[1.0.x] [V1.9f] Kerbal Foundries wheels, anti-grav repulsors and tracks

[Rushligh]

10 hours ago, lo-fi said:

Sorry, I ran out of time before I left! 

Basically, I made a part module that searches the part for wheel colliders, removes them then adds in ours to the relevant game objects.  

I'd modified KFModuleWheel to look for SLWheelCollider and utilize it the very slightly different way in needs, mostly to do with the hit info. At the moment, it goes bonkers, so I was looking at stripping a load of stuff out of the plugin and enabling some debugging info and debug lines in to see what the hell is going on. We're talking explodes the runway, makes the wheel parts go odd shapes and phantom forces the craft into orbit kind of crazy. 

The characteristic you're describing happens when one object spawns INSIDE another in unity. becasue unity physics LOVES exponential equations, having a negative distance turns what would be a fraction, into a number with a lot of zeros. this is the case with the coliders. whatever is happening, unity thinks you have one collider inside of another, and the result is a tremendous force that should not exist. This is what happens with old wheels; they spawn INSIDE the runway and then boom.
It also used to be a serious problem if you have more than 3 parts offset inside one another; it would explode on the runway.

[Rivvik]

<3

[lo-fi]

16 hours ago, Rushligh said:

The characteristic you're describing happens when one object spawns INSIDE another in unity. becasue unity physics LOVES exponential equations, having a negative distance turns what would be a fraction, into a number with a lot of zeros. this is the case with the coliders. whatever is happening, unity thinks you have one collider inside of another, and the result is a tremendous force that should not exist. This is what happens with old wheels; they spawn INSIDE the runway and then boom.
It also used to be a serious problem if you have more than 3 parts offset inside one another; it would explode on the runway.

Thanks, that's interesting info, and very possibly relevant to our situation. Also potentially annoying as heck. 

And @Rivvik just won the Internet for the day. Love that film!!! 

[Rushligh]

Im not sure how your system works, but if you have multiple collides for each wheel in the same place, or overlapping that could explain the behavior. also, because unity coliders are 2 sided (the inside respells as well as the inside of an object; it's not a one way wall), if you have an object partially or completely inside another one that can cause it to become trapped and create this infinite rotating/vibrating loop of force: that's what happens when your craft swings around and goes spinning, flying off until it explodes.

In the case of tank tracks, you're better off to have the tracks animated but not as actual objects (ie have no actual physics collier) and have the wheels do all the work; the track shape can be dived the position of the wheels.

Im happy to do some testing for you if you want; maybe i can spot something.

[lo-fi]

We do have a very different system now built entirely from scratch, which shouldn't suffer those issues. Or, at least, I can't see why it would, but that doesn't mean there isn't something weird going on. 

The tracks do indeed work exactly that way, though I've only been testing the new colliders with simple wheels so far in game. 

I'll get stuck back in on my return from Norway, and hope there's a simple explanation. 

[Madrias]

Out of curiosity, Lo-Fi, once you have Kerbal Foundries working again, would it be possible to get something similar to the Bahamuto Dynamics Critter Crawler?  Again, primary focus is obviously getting things working, but I think it could be interesting to have some form of automated crawler leg unit working on KF code and thereby being kinda like the HypnoDrive was, where it looked like it was doing one thing, but was really just a set of invisible wheels holding the machine up.  Except instead of spinning, it'd animate some sort of insect/arachnid-like walking motion.

And no, I'm not asking when the mod will be done.  I know it takes time, and I know there's quirks and bugs to work out.

[lo-fi]

Nli2work and I discussed something like that, actually. He even had a little proof of concept. I know enough to be able to do it, just don't really have an idea for the design. 

[0111narwhalz]

1 hour ago, lo-fi said:

Nli2work and I discussed something like that, actually. He even had a little proof of concept. I know enough to be able to do it, just don't really have an idea for the design. 

Perhaps refer to Robocraft?

[lo-fi]

Robocraft? I wasn't familiar, and had a look, but didn't see any crawler things. Did I miss something? 

Edit: oh, got it now. An interesting challenge is sequencing the legs so they don't just end up lifted all at the same time 

Anyway, I'll get back to the job in hand for the moment 

Edited September 28, 2016 by lo-fi

[Madrias]

I can't really help on design other than to try to describe ideas, but...

