Wow, never thought you'd open this folder. Heh.
Anyway, thanks for joining me here. This is where I will explain the absolute rollercoaster of development that was SSP.

First, let's get some things straight.

The released version of SSP was started on January 19, 2021. It, of course, released on INSERTDATEHERE.
But, I've  been trying to make something like SSP for hours before.

Chapter 1 - Problems I faced starting SSP (and how you can avoid them if you make your own Kopernicus Pack)

My obession with Kopernicus started in November when I downloaded OPM.

Ever since then I've wanted to make a planet pack...
However, I followed a Tutorial by TheWhiteGuardian (please don't hate on him, yes his tutorial is too vague and hard to get working but its probably because it's outdated).
Not realizing how much Kopernicus had changed by then, I couldn't get the planet to appear for the life of me.

This planet was called Dane. It was meant to be a test object orbiting between Kerbin and Eve. I just couldn't get the dang thing to appear!

So, in hindsight, your best bet to start making planets is to template a planet. All the rocky planets in this mod are templated from a captured asteroid from OPM, for example.
The code is sufficiently changed so that I am not copying them, but the point remains.

So after I realized this, I made the mistake of downloading the Kopernicus Examples.

If you didn't know, the Official Kopernicus Examples are severely outdated and the ones that still work don't do so even remotely properly.
Silly me didn't know this at the time and did it anyway.

I used the Procedurally Generated body template and created the first iteration of SSP. I think it might still be in my Recycle Bin, but I'm not sure. I cleared it quite recently. :/

It took 3 hours to create, and here are the planets it contained:

Dane - New moon of Duna, in far duna orbit (eventually remade as Desma)
Vist - Moon of Dres (eventually remade as Vesi)
Sendno - Dwarf planet (eventually remade as Seno)
Satio - Saturn-like gas giant (eventually remade as Sati)
Bluh - Captured asteroid around Minmus (inspired Nea, though Nea orbits kerbin and not Minmus)
Era - Dwarf Planet (eventually remade as Erai)
Dysa - Moon around Era (eventually redone)
Pai - Small moon around Satio (eventually redone as Enca)
Kao - Large moon around Satio (eventually redone as Tilo)

I was then getting ready to post this prototype on the forums. To celebrate, I thought I'd record a video where I visited Dane, Vist, and Bluh in 1 mission.
However, this is when things began to fall apart.

First off, the procedurally generated body example is terrible! No matter what you do, even if you change the color noise, the surface (not what's shown on map screen) will be pink. Always.
Second, on every planet if you looked up you saw a sort of ghost surface. It looked awful, glitchy, and overall severely incomplete. This effect happens very slightly in low orbit around some of the more rough planets in modern SSP, but it's barely noticable and it happens in OPM too.

Problems didn't start until I went to Vist. You see, since Bluh was meant to look like a blueberry, I actually didn't notice the fatal mistake I made when landing on Bluh, since the surface was meant to be blue anyway. I didn't notice the slightly-off hue.

When I arrived in the Dres system, I noticed Vist looked nothing like I wanted to. Vist actually used the same Color map as Vesi does in SSP, and it was meant to look the exact same as Vesi.
But instead what I got was this awful gray ball of spikes. Exactly what I didn't want.

Trying to land on it, I noticed the surface turned purple, and there was nowhere to land - It was just PACKED FULL of spikes.

Also fun fact, for some time Nea was also a spikeball like Vist. But I changed the PQS mods and fixed that.

Anyway, I sort of wedged my rocket upright in between 3 spikes, and thought "This is awful..." to myself.

But things were about to go from bad to worse.

I was busy looking at the purple surface, and then I looked up and saw giant Z-fighting spikes above me.

At this point I gave up.

I used HyperEdit to land on all the other planets, and the following planets had issues.

Every Planet apart from Satio - Purple surface and ghost surface in the sky

Vist - Extreme spikes, most glaringly obvious ghost surface
Sendno - Checkerboard Surface
Bluh - Sphere of influence was so large that landing on Minmus was impossible
Dysa - Spike ball like Vist or early Nea
Kao - Atmosphere was invisible and extended all the way to the edge of its SOI, and was insanely hot for some reason.

I gave up and thought "This is too hard. Never again please!"

But over the entirety of December, I tried adding Herma to the game, with increasing levels of success.

Eventually, on January 17, 2022, I tried to finally take another go at creating a planet pack.

This one was named MoreMoons, and, fun fact, SSP was originally named MoreMoons as well. That was until I decided to add Sati.

Another fun fact, Sati was a part of this original MoreMoons. Infact, so was Herma and Desma.

Here was the list of all planets:

Herma - Moon of Moho, revamped in SSP
Desma - Moon of Duna, revamped in SSP
Vasi - Moon of Dres
Sati - Exactly as it is in the final pack
Nan - Small moon of Sati, eventually redone as Mina
Pan - Small moon of Sati, eventually redone as Enca
Stan - Large moon of Sati, eventually redone as Tilo

Things were going well! No ghost surfaces, no spikeballs, and everything was nice.

That is, until I landed on Stan.

I realized that the purple surfaces were indeed still there, even though I changed the SimplexColorNoise or whatever it's called - It's too mentally tiring to use so I just use colormaps.

At this point I just gave up again.

Then I decided to use an OPM planet as a template.

Chapter 2 - Early SSP Development

I used that small captured Asteroid around Sarnus as a template, and created Charla.

Charla caused the game to softlock every time it got past the initial screen. I spent hours trying to find out what was wrong - A common theme I have noticed with Kopernicus is that it physically couldn't be less specific with errors.
Then I realized that I just named the Textures folder Taxtures, and realized I had spent 2 hours of my life banging my head against my desk over 1 letter. Yikes.

Charla worked beautifully, but the heightmap didn't work.

Chapter 2.5 - HEIGHTMAPS!!!!!

I dread Heightmaps. Absolutely NOONE tells you how to export them - they tell you how to create them, how to make them tileable, and stuff like that, BUT NOONE TELLS YOU HOW TO EXPORT THEM.
First I tried making a normal .dds like all the color files.
Nope.
Then I tried making a literal normal .dds (like the _normal files).
Nope.
Then I tried that stupid F8 or whatever it's called format.
NOPE.
At this point I gave up and, until I found a way to create Heightmaps, just relied on PQS mods.

I actually found the answer when looking at KittopiaTech's source code - it has every planet in the solar system's heightmap as a .png in a folder somewhere I forgot.

I tried one of these and it caused the planet to have a proper heightmap - not the one I wanted, but a heightmap nonetheless.

And then it dawned on me - just use a .png.

This was the biggest "bruh moment" of my life, no doubt. Imagine spending 2 days trying to find out what subformat you need to put an image in, and yet all along, nobody told you but you could just make it a .png, and you didn't know because, for some reason, nobody seems to do that.

Please - If you want to export a heightmap, save yourself the trouble. It looks less professional, but just export it as a .png instead of a .dds.

Chapter 3 - SSP Betas

On the night of January 20, 2022, I released the first beta of SSP. First unsure whether it was even good enough to be allowed on Stardock, it turned out to be the case thankfully, and this gave me a rush of confidence.

To celebrate, I started a Sati 5 mission. However, I noticed Sati and Jool had intersecting orbits.

No matter, I fixed this in Beta 1.1.

This section was actually written before Beta 1.2 was finished. So that's fun.
As I am writing this, I'm still planning what to add in Beta 1.2....

However, once Beta 1.2 was released, it also got accepted into CKAN! 

This caused another major rush of confidence. I had a lot of motivation I could spend on Beta 1.3, and so the only logical step was to have an absolutely titanic update...
