[WIP][1.0.5]* RSS Visual Enhancements (RVE)

[Dale Gribble]

Oh man, Pingopete, this is amazing! Thank you so much for all the work you're putting into this! I've download 2.2, and so far there's not really been any bugs (or ones that I can identify).

Just one quick questions though, the sky in my KSP is quite dark at day time

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Im not sure if this is simply the settings, or perhaps its on my end (I read someone earlier had an entirely black sky? however, this is entirely the case for me)

[pingopete]

Oh man, Pingopete, this is amazing! Thank you so much for all the work you're putting into this! I've download 2.2, and so far there's not really been any bugs (or ones that I can identify).

Just one quick questions though, the sky in my KSP is quite dark at day time http://imgur.com/a/eNjQA

Im not sure if this is simply the settings, or perhaps its on my end (I read someone earlier had an entirely black sky? however, this is entirely the case for me)

Thanks, it's good to here someone who hasn't been hassled by endless bugs

Yes I am fully aware, basically, if this were stock sized kerbin, I'd make it light in the day with layers, then make them fade appropriately as one passes through them using rim distance and fade scale, however on RSS, due to it's realisticly enormous size, the layers don't like this being done to them, and the fading effect is FAR less discrete and leaves ugly artifacts from the process on the horizon. The other option would be to lighten the sky with the stock AFG node, however getting it looking good on the ground means having it look ugly in orbit, so I compromised the glitchness for having darker skies in the day.

I'll give the layer effect another go though, just in case

Actually I've just found a way to do it, thanks for getting me to do that :L

Edited October 9, 2014 by pingopete

[pingopete]

Fixed the dark skies at day issue:

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[Dale Gribble]

A small question and suddenly a radical change Seriously though, it looks amazing, these nice blue skies deffinitely make a difference. And I'm amazed at how fast you are!

Again, thanks for putting all this work into it! I dont play KSP without it anymore

[ReventonHawx]

Thanks for this awesome mod! makes RSS look so much better. I got 0.2.2 to work in KSP .24.2 w/ RSS 7.3 and 7.4, then moved onto .25 w/ RSS 8.0 just to test where it worked quite well as well (after I installed ATM of course). The only things I noticed were, as stated above, the darker sky during the day but I see you've already figured that one out and the city lights looked weird during the day and night in all the KSP and RSS versions I tested. They are white and red/pink. Could that be just because you haven't gotten them finished like you said in an earlier post? In any case, I just reverted back to the 0.2.1 city lights and the look "ok" for now.

Oh, also the oceans seemed off. The water doesn't appear to be moving (I honestly can't remember if it did in stock KSP), instead, it seems to be flickering. I might check that one again though and report back, even though that one doesn't bother me as much as the city lights because you don't see the flickering from orbit.

Keep up the good work!

[Hattivat]

Holy cow, that looks a neat holiday retreat

[NathanKell]

What Dale said.

pingopete: you have PM re: configs.

[Motokid600]

Oh man, Pingopete, this is amazing! Thank you so much for all the work you're putting into this! I've download 2.2, and so far there's not really been any bugs (or ones that I can identify).

Are you playing on Windows 64bit or 32?

[pingopete]

A small question and suddenly a radical change Seriously though, it looks amazing, these nice blue skies deffinitely make a difference. And I'm amazed at how fast you are!

Again, thanks for putting all this work into it! I dont play KSP without it anymore

Thanks so much, it means a great deal to here there are dedicated users of this mod! and it's comments like this that make RVE enjoyable and worth doing!

Thanks for this awesome mod! makes RSS look so much better. I got 0.2.2 to work in KSP .24.2 w/ RSS 7.3 and 7.4, then moved onto .25 w/ RSS 8.0 just to test where it worked quite well as well (after I installed ATM of course). The only things I noticed were, as stated above, the darker sky during the day but I see you've already figured that one out and the city lights looked weird during the day and night in all the KSP and RSS versions I tested. They are white and red/pink. Could that be just because you haven't gotten them finished like you said in an earlier post? In any case, I just reverted back to the 0.2.1 city lights and the look "ok" for now.

Oh, also the oceans seemed off. The water doesn't appear to be moving (I honestly can't remember if it did in stock KSP), instead, it seems to be flickering. I might check that one again though and report back, even though that one doesn't bother me as much as the city lights because you don't see the flickering from orbit.

