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

[BoomShroom]

Dang. I was really looking forward to something like that.

[Gaalidas]

Unfortunately even the most amazing things we can do here have their limits. Sure, it might be possible, even down-right easy, sometime in the future, but for now it's just not feasible.

Looking at that picture, however, reminds me of those wheels from the ASET ERS package that we were talking about trying to make compatible a while back, but never came back to it. Maybe we should look at those again.

Also, I'd like to add to that next-next version to-do list in the area of the dust emitters. The wheel dust is a great idea, but what would be a better priority for the dust emitter is attaching it to the repulsors. One thing that might be a challenge, however, is how to display the dust so that it fits in with the environment. For instance, the "dust" would have to be turned into small liquid particles when over water/liquid and you'd either have to make the effect extremely subtle (95% transparent, more like an air-refraction than actual dust) so that it could look right on planets like Duna and Kerbin without a texture swap, or implement a planetary detection module that could apply a color modifier to the particles.

Another thing to put on the extended list would be more appropriate sounds for the tracks (something that resembles track-segments rattling around on the ground as well as the internal engine rumbling along) and the repulsors (I have a few sound clips of hovering thrusters that might work) and a more appropriate electric wheel sound for the really tiny unmanned-rover wheels to match with the generic electric/fueled sounds for the larger wheels that we have right now.

So, yeah... the secondary beta addition will be filled with some really sweet stuff...

EDIT:

here's what i mean... i had to hack gravity for this because the servos aren't strong enough to hold up the tracks without "bending"

http://imgur.com/a/7VPTf

see i'd like tracks that flip over then go into the body of the craft....

if you have something better in mind then that's ok o.o

Yeah, that's what I'd like to see implemented for the majority of the parts we've got here, within reason (not gonna be folding those massive things inside anything anytime soon.) but I'm not sure the spinning-upside-down is as great of an idea as it looks. I'd think a simple rotation inward would work. The tricky part is whether or not we want to provide the compartment they retract into ourselves, or simply provide the animation and let the user figure out where they will retract into themselves (inverted cargo bays and whatnot.)

Repulsor retractions would also be awesome. For the surface ones, you could simply make them recede into the surface of whatever they are attached to and have an iris-like door close in over it. For the side-attached ones, even just an animation where the arms fold up and back, and the repulsor sits in a sideways position closer to the side of the craft would be great, but a more complicated one where the arms are segmented and retract upon themselves, bringing the repulsor disk straight inward toward the connection plate and closing an iris-like covering over the repulsor field plate would be sweet stuff.

More to add to the next-next-next beta release to-do list.

Are we insane or what?

EDIT2: Also, a note on the "small repulsor wheels." Those are sorta unnecessary until we get our vintage car-part package, if anyone ever completes one. I know there's at least one guy making a muscle-car package, which is pretty close. Dang, I just realized I'm talking about "vintage cars" when, in fact, I wasn't even born yet when the first of the modern sports cars were born into the world. I'm old, but not that old.

EDIT3: I sure edit my posts a lot, don't I?

Edited January 17, 2015 by Gaalidas

[Madrias]

Wait a sec... Gaalidas, could you skip me a link to the whole muscle-car parts pack? Any attempts to google my way to victory lead to me finding a billion threads about stock craft.

[lo-fi]

Dang. I was really looking forward to something like that.

As Gaalidas points out, the ASET wheels do kind do that, but I don't like how it works at all. I'm still at the idea stage, let alone getting the workflow sorted to a point where it's viable. For example, the Unity rig for the latest tracks which are asymmetrical in the same way the suspension on those wheels would need to be looks like this:

Yep, that's two versions of a part in one: one for each side. That track currently works, but only because I saw the need for it way ahead and coded the plugin carefully to allow for it. I've had to write my own LookAt and position controllers to suit too, which is why there's no funky suspension yet. I'm not complaining - it's a lot of fun doing something that crazy! - but there are limits. Anyway, that's just a little insight into how complex this stuff gets when you're trying to achieve something that looks, at first glance, simple.