*smacks head*  Of course I can design...  I've got KSP and a butt-load of mods.  I'll just load up 1.0.5 and bash something together using a mess of parts.  Won't be functional, but the idea will be there.

Okay, a couple minutes of poking about and I've got a rough idea of what could work.  I was going more for industrial than anything else, so it would fit better with the DSR units as well as the general majority of heavy vehicles.

I only made the one unit because I wanted to keep things simple, and the rough design is overly simplistic, as I'm not sure what kind of casing it should go in.  What I do know is I believe it'd work better if these didn't retract like the ones on the Critter Crawler, leaving this to have legs deployed at all times.

As stated, a very industrial design scheme is what I was going for.  Functional without much effort placed into being stylish.

And as for the reason of "Why four legs instead of three?", well, I feel four meshes better than three does, especially if you could animate them in a bit of ripple.  Mostly because then multiple units would lift and lower legs in an expected fashion, much like a centipede.  That, and for a single-set vehicle (something resting on just one set of crawler legs), four looks more stable than three does.  And I'll admit, I like spiders more than I like most bugs.

[Mycroft]

7 hours ago, Madrias said:

And I'll admit, I like spiders more than I like most bugs.

Hooo boy! My sister would HATE you with a passion!  She cannot stand spiders! Many a time she's been paralyzed with fear from a tiny spider the size of a small marble. 

[Madrias]

29 minutes ago, Mycroft said:

cannot stand spiders

There's about 4-6 really good-sized wolf spiders in my bedroom.  I let them live because they catch, kill, and eat things like wasps.  Same for most spiders, really.  Yes, I know, wolf spiders typically are more aggressive, but I've never really had a problem with them.  Granted, spider bites itch like crazy, but they're less annoying than mosquito bites or wasp stings.

So, yeah, I like spiders.  Heck, there's a dead compact fluorescent lightbulb in the closet that I've not bothered to replace because there's a spider that's made it their home.  Not that I needed a light in the closet, but I did switch out from the incandescent bulbs just because I kinda hate those.  Too much heat, too wasteful on energy.  Been enjoying LED bulbs lately, but still got a few CFL bulbs floating around.

That said, I understand some people just don't like spiders, or they're afraid of them.

[Shadowmage]

@lo-fi  Going to take a crack at loading the custom wheel code into KSP tonight, if nothing else than to just see if we get the same/similar results.

Seems like I may have to adjust the setup of a few of the classes a bit; I don't think KSP will like the wheel-collider being a MonoBehaviour, so I'll likely change it to a standard class and link up the 'update' methods to be called from the controlling PartModule.

But anyhow, doing this all in a new branch so that it doesn't affect any of the existing stuff, just taking the shortest route to getting things testable in KSP.   Will be using a super-simplified part config and model for testing, the absolute minimum that would be usable for a test case (a suspension transform and wheel collider transform, along with wheel mesh for some visual feedback).

[Gaalidas]

Hey y'all... me again...

Hold the applause... I am surely not worthy anymore.

Looks like progress is being made.  I was reminded of this mod a few days ago and started to miss the old days when things worked in the expected way and our biggest problem was what to create next.  So sad.

I'm still wanting to revisit my dust effects modules someday in the future once the dust is settled (woah... what just happened there?).  Better just strip all that out for the time being and get this mod working in the most basic form first.  KSP 1.2 looks like it could be a major stepping stone to getting these things functional again.  At the very least the videos of the wheels in action under 1.2 are looking a lot more stable.

Good luck y'all.  Yer gonna need it.

[Mycroft]

1 hour ago, Madrias said:

There's about 4-6 really good-sized wolf spiders in my bedroom.  I let them live because they catch, kill, and eat things like wasps.  Same for most spiders, really.  Yes, I know, wolf spiders typically are more aggressive, but I've never really had a problem with them.  Granted, spider bites itch like crazy, but they're less annoying than mosquito bites or wasp stings.

So, yeah, I like spiders.  Heck, there's a dead compact fluorescent lightbulb in the closet that I've not bothered to replace because there's a spider that's made it their home.  Not that I needed a light in the closet, but I did switch out from the incandescent bulbs just because I kinda hate those.  Too much heat, too wasteful on energy.  Been enjoying LED bulbs lately, but still got a few CFL bulbs floating around.

