[0.22] Universe Replacer v4.0

[Lyinginbedmon]

...How do I, um...get it to work?

I put the UniverseReplacer in the GameData folder, downloaded the Jool and Eve cloud textures and spacex34's Planets and Moons (just the Kerbin textures), put them in their respective folders, and loaded up the game. Didn't see anything.

Were you in orbit?

[Franklin]

Do you have a Head1? I had the same issue and it was fixed by renaming one of my head textures to Head1 (and renaming the others accordingly).

That was it! They seem to load now.

I knew it was random, which heads were used, but it's not even consistent to the Kerbal, huh? Like leaving a hatch, re-entering, then leaving again will produce a new head every time.

[Lyinginbedmon]

Yeah, kerbals essentially cease to exist when they enter pods, so there's presently no way to create persistence.

[Raptor831]

I keep getting weird glitches on kerbin (didn't try other planets) in LKO an below (even in the VAB)

I'm on 0.22 using the cloud HD pack, on a mac (if that makes a difference..)

That looks like an "out of memory" glitch. Happens to me when KSP hits it's memory allocation limit (somewhere around 3.5 GB RAM). Doesn't matter how much you have in your machine, either, it's a Unity engine problem (it doesn't handle textures the best) and due to 32-bit application limits.

Solution: turn your textures to half-res in your settings or delete some mods. Or, get the reduced texture versions of mods if they exist.

PS - I'm on a Mac too, and I've seen that in the VAB. That's when I know it's time to restart the game!

[ThesaurusRex]

Were you in orbit?

No, I was in Map Mode trying to get a preview of the planets. Does it make a difference?

[Zander]

Now that an earth size kerbin is available the 8K textures are too low resolution and look blurry on the new earth size kerbin. Is it possible that we can get higher resolution kerbin reskins?

Maybe a 10K or a 12K kerbin reskin would work nicely.

Edited October 24, 2013 by Zander

[KerbMav]

Ramember ramember the limits of RAM ...

[Camacha]

Ramember ramember the limits of RAM ...

Time for a dedicated Linux KSP-installation And a videocard with more VRAM of course. Universe Replacer will rock combined with the Realism Overhaul.

Edited October 25, 2013 by Camacha

[eRe4s3r]

Now that an earth size kerbin is available the 8K textures are too low resolution and look blurry on the new earth size kerbin. Is it possible that we can get higher resolution kerbin reskins?

Maybe a 10K or a 12K kerbin reskin would work nicely.

Maximum texture size is 9999x9999 (Unity Limit) and 8192 * 4096 (DX9 limit)

Or to put it bluntly, it's really 8192 * 4096 ^^ anything else produces errors and bugs (the displayed image will be a mipmap half the resolution you actually wanted

Adding to that... if you wanted more detail, only way is for some insanely smart mod to cut the planet texture into half (so that we got 4 textures instead of 1). So that the planet is somehow mapped with multiple textures instead of one. Allowing for 16k * 8k (but not more)

Still, the current texture size is good enough for anything beyond 150km assuming you somehow hack away the bump (when using clouds or city lights) but it is not what we really wanted

Sadly, the 8k limitation is set in stone until KSP is a DX10 game and Unity allows for higher texture resolutions

Edited October 25, 2013 by eRe4s3r

[DresCroffgrin]

A quick question:

I recently installed this mod for my game, with Raredens Skybox r4.7 (2k) and Celestial Bodies Revamped r4 (Standard Resolution), and my framerates in the game dropped from 60 solid to ~28 with the same rocket, same point in time, and same view (uninstalling bumped framerates back up). My computer is an i7-3770k @4.1 ghz with a GeForce 660 gpu, and KSP is still below 3gb of RAM used. Is this a common problem with this mod? If not, are there any common installation errors I may have made that caused it? Are there any known conflicts with other mods that cause framerate issues with this mod (I have a lot of plugin mods installed, but not a ton of part mods)? I love this mod and really want to use it, but I treasure my framerates more.

Thanks!

[Lyinginbedmon]

Yes, the textures have a big effect on RAM usage.

[Camacha]

I am having a bit of a hard time finding out exactly what version of Unity KSP uses and what it is capable of, as there are DX11 versions of Unity.

