[1.9-1.10] Global Construction

[Critter79606]

Getting ready to ship a portable drilling unit to get resources not at my base.  Testing out my improved Mobile Workshop and trailer for transporting the DIY kit.

I'll build the DIY kit w/ the docking ring on top so I can pick it up with my IR servo after building it on site.  Here I'm lowering it to the ground.

 

Finally found some wheels that can take the stress of the weight. (no they aren't tweak scaled)  With the hitch and suspension of the wheels, I can go up and down inclines without loosing wheel contact and traction.  Best of all they make the Mobile Workshop look good!

[Bakkerbaard]

I am loving this mod, mate. I was getting kinda desperate trying to get all kinds of stuff that just wouldn't fly to the Mün. Now I can just stuff it in a box and ship it... Heh, I just pictured ET in a UPS hat. Looks stupid.

Anyway, I'm happy it still leaves a bit of challenge, still having to figure out on my own how to get an operation started. Good stuff, is what I'm trying to say, good stuff.

[Storywalker4]

I'm sure this has already been asked but is there any plan to add an orbital construction method? Is it even possible to do so in the mod's current state?

[allista]

6 hours ago, Critter79606 said:

@allista  I loaded your nightly build, and I'm not sure what happened, but the DIY boxes no longer have a Select Vessel button, and my saved craft that had a loaded craft were all default sizes.

Most likely you haven't updated AT_Utils that come along.

output_log.txt will tell for sure (somewhere at the beginning, when all the .dlls are loaded)

51 minutes ago, Storywalker4 said:

I'm sure this has already been asked but is there any plan to add an orbital construction method? Is it even possible to do so in the mod's current state?

In current state, no; plans exist and the work is in progress right now. But, for starters, we'll have the ability to create DIY kits on other planets and in orbit. Then, I'll add space docks to build in orbit. I plan to finish the work during the summer.

[allista]

To have a taste of what's coming, here's a sketch of a Ground Assembly Line that will produce DIY Kits on-site.

*yeah, I'm not even close to @RoverDude in these things; and can't even say "I'm learning" because I'm currently learning asyncio and basic ML/AI stuff for work.
But at least it's in line with the Ground Workshop, and it's better than nothing... 

Edited May 17, 2018 by allista

[Brigadier]

9 hours ago, allista said:

To have a taste of what's coming, here's a sketch of a Ground Assembly Line that will produce DIY Kits on-site.

*yeah, I'm not even close to @RoverDude in these things; and can't even say "I'm learning" because I'm currently learning asyncio and basic ML/AI stuff for work.
But at least it's in line with the Ground Workshop, and it's better than nothing... 

Don't sell yourself short.  You're much better at it than me (but that's not setting the bar very high ) and I'm glad you're giving it a try; I wouldn't even know where to start.  All you modders are wizards in my book.

[Critter79606]

On 5/17/2018 at 2:45 AM, allista said:

Most likely you haven't updated AT_Utils that come along.

output_log.txt will tell for sure (somewhere at the beginning, when all the .dlls are loaded)

That must be it.  I didn't realize you were the author of that too..  I try to let ckan update my mods, because so many people put copies of other peoples mods in their downloads... I didn't even look.

I'll give it another try tomorrow.

Thanks!

I love the assembly line part.  Question... how are you planning on allowing us to grab the kits for transport?  Things don't generally sit very well in things like rover beds in ksp, and magnets just don't cut it.

 

[allista]

5 hours ago, Critter79606 said:

That must be it.  I didn't realize you were the author of that too..  I try to let ckan update my mods, because so many people put copies of other peoples mods in their downloads... I didn't even look.

I'll give it another try tomorrow.

Thanks!

I love the assembly line part.  Question... how are you planning on allowing us to grab the kits for transport?  Things don't generally sit very well in things like rover beds in ksp, and magnets just don't cut it

Good question. Frankly, I was going to leave this a challenge. There are two hatches: the front one allowes pulling the box away with a tag, while the top allows to claw and lift it; the rest is up to the user. I can try to make an animation that will actually push the kit from within the assembly space, but I'm not sure this'll work.