Unfortunately even the most amazing things we can do here have their limits. Sure, it might be possible, even down-right easy, sometime in the future, but for now it's just not feasible.

Looking at that picture, however, reminds me of those wheels from the ASET ERS package that we were talking about trying to make compatible a while back, but never came back to it. Maybe we should look at those again.

Also, I'd like to add to that next-next version to-do list in the area of the dust emitters. The wheel dust is a great idea, but what would be a better priority for the dust emitter is attaching it to the repulsors. One thing that might be a challenge, however, is how to display the dust so that it fits in with the environment. For instance, the "dust" would have to be turned into small liquid particles when over water/liquid and you'd either have to make the effect extremely subtle (95% transparent, more like an air-refraction than actual dust) so that it could look right on planets like Duna and Kerbin without a texture swap, or implement a planetary detection module that could apply a color modifier to the particles.

Another thing to put on the extended list would be more appropriate sounds for the tracks (something that resembles track-segments rattling around on the ground as well as the internal engine rumbling along) and the repulsors (I have a few sound clips of hovering thrusters that might work) and a more appropriate electric wheel sound for the really tiny unmanned-rover wheels to match with the generic electric/fueled sounds for the larger wheels that we have right now.

So, yeah... the secondary beta addition will be filled with some really sweet stuff...

EDIT:

Yeah, that's what I'd like to see implemented for the majority of the parts we've got here, within reason (not gonna be folding those massive things inside anything anytime soon.) but I'm not sure the spinning-upside-down is as great of an idea as it looks. I'd think a simple rotation inward would work. The tricky part is whether or not we want to provide the compartment they retract into ourselves, or simply provide the animation and let the user figure out where they will retract into themselves (inverted cargo bays and whatnot.)

Repulsor retractions would also be awesome. For the surface ones, you could simply make them recede into the surface of whatever they are attached to and have an iris-like door close in over it. For the side-attached ones, even just an animation where the arms fold up and back, and the repulsor sits in a sideways position closer to the side of the craft would be great, but a more complicated one where the arms are segmented and retract upon themselves, bringing the repulsor disk straight inward toward the connection plate and closing an iris-like covering over the repulsor field plate would be sweet stuff.

More to add to the next-next-next beta release to-do list.

Are we insane or what?

EDIT2: Also, a note on the "small repulsor wheels." Those are sorta unnecessary until we get our vintage car-part package, if anyone ever completes one. I know there's at least one guy making a muscle-car package, which is pretty close. Dang, I just realized I'm talking about "vintage cars" when, in fact, I wasn't even born yet when the first of the modern sports cars were born into the world. I'm old, but not that old.

EDIT3: I sure edit my posts a lot, don't I?

I did get the ASET wheel working, I think, though I never bothered trying the JSI side flip or whatever it was. I'll make sure the config is with the stock ones.

Yes, definitely need a better, broader range of sounds. What's there is more or less a placeholder (it's actually a snip of some clip of an electric heater or something I mashed through Audacity), so something better would be really good. Sounds are surprisingly hard to get right, I found.

For the particles, I was thinking of sampling the colour what whatever the wheels or repulsors are going over and adjusting accordingly. I think that'd be pretty cool.

Having given it some thought, maybe the track retract is a job for an IR mod. On their own, some spindly leg things popping out of the tracks to do a sort of retract in unlikely to be much use to most, and I'm never going to cover all the design possibilities - it's too narrow a focus, and impossible to cover all the bases. A couple of scalable bays of different designs, however, might be much more useful.

Repulsor retracts would be good, maybe I ought to revisit the mounting hardware design..

[Haifi]

Hey guys.

For the repulsor particle effect... I dont think a repulsor would kick up much dust because of the repulsors own "nature". The force it genrates applies in an area directly downwards, no torque / rotational forces in any way, and dust particles flying up would be affected as well as the ground theyre coming from. What i would suggest for them is either a mirage like warping effect, something like looking through hot air, but i dont know if unity has something adequate. Or some faint glow (blueish maybe), just the hint of an effect actually.

Edited January 18, 2015 by Haifi

[lo-fi]

Sadly, you need a paid for version of Unity to do anything particularly cool like heat haze or distortion effects, and beyond that I've not looked into it much. Some lighting effects should be easy enough, though.

[Madrias]

A soft blue glow would be cool enough. Especially if it gets more intense with higher power settings.

[Haifi]

This is my first try on a logo, its not completely finished yet ( most likely ill redo some parts like filling the oval with a silvery, brushed metal like structure), what do you think?

Its looking better at its actual size.

Edited January 18, 2015 by Haifi

[Gaalidas]

Bah, paid version my a... err... donkey! Just means you'd have to do some crazy workarounds. But still, would be rather more difficult than it's worth. No, we need something simpler than that. Detecting the body on which the craft is landed and shifting the color scheme of the dust effect, or switching to a really light color scheme when over water, would probably not be too difficult. Not that I know anything about the difficulty level of any of this. I just know what's been done before, and if other plugins can detect when the craft is landed, and what SOI that landed craft is within, and your plugin can detect when the craft is over water in order to use the water repulsor stuff, and other mods yet can automatically switch modes for engines or wheels or whatever depending on these situations, then surely altering a texture color scheme or changing the texture entirely to fit a situation is totally plausible.

That was such a long sentence, I am not even sure it made any sense. Point is, if all that stuff can be done separately by other mod developers, then combining those abilities to make something like environment-sensitive dust emission should be doable, eventually.

Lighting effects would be cool too... I guess...

[AccidentalDisassembly]

CollisionFX is working on different dust for different landscapes, methinks..

[lo-fi]

A soft blue glow would be cool enough. Especially if it gets more intense with higher power settings.

That's exactly what I'm thinking

This is my first try on a logo, its not completely finished yet ( most likely ill redo some parts like filling the oval with a silvery, brushed metal like structure), what do you think?

http://i.imgur.com/lynV321.png?1

Its looking better at its actual size.

Hey, nice! Suitably industrial

Bah, paid version my a... err... donkey! Just means you'd have to do some crazy workarounds. But still, would be rather more difficult than it's worth. No, we need something simpler than that. Detecting the body on which the craft is landed and shifting the color scheme of the dust effect, or switching to a really light color scheme when over water, would probably not be too difficult. Not that I know anything about the difficulty level of any of this. I just know what's been done before, and if other plugins can detect when the craft is landed, and what SOI that landed craft is within, and your plugin can detect when the craft is over water in order to use the water repulsor stuff, and other mods yet can automatically switch modes for engines or wheels or whatever depending on these situations, then surely altering a texture color scheme or changing the texture entirely to fit a situation is totally plausible.

That was such a long sentence, I am not even sure it made any sense. Point is, if all that stuff can be done separately by other mod developers, then combining those abilities to make something like environment-sensitive dust emission should be doable, eventually.

Lighting effects would be cool too... I guess...

I've sort of been playing with texture stuff on and off, so that's all mostly possible

CollisionFX is working on different dust for different landscapes, methinks..

Thanks for the heads up, that'll be handy code to look at!

[Gaalidas]

Indeed, I even tried to help the developer of CollisionFX to properly handle KF modules when patching parts for use with his mod. Unfortunately, I tried to update it for the recent updates to the module names and was certain we were within a week of releasing an update. Warp ahead a month to today and we still have not released that update. oh well. Either way, he still didn't quite get the module name search quite right. I've since updated my local version to handle all the updated module names, but haven't seen any updates from that developer lately. Still, the mod itself might be a good example of how to handle this sort of thing. Heck, if you change the circumstances in which the effects spawn and remove the need for a hard collision (just the basic collision caused by rolling over a surface) then you might have the answer.

[lo-fi]

Ah, I see. There's loads of lovely position/force/grip data available directly from the wheel collider raycasts, so I might be able to code dive enough to not to have to re-invent the wheel (again), I learned all of this while messing with that dozer blade a while back!

