HB Stratos

Here's an excerpt of my log, something seriously went wrong with this. It used to work and I have made no changes ot the effect since. The above is an excerpt of the log when I open the waterfall effect editor windo. In game no effect is visible, too. Issue has been identified to have been a wrong MM patch, I used :NEEDS[ReStock] instead of :NEEDS[!ReStock]. I'm curious why this caused the entire UI to break and to throw a wave of errors though.

I don't know what you mean by this, exactly, but rotation is a vector direction now. It could be an euler rotation if that is preferred, maybe that's what you think it is? I was indeed expecting euler angles as this is what the normal Offsets also use. A direction does also not allow rotation of the plume around it's axis, so I would prefer eulers here. They should show different things because of a randomization effect so that no two plumes on different engines are identical, or are you describing something else? I have never observed this feature anywhere else, and in fact I would prefer it to not automatically exist, but for the randomisation to be user controlled. Perhaps a toggle that allows the user to switch this on or off for each effect. All the mach diamonds in my recent FX work by utilizing a noise texure that has a tiling of zero in one direction. and I wanted to use it for a few other things as well. Both UV modifiers should be removed, I don't see their utility anymore. I do, and use them in almost every single Effect. It allows a few tricks with a smooth fallof that I wouldn't want to loose. it's honestly super useful and removing it would break many of my FX with no real available fix. It would be nice if they were accessible to modifiers, too. No, that is the intended behaviour. I can add speed as a control as well. Please add a speed control. The perlin noise is pretty much useless without it.

public float PerlinNoise() { return Mathf.PerlinNoise(seed+Time.time*scale, seed + Time.time*scale); } If I'm right changing the code in the perlin controller to this should fix the scale

https://imgur.com/a/zlFKZe7 Another bug, the UV Offset only affects one of multiple plumes on engines like the rapier

Depending on how the mod is implemented that might already be possible. After all, the mod is able to support the Panther engine with it's afterburning and dry configuration already. And as the mod likely also uses a similar engine ID system something like this should be possible Also, another bug I observed is that the scale on the perlin noise scales the amplitude and not the speed of the noise, see above for the others @Nertea

https://imgur.com/a/ucGci5n here you can see what I mean

I've found an odd bug with how rotation behaves. Adding a rotation modifier to a cylinder mesh with additive dynamic shader nothing behaves like it should. When targetting the mesh or the effect with the modifier nothing behaves like it should, with values doing seemingly arbitrary things to the roation Another bug I observed is that seemingly with this update two instances of an effect with their animate speed set to 0 don't show the same thing

These updates sound amazing! Looks like I'll be busy... The documentation on controllers isn't up to date yet though, would be nice if you could update it with all the new ones @Nertea

that sounds great! Well fixing speeds is less than I had to do previously, so long as my FX stop breaking on me. Also great to see the mach number controller. I have some coding experience with unity, but none so far with modding KSP. How hard do you think it would be to sub-mod Waterfall to get the controllers I'd like to see?

First off, thanks for having a look. Also, thanks for all your work on this mod so far. You're doing this for free so I really expect nothing from you there. Take these rather as suggestions on how the mod could improve. Not hard, could be added. would be cool to have to change how mach diamonds move. May run into issues when in a vacuum, though this may just be up to the patch maker to disable the FX being influenced by mach depending on atmosphere depth That's a lot more nuanced than you think it is. How frequently is a new random number generated? what is the rate of movement between the two numbers? I was thinking of something like perlin noise, which is inbuilt into unity. You'd take samples from it at position x * currentTime where x is the speed set by the user. It would also be nice if the user could either set a seed or choose to have it randomized for every instance of the FX That's... really involved at this point. I can think a bit about it but I'm really trying to avoid more UI work. I haven't dealt much with UI so it's hard to judge for me how hard it would be to implement. However, it would be really helpful to at least be able to re-order modifier as currently I either have to change it in the file and re-launch the game, which takes ages, or I have to delete modifiers and re-add them manually, which is quite annoying to do. I do think this would also help everyone who is making patches for the mod, not only me who is working on atmosphere engines. That seems like overkill for that situation? What is preventing you from doing that with multiple modifiers with different blend modes? The effect you describe could for example be accomplished with a throttle-driven curve (replace) that animates a positive gradient. A atmosphere-driven curve (multiply) that moves between values of -1 (at sea level) and 1 (at altitude) should invert the curve as described. That could actually work, but it would be a bit annoying with more complex curves. Though, seeing as this would be quite complicated to implement otherwise I think I can live with this solution. Probably not impossible. Is it an issue with the KSP mod API not allowing you to access these values? In this case I think it should be possible to get these values by comparing the angles of thrustTransform and model I'll think about the best way to achieve this as it seems like a good improvement in general okay great! I don't think this one will be happening. I figured as much, but I'd love to see it, especially for something like a falcon 9 reentry burn with the plume correctly showing up as blasted by the airstream as it slows down the rocket. This would require a combination of the attack X, attack Y and mach number controllers, but it would be pretty cool. I believe you missed this one... maybe it could be implemented as an expansion upon the igniton/shutdown FX Can you provide some kind of template for me to reproduce this? Whiplash Patch and a Plane to test it with Here it is relatively easy to observe when an animation is stuck as you have two engines. Which FX and on which engine it is stuck appears to be random, sometimes all FX work, but with the amount of FX I have in this one that's rarely the case. My Panther patch suffers from the same problem, though it may be less obvious at times I also mentioned that it happens when creating a plume. For this create a cylinder mesh with the additive dynamic shader with the transform set to smokePoint on the whiplash, then rotate it by x = -90° and turn up the falloff and noise. As a default animation speed is already set you'll see that often when doing this it will animate backwards, which is sometimes fixed by copying the effect and deleting the original one. I think that's all for now, thanks for all the awesome work on this mod!