Edited October 25, 2013 by Camacha

[Camacha]

My computer is an i7-3770k @4.1 ghz with a GeForce 660 gpu, and KSP is still below 3gb of RAM used. Is this a common problem with this mod?

Did you check the vital signs of your GPU and CPU while doing this? It would be good to monitor CPU load, GPU load and GPU memory usage (VRAM). You already checked RAM usage, but it never hurts to do that again. That way it should not be too hard to identify the problem.

I personally suspect VRAM, but that is just a hunch. If textures are swapped back and forth between the GPU/VRAM and RAM it will cause some delays.

Edited October 25, 2013 by Camacha

[eRe4s3r]

I am having a bit of a hard time finding out exactly what version of Unity KSP uses and what it is capable of, as there are DX11 versions of Unity.

The problem goes deeper than that. What prevents higher res textures is a Unity Engine issue (Unity itself refuses to load textures larger than 9999x9999) nothing KSP devs can do about that, I don't think anyone aside from us in this topic ever even tried that as the only reason you want this resolution is 1-texture-per-planet (when viewing it up-close). But even if Unity were to load these textures correctly, you'd have to run with a forced DX11 mode to get above the DX9 limit, and KSP doesn't like that at all. Meaning several effects/shaders, one of them being the atmosphere, and the other being specular and bump, stop working.

The only way the planets in KSP are ever going to look good up-close is if the devs throw out the idea of baked planetary texture maps and instead go 100% procedural.

Especially with the "real scale" mod thats floating around you will never get a non blurry Kerbin with old fashioned texture maps. The current optimal height is about 150km for 8k*4k. 16k*8k would make that 75km (which is why we wanted originally 16k textures as it blends to 3d terrain at about that height). But if you scale kerbin up 10 times your optimal texture height is now 1500km. And even 16k it would be 750km.

If you want to see the difference between texture and procedural.. I would point you to Space Engine. Space Engine looks best whenever planetary texture maps are not used.

To further punch this in.. this is what a 64k texture looks like

http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/17-1152-1

(From Space Engine, Moon 64k Texture)

Anyhow... Procedural textures are the only way you'll ever see real scale Kerbin non blurry.

Edited October 25, 2013 by eRe4s3r

[Camacha]

The problem goes deeper than that. What prevents higher res textures is a Unity Engine issue (Unity itself refuses to load textures larger than 9999x9999) nothing KSP devs can do about that, I don't think anyone aside from us in this topic ever even tried that as the only reason you want this resolution is 1-texture-per-planet (when viewing it up-close). But even if Unity were to load these textures correctly, you'd have to run with a forced DX11 mode to get above the DX9 limit, and KSP doesn't like that at all. Meaning several effects/shaders, one of them being the atmosphere, and the other being specular and bump, stop working.

That is pretty much the information I am searching for. Can you point to any sources? I have a hard time finding anything solid to go on.

I know procedural maps would be a lot more ideal for things like this; more detail en (if implemented correctly) less 'dumb' overhead. It is unfortunate that Squad did not opt for this, but I guess that Unity is not ideal for a number of other reasons, the lack of proper 64-bit support being an obvious one.

That moon is abolutely gorgeous though.

Edited October 25, 2013 by Camacha

[eRe4s3r]

Sorry, all of this is just based on our tests (about page 50 +-5) and an PM i sent C7 about the error that we get when texture is larger than 9999

This was the Error with 16k textures, narrowed down to 10000 (error) and 9999 (works)

[ERR 01:29:09.431] Texture has out of range widht / height (Yes, bad spelling sponsored by Unity)

To which C7 replied (in a PM)

I've gone over the code here and the error messages you've pasted aren't coming from our error logging software. It's an engine error code.

That's all the "solid" info I got. It's all in this topic though (except the PM obviously). Just nay impossible to find ;P

I don't even know who told us about the DX11 switches or where that was... it all happened bit ago ;P

[Camacha]

Okay, that is actually pretty good empirical data. I will take that for an answer Did you test on the 64-bit version too?

[eRe4s3r]

Of Unity? No Only tested with KSP itself.. and KSP afaik uses Unity 4... but who knows ;p

Either way, the way to improve the image quality with ever increasing texture sizes is definitely a bad idea anyway.

