Parallax is a custom terrain shader for Kerbal Space Program that combines tessellation and displacement mapping to create realistic planetary surfaces.
Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TjmvMywTN4
Parallax completely replaces the terrain shader used in the normal game in favour of more and better features, including:
- Tessellation
- Self-shadowing
- Accurate lighting
- Accurate normal mapping
- Support for multiple lights
- Reflections
- Specular highlights
- Metallic materials
- Influence mapping
The shader that Squad uses for Kerbal Space Program is extremely limited. You can only assign 2 textures that work unless you opt to use an extremely complicated 'Atlas' shader that was introduced in 1.9. We will pretend that the Atlas shader doesn't exist because it's only used on Kerbin and it is extremely unoptimized.
Parallax improves upon the stock shader in a number of ways, for example:
- Normal mapped lighting is accurate and faces the right way on a surface at any angle
- Tessellation allows surfaces to have much more complexity, allowing for the creation of lifelike planet surfaces
- Texture blending is a much smoother transition and varies based on the distance from the camera
- You can have a much greater amount of control over the planet - You have a low, mid, high and steep texture to use
- Complete control over how much colour of a texture to apply to the surface VS how much colour of the surface to retain (using an influence map). This prevents your grass from changing colour on brown terrain, but lets you change the sand colour as it varies with the planet's surface colour.
Parallax has been created for my planet pack 'Beyond Home' for its beta stage so that I can spend time working on fixing any bugs and working on improvements / optimizations before the mod is used elsewhere.
As for system requirements, the trailer was recorded using the following specs - But these are NOT the recommended system specs:
- Intel i9 9900k, 5.0Ghz
- RTX 2080 Super
- 32GB DDR4
Keep in mind that the trailer was also recorded at 4k.
- Download the Parallax, Parallax_StockTextures and Parallax_ScatterTextures folders from the releases page (on the right)
- Download and install Kopernicus. Version 139 or later is required.
- Open the Parallax zip and move the Parallax folder to GameData
- Open the Parallax_StockTextures zip and move Parallax_StockTextures to GameData
- Open the Parallax_ScatterTextures zip and move Parallax_StockTextures to GameData - Merge it with the existing folder.
- Launch the game. Set your terrain quality to High. Set your terrain shader quality to High or Ultra - Ultra will enable tessellation.