That said, I understand some people just don't like spiders, or they're afraid of them.

I kinda think that wolf spiders are cute. The first time I told my sister, she almost slapped me . But my view on spiders in general is if they don't bother me, I don't bother them. I don't go out of my way to nurse spiders (I'll do it for birds tho), but I don't go out of my way to kill them either. If my sister asks me to get rid of a spider, I usually just toss it outside.

But anyway, enough off topic nonsense.

I am really pumped that work is continuing on this mod. The wheels in this mod have always been better than the vanilla ones, IMHO.

[Madrias]

13 minutes ago, Mycroft said:

The wheels in this mod have always been better than the vanilla ones, IMHO.

Totally in agreement.  Better handling, better adjustability, more weight capacity without exploding the tires, handles impacts better, can be adjusted on the field to make lining up bases easier, and they just look better.

It's why I think a lot of us are excited to see progress, because it's not just the tracks, screws, repulsors, skids, and potential walkers that have people wanting the mod, it's also the improved wheels.

It's also why I'm not a big fan of the 'improvements' made to the wheels in 1.1.  We traded good wheel mods and cool custom wheels for wheels full of built in make-work designed to force you to drag an engineer along on anything with wheels because you will get a flat tire, either because you drive like you're handling a Tron light-cycle, or because you decided to jump that mun crater like the General Lee in space, or because your mobile mining platform is 1 ton below the limit when loaded with ore and fuel, so any driving overloads the wheels and makes using wheeled vehicles not fun.

I understand what they were going for, to improve the usefulness of engineers in Career mode, but it breaks the fun in Sandbox when every flight I have to drag engineers along to fix flat tires.  That, and the handling of the new stock wheels is... awful.  They lose grip whenever they feel like it, gain grip whenever they feel like it, accelerate violently in random directions when you drive like a jerk, and while most of that can be wrestled down to similar levels to the original stock wheels by locking friction and overriding traction control, you're left with "I've got a flat because I hit an anthill" wheels.

I mean, I get it, they needed to go to Unity 5, and everyone kept pushing and begging for U5 and 64 bit, even when they heard 'It'll break the wheel mods' because mod developers usually were able to bounce back from version-by-version 'mod breaking'.  The masses thought "it'll just be a week or two to get our wheels and tracks back" not realizing that no, it'd need just about a total rewrite and rebuild.  I have to stop myself from hitting these people with a "You got what you wished for.  This is KSP in Unity 5 64-bit.  They told you it'd break all wheel-related mods.  You said 'That's okay, the mod authors will fix it.'  Well, you got exactly what you wished for.  KSP with stock wheels."

I've never spent this much time being back one version, because even when we jumped from .25 to .90, I got used to .90's quirks.  Even when we went from .90 to 1.0.x, I got used to 1.0's quirks.  But 1.1 is inherently broken.  All of the wheels are broken.  As a space/airplane pilot in KSP, that's not acceptable.  As a rover commander in KSP, even less acceptable.  I don't fly rockets under most circumstances.

 

But, back on track, I'm glad to see a bit of progress.  I agree, simple is good at this point.  I know everyone wants tracks, wheels, screws, and walkers, but we need simple to start with.  That, and take your time.

[Mycroft]

I couldn’t have said it better!

[Shadowmage]

Well, testing last night didn't go as well as I had hoped, but about like I expected.

Used the simplest wheel test model that I could think of, and created an extremely trimmed-down PartModule to handle the KSP interaction side of things.  Sadly the results I was seeing were about like Lo-fi detailed the other day -- explosions and wonkiness as soon as the wheels contact the ground.  I even removed the friction part of the code (force application stuff) to see if that was by chance responsible... but the explosions persisted; so whatever odd stuff is happening is due to the joints.

Sadly that is about where my knowledge on the subject of joints ends.  I know that it has to be the joints, but don't know enough about them to even know where to begin investigating how to fix it.

On a related note -- I'm going to give the force-based suspension setup another go on integrating it into KSP.  With the changes to joints in the recent unity versions they might be more stable inherently with force-based suspension, and I might also be able to clean up the jitters with the addition of more wheelPart->parentPart joints (or just use the KSP auto-strut feature for them?).  If this works though, it would leave us back at looking for a bump stop and sticky friction solution -- which might still be able to be done with joints.