I figured out how to make realplume smoke trails compatible with my waterfall engine patches. In other news, @Nertea did you see the bugs I observed and the rest contained in that post? this link should lead you straight to my comment.

My implementation to get the sound working again is a little ugly as I just copied the stuff from the original panther config and inserted it there, modifying it to have no smoke or particle based afterburner. Also @Nertea is the Smoke Control button in the GUI supposed to do anything? At least when I click it nothing happens, though I may be doing something wrong

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/772485444570316831/793122664054259712/HBpantherPatch.cfg here you go, my current panther patch for you to dig through and see how I made the MM patch, note that the panther is a multi mode engine so it has two different fx. I believe it still contains broken fx from 0.1.2 on dry running, don't let them confuse you

yeah @RyanRisingsadly I can't only make it appear on ignition. Well technically I could, but I've made it so the effect only starts at 1/3rd throttle tobe accurate with how the nozzle of the whiplash is animated. It also has the annoying problem that when precisely 1/3rd throttle is hit then the flash stays on permanently, but I've made the throttle window where it is visible very small, so that's not really an issue. There's a multitude of controllers and features I'd like to see so I can improve my FX further, so I suppose it's the time to ping @Nertea to notify them of my list of features I'd like to see in the future. - A mach number controller - A smooth random controller, as the current random controller just leads to violent jerks instead of a smooth shaking -The ability to re-order modifiers and effects -The ability for modifiers to directly affect other modifiers. Or in other words, more than 2d curves. For example I'd like to have a curve linked to throttle that has a negative gradient at low altitude, and at high altitude it the curve should have a positive gradient, morphing between the two as altitude changes. This is currently only possible by duplicating meshes and making them only visible at certain altitudes, but this is a rather ugly solution as it leads to a bunch of meshes clipped in the same place. - A gimabl deflection x/y controller so the plume can be animated based on how the vectoring petals impinge on the plume. - A way to to also utilize mesh based effects for flameout/reignition/startup - An angle of attack x/y controller to bend the plume when the airstream is hitting it sideways, here one of the 3d curves to combine it with the mach number controller would be useful - As mentioned above, a way to create the TEB ignition properly, maybe a trigger system along the lines of: When throttle threshold x is passed from below/above/both then play animation y for z seconds. Tips for those getting started with the mod - if you ever want a effect that does not move as the engine gimbals, "model" is the transform name you want to use. - on mostly jet engines using thrustTransform as the parent transform leads to issues, smokePoint is the one you should use A bug I observed: - animation speed often seems to be glitched. When creating a new effect (tested using cylinder mesh and additive dynamic shader) the animation often runs backwards and responds to the speed setting in reverse. Sometimes no movement is possible at all, too. This can also sometimes be observed when using the engine patch in fligh, refer to the video below showing one of the plume animations on the right engine to be stuck. https://imgur.com/a/HEsIfwE https://imgur.com/a/8GoisgC here's another video of the same issue, sadly the quality is bad, but it can be seen here that the outer effect is stuck with no animation while the inner effect is slowly moving, but in reverse

https://imgur.com/a/iGgZWIX https://imgur.com/uDSE5me I've been busy again after quite some time of doing nothing with the mod. I'm now happy to present the results, or at least preliminary ones. I'll release a pack of patches once I'm done, but that will be a while as I'm trying to make patches that work with realplume, stock stuffs etc. Until then, enjoy these two videos here

Yes, I do have everything installed correctly. The mod also works prefectly fine when not using slow motion. But as I said, that isn't always an option for me. Are you able to replicate the issue? (the slowmo mod I use is TimeControl)

Since there is no direct thread for Camera Tools I figured I'd come here with my issue. I like to make a lot of cinematics, for which Camera Tools is a great mod, though annoyingly it breaks whenever I try to use any Slowmotion Mod. With the large crafts I use I pretty much always have to use those to get any stable frame rate. https://imgur.com/a/0g4WhdE please refer to this video showing off the issue, even when using a fixed pyhsics step camera tools breaks the second Slowmo is enabled. This happens even at 100% time speed set and even with other slow motion capable mods like better time warp. I would provide log files, though I checked them and there are no messages reported. Now I'm left wondering if there was any fix for this issue, it has been there as long as I've been using camera tools (KSP version 1.3.1) and it would really help me out a lot to have a fix for this. Thanks in Advance for Help!

