layers of dust and friction?

[Black_sod]

was just wondering if adding a certain thickness of a dust layer to certain bodies would be feasible or desirable? rovers could leave tracks in it and/or be slowed down by having to push through it. was (trying to ) drive a rover on pol and thought more friction would have helped with control. just an idea, entirely possible it would be too demanding to simulate

[vexx32]

Almost certainly impossible to simulate properly. Imagine it like this -- in order to correctly simulate any kind of dust, you need the program to keep track of pretty much every particle. You can group them, to a point, I guess, but the particles in something like dust will be so numerous that simply the act of displacing enough particles to leave noticeable tracks could easily bring the best computers to their knees if they have to keep track of the particles and perform physics operations on them.

You can fake it to an extent, of course, but that too has its issues. If you try to paste sprites on terrain, either they won't match the terrain or they'll be stretched in extremely weird ways. Other options are available, each with their own flaws.

Apart from all that, the next question is how do you save it? If it's a proper particle simulation, suddenly you need to save the positions of potentially millions of particles. If it's a sprite, you need to precisely save the orientation and rotation of the sprite on the terrain... and as can happen, if the game loads the terrain later only to find that it's slightly out of place (occasionally some floating-point errors may mean the game cannot perfectly put the terrain exactly where it was), or around the poles of planets, the terrain could easily change drastically when reloaded (in current implementation, the terrain around the poles is glitchy as all hell since they have to map a square-shaped heightmap all the way around a sphere. Try wrapping a piece of paper around a sphere without wrinkling it or overlapping it... never really works very well.

In addition, regardless of how you do it, if you have enough "tracks" to be saved, it's going to end up bloating the size of your KSP installation immensely; obviously, if you spend an awful lot of time trekking about or roving around, it's going to take massive amounts of space to save all the tracks that result from that.

Naturally, it can be done... it's simply a matter of finding a way of doing it that works well enough to make the feature worthwhile.

[Charzy]

You're thinking too inside the box.

The tracks could simply be an overlay, the friction could simply be added friction. Then you need seperate dust overlays for each wheel type for each planet.

[Tw1]

Very similar suggestion just a few below this.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/61655-Soil

[Black_sod]

Oops didn't see that