And as you are probably asking because of the real solar system mod... I think scaling planets up is the wrong way to go about this. If anything models need to scale down, not planets up.

Otherwise you end up with a giant planet.. that still has it's optimal orbit at 70km

If you scale the models down, then that would not change, but the scale would fudge the numbers (5 times smaller models = scaled orbit height would be 350km) assuming planets don't scale up, with 8k you could have "acceptable" quality at that height and scale. I don't know how KSP could handle much smaller parts though.

[ricardoprisco]

This may be off topic, or not.

In my experience with unity x texture size and quality I have learned that the best way to do hyper quality stuff (without being 100% procedural) is not look to a texture per model with low poly count, but a high poly model with one texture or more, used like a map. You see, polygon vertices and faces overload the system little specially in the unity engine that "exclude" not visible faces. Textures overload a LOT. The thinking is simple: You can have a large number of faces mapped to the same 256x256 seamless part of the texture map. Say, for example, good quality sand on duna. Other stuf, like rocks, and mountains, the same thing. So, with a low quality alpha map, you make the continents mountains and plains "limits" and merges, and with another map you do the details, the last one, being a "texture atlas". There is a lot of literature about this process. And one feature that ksp lacks actually, about optimization, is the correct use of texture atlas. Specially in the in the planets (and parts). The last build adds new details to the planets. Maybe they are merging textures into atlas, and correting UV maps and stuff. Maybe not.

[Camacha]

Of Unity? No Only tested with KSP itself.. and KSP afaik uses Unity 4... but who knows ;p

I was referring to the Linux 64-bit version, which seems to function properly. It would be less than ideal to make a mod/texture just for one platform though.

Either way, the way to improve the image quality with ever increasing texture sizes is definitely a bad idea anyway.

As we do not have procedural terrain generation and will probably not have that in this edition of KSP, it is the way to go. Not the best solution, but the best considering the options.

And as you are probably asking because of the real solar system mod... I think scaling planets up is the wrong way to go about this. If anything models need to scale down, not planets up.

Otherwise you end up with a giant planet.. that still has it's optimal orbit at 70km

If you scale the models down, then that would not change, but the scale would fudge the numbers (5 times smaller models = scaled orbit height would be 350km) assuming planets don't scale up, with 8k you could have "acceptable" quality at that height and scale. I don't know how KSP could handle much smaller parts though.

They are taking a lot of things into account with that mod; it is modelled after real life. Scaling down will probably be as problematic as scaling up. Planets are and always will be huge things, so for enough detail you are stuck with huge textures (when going the texture route).

[DresCroffgrin]

Did you check the vital signs of your GPU and CPU while doing this? It would be good to monitor CPU load, GPU load and GPU memory usage (VRAM). You already checked RAM usage, but it never hurts to do that again. That way it should not be too hard to identify the problem.

I personally suspect VRAM, but that is just a hunch. If textures are swapped back and forth between the GPU/VRAM and RAM it will cause some delays.

I did the tests, and my CPU is hovering at less than 50% used on all eight threads, my gpu is at about 50% use, and my VRAM is less than 800 MB used out of 2 gb. So no obvious suspects. I'll continue debugged to see if any graphics settings can change it.

[Zander]

So there is no possible way to put more than 1 texture on a planet? Why can't you just divide the planet into 4 and put 1 texture on each 4th of it?

[Mr.Rocket]

Planning on installing this mod, but have a few questions.

1. Does this make the game run slower since it looks sooooo coooooool?

2. Do i have to create the textures, or do they come automatic since i don't know how?

3. What's the difference in the two newer versions? one was src i think?

Any help appreciated

[Zander]

Planning on installing this mod, but have a few questions.

1. Does this make the game run slower since it looks sooooo coooooool?

2. Do i have to create the textures, or do they come automatic since i don't know how?

3. What's the difference in the two newer versions? one was src i think?

Any help appreciated

1. Not really slower but it definitely increases the risk of running out of memory and crashing if you have it with other mods.

2. You can download textures that you like from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/KSPTexturePacks/

3. i also want to know this.

[Superfluous J]

Planning on installing this mod, but have a few questions.

3. What's the difference in the two newer versions? one was src i think?

Any help appreciated

src is a link to the source code. It's completely unnecessary if you just want to use the mod.