Raycasting to the water's surface as well as terrain?

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

There's a bug in @charfa's otherwise-excellent update to @XanderTek's Landertrons mod that I had thought would be an easy fix, but is not proving so simple to overcome.

Landertrons are solid-rocket motors which can be set to automatically execute a suicide burn to land a spacecraft.  They get the distance to terrain (in the direction of the landertrons' thrust vectors) by raycasting to layer 15 (i.e. using 1 << 15 for a layer mask).  This doesn't work over water, because the "terrain" is several hundred meters below the surface, so the landertrons don't get the correct distance. I had thought it would be easy enough to fix by adding layer 4 to the mask as well (i.e. layerMask = (1 << 4) | (1 << 15);), but it doesn't work -- the landertrons still only see the terrain below the water.  Is the surface of the water on some other layer, or is this going to require some kind of workaround like Kerbal Foundries does (spawning a collider underwater to give their repulsors something to push against)?

[Crzyrndm]

Water surface is always at 0m altitude unless Kopernicus has changed things (changed as in made that not a given. I would assume not). Because the ocean sphere will show up in any land below 0m, you can report the distance to 0m for any planet with an ocean

rayCastResult = ....;

if (vessel.mainBody.ocean)
  raycastResult = Min(vessel.Altitude, rayCastResult);

 

Edited March 2, 2016 by Crzyrndm

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

That's a good point -- though I'd actually have to do a little trig, since the point of the raycasting is that the spacecraft may be landing at an angle.  Thanks!

Edited March 2, 2016 by Kerbas_ad_astra

[NathanKell]

Water doesn't have a collider so you can't raycast.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

Thanks for the confirmation.  The trig works!

[NathanKell]

Hurrah!