The Ability for modders to add planets

[liamthom]

I am not a modder myself and do not know what is feasible to do and not to do, but i think it would be cool if modders can add planets.

I also do understand though it is probably a lot of work.

[PDCWolf]

It's like resources. It's coming eventually. Probably not before 2020.

The only guy who managed to do this was first buried by the mods and devs themselves because he had to decompile the game. Once he made further progress, he was then drowned by fanboys defending the devs.

[vexx32]

It is possible. It's just insanely difficult. There were one or two mods that did this, but have since been abandoned. Hell, there's one guy already designing ringed​ planets, that I saw on Reddit.

[Rage097]

It's impossibly difficult. It would get you in some sort of trouble with the devs if you aren't careful. It's probably not going to happen.

[vexx32]

Trouble with the devs? How? Never seen any cases of that. (admittedly, only seen two or three people insane enough to attempt such a mod)

[Rage097]

Trouble with the devs? How? Never seen any cases of that. (admittedly, only seen two or three people insane enough to attempt such a mod)

I'd assume you have to disassemble the whole game basically.

Check the PDCwolf's post.

[Pugspaceprogram]

I believe modders already can add them, as i have seen one modder (i forget who it was) add something like Moho, but the size of mun in orbit around Jool. It looked slightly like Venus though.

[leax256]

I'll put my friend on the job. he doesn't know when to give up when it comes to coding. i'll be sure to tell him to not decompile the game though.

[ThirdHorseman]

Why would this be any different from adding any other asset to the game? There is already a mod that adds asteroids, those are just small planets. You would just need to model the planet, and if you tried to do anything really large it would be a ton of polys. But it should be doable.

Granted you need to use other mods to place the planet into an orbit, but that's doable as well. You wouldn't have atmospheric effects either, so it would be best to stick with adding a moon or smaller planetoid.

Also not sure about gravity. If the game sets gravity based on the mass of the object then that shouldn't be a problem. If you have to add gravity fields using Unity code then that's a whole other ball-game.

[PDCWolf]

Guys, guys, there's no way to legally do this, read the posts and use the search function.

The planets are, for now, hardcoded into the game. That means they are internal assets and are not read from external folders like parts and plugins are. To access the planets one would need to decompile the game, which is supposed to be illegal or something.

Only one guy that I know of forced his way through that:

As i said before, this guy got tored apart by devs and fanboys alike acting like rabid dogs, because he had to decompile the game.

[Sylandro]

He's still doing it.

[ThirdHorseman]

There's no reason you couldn't add a new planet or moon as a simple Part. Take a FASA Asteroid, http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/20-asteroids-from-fasa-2/, scale it up 10x, use a mod to plop it into a perfect 11km x 11km orbit around Kerbin, and boom you have a new moon.

Create a huge sphere in Blender, around 50k polys or so, apply a noise modifier to give it some bumps, apply a high-res texture, plop it into orbit around Kerbol, and boom you have a new planet.

It looks like from the FASA Asteroid mod that you can even apply gravity to it. I don't see why it's so hard. Will the texture look crappy when you are walking around on the surface? Sure, but no more crappy than any of the existing textures for the existing planets/moons.

Maybe I'm missing something...

[Bobhendly]

Gravity, And making it NOT A PART.

FASA Asteroids is a part mod.. Big parts with modded gravity, But parts nonetheless.

[Galacticruler]

also, a side effect of making a part with gravity is that you can't land.

It just eats the ship.

[BenHR]

I can see why the devs are mad at that, but dang. Those are beautiful. I almost think they should bring him into the team, if he's gunna just plop a bunch of planets and stars all over the place. Populate the lands. Though, many were just copy/paste/palette swap.

[rasheed]

use a mod to plop it into a perfect 11km x 11km orbit around Kerbin, and boom you have a new moon.

Lolwut? it just burns up.

[Holo]

That guy should post his methods, adding new planets is something revolutionary in the field of KSP modding.

[ThirdHorseman]

Gravity...

The FASA Asteroids have gravity. Looks like it's just a Module added to the CFG file. So no problem there...

...And making it NOT A PART.

Who cares if it's a part? Does that matter?

also, a side effect of making a part with gravity is that you can't land.

It just eats the ship.

Why? I have Kerbals walking around on parts and they don't get eaten. I have landing pads made from panels, and I land my shuttles on them all the time. If the part has a collision mesh then there shouldn't be any problem. In fact, if you look at one of the FASA Asteroid screens there is a Kerbal walking around:

http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/7784/asteroidq.png

Now I guess the collision mesh is beneath the model surface, so walking around would be a little weird. But you should be able to walk around, land, etc without getting eaten.