[lo-fi]

Interesting and frustrating in equal measures

I wonder whether it's to do with the way KSP moves the coordinates around as part of KrakensBane, and it's disturbing the position of the joint contact points. I'll need to set up some serious logging and debug stuff, but that's my chief theory for the moment.

[Shadowmage]

15 minutes ago, lo-fi said:

Interesting and frustrating in equal measures

I wonder whether it's to do with the way KSP moves the coordinates around as part of KrakensBane, and it's disturbing the position of the joint contact points. I'll need to set up some serious logging and debug stuff, but that's my chief theory for the moment.

You may be onto something there, was one of my thoughts on it as well (KSPs differing reference frames).  From my testing it appeared that the joints were trying to force some rotation onto the parts as soon as ground contact was reached; this would quickly rotate the vessel sideways which resulted in explosions as the parts collided with the launchpad.  (was dropping the test craft a short distance from launch clamps; there were no problems while clamped or falling, so at least the 'non contacting' bit of the code is working).

[RocketSquid]

Crud. It's 1.2 already.

I feel so sorry for you, Lo-Fi. You're probably going to have to start over again.

Hopefully it isn't too much of a change.

[lo-fi]

Nah, been testing in 1.2 beta from steam.

Be interesting if it's just rotation causing the issue. I wonder....

[Madrias]

On 9/6/2016 at 4:51 PM, lo-fi said:

An IR style thing with return to centre steering to attach them to ought to be possible, though.

Okay, I know, shame on me for going back to stuff that still needs the mod to actually be working before anything can even be considered, but... I was screwing around with ideas again and came up with something else to toss in the "Is it even practical" pile.

You'd mentioned, as quoted above, that some method of steering components may be possible.  This got me thinking, and some screwing around with 1.0.5 caused me to come up with this idea, that it'd be nice to also have KF Suspension between connection point A and connection point B.

The idea being that if you need steering on something that normally can't support it, you use a KF Steering Unit to make it steer.  If you need suspension on something that normally can't support it (or you just want more ride height on demand), you use a KF Suspension Unit to lift it up a bit.  And if you're being crazy, you could put a KF Steering Unit on the end of a KF Suspension unit and thereby have a track or hypno-drive with a suspension arm and automotive style steering.  I know, I know, "Why on Kerbin would you want that?"  I think it's the idea of wanting to do somewhat like some trucks have, where you take the tires off and bolt on a track to the already existing steering and suspension linkage.  Except instead of some custom pre-fabricated track to go on a specific vehicle, and thereby only has to contain the track and requisite track suspension, we don't have the vehicle with steering and suspension that works if you put a track on an attachment node.

I understand, getting stuff working comes first, getting old stuff working is second, and then any crazy ideas can be considered.  I've got a head full of ideas, I just can't do anything with them.

That, and I'm thinking on things like the rollcage and thinking it'd be cool if we had a way to take that idea, the rollcage seat, but make a two-kerbal exploration buggy using nothing but Kerbal Foundries parts, one that'd be stable enough to handle aggressive driving on planets while remaining something that could be, at least in theory, set up to be KAS/KIS compatible, so it could be broken down, stored in a crate, and assembled on landing.  The idea being that a two-kerbal exploration buggy could be carried in the cargo pod, packed in pieces, of a DSR-4, and thereby be used for instances where the DSR-4 ended up turned into a mobile base.

As mentioned previously, and mentioned every time I have an oddball idea, the mod's functionality obviously has to take priority, followed by making sure the stuff we all used through 1.0.5 works, followed by deciding what new stuff is worth adding and is actually practical to do.

[0111narwhalz]

I remember seeing

Quote

Prerelease 1.10 Get it now!

Warning: Extremely unstable.

on this thread yesterday. I went .

Then I realised it was actually a dream that I was remembering as truth, and my face fell. 

Get well soon, Kerbal Foundries!

[Mycroft]

1 minute ago, 0111narwhalz said:

I remember seeing

on this thread yesterday. I went .

Then I realised it was actually a dream that I was remembering as truth, and my face fell. 

Get well soon, Kerbal Foundries!

From the looks of things, 1.2 could very well be the last update for a while, so that means no rush at all. Which means better quality all around! Yay!!