Keep up the good work!

Yeah it doesn't move as far as I know, I'm not sure if it ever did with the overhaul mods. And the lights certainly aren't supposed to be like that, sounds like that's to do with ATM or texture reducer or whatever messing it up, or failing to load because short on memory. And thanks for testing on 8/ .25, I literally ran it once, and that's it, will probably hold fire on updating to .25 as of it's apparent instability issues.

Also regarding the dev testing versions, I'll probably do frequent updates on these versions instead of putting up as separate releases just to allow for testing by you awesome guys ;D

[ThorBeorn]

Thought I'd chime in with some praise. I got RVE 2.2 working on my RO/RSS install with the correct RSS version now. My jaw dropped as I launced a tiny suborbital rocket just to take a look. This looks so much better than in the pictures, the fantastic cloud textures, the distant haze, the blue tint in the atmosphere etc. I see why this is still a WIP though, but it has improved so much since the early releases. Maybe I'll post some pictures too.

Btw. Had to get rid of the night/day city textures. I'm running on 80-85% RAM (out of 8 gigs) on my current install, so I'm in favour of staying on 24.2 for a while.

Edited October 10, 2014 by ThorBeorn

[Motokid600]

I think I got it running pretty good. The only problem I'm having now is .. there's a 50/50 chance of the game braking on startup. Sometimes when it gets to the main menu the Earth is a big blurry ball. When I get to the VAB nothing functions.. the only building that works is the training facility. But upon exiting it the game locks up.

But that hasn't happened in awhile. Started the game up a few times last night real happy to see the Earth as it should be and everything works real nice. And pingopete... It's incredible. It really is. I'm collecting a nice gallery I'll post once I get a good set of pics. I need to learn how to make gifs..

[pingopete]

Thought I'd chime in with some praise. I got RVE 2.2 working on my RO/RSS install with the correct RSS version now. My jaw dropped as I launced a tiny suborbital rocket just to take a look. This looks so much better than in the pictures, the fantastic cloud textures, the distant haze, the blue tint in the atmosphere etc. I see why this is still a WIP though, but it has improved so much since the early releases. Maybe I'll post some pictures too.

Btw. Had to get rid of the night/day city textures. I'm running on 80-85% RAM (out of 8 gigs) on my current install, so I'm in favour of staying on 24.2 for a while.

Thanks, please do post pics yeah the 8k cities are kinda an experiment, I'll probably crop them down to a 4k at some point

[Dale Gribble]

Are you playing on Windows 64bit or 32?

I was playing on 64 bit, but now switched to 32 bit as I found out for some reason all control surfaces weren't working...

Anyway, now I do encounter some bugs, though I vaguely remember experiencing something similar before and I'm therefore not sure if its related to this mod:

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[tedach]

I was playing on 64 bit, but now switched to 32 bit as I found out for some reason all control surfaces weren't working...

Anyway, now I do encounter some bugs, though I vaguely remember experiencing something similar before and I'm therefore not sure if its related to this mod: http://imgur.com/a/MFJWi

I had the same red/white Kerbin textures; it occurs when you hit a memory limit (mine seems around 3.25 gigs) -without- a crash, so you get corrupt textures/wacky terrain elevation/clipped or black textures. Or at least that's my unprofessional opinion. I reduced my memory footprint and it cleared the problem.

[Dale Gribble]

I had the same red/white Kerbin textures; it occurs when you hit a memory limit (mine seems around 3.25 gigs) -without- a crash, so you get corrupt textures/wacky terrain elevation/clipped or black textures. Or at least that's my unprofessional opinion. I reduced my memory footprint and it cleared the problem.

That was indeed the problem, totally unrelated to this particular mod. I just fixed it by scaling down the earth texture (the one found in plugindata) in photoshop and it ran fine

[tedach]

That was indeed the problem, totally unrelated to this particular mod. I just fixed it by scaling down the earth texture (the one found in plugindata) in photoshop and it ran fine

Nice! Do you just size the image down, or is there some spiffy technique to lower the resolution in another way? I dont know much about this stuff, so I imagine that if I reduce the texture size, it won't scale well with the config? I dunno!

[NathanKell]

Nope, you just scale the image down.

Do make sure the new resolution is also a power of two, i.e. 8192x8192->4096x4096

I would scale down everything but heightmaps first; if you scale down the color or normal map, things will look blurry; if you scale down the heightmap, terrain will change.