Also, I somewhat remade the model, so the hatches now open away from the assembly line, not to the side. So one can use a П-shaped rover with a crane in the middle, like the one in your own screenshots. But that have to be a big rover!

Edited May 19, 2018 by allista

[Critter79606]

10 minutes ago, allista said:

Good question. Frankly, I was going to leave this a challenge. There are two hatches: the front one allowes pulling the box away with a tag, while the top allows to claw and lift it; the rest is up to the user. I can try to make an animation that will actually push the kit from within the assembly space, but I'm not sure this'll work.

Also, I somewhat remade the model, so the hatches now open away from the assembly line, not to the side. So one can use a П-shaped rover with a crane in the middle, like the one in your own screenshots. But that have to be a big rover!

Could you make it an option to build it with a Clamp-o-tron attached to the top?  Claws don't always keep attached, ports do.  I actually tried using a KIS winch and attachment on my one trailer, but the connection was too unstable for the weight.  I had to opt for an IR hydraulic and docking port. 

With those wheels, I can do about 20ms in the workshop/trailer, which is a pretty good clip for something that big.  I kept breaking all of the smaller wheels I tried when I went over inclines.  Too few wheels were in contact for too long, and boom, blowout on the Mun.  Even the mods I have with tracks weren't working.

BTW, I tried unzipping that nightly download (all of it this time), and it hung the loading on your Hanger mod for some reason.  Had to task kill it, and restore the CKAN version after trying a couple times.

I noticed a huge memory spike.  CPU was running, memory climbing, but never left the Hanger loading.  My game normally runs at 12g memory, and it was well over 13 when it hung, and still had a lot to load.  I didn't think to grab the log, but I can re-replicate it if you want.

[Bakkerbaard]

I'm in a bit of a rush and I can't go through all the pages. so sorry if any of this has been mentioned before.

1. Just to check, I have a manned Workshop on the Mün, next to that is the DIY package and next to that a K&K part full of materialkits. All of these are within 300m of eachother, but no part is docked to another. The DIY pack will deploy, but then when I right-click it to see what's going on, it says: "Building: Nothing". This is considerable less activity than I expected. 

I suppose I need more materials than just MaterialKits? I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, I just can't figure out what.

2. The big Convert-o-tron clearly states that it can convert ore into materialkits. And select fuel containers also clearly state they can carry materialkits. However, the K&K Planetary Base shaped Convert-o-tron does not state it can convert ore into materialkits. Is this just an oversight at the current time in the development process, or do parts that do not mention materialkits actually not work with materialkits? Am I making any sense at all?

3. If I want to ship MaterialKits from Kerbin to the Mün to get an operation started, it seems I'm limited to the K&K shaped container, which isn't really great for rocket design. While I can work with it, it's just rocket science, after all, I'm just wondering if there'll be more (rocket shaped) parts that carry or work with materialkits.

In short: I have no idea what I'm doing, basically.

Edit: Oh! And I couldn't find this fancy mod on CKAN. I installed it by hand. Not that I mind, but on the front page you mentioned CKAN, so I figured you might wanna know.

Edited May 19, 2018 by Bakkerbaard
Thought of more things

[Bakkerbaard]

I don't know if this counts as a double post, but I found a seperate thing. Maybe a bug.

I had this colossal base packed up and started to deploy it on the Mün. Deployment was rather slow, so I set warp to 1000x and when it reached 100% the whole thing just poofed off. The Construction Window said that the package didn't have ground contact so I looked up and behold, a giant floating box. 

So I tried again, warping by 1000x, but this time stopping at 90-ish%. Poof. The box went up again. Not as high this time, so I figured I'd wait it out, but the return velocity became too high and the box crashed and exploded. Tried one more time, stopping at 50%, same thing happened. 

So, manually warping while deploying willend in tears. I don't know what it's gonna do unwarped, as that will take a while. 

[allista]

On 5/19/2018 at 10:46 AM, Critter79606 said:

Could you make it an option to build it with a Clamp-o-tron attached to the top?  Claws don't always keep attached, ports do.  I actually tried using a KIS winch and attachment on my one trailer, but the connection was too unstable for the weight.  I had to opt for an IR hydraulic and docking port. 

