A StarMap mod for Kitten Space Agency that puts the real world on Earth: buildings and roads from OpenStreetMap around the camera, city lights at night, and satellite imagery when you look down from altitude.

> Heads-up: this mod was programmed entirely by Claude (Anthropic's AI). It works, but it is a hobby project: > don't expect anything too special, and expect rough edges.

Launch at night with city lights

Florida from orbit with satellite imagery

Satellite imagery under the clouds

LC-39A launch complex

Features

Buildings and roads from OpenStreetMap vector tiles, streamed around the camera and cached on disk. Buildings

get facades, roofs, details nearby and a window pass. Roads are laid exactly on the terrain. The game's trees and shrubs are cleared from roads and buildings.

Far field: simplified buildings out to tens of kilometres, so cities stay visible after launch.
Night: lit windows, street lights in towns, and city lights visible from orbit.
Satellite imagery (Sentinel-2 cloudless, 2016) draped over the ground when seen from altitude.
Trees where real forests are: the game's trees, shrubs and grass are kept only where ESA WorldCover land cover

says they grow, with a few lone trees in open land; none on water, fields, rock or snow.

More kinds of trees: spruces, pines, birches, an autumn poplar and shrubs from a tree pack are mixed into

the game's own trees.

Launch complexes at all of the game's pads on Earth, placed from OpenStreetMap data:
LC-39A (Kennedy): the fixed service structure (from NASA's "Gantry" model) with a crew access arm that docks

and undocks, the Starship integration tower, water and lightning towers, hangar, tank farm with boil-off vapour, and pipelines. Also LC-39B's towers and the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Starbase (Boca Chica): both Starship launch towers with their catch arms, and the tank farm.
ELA-4 (Kourou): the Ariane 6 mobile gantry, the four lightning masts and the water tower.
SLC-4E (Vandenberg): the launch tower and the helium and propellant tanks.
LC-1 (Mahia): the lightning masts and the tank rows of pads A and B.

Install

Install Kitten Space Agency and the StarMap mod loader.
Download the zip of the latest release from the

Releases page and extract it so that you have Documents/My Games/Kitten Space Agency/mods/GEE/ with mod.toml, GEE.dll, Assets.xml, Meshes/ and Textures/ in it.

Start the game through StarMap. The mod window is in the mods menu.

The mod needs an internet connection the first time an area is shown. Everything downloaded is cached under mods/GEE/cache/, and "Clear download cache" in the window empties it.

Settings

Every part of the mod can be switched off on its own, in the mod window or in settings.json in the mod folder (written on the first start). For example, turn off the low-poly OSM buildings but keep the roads, the satellite imagery and the launch complex.

| Setting | Default | What it does | |---|---|---| | Enabled | on | The whole mod | | ShowBuildings | on | Plain OpenStreetMap buildings (boxes with facades and roofs) | | ShowRoads | on | Roads (and the street light glow along them) | | LaunchComplexModels | on | The modelled launch complexes: LC-39A/B towers, crew arm, VAB, hangar, pipelines, tank farm | | Airports | on | Runways, taxiways, aprons and their lights | | Roofs, BuildingDetails, Windows | on | Pitched roofs, details near the camera (doors, cornices, roof units), window pass | | ReflectorPosts | on | Small posts along unlit roads | | NightLights, CityGlow, RegionalLights, GlobalLights | on | Point lights near the camera, night glow, city lights from orbit | | ClearClutter | on | Removes the game's trees and shrubs from roads and buildings | | LoadRadiusKm, RenderDistanceKm | 3, 15 | How far detailed tiles are loaded and drawn | | MaxInstances | 150000 | Cap on drawn building pieces; beyond it, distant small buildings thin out | | FarBuildings, FarRadiusKm | on, 35 | Simplified far buildings | | SatelliteImagery, SatelliteFadeFromM | on, 1500 | Satellite imagery from altitude, fading in above this height | | StreetLights | BuiltUp | BuiltUp (lit in towns, from building density), Data (OpenStreetMap lamps, see below), All, None | | StreetLightOverpassUrls | overpass-api.de | Overpass servers for Data mode, comma separated | | TankVapor | on | Vapour over the launch complex tank farms | | DebugLogging | off | Statistics in the window and progress lines in the game's log (errors are always logged); also "Debug" in the GEE menu |

Street light data (optional)

StreetLights = "Data" places street lights where OpenStreetMap maps them (highway=street_lamp, lit=yes/no). That data is not in the vector tiles, so it comes from an Overpass API server. The public servers are shared, volunteer-run and slow (15–90 s per area), and their usage policy asks apps with many users not to rely on them. The mode is therefore off by default. If you use it, prefer your own Overpass instance; results are cached for good.

Building from source

Requirements: .NET 10 SDK, the game, and StarMap.

cd src
dotnet build -c Release

The build writes GEE.dll into the mod folder. If the game is not installed in C:\Program Files\Ahwoo\Games\Kitten Space Agency\, pass -p:KsaDir="<game folder>\". Close the game first: it locks the DLL.

The meshes and textures are generated by Python scripts (Python 3 with numpy and Pillow):

cd src/tools
python make_assets.py

Roadmap

Next up:

Bug fixes
Street rework
Building enhancements

Contributing

Contributions are welcome: bug reports, ideas, screenshots and pull requests.

Have an idea or found a bug? Please open an issue on GitHub. Feature wishes, places that look wrong, crashes,

anything: every issue helps.

Want to fix or build something yourself? Pull requests are very welcome, small or large. If it is a bigger

change, opening an issue first to talk about it is a good idea, but not required.

By contributing you agree that your contribution is licensed under the GPL-3.0 (with the additional permission in NOTICE.md), like the rest of the mod.

Credits and licenses

GEE is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (LICENSE), with an additional permission to combine it with Kitten Space Agency, StarMap and Harmony (NOTICE.md). You may use, change and share it; if you distribute a modified version, you must publish its complete source code under the same license. Data and models from others keep their own licenses; NOTICE.md has the details.

Satellite imagery: EOxCloudless https://cloudless.eox.at by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus

Sentinel data 2016), CC BY 4.0.

WorldCover consortium, CC BY 4.0.

LC-39 fixed service structure: NASA 3D Resources "Gantry" (NASA / Michael D. Carbajal). Not endorsed by NASA.
Road asphalt: "Asphalt Pit Lane" by Dimitrios Savva, Poly Haven, CC0.
Extra trees: based on "Low Poly Forest Tree Pack"

by 99.Miles, CC BY 4.0.

This is a fan-made mod. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the game's developers, NASA, SpaceX, or any data provider.

GEE - General Earth Enhancements

Description