Also a few bug reports: As soon as any scale/rotation/position modifier is used the offsets get locked out. So long as a modifier exists the associated offset gets locked out. using multiple modifiers set to multiply (or anything else) doesn't work properly, tested with scale on the instance, not the mesh: When using a scale modifier to modify the Z axis based on throttle it works, when adding another, seperate modifier that changes x and y axis with both set to multiply both modifiers show no effects when throttle is changed. the random controller doesn't appear to work properly: using a position modifier with a curve on a single axis and the controller set to random as a controller nothing happened, when then checking the "use randomness" button the effect started moving on all axis, ignoring the set-up axis. a minor one, when adding a new materialFloat modifier then this one only works on the mesh itself. the instance button gets hidden when selecting material float. However the button does not get hidden when the previous added modifier also was a materialFloat and so materialFloat is already pre-selected as the modifier type. And a few last words, I truly think this mod is amazing, keep the awesome work up! The more I learn how to use this mod the better my FX get, also thanks to the help I got here. My plan is to release a patch pack for all airbreathing engines soon.

https://imgur.com/a/QxB2N8A my current whiplash effect, I'm super happy with it. I want to distort a plume based on gimbal deflection, I know that parenting is possible and I already used it on my engines. Just needs a shader. I prototyped this years ago (a number of modders have over the years), it's not terribly difficult abd should be supported by this system quite well. I sadly don't know anything about how to code shaders so I'd need his help to get a heat distortion shader working with waterfall. Great thing to try to learn with! I have a lot of projects, the scope of this is staying where it is. I wasn't able to find any resourches that teach how to actually get code and not just models into ksp, if you could show me some that would helpme a lot. And I understand, your projects, your decisions. I disagree, suffice to say that KSP does not implement any of the capability and performance features that Unity's modern systems use. Implementing those would be a first step. Black smoke is definitely possible. Well yes but no, it just isn't possible to spawn enough particles to stop them getting ripped apart on laggy craft. As for black smoke, all shaders ksp provides for particles are as far as I have seen additive and therefore do not allow black smoke.

Also another idea, controllers for gimbal deflection would be nice. And the ability to make linear curves instead of the smoothed ones

it would be awesome if you could provide us with a trail renderer that we can use as a seperate effect, I can already see some really useful applications. I'd love to help out with this project as I've been wanting realistic engine FX forever. I know how to write code for unity, but not how to integrate it with ksp (yet). I wanted to make a mod that adds a wingtip vortice generator as a part for ages now, but I lack the knowledge to do it. as for smoke, I really think that particles are not the way to go here as ksp just can't handle it, especially with laggy craft. Maybe a modifies trail rendere could work here. This also leads me to another thought, black engine smoke currently isn't possible in game, but would be super cool to have. Anouther thought, the project is currently somewhat on break, but @blackrack was working on heat distortion via particles, I wonder if his shader could be applied here or even on a trail renderer. You need to add the file extension (.png, .jpg, etc) to the end of the link when you insert image from URL I mean technically it would have been .mp4, .gifv or .gif, not sure what imgur makes out of uploaded images

Nice work! Are you talking about smoke? This method is not super well suited to that, I have some other ideas on how to accomplish it. yes, I'm speaking about smoke and various other trails like the vortices on wingtips... I'd be curious to hear what you have in mind for that. Though thinking about it... the current method may be suited for low pressure condensation above wings, aka this or propper mach effects like this

https://imgur.com/a/yoCUgNH this is my favourite shot so far, I still need to fix a bunch of issues but it works!

https://imgur.com/a/j4MQeE0 embeds aren't working but this is my afterburner so far, I'm pretty happy with it. Now this makes me think if it was possible to use the mesh method for trail particles as well since they are also notorious for getting ripped apart with laggy craft. It would probably be a fair bit of effort and require multiple meshes to form a trail but it would be super cool to have

Repro steps would be nice, I didn't see any issues with this when I was working on things last night. Glad you're using the tools, at least. Feedback helps improvement. ok, create a new effect using the additive dynamic shader, then edit it's material by moving the slider for _ExpandLinear. Then try to enter a value into the field on the right to reset the slider. The slider will move, but it won't have an effect on the engine.