[1.2.1] Outer Planets Mod (2.1) - Active development has moved, see first post for new thread

[CaptRobau]

Seriously? two hours and six minutes after I reveal that I and a fellow modder have been working on a fanmade moonpack, the official moons are released?

...

Ahahaha! My timing is just sooooo bad!

Anyways, I'll convert the 'fanmade moons' into a separate modpack. Gongratulations on the update by the way.

Yeah, I felt kind of bad when I read that . No doubt they'll make a great addition to the official moons.

As far as I know, the gas giant clouds don't affect EVE in any way, nor vice versa.

I really like Thatmo, I've never seen planets with atmospheres that thin, and it's already a challenge to fly aerodynamically on Duna...

That's good to hear. I don't know the specifics of EVE nor KE, so it's all just guess work for me.

By the way, I realise that it might not be possible due to Thatmo's size, but could you add a sky visual to Thatmo? I get that in real-life you wouldn't be able to detect a visible difference but I still think that it would really help Thatmo feel alien and I would love to see Neidon amongst the thin white skies of Thatmo - something similar to the second post here would be, literally, the best thing ever: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/24533-Show-off-your-awesome-KSP-pictures!/page999

A atmospheric haze, however slight, is in the works. Couldn't get it right for release and didn't want to hold it up for that.

[hazard-ish]

A atmospheric haze, however slight, is in the works. Couldn't get it right for release and didn't want to hold it up for that.

Oh fantastic, as long as it will be implemented I'm happy! What colour will it be, by the way? I assume white but washed out version of any colour could be very interesting...

Take your time though, I'd rather ensure you feel happy with it before releasing. Besides, I've got to get there first before I can appreciate the view

[CaptRobau]

I'm going for something light grayish, as that's the color often shown in the Triton atmosphere pics.

[LaytheDragon]

From your screenshots, the new moons look great! It is wonderful to have much more reasoning to go to Neidon than just to orbit for a length of time or get a flyby to eject something out of the Kerbol star system. With there being only two new moons for Neidon, will there ever be another moon for the frigid purple planet in the stock OPM?

In the meantime, within my sandbox save I have two huge ships just exiting Kerbin's SOI toward Urlum, and another ship orbiting Ovok. Unfortunately, time warping already takes more time than anyone wants to spend to get to Jool, but 13 years for one vessel and 15 years for the other to get to Urlum is more than an annoyance to wait through, especially since the Better Timewarp mod started glitching my vessel immediately after loading it . I did make an album (that I didn't post yet) on the launch of the larger ship (which is pictured in my avatar), though, and I can make one for the smaller craft too.

Neidon and it's freshly-added moons must take a half-hour's worth of time just to reach, not to mention leave. When I visit Neidon's moons, I might want to start a stopwatch to track how long it takes to time warp there in real-time.

Edited November 6, 2015 by LaytheDragon

[tkw]

[h=2]procedural gas giant clouds woah[/h]

[Trinzilla]

Well, I better get started on making my own Proteus and Neso analogues. Good job on the new release!

[Olympic1]

Congrats on the new moons, already added the basic info to the wiki.

@-ctn-, could you add some information about them like you did with the other OPM planets? I'll try to begin with some info about them.

As for resource configs for CRP, I'll need to wait for biomes but this is not necessary.

[CaptRobau]

From your screenshots, the new moons look great! It is wonderful to have much more reasoning to go to Neidon than just to orbit for a length of time or get a flyby to eject something out of the Kerbol star system. With there being only two new moons for Neidon, will there ever be another moon for the frigid purple planet in the stock OPM?

In the meantime, within my sandbox save I have two huge ships just exiting Kerbin's SOI toward Urlum, and another ship orbiting Ovok. Unfortunately, time warping already takes more time than anyone wants to spend to get to Jool, but 13 years for one vessel and 15 years for the other to get to Urlum is more than an annoyance to wait through, especially since the Better Timewarp mod started glitching my vessel immediately after loading it . I did make an album (that I didn't post yet) on the launch of the larger ship (which is pictured in my avatar), though, and I can make one for the smaller craft too.

