I made a bunch of revamps and little tweaks to the new version of RSS, which I'm calling "A New Base" (which is kind of a pun). Of those this post should highlight all the major ones.

The Sun

The sun changes constantly, so it's impossible to represent accurately, but what is possible is to use newer data of the Sun to make a more high res map to wrap around it in the system. So that's what I did, and it's way more accurate in terms of scale and in 8k resolution. Source? Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager nolimbdark data of the sun.

There was also a bug with the Sun not giving solar panels any energy. I changed the temperature of its atmosphere to be accurate and now solar panels work.

Mercury

Mercury is in color now baby! And I'd say that actually makes a difference. With this change I'd suggest to anyone wanting to do a texture based planet to check it out as a way to learn how it works, since it doesn't have any of the more complex stuff like Venus, Earth, the Moon and Mars do.

Saturn revamp

I updated both Saturn's surface and its rings. I made the rings texture by cropping part of this, then motion blurring it, doing some other stuff to bring out the tiny details, and (sadly) having to downscale it to 16384 pixels wide since you can't go above 16k. Oh well, the rings fade too early for it to matter anyway.

Here's the ring texture, a bit widened. Open in new tab and zoom in to fully take it in!

Skybox fix

New skybox time! The previous skybox was flipped 180 degrees to what it was supposed to be, meaning you'd see the southern cross and magellanic clouds while launching up at Cape Canaveral. With NASA data and some minimal editing in GIMP, I whipped up a completely new one.

Mars procedural terrain

RSS does procedural terrain when you get close to a planet, since the texture maps don't have a high enough resolution to depict all the little mounds and craterlets. Mars' took a long while, since I didn't have a good idea of how it looked up close, but now I do... kind of. If we generalize it's all craters with dunes inside them, bedrock around craters, dunes on bedrock, dune fields and mesas. So that's the type of terrain you'll find up close in game, though some parts like major crater floors are flatter than others.

Flat Venus

Venus is pretty flat irl, most images you see have terrain height exaggerated like 28 times, even the one used as reference for the Sergeaa volcano. So it only made sense to make it flatter for JNO. Hey, it's got more unique terrain though.

Yet another Moon revamp

Can't go an update without one... I added high detail areas of surface features which were too small to be visible before such as Ina, as well as a "light plains" biome which has larger craters and made the procedural terrain more optimized.

The biggest one of them all: New game content

After new sun flares and very high res scaled space spheres were added most of my wishes for this game were fulfilled, and with them RSS has the potential to look way better. By setting the PQS loading distance back to automatic on every planet I helped realize that potential. If you're on Very High or Ultra it'll take a lot longer for the high res textured sphere to disappear than before, and that's a good thing. Oh and all the atmospheres are higher too.

Here's an example of the what the new scaled space spheres can do: