EPL Replacement Smelters

[BlackFang]

I think the EPL smelters are ugly so I made these. http://www.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/225557-extraplanetary-launchpads-smelter-replacement

Feel free to let me know what you think.

Edited November 14, 2014 by BlackFang

[CaptainKipard]

I think the EPL smelters are ugly so I made these. http://kerbal.curseforge.com/ksp-mods/225557-extraplanetary-launchpads-smelter-replacement

I think it needs to wait for approval from a Curse moderator, so the link might not work for a bit.

Feel free to let me know what you think.

They look like a hyperlink. A hyperlink leading to a page with an equal number of images for our consideration. You know what to do

[Gaalidas]

I like hyperlinks. They're so blue and.... and.... I got nothin' more to say I guess.

[BlackFang]

Planned features:

Adding a pulsing effect to the glowy bits if Unity will cooperate.

Tweaking the colors to better match stock.

Fixing bug where hovering over the 2 smaller sizes makes the icon grow... and grow....

Use a simpler collision model for the smaller sizes.

Add Scrap Metal and Ore icons to the two upper compartments, and a Metal icon to the bottom one.

Edited November 14, 2014 by BlackFang

[CaptainKipard]

Why does it have windows?

[BlackFang]

So the molten metal can see out while its being smelted. I figured if I closed it up completely there wouldn't be anything to visually indicate it as a smelter. Definitely not realistic by any means, but that wasn't my goal. I just wanted to learn the basics of part modding and have a smelter that blended in better with stock parts.

[CaptainKipard]

If you must have windows, you can try animating that texture a bit. That plugin is a WIP, and lo-fi is fairly active, so ask him for features and advice if you need.

I admit though I have no idea whether molten metal even moves, like boiling water does, but it's something to consider.

Edited November 14, 2014 by Cpt. Kipard

[BlackFang]

Thanks, that looks like a good plugin. I'm guessing I'll have to separate the bits I want animated onto a separate game object. That shouldn't be too difficult.

I added the Icons, and animation. I also reduced the collision mesh to 12 sides with faces aligned to the axis as opposed to edges. Working on sprucing up that lava texture.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited November 14, 2014 by BlackFang

[Akira_R]

Planned features:

Fixing bug where hovering over the 2 smaller sizes makes the icon grow... and grow....

So I was looking over your cfgs because this is a stock bug that usually happens when you have improper Module definitions and such, and since it wasn't happening with the large smelter I figured maybe there was a copy paste error. After looking at them I didn't find any errors of the sort that I normally see that cause this, but I did find this different between the standard large smelter and the small and tiny ones:

Standard smelter:

// --- standard part parameters ---
    mass = 10
    dragModelType = override
    maximum_drag = 0
    minimum_drag = 0
    angularDrag = 0
    crashTolerance = 7
    breakingForce = 200
    breakingTorque = 200
    maxTemp = 5000
   [B][U][I]ThermalAnim = LightPulse;[/I][/U]
[/B]

small/tiny:

// --- standard part parameters ---
    mass = 2.5
    dragModelType = override
    maximum_drag = 0
    minimum_drag = 0
    angularDrag = 0
    crashTolerance = 6
    breakingForce = 150
    breakingTorque = 150
    maxTemp = 5000
    [B][U][I]ThermalAnim = EmissiveAnimation;[/I][/U]
[/B]

Anyways i haven't tried changing this and loading them into my game yet but it was the only difference I could find, they look really good by the way.

[BlackFang]

That was from my earlier attempts at animating the glowy bits. I think the bug has to do with my using of rescale factor instead of scaling the values all separately. Actually, my icons have disappeared since I enabled the idle animation, so I will have to fix that before I fix the growing icon bug. ThermalAnim doesn't seem to work on parts that aren't engines, at least not that I can tell. Hmm...

Thanks for the compliment on the look.

[Akira_R]

gotcha, yeah I'm not sure about the rescale thing, from my times running into it in the past I was told that for some reason in KSP if you have a part with more than 2 resources and it doesn't have any modules defined in it then the bug happens, usually any part with more than two resources does have some kind of module in it so this usually only crops up when the module name gets misspelled or the plugin that is supposed to add said module isn't present, I was just looking for any differences between the small/tiny and the regular one and that was what I found.

I'm going to change them over to use the USI_Converter, as I use Karbonite instead of Kethane in my career save, put them in my game and see what happens. I love EPL, but man the models just... well leave much to be desired lol.

[BlackFang]

I actually don't have Kethane installed either, so that might be it.

[Akira_R]

I actually don't have Kethane installed either, so that might be it.

Lol yeah that may do it, although weird it only did it for the small and tiny ones

[Riverey]

Looks nice! Much better then original ones anyway=)

But it was better without icons=)

[lo-fi]

That'd indeed be a cool use for the texture animator plugin - do shout if you decide it's something you want to try and need a hand. Nice work

[BlackFang]

Can you explain how my object hierarchy should look in unity to use the plugin? I think I specify the gameobject I want this applied to in the .cfg which means I need to split it into completely separate game objects?

[lo-fi]

Yep, you've got it The plugin will find the named object no matter where it is in the hierarchy. Just split the windows off as a separate mesh, name it in the module in the config and play with the settings. The defaults ought to be a good starting point, but maybe up the speed. Off out this eve, but I'll look in over the weekend and see how you're getting on.

[BlackFang]

I updowngraded Unity to 4.2 instead of the 4.3 I had and now I can make the emissive part pulse. I haven't gotten the texture animation plugin to work though. I'm still quite new to Unity and coming from Unreal Engine 4 to this is... Well, It makes me glad I don't have to use Unity as anything besides a file converter to get my models in KSP.

[BlackFang]

New version is up on curse. Textures are updated, animation is added, collision is optimized, and some tweaks were made to the .cfg. Texture animation isn't integrated yet due to it not working with emissive at this time. I tried to make the glowy bits look more like liquid metal than lava this time. Do you think it would be worth it to add actual lights to the glowy part?

[Hupherius]

I still love this model and recently I tried converting your textures to .png and then to .dds (using Paint.net and a conversion tool) to save memory, but I always loose something on the conversion to .png. Do you still have the original textures (not .mbm) I could use for my .dds?