[tedach]

Nope, you just scale the image down.

Do make sure the new resolution is also a power of two, i.e. 8192x8192->4096x4096

I would scale down everything but heightmaps first; if you scale down the color or normal map, things will look blurry; if you scale down the heightmap, terrain will change.

So honored to have a reply from the might Nathan! Wish I were half the modder you were!

So RSS reads terrain height from the heightmap texture? Like a pixel's color or amplitude translate to a given height? Because that's mindblowing and awesome.

Pingo, if I made a low/med res texture pack, could you use it? I'd just use it for myself for the time being, but I imagine quite a few others running 32bit will want a little headspace when using your fantastico mod. I can PM you the files and anyone else interested, as long as it doesn't conflict with forum and licensing rules. I'll add file attributions of course. Will not do so until I'm given the go-ahead.

edit: if I scale EVERY related texture down by the same power, should they all fit nicely?

[NathanKell]

D'awww

KSP does that, actually. It's just that the heightmaps it uses are locked up in Assets. One of the things RSS does is let you either add a heightmap to bodies that don't have one, or replace the heightmap on bodies that do. Note that the PQS is made up of more than just the heightmap; really, the heightmap is just one of many "PQSMods" that create the final terrain.

.

If you're more on the technical side, here's what PQS is based on, Sean O'Neil's original procedural planet stuff (Part One on Gamasutra, search there for the other parts).

[tedach]

Nice, research for my new foray into kludging terrible mods for KSP! I'll blame you, Nathan. Thanks much! G'night all

[pingopete]

I think I got it running pretty good. The only problem I'm having now is .. there's a 50/50 chance of the game braking on startup. Sometimes when it gets to the main menu the Earth is a big blurry ball. When I get to the VAB nothing functions.. the only building that works is the training facility. But upon exiting it the game locks up.

But that hasn't happened in awhile. Started the game up a few times last night real happy to see the Earth as it should be and everything works real nice. And pingopete... It's incredible. It really is. I'm collecting a nice gallery I'll post once I get a good set of pics. I need to learn how to make gifs..

It's good to here you've been able to get at least some solid runs with it. It is experimental and the 8k textures are sorta a wip test atm, you'll probably wanna crop them to about 1/4 size for the time being to save your CPU's. And I'll be happy to see that gallery I'd quite like to use user content pics on the OP intead of mine, would make it feel more legit somehow

I had the same red/white Kerbin textures; it occurs when you hit a memory limit (mine seems around 3.25 gigs) -without- a crash, so you get corrupt textures/wacky terrain elevation/clipped or black textures. Or at least that's my unprofessional opinion. I reduced my memory footprint and it cleared the problem.

I can confirm this to be true as well, black texture, red/white globe or city lights are all artifacts of ksp failing to load all textures properly. For the time being I'd recommend reducing the textures, either manually or with mods, if you plan to use RVE for anything other than testing

Edited October 11, 2014 by pingopete

[Hattivat]

I've finally managed to get it to work with the minimum amount of Realism Overhaul mods on KSP 24.2 x64. This is such a massive upgrade over the default RSS visuals that I don't even know how to express my feelings over this properly. You're the man, Pingopete!

Didn't have time to do much flying, but here's some pics:

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Just a note - in order to get it to work (even on x64) I had to reduce the resolution of city textures to 4096x4096 using Gimp, so you might probably want to use this resolution in the default pack and provide the 8k ones only as optional extras for people possessing of monster computers

Edited October 11, 2014 by Hattivat

[pingopete]

I've finally managed to get it to work with the minimum amount of Realism Overhaul mods on KSP 24.2 x64. This is such a massive upgrade over the default RSS visuals that I don't even know how to express my feelings over this properly. You're the man, Pingopete!

Didn't have time to do much flying, but here's some pics:

http://imgur.com/a/THkEA

Just a note - in order to get it to work (even on x64) I had to reduce the resolution of city textures to 4096x4096 using Gimp, so you might probably want to use this resolution in the default pack and provide the 8k ones only as optional extras for people possessing of monster computers

Thanks man, honestly all credit to rbray who's made this possible And nice pics dude

[Taki117]

Forgive me, but how does this hold up in .25?

[Algiark]

Is this compatible with the stock planets?