Neidon and it's freshly-added moons must take a half-hour's worth of time just to reach, not to mention leave. When I visit Neidon's moons, I might want to start a stopwatch to track how long it takes to time warp there in real-time.

If it turns out the system is lacking, maybe another more easy-to-get-to moon based off of Proteus or something. But that's future talk. Neidon has moons for now and there's still enough other things to be done, for example Plock and its moon.

Congrats on the new moons, already added the basic info to the wiki.

@-ctn-, could you add some information about them like you did with the other OPM planets? I'll try to begin with some info about them.

As for resource configs for CRP, I'll need to wait for biomes but this is not necessary.

Once I get the biomes done, I'll send over the data so you can make the CRP configs and have those and the biomes in the same update.

[richfiles]

Aside from the fact that the new moons haven't been added to the description on the top of this forum and on Kerbal Stuff... I noticed what seems to be an image goof on Kerbal Stuff. It appears that Neidon's image is where Polta should be, and all the other images are shifted down by one, making it confusing, but still possible to follow. Very amazing work! I'm holding out on installing this as a reward for finishing my simpit. I'm making progress! Got LED displays lit up today!

[hazard-ish]

Also, why is it that parachutes don't work on Thatmo? You said: "parachutes are useless". I get that the atmosphere is very thin - about 1% of Kerbin's pressure but that is the same thickness as Mar's atmosphere in real life and parachutes have been used frequently to help landers and rovers slow down during their descent.

[CaptRobau]

Stock parachutes don't have a minimum pressure setting low enough for them to deploy. Without an initial deploy, they won't be able to fully open up either when they get below a certain height above ground.

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Aside from the fact that the new moons haven't been added to the description on the top of this forum and on Kerbal Stuff... I noticed what seems to be an image goof on Kerbal Stuff. It appears that Neidon's image is where Polta should be, and all the other images are shifted down by one, making it confusing, but still possible to follow. Very amazing work! I'm holding out on installing this as a reward for finishing my simpit. I'm making progress! Got LED displays lit up today!

Thanks for the heads up about the images. The forum OP and download pages need to be updated. That's still a WIP.

[Olympic1]

Once I get the biomes done, I'll send over the data so you can make the CRP configs and have those and the biomes in the same update.

Thanks in advance

[The White Guardian]

Yeah, I felt kind of bad when I read that . No doubt they'll make a great addition to the official moons.

Ah, don't feel bad, making them was fun. Besides, I'm considering to add another star, and I bet those moons will make a fine addition to this new pack.

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What Olympic posted was a comment that NathanKell made in the Kopernicus thread a while ago, the properly refers to as opposed to the "set the opacity of your normalmap to 50%" tip that gets thrown around in response to the question you asked a lot. I had no idea what to do when I read that at first, so I wrote a little tutorial on it after figuring things out with lots of trial and error.

Normalmaps can be generated from your Heightmaps, high initial resolutions are preferred here. The process for doing this right can be slightly daunting at first, but correctly executing it is important for achieving an acceptable standard of quality. Alternative solutions presented for this problem often consist of slaughtering your normalmap's quality among other things, so try to refrain from them.

To generate a normalmap from a heightmap with Photoshop, you will first need the Nvidia normalmap and dds plugins. After having downloaded and installed those, execute the following steps:

1. Image > Mode > RGB Color

   
   

2. Filter > NVIDIA Tools > Normalmap Filter, check “Invert Xâ€Â. The Scale option allows you to set the “strength†of your normalmap, experiment a bit! Click ok, and you are halfway there.

   
   

3. Next, go to Image > Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontal, followed by Filter > Other > Offset, where you offset by ¼ of your image width.

   
   

4. After that, Save your normalmap as dds and select DXT5_NM from the dropdown menu. Make sure that you do not save flipped vertically at this point.

   
   

5. )
   

   Voilà, you just made a normal map (provided I explained correctly and you followed correctly, that is

   
   

6. Note that step 3), for reasons related to the Unity engine, has to be done for all planetary maps in Kerbal Space Program so make sure that your maps are aligned after completing all of them. Also, I think it is a good idea to start with an unmodified heightmap, then change it to a normalmap by all the steps above, then do step 3. for the heightmap and colormap.

