![]() Now, I should say I'm not trying to bash the developer who originally did these models (and has long left the team), as making so much content was still a hard and long job that provided KSP with valuable placeholders to ride with for a long time. No attempt was made to build a consistent color palette that works together in interiors, each texture was created without referencing others, which leads to a chaotic, unpleasant color set without any nice contrasts for the eye. I vividly remember, for example, a photo of some small electric control panel stretched onto the whole height of an old launch tower, or strange green boxes each VAB "shelf" was stuffed with, with dials so large a kerbal could fit into them! Some stuff evidently used non-proportional transformations. Diffuse textures contained puzzling detail. Normal maps, if used, were hastily generated by an automatic filter with poor results. Sometimes it's unavoidable, like with the terrain system that's forced to operate on enormous scale, but there is no excuse not to make building models consistent in themselves. Ideally, you should get exactly the same texture resolution per surface area everywhere: 512x512 per 8x8 meters, for example (that translates to 2x2m for 128x128 textures and so forth): that hugely helps to make everything look more consistent, and makes MIP mapping behave nicer. First, there was an extremely inconsistent texel density (which means that texture resolution varied wildly across the surfaces, with crystal-clear high-resolution metal seen right next to a muddy concrete stretched across hundreds of meters).Click them.Īnd finally, the quality of texturing. ^ As a side note: most of the images there and from now on are clickable thumbnails that will lead you to high-res originals. Unsatisfying overall quality from an architectural standpoint: problems with composition and color, lack of consistent elements like window and door systems, lack of ventilation, questionable structure, surfaces lacking contrast between high and low frequency detail.Elements lacking function added just for the sake of filling space with something, in the vain of "greeble" used to cover surfaces of sci-fi ships.Buildings were using vastly disproportionate elements, like glass industrial lamps on the VAB clocking three meters across, randomly scaled doors and 10 meter-high observation windows.Aforementioned wouldn't be as much of a problem if those buildings looked rad, but alas. Well, the old VAB interior was consisting of dozens of separate models, and some other objects were no better off. having a building consisting of five models, is better than having a building consisting of half a hundred (I'm leaving it to you to imagine how draw calls are multiplied in that case). Old buildings were using a multitude of materials: for example, the old Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) interior used 16 materials (which wasn't even noticeable from surface resolution or material variety). Should the object cast shadows and receive shadows? Add two more! Now, guess what happens if an object is using 20 materials? The amount of draw calls adds up extremely quickly then, and your CPU can only send so much and your GPU can only receive so many before things start to slow down. Want to use transparency? Add another one. Want to use a normal map? That's another two heavy draw calls. If you want to use a diffuse texture under simple ambient light, it would be two drawcalls: one for the geometry and texturing, and one for shading. If you want to render a textureless cube without lighting, that can be done with just one draw call. There is a multitude of factors that break everything into hundreds and potentially thousands of separate calls. And the thing is, what you're seeing in any given frame isn't being sent to the GPU in one chunk. Why? There are things called draw calls, which are portions of information sent from the CPU to your GPU describing what to render. Second, the material count, and subsequently, the amount of textures old models were using was problematic. While old buildings were seemingly simple in their shape, they were modeled using some techniques like boolean extrusions which did not work out too well for their polycount. Let's recount the issues that were present in the old content.įirst, the polycount.
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