric effects

 

[DareMightyThingsJPL]

12 minutes ago, stupid dumb idiot said:

wait can 1.12.5 work on this mod?

Yep, can confirm that it does

1 hour ago, TwoCalories said:

Should I remove Reentry Particle Effects before installing this mod?

Probably yes. Also reduce the stock re-entry effects as low as they can go, so that this mod works best.

[stupid dumb idiot]

Why does it say FX not loaded on ship or something like that? and how can i remove the star on items in the ingame editor?

19 minutes ago, DareMightyThingsJPL said:

Yep, can confirm that it does

Probably yes. Also reduce the stock re-entry effects as low as they can go, so that this mod works best.

 

 

[Kunatics]

I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Andrewgeorgeea]

This is a great mod! But I think there might be an issue with RSS+RO. For example, normally when the reentry speed is above 7500m/s, the reentry effects should appear at an altitude of around 100km, but the plasma effect doesn't start until 68km. I wonder if this is a mix-up between the stock and RSS configurations? I remember that in the stock environment, the reentry effects start appearing after 68km. I’d like to know if this is a bug, and if not, how can I fix it? If it is a bug, how can I solve it?

[mark7]

I encountered a problem when Firefly is installed. 

Everything is perfectly fine, until I switch to IVA view, where things got very blurry when moving the camera. If the camera stays still, the blurry goes away.

you can find the ksp log and picture here

[JoolRools]

Just downloaded, I think this will be the next parallax or EVE.

[JonnyOThan]

1 hour ago, mark7 said:

I encountered a problem when Firefly is installed. 

Everything is perfectly fine, until I switch to IVA view, where things got very blurry when moving the camera. If the camera stays still, the blurry goes away.

you can find the ksp log and picture here

Try turning off temporal antialiasing in scatterer and tufx.

You’re on a fairly old scatterer version as well,  And somehow you have TSSafetyNet and TweakScale /L.

Edited Saturday at 12:19 PM by JonnyOThan

[Spacedude9]

@OrbitalManeuvers I love your screeshots and I wanted to know what TUFX config you use?

[OrbitalManeuvers]

43 minutes ago, Spacedude9 said:

@OrbitalManeuvers I love your screeshots and I wanted to know what TUFX config you use?

Yikes this took me a minute to find because the author's thread has changed.  The profile in those shots is probably 'Steven_Colour_Hassle' (slightly modified) and comes from a file called steven_tufxprofiles.cfg. I don't know if the names will be the same any more, but this was the thread and the link I used at the time. The thread /profile owner/author is incredibly talented so hopefully you'll get to see some of their work.

 

[Eclipse 32]

20 hours ago, Reverse Equa said:

Do you know how to fix this, the re-entry effect is not loading

i had teh same thing happen when i pressed the "turn effects off" button, and the "turn on" button didn't appear.

[Spacedude9]

1 hour ago, OrbitalManeuvers said:

Yikes this took me a minute to find because the author's thread has changed.  The profile in those shots is probably 'Steven_Colour_Hassle' (slightly modified) and comes from a file called steven_tufxprofiles.cfg. I don't know if the names will be the same any more, but this was the thread and the link I used at the time. The thread /profile owner/author is incredibly talented so hopefully you'll get to see some of their work.

 

Thank you so much, it looks amazing.

[lajoswinkler]

This looks amazing. Great work.

But it's bittersweet. It took over a decade and a modder for KSP to get proper effects for reentry. So many of us have asked game authors for this and were ignored all these years.

[Stratickus]

9 hours ago, DareMightyThingsJPL said:

Also reduce the stock re-entry effects as low as they can go, so that this mod works best.

Where is this setting located? I looked and couldn't find it.

Cheers,

[Krakenium]

Okay, I went ahead and lowered the quality of the textures even more.

 

It happened again, but this time KSP did not crash (only the image is freezing).

 

I don't think it is a memory problem. The task manager shows that RAM is not full at any time, and my hard drive is very far from being full. Also, I don't see why this mod would use so much RAM.

I don't know if it's helpful or not, but here are some findings in the logs:

in KSP.log, an error : [ERR 17:43:25.195] Texture 'Firefly/Assets/Meshes/Bluedog_DB/Apollo/white' not found!

in player. log : a bunch of "d3d11: failed to create buffer" and "GarbageCollector disposing of ComputeBuffer. Please use ComputeBuffer.Release() or .Dispose() to manually release the buffer."

 

[jebycheek]

This is  incredible！

[Krakenium]

I just tried to mess with the settings. If I disable the bowshock effect, everything is fine.

 

On my screen, it really looks like the texture glitches and ends up "exploding."