minor issues with reentry effects (and when can they be resolved)

[balmy mist]

so basically the reentry effect itself looks really awesome but i have made it well known that the reentry effects are too transparent around ship parts as if ship parts render on top of the effect, but there is also a bug i have encountered with the reentry plasma where it looks different at certain zoom levels for the camera. i just need developer input regarding this and a rough estimate on how long it would take to fix this minor bug as well as tune up the visuals to resolve the transparency issue

how it looks at one zoom level

and how it looks zoomed in by one click of the mousewheel

i just thought i would bring this up to you @wintry shuttle since you responded to my feedback in ksp2_general. i am doing my part in reporting bugs to the QA who can bring it to the technical artists

[boreal basin]

I’m having that same issue, I wasn’t sure if it was bugged or that’s just how it’s suppose to look?!?

[wintry shuttle]

It's not a bug, but it IS worth chatting about - so I always appreciate feedback like this. Heating and VFX will continue to undergo changes throughout the 0.2.x cycle (and beyond) as we make changes and verify those against perf costs.

We definitely want feedback and opinions on it as we make those changes.

[balmy mist]

How quickly can we start to see changes to reentry vfx? Because i feel like the vfx are so close to being perfect. Just needs a few tweaks

[balmy mist]

another thing i noticed is that the light that is projected onto vessels during reentry is not visible on heat shields. just something to consider after the Christmas break. and yes i feel like this is related to my issue with plasma transparency

same effect with RCS blocks

from another angle you can see that the reentry effect IS visible but it's just very VERY faint (on that middle RCS block). i just wish to know when these visual issues can be resolved to help the effect look way better

[balmy mist]

as an additional improvement concept since i love improving reentry fx in kirita. i give you ANOTHER proof of concept. here is someone's screenshot of reentry on a probe or whatever it is

and after my improvements. tbh this is my best yet. the fireball looks HOT, the heat shield is illuminated, and you see the licks of flame on the side facing the camera but it is also transparent enough to let you see the ship underneath

i take no credit for original screenshots. only my edits of them

[slim ridge]

What i find from my observation is that the reentry effect DOES scale with intensity as length of the tail but not in "brightness" or visual "strength" as the ksp1 effect, for a lack of a better term.

Like when you come back from mun, the effect comes on strong and bright right away as if you are already heating up like mad, but when you look on your ablator its hardly bothered... there isnt all that much heat, but the effect communicates something else, all is glowing white hot.

What i mean is that it is hard to gauge how "strong" the actual heating on your craft is. The effect in KSP1 communicated this very well i think, it ramped up slow or fast corresponding to the heating.
But this new effect, by the feel of it, it has no(or difficult to discern) ramp up or down... it come on or goes off, it varies in lenght of the tail and that is it.

I hope it is clear what i mean to say.

[balmy mist]

yeah i feel like ablator is too resilient, it pretty much nullifies the danger of reentry to the point where as long as you keep the heat shield pointed forward there is no worrying if your ship is gonna get back safely. and yes there needs to be a sort of transition. not like a fade in or anything but it would be cool if it was like the heat shield and exposed parts start glowing, you see a few licks of flame then more and more getting longer and brighter before you have a full on inferno surrounding the craft and has to have a similar ramp down with a vapor cone for supersonic effects

[slim ridge]

Well i dont want to overdo it, PC´s should not grind to a halt because of funky sparkle sparkle effects around the craft. All i am saying is that, in my opinion, the effect right now does a rather bad job of actually informing the player if the heating is light, strong, very strong... or whatever it maybe. It does not scale well from the early onset of heating to peak thermal flux and back down.