   
   

I just made a quick and dirty test of this method with an old map of mine and it seems to work,

http://i.imgur.com/QjpfKYJ.png

but please correct me if you spot any errors. And all of this really belongs in the Kopernicus thread, so sry for going offtopic.

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Edit: The plugin Sigma mentioned is Gimp DDS and will allow you to save as DXT5nm. Following the steps above should be doable in gimp as well, but I can't help with that.

Sir/Madam, thank you so much for those steps! I'm installing GIMP and the DDS plugin as I'm writing this, and if it works, I'll make a full tutorial on how to make planets for Kopernicus in a separate thread.

[The Hawk]

Capt and Eudae, congrats on the release of Neidon's moons! I've been waiting for a Triton analog for a long time and Thatmo looks like just what I had in mind.

Are all the science defs done for these two, or are you going to be crowdsourcing them again?

[Olympic1]

Capt and Eudae, congrats on the release of Neidon's moons! I've been waiting for a Triton analog for a long time and Thatmo looks like just what I had in mind.

Are all the science defs done for these two, or are you going to be crowdsourcing them again?

biomes and science defs still needs to be done for the new moons. Capt will announce when we'll be able to add science defs

[The White Guardian]

biomes and science defs still needs to be done for the new moons. Capt will announce when we'll be able to add science defs

"We'll be able to add science defs"

Really? We can add science defs? Oh, you can count on me!

[CaptRobau]

Capt and Eudae, congrats on the release of Neidon's moons! I've been waiting for a Triton analog for a long time and Thatmo looks like just what I had in mind.

Are all the science defs done for these two, or are you going to be crowdsourcing them again?

Crowdsourcing a la with the Urlum moons. So I'll release the biome maps when they're done (and you people have had some time to explore the new worlds we added). Based on that we can all fill out the science defs and in the following update I'll add both the biomes, plus the sciencedefs, plus the resource defs for third party resources (courtesy of Olympic1). That way the Neidon system will gets its biome-related stuff all in one go, no waiting in between.

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"We'll be able to add science defs"

Really? We can add science defs? Oh, you can count on me!

OPM has crowd-sourced its science defs for a while now. It's a simple, quick and fun system that has led to the mod having even more science defs than stock KSP. Really helps make the mod feel more complete. Can't express how awesome I find that we've managed to do this so often and so well. Really sets this mod's community apart from the others!

EDIT: Also, OPM got a 1000 combined downloads in one day. Can't believe how big this community has gotten.

Edited September 1, 2015 by CaptRobau

[Jodo42]

Well, I better get started on making my own Proteus and Neso analogues. Good job on the new release!

A Neso analogue sounds intriguing. For anyone interested, at its aphelion, Neso is farther from Neptune than Mercury is from the Sun at its aphelion. I can't find any reasonable pictures, though, as I don't think there are any. Will you be going with what little we know f Nereid's shape/color as a basis, or will you be taking more creative license?

[Trinzilla]

Will you be going with what little we know of Nereid's shape/color as a basis, or will you be taking more creative license?

I'll likely take a little bit of both.

[VASMIR]

How do you make biome maps?

[Jacob Chernyak]

Outstanding mod! It's so stockalike it should be implemented into the stock game! Good luck on further development!

[The White Guardian]

How do you make biome maps?

Make a map of the surface that is completely black/while/blue/etc, then mark areas with other colors. These diffrently colored areas are diffrent biomes, and their code (RGBA) must be inserted in the script file of the planet so Kopernicus knows what biome has what color on the biome map.

Take a look at Tekto's biome map, for example, and compare it with the color map.

Hope this helps. If you still have any questions, feel free to ask, though I don't think the OPM thread would be the best place.

- The White Guardian

[nsgallup]

This is by far the best mod for this game.

[nalfz]

Tried to rescale Nissee and Thatmo for 64k and it turns out I'm not very good at kopernicus configs

Also the planet renders in front of a gigantic ghost of itself from scaled space. Anyone know what I can do to fix all of these issues?

[Nansuchao]

Now we know how Moho was born... ;-)