And I found another Asteroid mod, where a user added gravity and landed on the asteroid:

http://imageshack.us/a/img28/7074/screenshot0cz.png

http://imageshack.us/a/img507/3010/screenshot1pu.png

So this seems very do-able.

[Captain Sierra]

IN adress to those people who say this is illegal, you're half wrong. The solar system is hard coded, not dynamically generated. You do have to decompile the game to do it. BUT, since you purchased and own the copy you are decompiling, Squad really can't do anything about it since you bought it legally. The trouble comes when you have to then make it public. The only game assets Squad has allowed modders to redestribute are part models, configs, and textures (welded parts packs, retextured stock parts, all these mod types utilize this allowance). You can't actually distribute parts of the decompiled game. You still have to be careful because Squad's license is kinda tricky about derivative works. Mods that derive off stock game are fine but you have to be careful when you pull from the root code. You do walk some fine legal lines there.

[vexx32]

Uhm, no, actually. Playing the game is fine. Decompiling the game is illegal. Squad's license gives you access to the game in its current state as well as the modding API to make parts and plugin DLLs and so forth. It explicitly forbids decompiling the game to access the source code, as far as I remember.

(I wasn't aware that you had to decompile the game to be able to add/edit planets. Thanks to those who pointed that out.)

[OdinYggd]

IN adress to those people who say this is illegal, you're half wrong. The solar system is hard coded, not dynamically generated. You do have to decompile the game to do it. BUT, since you purchased and own the copy you are decompiling, Squad really can't do anything about it since you bought it legally. The trouble comes when you have to then make it public. The only game assets Squad has allowed modders to redestribute are part models, configs, and textures (welded parts packs, retextured stock parts, all these mod types utilize this allowance). You can't actually distribute parts of the decompiled game. You still have to be careful because Squad's license is kinda tricky about derivative works. Mods that derive off stock game are fine but you have to be careful when you pull from the root code. You do walk some fine legal lines there.

Decompiling the game is very much illegal, and is outlined in the end user license agreement you accepted when you started playing it.

What you purchased with KSP is the right to use one copy of the game on one computer at a time. You do not at any time own any part of KSP or its related intellectual property.

Thus although a few people have succeeded in hacking in planets, the methods used to do so involve modifying the game in ways that are against the end user license. As such they cannot be distributed to anyone, and are of questionable legality just existing at all.

So in favor this this suggestion, yes it is something that would be really neat to see. I'm sure entire custom solar systems would spring up in due time, not just custom planets. But I don't think a lot of people would benefit from it right away, and it would require a lot of effort to restructure how the game handles planets to make it use an external resource instead of internal pre-baked assets.

Worth nothing, this thread qualifies as WNTS under the more planets category: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/36863-What-not-to-suggest

However since it has yielded an interesting discussion, and admittedly is not a topic seen as often as it used to be, I'll let it run a little longer before closing it.

[BenHR]

Agh, decompiling always makes for the most amazing mods. And if Squad is like just about every company ever, those IP rights ain't goin' away 'till the death of heat.

[Keldor]

Honestly, I'd love to see Squad move to Minecraft's model of mod support, which does in fact permit decompilation. It seems to work fine for them! I for one would love to do infrastructure mods - i.e. rewrite/replace the physics engine, add cool graphics effects, and so forth. The only real issue I see could be the possibility of Unity's license preventing this, though a clear seperation of Squad's code from Unity engine code might fix this.

Anyhow, I think adding modable planets would be of moderate difficulty to the devs. The tricky thing would be getting it to work with procedural generation, but even then, a simple callback into either Squad's code or a plugin should suffice. Except for the space center, but it could be a special case. A planet definition would have a structure something like this:

Planet name

Orbital, rotational, scale, gravity, sea level and atmospheric parameters, ect.

Texture and heightmap paths

Points of interest

Various special rendering and other flags, parameters

Procedural generation callback (can be overidden in a plugin)

Special handling callback (intended for difficult special cases where direct access to game code is needed, e.g. Duna easter egg. Probably not overridable)

Many fields would be optional, and unrecognized items would be ignored, so that later versions of the game could change and add things without breaking too much.

Edited September 27, 2013 by Keldor

[Dart980]

Yesterday I was thinking about adding something like this.

[pizzaoverhead]

Worth nothing, this thread qualifies as WNTS under the more planets category: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/36863-What-not-to-suggest

However since it has yielded an interesting discussion, and admittedly is not a topic seen as often as it used to be, I'll let it run a little longer before closing it.

The thread is discussing an API change, not requesting new content be created.