With those wheels, I can do about 20ms in the workshop/trailer, which is a pretty good clip for something that big.  I kept breaking all of the smaller wheels I tried when I went over inclines.  Too few wheels were in contact for too long, and boom, blowout on the Mun.  Even the mods I have with tracks weren't working.

BTW, I tried unzipping that nightly download (all of it this time), and it hung the loading on your Hanger mod for some reason.  Had to task kill it, and restore the CKAN version after trying a couple times.

I noticed a huge memory spike.  CPU was running, memory climbing, but never left the Hanger loading.  My game normally runs at 12g memory, and it was well over 13 when it hung, and still had a lot to load.  I didn't think to grab the log, but I can re-replicate it if you want.

It's not that simple with the docking port: the craft for the new DIY Kit has to be generated programmatically, and that's one thing to make a vessel consisting of a single part, and another -- to make part joints, calculating corresponding positions/rotations. Also keep in mind that the kit itself has dynamic dimensions; so a size 1 docking port would probably not be enough to lift some 20t of cargo, while it would be too big for a smaller box.

I'll certainly explore the possibility of attaching something to the box. Or maybe I just add the docking port directly to it's top node, making it of appropriate "size" to couple with corresponding stock ports.

*as for the night builds, I'm puzzled: the hangar has not been altered with respect to current stable version, and in any case it has never behaved like that. So I still think it to be an installation problem. Look at the loading process in the output_log, see what's happening in there...

[allista]

5 hours ago, Bakkerbaard said:

I don't know if this counts as a double post, but I found a seperate thing. Maybe a bug.

I had this colossal base packed up and started to deploy it on the Mün. Deployment was rather slow, so I set warp to 1000x and when it reached 100% the whole thing just poofed off. The Construction Window said that the package didn't have ground contact so I looked up and behold, a giant floating box. 

So I tried again, warping by 1000x, but this time stopping at 90-ish%. Poof. The box went up again. Not as high this time, so I figured I'd wait it out, but the return velocity became too high and the box crashed and exploded. Tried one more time, stopping at 50%, same thing happened. 

So, manually warping while deploying willend in tears. I don't know what it's gonna do unwarped, as that will take a while. 

Ah, perfect! I have honestly never anticipated this 

The thing is, the deployment is an actual physical animation. Each frame a kit grows a tiny bit, pushes against surrounding colliders and is moved by the force this generated. That's why the process should be slow.

When you speed it up, Kit's size begins to jump by much larger steps, so it literally kicks itself into the air (or into vacuum in your case).

I'll have to think carefully about how to circumvent this. Because building this kind of stuff is what GC is really for. But in my tests I obviously never have build anything that large 

Thanks four the report!

EDIT: BTW, the main reason for this physical deployment, as was discussed above, is the need to ensure that no physical object gets inside the construction space. You don't want to launch that base of yours to see it explode due to the "collision" with a rover that you forgot to move a little but further away...

Edited May 21, 2018 by allista

[allista]

On 5/19/2018 at 7:41 PM, Bakkerbaard said:

I'm in a bit of a rush and I can't go through all the pages. so sorry if any of this has been mentioned before.

1. Just to check, I have a manned Workshop on the Mün, next to that is the DIY package and next to that a K&K part full of materialkits. All of these are within 300m of eachother, but no part is docked to another. The DIY pack will deploy, but then when I right-click it to see what's going on, it says: "Building: Nothing". This is considerable less activity than I expected. 

I suppose I need more materials than just MaterialKits? I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, I just can't figure out what.

2. The big Convert-o-tron clearly states that it can convert ore into materialkits. And select fuel containers also clearly state they can carry materialkits. However, the K&K Planetary Base shaped Convert-o-tron does not state it can convert ore into materialkits. Is this just an oversight at the current time in the development process, or do parts that do not mention materialkits actually not work with materialkits? Am I making any sense at all?

