[1.0.0] Firefly - Revamped Atmospheric Effects

[Saaur]

The configs for RSS are borked. I.E., Earth's config is exactly the same as Kerbin's despite the atmosphere being twice as deep. Effects don't appear until 70km altitude, but you're through most of your heating by that point.

I poked around in the config files but can't find anything to adjust altitude of the effect. If you could base it off dynamic pressure, that would be even better, but altitude is close enough for government work.

@MirageDev, any thoughts?

[AmanitaVerna]

This is fantastic!

[Char0703]

This looks amazing! Can't wait to make my school laptop suffer even more!

[miklkit]

As someone who takes extra time to make sure that all joints are as accurate as possible I find the hilites at every joint to be unsettling.  Please reassure me that this is just a visual glitch.

[Lyra]

I decided to test out how my Jool 5 SSTO I'm working on looked with firefly and encountered a pretty nasty visual bug. Something in the cargo bay seems to have a weird collision box or something, and it produces this aero/reentry trail under the cargo bay. It starts in transonic (300ish m/s) and gets very bright once you reach 800-900 m/s or so and heating effects show up.

Due to its position and size (looks like 2.5m radial) I thought it was my Tylo lander but removing it changed nothing.

I made a test craft and managed to figure it out: it's the large Drill-O-Matic, mounted upside-down. Lo and behold, the exact same visual bug.

Here's the setup I used in the test craft. The Jool craft is very similar except the drill is attached to a hinge, which itself is attached to the converter. Front of the craft is to the left if it's unclear. It seems to create the bug well in front of the drill, and in a roughly circular shape, which was very confusing for me while figuring out what caused it.

More screenshots in the spoiler.
 

Spoiler

This is about where the bug starts to appear, with the otherwise-fine-looking transonic effects. Note the small trail below the cargo bay.

The same, but a bit clearer at higher speed

Once heating FX show up it becomes impossible to miss. It's far brighter than the rest of the craft even at the lowest of speeds where heating FX occur.

Deploying the drill while still in the cargo bay, just to see what happens. The trail moved and changed shape.

Fully deployed, trail is more diffuse and some of it is angled

Retracting

Fully retracted, some of the trail stays at an angle but the rest returns to the previous state

It has two tails, almost like a comet.

 

And this is about where I reverted the flight because I had the screenshots I needed.

I don't know if this affects other parts, nor do I know what changing the orientation/position of the drill does. @MirageDev let me know if you need more testing or screenshots. I'm on Mac if that's anything.

[umbra humanus]

Very beautiful mod though I am experiencing a minor graphical glitch where when I am re-entering the atmosphere there is a blue ouline of the bottom of my spacecraft.

 

[BSS_Snag]

16 minutes ago, umbra humanus said:

Very beautiful mod though I am experiencing a minor graphical glitch where when I am re-entering the atmosphere there is a blue ouline of the bottom of my spacecraft.

 

The blue outline which is in front of the heat shield is the bow-shock of reentry. Currently it does just copy and render the part facing the atmosphere, (adding unnecessary details to it). It is on purpose but, But refinements are still in dev
See the github issue here https://github.com/M1rageDev/Firefly/issues/9

[Archwolfgamer]

will you release this on curseforge?

[abcmatteo]

On 2/9/2025 at 7:35 PM, Marsflugzeug said:

i'm absolutely loving this! Sadly i'm a linux guy and have to use Proton to play KSP as other visual mods (parallax) don't run (without glitches) on the native linux client.

 

So, any idea how to workaround or fix the glitch in lower atmosphere on Linux/Proton yet? I tried but didn't find any posibility to affect the  effect state other then  in the effect editor... this might be one dirty fix...

IMAGE

BTW, it's working fine in upper atmosphere...

IMAGE

Simillar issue here, but its everywhere.

[Eclipse 32]

9 minutes ago, abcmatteo said:

Simillar issue here, but its everywhere.

tbh it looks like you are narrowly avoiding a Death Star blast in the first image

[Mr. Kerbin]

On 2/6/2025 at 4:33 PM, mindseyemodels said:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

THE PICTURE IS BROKEN

[Eclipse 32]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[AdrianDogmeat]

Here's some of my Firefly screenshots (in chronological order):

 

[mindseyemodels]

Hopefully this periodic table image doesnt break. This should help with developing configs 

[Eclipse 32]

Just now, mindseyemodels said:

Hopefully this periodic table image doesnt break. This should help with developing configs 

i've got it saved on my end, just in case!

[klyith]

On 2/10/2025 at 12:44 PM, klyith said:

Proton v8 is somewhat nicer that Proton v9 on my machine, but that also may be GPU dependent. (I've got an AMD.)

Here's what I got as a fix:

//remove mach effects in normal atmospheres
@PHYSICSGLOBALS:FINAL
{
	@aeroFXMachFXFadeStart = 1.55
	@aeroFXMachFXFadeEnd = 1.5
}

 

An update to this for the other linux peeps: the above allows you to fly planes at low mach in atmosphere, but the artifacts come back in the early part of reentry heating.
It also helps to reduce the gap between aeroFXStartThermalFX and aeroFXFullThermalFX to minimize the amount of time the game is drawing both the mach effects and reentry effects.

Default KSP those are 2.5 and 3.75 respectively. So you could add:

	@aeroFXStartThermalFX = 3.4
	@aeroFXFullThermalFX = 3.5

But if you are in any type of planet pack (RSS, JNSQ, KSRSS, etc) they will often be different, since velocity is generally higher in most alternate Kerbins. (I do JNSQ and have them set to 5.1 & 5.25)

[supra_Turbo]

Holy smokes, this is fire. No pun intended.

[abcmatteo]

Here's a new batch of cooked screenshots. (btw for the Linux guys, I'm running the Windows version through Crossover on a Mac, so I may be having a completely different set of causes for the issue)

This ones pretty bad:

Mach 4-5 in atmosphere:

One of my least screwed-up screenshots:

[klyith]

8 hours ago, abcmatteo said:

Here's a new batch of cooked screenshots. (btw for the Linux guys, I'm running the Windows version through Crossover on a Mac, so I may be having a completely different set of causes for the issue)

Crossover is basically the commercial version of Wine, and is closely related to Proton. Valve and Codeweavers work pretty closely together.

[MirageDev]

Hey!

If anyone runs into the Linux bug, then please see this Github issue page and reply in it: https://github.com/M1rageDev/Firefly/issues/16

We're trying to collect as much info about it as possible, to be able to find out what's causing it, since I can't reproduce the bug on my Linux install.

 

Spoiler

mentioning @Marsflugzeug, @klyith and @abcmatteo, since you reported it here

 

[abcmatteo]

Will grab logs as soon as I’ve finished my current maneuvers and restart the game to recreate it on a fresh load.

[Spaceman2000]

Question: Does this mod replace or disable the stock aero effects, cause there are no air effects around my rockets anymore, makes launches kind of boring

[Eclipse 32]

they still exist, it just turns them way the heck down. it's the Aerodynamics FX quality slider in settings.

[Spaceman2000]

3 minutes ago, Eclipse 32 said:

they still exist, it just turns them way the heck down. it's the Aerodynamics FX quality slider in settings.

Ah, ok. Thank you

[MirageDev]

10 minutes ago, Spaceman2000 said:

Question: Does this mod replace or disable the stock aero effects, cause there are no air effects around my rockets anymore, makes launches kind of boring

It just turns the stock setting down, but if it's set to anything other than "Minimal" then the effects mix and look worse. The mod will get additional customization settings in future updates though, which would allow for additional aero fx for example.