[1.1.2][1-1-2] May 13-2016 EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements

[theSpeare]

Is anyone else getting super creeped out by the pitch-black clouds at night?

[rbray89]

Is anyone else getting super creeped out by the pitch-black clouds at night?

Yeah, I have to figure something out there...

[jduchock]

Great mod rbray, no doubt about it. While i did have ZERO lag problems with this mod, i did have an inordinate amount of crashes since installing it. While using it, i was using the following mods with .22 career mode:

- mechjeb

- NovaPunch (et.al.)

- Docking camera

- Kethane (part configs manually modded for career tree)

- KSP Interstellar

- Kerbal Attachment System (KAS)

- Chatterer

- FusTek station parts

- Bio Mass

Typically, the crash would occur on ships over 200 parts, and most of mine are now 250+...

I am not certain that the crashes were a result of core game compatibility or compatibility with another mod...but after removing city lights, the crashes did stop.

Most often, the crashes would occur when going from VAB to launch pad and i do have a few crash reports that i can send, just let me know (log files indicate a break in a directx .dll)

I will be watching your updates and will give this another go after any changes you make.

Thanks for all your hard work !!

Johnnee Kerman

[rbray89]

Great mod rbray, no doubt about it. While i did have ZERO lag problems with this mod, i did have an inordinate amount of crashes since installing it. While using it, i was using the following mods with .22 career mode:

- mechjeb

- NovaPunch (et.al.)

- Docking camera

- Kethane (part configs manually modded for career tree)

- KSP Interstellar

- Kerbal Attachment System (KAS)

- Chatterer

- FusTek station parts

- Bio Mass

Typically, the crash would occur on ships over 200 parts, and most of mine are now 250+...

I am not certain that the crashes were a result of core game compatibility or compatibility with another mod...but after removing city lights, the crashes did stop.

Most often, the crashes would occur when going from VAB to launch pad and i do have a few crash reports that i can send, just let me know (log files indicate a break in a directx .dll)

I will be watching your updates and will give this another go after any changes you make.

Thanks for all your hard work !!

Johnnee Kerman

Thanks!

Unfortunately, I would suspect that this is a memory issue. KSP is 32 bits, and can only address up to 4GB of ram. This mod adds quite a few high res textures, and probably pushes your memory to the usable limit.

[Kalista]

Thanks!

Unfortunately, I would suspect that this is a memory issue. KSP is 32 bits, and can only address up to 4GB of ram. This mod adds quite a few high res textures, and probably pushes your memory to the usable limit.

Accually I'm fairly surprized how little this mod uses as far as ram. I just counted the number of mods i use (42) and even with this mod running my average ram usage is only 2.9-3.3 gb. Granted most of my mods are informational or immersion but I am running most of the major part mods with only one (B9) needing the texture reduction thus far.

[NathanKell]

Um, regarding those textures:

1. As I said above, Unity will rescale non-power-of-two textures. So your 1200x1200 textures are likely being turned into 2048x2048 textures. You really shouldn't be using NPOT textures...

2. For city lights, it looks like main-4k is never actually used, it's just loaded into memory. Why not get rid of main, and rename main-4k to main.png?

Finally, you might want to consider mbm or tga, since KSP's Unity base still has the bug where it doesn't generate mipmaps for PNGs (but does for mbm and tga).

[rbray89]

Um, regarding those textures:

1. As I said above, Unity will rescale non-power-of-two textures. So your 1200x1200 textures are likely being turned into 2048x2048 textures. You really shouldn't be using NPOT textures...

2. For city lights, it looks like main-4k is never actually used, it's just loaded into memory. Why not get rid of main, and rename main-4k to main.png?

Finally, you might want to consider mbm or tga, since KSP's Unity base still has the bug where it doesn't generate mipmaps for PNGs (but does for mbm and tga).

Yeah, these are coming in the next release (today).

[rbray89]

Yeah, these are coming in the next release (today).

Maybe. The textures could probably be improved, but I'm not an artist, so I'll leave some of them as they are. Though I'll convert to TGA.

[NathanKell]

You can grab cloud maps from NASA, btw. Also, I failed last time uploading my detail texture; apologies. Here is my set of cloud textures again:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9bdojyqv4vni44h/CloudTextures.zip

Includes detail1.png, the source PSD (layers, so you can control blending and lightness yourself), and two Kerbin cloud textures from NASA's Blue Marble site.

(They're still PNGs too; I had forgotten about the mipmap issue until recently I saw some flicker/swimming).

Also, I think I have some reasonable configs for Real Solar System. I just have to fix the clouds on Jool again. But I got Eve-as-Venus and Laythe-as-Titan colored reasonably.

BTW, for "not an artist" you're doing some pretty awesome stuff!

[rbray89]

Release 2 is out. Bug fixes primarily, but also TGA conversion.

[Stiggles]

In an attempt to make the textures feel a bit less out of place, I created a set of textures and a config for the planets Kerbin and Duna and also Laythe. The only issue I'm having is a framerate drop when looking at the clouds in flight. (probably due to the bumpmap for the lowest cloud layer; I don't remember it being there until those were added).

I think I found the way to get the clouds looking right, but am having a pretty difficult time getting Photoshop to translate black level into transparency. Additionally, I wish I knew a good way of getting a decent bump map for the whole cloud layer that isn't just randomly punching levels into Photoshop on the base texture.

Here's the result of a lot of tweaking. Duna is really subtle, but much easier to see in game:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

If anyone wants to try the textures out: https://mega.co.nz/#!Iwki2BLZ!dovJ1kdngPtiHcExa1Ha7TMnM9kbXzKiN52o-Vo01O0

Is there any way to expand the halo around Kerbin to reflect the actual extent of its atmosphere? My cloud layers are at around the right heights according to the formulas, but the atmosphere ends, visually, way too early.