3. If I want to ship MaterialKits from Kerbin to the Mün to get an operation started, it seems I'm limited to the K&K shaped container, which isn't really great for rocket design. While I can work with it, it's just rocket science, after all, I'm just wondering if there'll be more (rocket shaped) parts that carry or work with materialkits.

In short: I have no idea what I'm doing, basically.

Edit: Oh! And I couldn't find this fancy mod on CKAN. I installed it by hand. Not that I mind, but on the front page you mentioned CKAN, so I figured you might wanna know.

1. If you're not using USI/MKS or some other mod that makes "wireless" resource transfer possible, you have to actually dock the workshop to the material kits storage. The simplest is to use KAS for that. Note, that you do NOT need to dock with the DIY Kit.

2. Resource converters convert only those things that they're configured for. GC adds an explicit MM patch for the stock converter, so it can produce mat.kits. No other converters are supported at the moment.

3. Use Configurable Containers (another one of my mods) to ship mat.kits in whatever container part you like.

4. GC should be on CKAN, was there from the start. What KSP version do you have?

Edited May 21, 2018 by allista

[Bakkerbaard]

8 hours ago, allista said:

The thing is, the deployment is an actual physical animation. Each frame a kit grows a tiny bit, pushes against surrounding colliders and is moved by the force this generated. That's why the process should be slow.

Well, that makes sense then. It would be nice to be able to speed up that process, but that's just because I tend to get a little antsy after several failed attempts to get anything anywhere and I wanna see how it'll turn out. It's kinda like Christmas, where you have to wait for your parents to get up before you can tear into your gifts... But in space. Dude, you created Christmas In Space! There's your tagline.

Anyway, I'll work on other projects in the mean time.

8 hours ago, allista said:

you have to actually dock the workshop to the material kits storage.

Yeah, due to poor planning, the workshop was not docked up to the Material Kits. On the positive side, I now got to EVA all over the place unscrewing bits from other failed attempts and creating a dockable Material Kit rover. I'm actually kinda proud of that sort-of-failure. So is Dotty, I should look into that promotion-mod for her.

8 hours ago, allista said:

Use Configurable Containers (another one of my mods) to ship mat.kits in whatever container part you like.

Yup, in my mod-grabbing-frenzy I got this one too. For now I'm waiting on my current DIY Kit, but I'm gonna have a Space Christmas Party when it's done.

8 hours ago, allista said:

GC should be on CKAN, was there from the start. What KSP version do you have?

I'm running 1.4.2, I haven't got CKAN on this computer to check, but whatever it was, you probably know a lot more about this stuff than I do, so chances are I've just been looking in the wrong place.

[Critter79606]

14 hours ago, allista said:

It's not that simple with the docking port: the craft for the new DIY Kit has to be generated programmatically, and that's one thing to make a vessel consisting of a single part, and another -- to make part joints, calculating corresponding positions/rotations. Also keep in mind that the kit itself has dynamic dimensions; so a size 1 docking port would probably not be enough to lift some 20t of cargo, while it would be too big for a smaller box.

I'll certainly explore the possibility of attaching something to the box. Or maybe I just add the docking port directly to it's top node, making it of appropriate "size" to couple with corresponding stock ports.

*as for the night builds, I'm puzzled: the hangar has not been altered with respect to current stable version, and in any case it has never behaved like that. So I still think it to be an installation problem. Look at the loading process in the output_log, see what's happening in there...

I'll give the nightly another try, and on a clean install too.  It maybe the weekend before I get time to though. 

I like the idea of the various size std docking port on top.  Just connecting it to the top node would be enough.  I could get really creative then building something to get it out of the Mfg thing.

 

[allista]

8 hours ago, Critter79606 said:

I'll give the nightly another try, and on a clean install too.  It maybe the weekend before I get time to though. 

I like the idea of the various size std docking port on top.  Just connecting it to the top node would be enough.  I could get really creative then building something to get it out of the Mfg thing.

I can spare you some trial and error if you share the output_log.txt from the unsuccessful game run.

Bear in mind that the "docking port" on top would be just a PartModule, not the actual visible part. It will be a possibility to dock to the container; docking ports would just stick to its top node, that's all.

