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Singularity Research Initiative - dev thread


Daemoria

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landeTLS; I'm still coming to grips with KSP's limitations. Some people say 7k tris is too much per engine, some say its fine. You have to balance the tri count per object based on how many you think players are going to use per scene. Engines for instance will probably be singular, or in pairs typically... but trusses and girders need to be much more optimized due to them being used multiple times per rocket/station/base. I won't know what my triangle counts are until I finish the first release and see if it needs further optimization.

I'm using this image I made as a rough reference for part modeling. The number on the left is the low poly segments per cylinder. the number on the right is the number I use for the highpoly reference mesh. I still will probably adjust the 5m radius (6.25 scaled,most likely my largest part radius) low poly, due to conversion/step down optimization to the lower radius polygons. If you look at the bottom and top of my engine mesh posted a couple pages back, you'll see what I mean by conversion/step down optimization. I'm sure there is an actual technical name for this technique, but I don't know it offhand.

singularity_scale.png

I use a power of 2 grid in photoshop, but when i drag these parts into my 3d app, i make sure to convert their pixel dimensions to metric units (100 pixels for 1meter part, 200 for 2meter part, etc).

Edited by Daemoria
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Hey Daemoria don't let tris limit your creativity, 64 bit is coming soon and letting awesome parts be less awesome because the game is holding back is stupid.

Even with 64-bit, it'd still be good practice to keep a low polycount as possible, while maintaining details that cannot be baked well into a normal map. Its also not so much a limit to creativity, as it is a different challenge in creativity (finding ways to keep nice forms with low polycounts can be quite fun). Also remember that not everyone who would want to use this mod would also use 64-bit, it seems a tad sad to limit the people who can use these parts in any decent count to only those with 64-bit machines.

I'd also think around 7k is a good tri count for a detailed engine, but it would be good to dial it back to around 3-5k. Get rid of any unseen surfaces, and Stubbles had mentioned a good few edge loops that can be removed.

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Even with 64-bit, it'd still be good practice to keep a low polycount as possible, while maintaining details that cannot be baked well into a normal map. Its also not so much a limit to creativity, as it is a different challenge in creativity (finding ways to keep nice forms with low polycounts can be quite fun). Also remember that not everyone who would want to use this mod would also use 64-bit, it seems a tad sad to limit the people who can use these parts in any decent count to only those with 64-bit machines.

I'd also think around 7k is a good tri count for a detailed engine, but it would be good to dial it back to around 3-5k. Get rid of any unseen surfaces, and Stubbles had mentioned a good few edge loops that can be removed.

The mainsail has over 8k tris, so 7k is defiantly good. But you are right, low tri count is a good practice.

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Kerbals have an estimated height of 75 *centi-*meters according to the wiki, my main resource for scale.

The tri count on the second stage motor is currently 5.6k tris and has been imported without any problems. The large fueltank in the second stage is 3.4k tris, and is being worked being imported into KSP on by green skull.

I'll probably release a low-resource pack when the first release is complete and balanced. But I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it, it's going to be a while before all the parts are modeled.

Edited by Daemoria
another derp on proofreading. sleep does a body good, m'kay.
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Kerbals have an estimated height of 75 meters according to the wiki, my main resource for scale.

Wut.

I think you mean centimeters? 75m is...taller than most rockets.

Productive point: don't stress over facecount. For 99% of KSP players (sorry Ferram! :( ) GPU is underutilized and CPU is the bottleneck. As long as the collision mesh is low-poly, should be fine.

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It only helps so much but I can contribute this:

1D4y9W9.png

The thick bar is one meter so you can see that the Kerbal in his whole suit is approximately 85cm, He's clipping into that plate a good bit and the camera angle is not the most accurate, so say somewhere between 80cm and 90cm with helmet. Given that 75cm for a bare Kerbal is easily reasonable, but his helmet contains a lot of the tris and probably near half of what texturespace is not on the Kerbal's face

The groundrule I was taught is "try not to go over 4K", but if looking really sweet is the goal, 4K is fine so 8K should also be fine, just a bit heavy. Trying to compare yourself to the stock parts in technical respects probably isn't the best idea since many of them are set up wrong (two of the Toroidal tank's colliders are missplaced, creating a hole in the part that you can confirm in game), many of them have way higher poly counts than is necessary, many of them use way larger texture sheets than they can justify, or have unnecessary alpha channels that make the sheets take up a bunch more space, or huge emissive maps and so on. You could easily do way more with the system resources stock parts consume, the mainsail is over 8K, but it'd probably look fine under 3K. If you want to have 8K parts clearly that's fine, 16K may even be workable, but they need to be worthwhile. I have lots of room in my instances of KSP for really nice looking parts that I like, I can always eliminate parts of /GameData/Squad/

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Wut.

I think you mean centimeters? 75m is...taller than most rockets.

Productive point: don't stress over facecount. For 99% of KSP players (sorry Ferram! :( ) GPU is underutilized and CPU is the bottleneck. As long as the collision mesh is low-poly, should be fine.

As a person with a completely bottlenecked computer (until I get a better CPU) I can confirm this! XD

I have a AMD RADEON gigabyte 7970 OC edition graphics card and a poopy old fx-4100 CPU XD (still the new graphics card helps :D)

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Can somebody tell me if my computer will probably not bluescreen with this mod? 4 Gb virtual memory, 2 Gb RAM, 2.66 Ghz dual-core, 512 MB graphics card.

Your RAM looks like itd be the limiting factor here. RAM is pretty cheap these days and very easy to install. I actually have no idea if virtual memory really makes any positive difference, I've never used it.

The mod isnt finished, but if it will replace most/all stock parts, it will likely use a good chunk of that RAM. I think if you can run the existing larger mod packs, you should be ok with this one.

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Can somebody tell me if my computer will probably not bluescreen with this mod? 4 Gb virtual memory, 2 Gb RAM, 2.66 Ghz dual-core, 512 MB graphics card.

i first got KSP running a Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 1GB GPU and it was limited on stock KSP to say the Least. Now have i7, 8GB RAM and 2GB GPU i can push the game to the limit, rather than my machine. As others have suggested an extra 2GB RAM stick would be the easiest and cheapest upgrade for net gain.

The next step would be a new Mainboard, CPU, RAM - the works. Still an affordable option if you buy the componenets and assemble yourself. Its pretty straight forward and there are some excellent tutorials on youtube for this.

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I knew nothing about pc building and I built my own after doing research on what to get and how to assemble. It was way cheaper than buying a pre built. There are only three things you need - Youtube, a screwdriver and a decent parts supplier - I used Amazon for the simple fact is in 4 years I have never had a problem plus returns and warranties are excellent. Out performs my bro's alien ware at 1/2 cost...

Anyway after all these sexy rocket parts we need some sexy station parts!

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I knew nothing about pc building and I built my own after doing research on what to get and how to assemble. It was way cheaper than buying a pre built. There are only three things you need - Youtube, a screwdriver and a decent parts supplier - I used Amazon for the simple fact is in 4 years I have never had a problem plus returns and warranties are excellent. Out performs my bro's alien ware at 1/2 cost...

Anyway after all these sexy rocket parts we need some sexy station parts!

Yeah station parts! I was alwyas missing something in this category. Probably very glassy modules? (err i mean transparent)

Edited by cziken20
My engrish ist sooo gut.
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