[therealcrow999]

Awesome update, probably the best. The menus system is working great. The dark sides of planets look better. Thanks for adding the RGB tweaks I did.

The Duna poles clouds look better with this update.

Release 2 is out. Bug fixes primarily, but also TGA conversion.

[rbray89]

In an attempt to make the textures feel a bit less out of place, I created a set of textures and a config for the planets Kerbin and Duna and also Laythe. The only issue I'm having is a framerate drop when looking at the clouds in flight. (probably due to the bumpmap for the lowest cloud layer; I don't remember it being there until those were added).

I think I found the way to get the clouds looking right, but am having a pretty difficult time getting Photoshop to translate black level into transparency. Additionally, I wish I knew a good way of getting a decent bump map for the whole cloud layer that isn't just randomly punching levels into Photoshop on the base texture.

Here's the result of a lot of tweaking. Duna is really subtle, but much easier to see in game:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

If anyone wants to try the textures out: https://mega.co.nz/#!Iwki2BLZ!dovJ1kdngPtiHcExa1Ha7TMnM9kbXzKiN52o-Vo01O0

Is there any way to expand the halo around Kerbin to reflect the actual extent of its atmosphere? My cloud layers are at around the right heights according to the formulas, but the atmosphere ends, visually, way too early.

I use GIMP to change the black to alpha. Has to be RGB mode. Image->Mode->RGB then Colors->Color to Alpha.

I'm not sure about extending the atmospheric halo... I'll have to look into it.

[rbray89]

Awesome update, probably the best. The menus system is working great. The dark sides of planets look better. Thanks for adding the RGB tweaks I did.

The Duna poles clouds look better with this update.

Thanks for reminding me! Edited credits to reflect.

[briansun1]

at the rate you puting these out I'm going to start running out of yay pics...

[Stiggles]

I use GIMP to change the black to alpha. Has to be RGB mode. Image->Mode->RGB then Colors->Color to Alpha.

I'm not sure about extending the atmospheric halo... I'll have to look into it.

Thanks! I also figured out a way to do it in Photoshop after looking at your tgas in the new version: Create an alpha channel and paste the black and white image into it.

With the new version, will png textures work or do they have to be tgas?

[NathanKell]

rbray89, re atmo halo: I think you can just tweak the child transform of the body's scaledspace transform. IIRC those are used for atmo.

EDIT: KSP doesn't care about extension. As long as the name prior to the extension matches (and there aren't two valid textures, of any extension, of the same name prior to the extension, in the same folder) then you're fine.

[sidfu]

god he puts out to many versions so fast. makes me feel like every time i restart ksp ther a new version of this out lol

[jduchock]

Thanks!

Unfortunately, I would suspect that this is a memory issue. KSP is 32 bits, and can only address up to 4GB of ram. This mod adds quite a few high res textures, and probably pushes your memory to the usable limit.

I would agree...when it works, it works flawlessly...with no lag on 250+ part ships, so i dont think it is a RAM issue. Again, error logs clearly show a consistent break with a directx DLL...and the fact that i am running Win8 probably would add to the confusion.

Also, i left kethane probe on my screen for 24 hours straight and when i came back, there was still no ram/framerate lag, but the clouds had turned all grainy. A quick restart of the game solved that problem though...

and again, taking the mod out resolved the problem...

i honestly think it is a win8/directx issue...

EDIT: i will get your latest update tonight and try to make the crash files available for you if it persists...

Edited November 7, 2013 by jduchock

[rbray89]

I would agree...when it works, it works flawlessly...with no lag on 250+ part ships, so i dont think it is a RAM issue. Again, error logs clearly show a consistent break with a directx DLL...and the fact that i am running Win8 probably would add to the confusion.

Also, i left kethane probe on my screen for 24 hours straight and when i came back, there was still no ram/framerate lag, but the clouds had turned all grainy. A quick restart of the game solved that problem though...

and again, taking the mod out resolved the problem...

i honestly think it is a win8/directx issue...

EDIT: i will get your latest update tonight and try to make the crash files available for you if it persists...

hmmm... That would be good. I'll have to take a look.

[Stiggles]

The new update seems to function a bit better on my PC but I am noticing one issue: the clouds near the horizon of the planet (beyond the horizon of the layer) are not being rendered when above a layer. This does break the effect since there's currently no depth to the layers, which I just realized is pretty much linearly corresponding to the alpha of the layer (ie. thicker clouds are more opaque).

[Majiir]

It's not a big deal because the snippets are small, but please try to avoid copy-pasting code from other plugins without permission. Snippet 1, snippet 2, original.

[rbray89]

It's not a big deal because the snippets are small, but please try to avoid copy-pasting code from other plugins without permission. Snippet 1, snippet 2, original.

Oh my... I completely forgot about that. I hope you aren't offended. I can attempt to replace it if you would like. I usually attempt to provide attribution to source/content used. I added you to the list on the front page for attribution.

[BLUAV8R]

This mod is still great and I've been using it ever since alpha 1 but i feel like in the latest releases there haven't been enough clouds and the current ones font look as good as some of the beta ones may i recommend that future versions have more clouds in the texture the lights are great and you've been making fantastic progress so far. Keep it up!

[Majiir]

Oh my... I completely forgot about that. I hope you aren't offended. I can attempt to replace it if you would like. I usually attempt to provide attribution to source/content used. I added you to the list on the front page for attribution.

A small attribution note is fine. Cheers.