Planetary Diversity

What is this? This is a mod that adds some diversity to the (otherwise static) KSP solar system. It archives that by changing various parameters of the CelestialBody and PQSMod components, but it has the potential for expanding it further, either through "official" tweaks, or tweaks made by other modders.

How does it work? Every savegame you create in KSP gets a random number assigned, a seed. This seed is different for every savegame you create. Planetary Diversity modifies the solar system between the MainMenu and the SpaceCenter scene. It uses the seed from the savegame that was loaded to generate random numbers, for example to replace the static seeds in the terrain system. Since most of the planets in KSP are procedural, this changes how the KSP planets are formed. They are a bit different, but the overall look doesn't change, i.e. Kerbin will still be blue-ish, and Eve stays purple. It supports planets made with Kopernicus, however, if they don't have procedural components (i.e. they only have a height and a color map), it won't be able to change them.

At the moment it changes the seeds, orbits, color of gas planets, atmospheric pressure, names (hi Sigma!) and it can add / remove atmospheres. Also, it is modular, with an API, so users can implement their own tweaks if they want.

However, there is one caveat: When you load a savegame for the first time, with Planetary Diversity installed, it will lock down for a while. The reason is that in KSP, every planet has a low-res representation for larger distances - called "Scaled Space". This scaled space representation needs to be computed, but the computation is rather expensive. Thats why Planetary Diversity will generate the representations of all bodies in the solar system that were changed, and save it into your savegame folder. When you load the same save in the future, the mod will simply load the files from your disk instead of re-creating them every time.