I just found out where kerbin came from... and it blew my mind!

[zekes]

Ok ok, so this sounds stupid, but i was reading the wiki and it says, for version 7.3:

• Kerbin is the only celestial object, does not rotate, and is a mirror reflection of the example planet from libnoise
  

So I clicked the link, and I saw this:

But then I went down! and the textures!

So, my question is: Firstoff, Did Squad really just kind of mirror copy this planet? And if they did, why can't we have those kind of textures?

[Guest]

I think those textures would kill my game...even more.

[Tex]

Astounding! We must send a team of research monkeys to investigate the dates of both the software and Kerbin's first appearance to verify the order of events!

Pretty cool find nonetheless!

[Tery215]

KSP isn't terragen.

[Megalodon 720]

I know that river, It's visible from orbit and in map view. It ends near the KSC 2 I think.

Also as someone who makes extra planets there must have been a rectangular texture there, like this:

There's also height maps for planets and normal maps.

[Alshain]

So, my question is: Firstoff, Did Squad really just kind of mirror copy this planeth?

That doesn't look anything like Kerbin. It may have been that at one time but it's not now.

[zekes]

That doesn't look anything like Kerbin. It may have been that at one time but it's not now.

It's flipped. Here, look when I mirror the image:

and here is the map of kerbin, circa 18.0:

all it seems they did since then is delete that big landbridge and add ice.

[Megalodon 720]

That doesn't look anything like Kerbin. It may have been that at one time but it's not now.

It probably has something to do with the distortions on the oval map.

[FatboyTim]

I do hope that the author of Libnoise has given squad permisison to use his map...

I'd hate for Kerbin to have to be made anew at this late stage of the game's development.

[Technical Ben]

KSP isn't terragen.

No, but maths is maths. If you use the same gen (there are lots of default ones around) then you get the same result. That's what procedural is all about.

PS, thus probably not copyrighted, it's just the default noise map in a lot of things.

[boxman]

I think those textures would kill my game...even more.

If they do it properly so that the GPU is used then it should not really affect it much as long as you have an okay GPU.

The lag issues in KSP is all about physics due to part count which is strictly CPU dependent.

[montyben101]

"2003-2005 Jason Bevins" who is this man!!! (Found it at the bottom of the page)

[KerbMav]

I read of an old myth from before I walked this space. That the great creator found this map and created his own world to its likeness in the first days. As his followers took on the task to name the lands and waters of the young world and began to hold them dear, he could not bring himself to reshape it anymore, for he did not want to cause any tears.

[Arsonide]

No, but maths is maths. If you use the same gen (there are lots of default ones around) then you get the same result. That's what procedural is all about.

PS, thus probably not copyrighted, it's just the default noise map in a lot of things.

I ported libnoise to Construct Classic about a billion years ago, so let me correct a few misconceptions here. First of all, the example planet is merely what the noise generates on a particular seed. Copyrighting that is like copyrighting a number, the seed. There are no copyright issues here. Kerbal Space Program likely uses libnoise since there is a port of it for Unity and that is what most people in Unity use for perlin noise generation.

Secondly, all libnoise does is take coordinates and output the height at that coordinate. The settings of libnoise determine how high resolution the noisemap will be, as well as the addressing system you use. (How often you sample the noise map, every two millimeters or every foot?) If your addressing system samples at larger values, the noise will still be the same noise, it will just not be as high of a resolution.

What each individual application does with the noise is up to that application. Kerbal Space Program has highly stylized planets, so it samples at fairly large rates. It is completely dependent on the application, it's style, and it's renderer. Whereas Kerbal Space Program has to render this stuff in real time, and have an LOD model that can scale from space to ground seamlessly AND wrap around spherically (libnoise handles the spherical part, not the LOD though), Terragen spends several minutes rendering small chunks of noise. It is not designed to run in real time, so it can sample at higher resolutions and spend more time lighting the scene.

So there.

[megatiger78]

a few things have been added according to the wiki

Edited July 14, 2014 by megatiger78

[megatiger78]

opps double post