So, beta release: Nli2work has produced a lovely texture for the small wheel, Scart91 is going to look at some others, and I'm happy enough with the rest that are going to go out with the next release. Anything show stopping that hasn't been dealt with? I'm aware of one issue that Haifi brought up with the bounds detection, but other than that I'm happy nothing is in a broken or semi usable state? There's a lot of parts to go through no, so easy to miss something now.

The potential list for beta is as follows:

Wheels:

Large

Medium

Small

Tiny

Tracks:

Long

Medium

RBI inverting

RBI Mole

RBI Tiny

Small

Surface

Repulsors:

Radial

Surface

Misc:

APU

Screw

Skid (though just remembered I need to look at this)

Rover Body (Needs a small texture update for the back, plus the animation names fixing)

Though I do need to update the author field in the configs to credit texturing and configuration work... I'll fix that now.

That still leaves a lot in the pipeline, but that's all stuff that can get released in incremental updates as time, texturing and maturity allow. Still lots on the to-do list plugin-wise, but mostly because we seem to have built up some momentum for crazy ideas and really nice-to-have features (which I think is fantastic). Thankfully it's all stuff that will slot in without breaking anything as it goes.

[chrisl]

Just tried this mod and have to say I love the wheels and tracks. Hope to see you release soon.

[lo-fi]

Cheers dude, won't be long now

[Gaalidas]

As far as I am aware, nothing is broken at the moment. Just be sure the release includes the scaletype definition file from the main directory and it'll all work fine from that end.

Oh, hey, one little thought... whatever happened to that new APU model you told us about a while back? The current one still has untextured parts and such.

Also, I may have spoken too soon about CollisionFX. I checked earlier today and it looks like it may have been updated a few days ago.

Edited January 19, 2015 by Gaalidas

[lo-fi]

I have an idea for a new APU model, but nothing solid yet. A nicer sound than the annoying stock jet would be great too!

[riocrokite]

Cheers dude, won't be long now

Hey lo-fi, you might want to check how your designs go with the frames:)

forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107791-0-90-Mobile-Frame-System-(v0-0-1)

[Koosmonaut]

I really love this mod, and can't wait for the update! I was wondering if smaller wheels and/or tracks are planned? The wheels are all kinda big for smaller rovers

[Gaalidas]

Hey lo-fi, you might want to check how your designs go with the frames:)

forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107791-0-90-Mobile-Frame-System-(v0-0-1)

I was just looking at those! Heck, the first example album makes use of the adapted RBI invertible tracks.

[lo-fi]

I really love this mod, and can't wait for the update! I was wondering if smaller wheels and/or tracks are planned? The wheels are all kinda big for smaller rovers

Cheers Yep, smaller tracks and wheels in next update.

Hey lo-fi, you might want to check how your designs go with the frames:)

forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107791-0-90-Mobile-Frame-System-(v0-0-1)

Very cool, I've been following your progress for a while now! Keep up the good work

[Haifi]

Hey lo-fi.

Sent you a dropbox link for the logo. If you want / need you can get a version with transparent background too. Just give me a heads up.

Regards

[lo-fi]

Yes please, that'd be handy

[Haifi]

Hmm i just had an idea how to make traction not as bothersome in low-G places. USI Kolonisation mod has an "Anchor" function in their base part. It adds weight when activated ( you can see the camera following the CoM shifting downwards). I put the module on one of my rovers and guess what, it climbs even the steepest hills on Mun. And is a lot less finicky on steering. Could you perhaps add something similar to your wheels / tracks, basically a module that can be activated / deactivated when needed. You could always claim its a repulsor with reversed polarity

Edit: And you got mail

Edited January 20, 2015 by Haifi

[lo-fi]

Great, thanks for that.

Always been a bit reluctant to add magic forces, I have to admit, but an inverse repulsor might not be a bad idea; it would sit well with the advanced sci-fi tech of the repulsors.