[Bakkerbaard]

Say, would it be an option to show an indicator when you're about to deploy a DIY Kit that shows how big it's going to grow? I mean, it's good as it is, but I can see myself getting into situations where I'll be deploying big bases in little spaces.

Just an idea, to be clear. I'm not the one who has to code it, so... ;o)

Also: Just noticed that the deployment of the package halts when I'm not looking at it. I was fiddling with the warping (I'm still impatient, you know) and figured out that I could do it in small bursts of 5x. As long as the package doesn't grow under the surface it won't bounce too much. Anyway, I left it a 3.1% before I got bored with myself and went to screw caps on my spacestation. That took ages and when I just checked back before logging off, it was still at 3.1%.

Edited May 23, 2018 by Bakkerbaard

[allista]

9 hours ago, Bakkerbaard said:

Say, would it be an option to show an indicator when you're about to deploy a DIY Kit that shows how big it's going to grow? I mean, it's good as it is, but I can see myself getting into situations where I'll be deploying big bases in little spaces.

Just an idea, to be clear. I'm not the one who has to code it, so... ;o)

Also: Just noticed that the deployment of the package halts when I'm not looking at it. I was fiddling with the warping (I'm still impatient, you know) and figured out that I could do it in small bursts of 5x. As long as the package doesn't grow under the surface it won't bounce too much. Anyway, I left it a 3.1% before I got bored with myself and went to screw caps on my spacestation. That took ages and when I just checked back before logging off, it was still at 3.1%.

1. I have already implemented this  You can grub the nightbuild to see for yourself  The kit will show a green "shade" -- a rectangle on the surface that shows its full-grown size. Height is not shown, but it usually doesn't matter.

2. Ah... I see. The default packing distance in KSP is 300m (unpacking -- 200m); so when the vessel isn't focused and you have moved further than that, the vessel is packed, meaning it becomes just a physical point with the appearance of the vessel; it does not receive fixed updates, and that's where the kit grow happens. So again, the physical animation is the cornerstone of all the problems here. I'm thinking over the possible solutions, but so far don't see an easy way...

[Bakkerbaard]

On 5/23/2018 at 8:09 AM, allista said:

You can grub the nightbuild to see for yourself

Awesome. I'll grab it when I get home. Late. Very feckin late. Damnit.

I keep forgetting to check for updates, sorry.

On 5/23/2018 at 8:09 AM, allista said:

I'm thinking over the possible solutions, but so far don't see an easy way...

Listen, as far as I'm concerned you're already doing more than I'd dare ask of a "hobbyist" (I just assume).

If it's gonna be the hard way, it'll be the hard way. We're all rocket scientists here, we'll improvise. ;o)

[allista]

Progress of on-site DIY Kit production development...

More tests are required, but it would seem the basic problem of spawning of an arbitrary ShipConstruct (read .craft file) in space is solved:

 

 

And on the surface, too. Notice the launch while flying and wildly rotating. Not an easy feat, I tell you 

 

Edited May 25, 2018 by allista

[Esendis]

So are you skipping the DIY production and going straight for the actual craft? 

Edited May 25, 2018 by Esendis

[allista]

1 hour ago, Esendis said:

So are you skipping the DIY production and going straight for the actual craft? 

No. It's just that the DIY Kit is an actual craft that has to be spawned like any other. It doesn't matter if it has a single part or a whole hundred of them 

[Critter79606]

18 hours ago, allista said:

Progress of on-site DIY Kit production development...

And on the surface, too. Notice the launch while flying and wildly rotating. Not an easy feat, I tell you 

 

OMG, I had my Bose headphones on, and when it fell off and exploded I jumped out of my chair.  My wife was wondering what I was doing, as I started laughing so loud!

Looks good!

[Esendis]

On 5/25/2018 at 2:00 PM, allista said:

No. It's just that the DIY Kit is an actual craft that has to be spawned like any other. It doesn't matter if it has a single part or a whole hundred of them 

Got it  For a second there I was afraid that you had abandoned the DIY idea. That box is a frigin lifesaver when deploying new bases...