nli2work

It's up now

Gotcha. Looking forward to it! Between this and JSISelectable flag, the look-customization possibilities will be endless!

hm, interesting. Is the animation component on the root transform of the entire part, or on the transform that is animated? if you have bits that use different animation clips, might help if the bits have their own animation component with it's own clip, instead of single animation component on the root transform with multiple clips. You can still call all the different clips as normal. Added bonus of being able to shift the animated transform around the heirarchy without breaking its animation clip.

This is awesome. Finally got to try it out. I tried two TextWriter modules, each pointed to a different transform and different texture. the first one (higher up in the part cfg) works as expected. the 2nd one applies it's own texture to the entire part when applying the new text. seems strange to me, since the 1st one doesn't displace other textures.

woops, misspelled it. TRReflection. it's a part module that adds visor shader reflection. I don't know how long it's been there, just saw it now.

The TRReclection Module is awesome!

I think parent objects of colliders can animate, and if a child object happens to have collider, it's not a probelm. but collider themselves should not have any key frames, like if you keyframed the radius on a capsule collider... or convex tick box on a mesh collider, that will usually give you errors either during export or during game load. it's hard to know why animations run super slow. a lot of times I end up redoing them and they work afterwards. are there any messages in Unity console when you scrub the animation on the part that's slow in KSP? I had a really weird error message related to an imported animation in Unity recently, but was never able to reproduce it. would have been useful for future references.

Llights are expensive to render. every part has to be checked against every light that's active based on game settings. Depending on the shader on each part, the calculations are per vertex and then per pixel of the texture maps (if you throw spec and normal maps in the mix), in successive passes. This has to be done for each frame. thousands of parts x hundreds of lights x multiple render passes = many many many calculations each frame. It's a good thing most of the lights in KSP don't cast shadows. watch your FPS go FPM when shadows get added to the mix.

ActiveTextureManagement has flags to exempt textures from being marked unreadable/writable. I think this limitation affects plugins like the WriteStuff more than plugins that simply switch texture being displayed. RPM doesn't seem to be affected by converting it's textures to DDS from what I read. FStextureSwitch2 doesn't appear to have any problems switching between MBM and PNGs. The flagDecal module and JSISelectableFlags will only display PNGs however. I'm don't know much of the internal mechanics of the code unfortunately. But until PartTools is updated to handle more shaders I'm pretty sure everything would have to be done via plugins and config file settings. A good place to start might be just to port some additional Unity shaders to KSP.

high number of mesh colliders can eat up frame rates, high number like in the 20+; also check to see if there are properties that have key frames where they shouldn't... things like collider size; component on/off. Most of those will give you an error during export or KSP load time and you won't see the part in game, but maybe some of them slips through.

not that I know of. but I've only been playing the game since 0.23. might be plugins from before.

landingleg module has to be one module per part I think. without plugins you can get multiple legs in a single part, but no suspension. it would just be simple generic animation clip. stock gimbal module doesn't have axis separated. If you need separated axis gimbals, check B9's F119 engine for KMGimbal module settings.

Very cool planes! Glad you like the parts. I'll get around to switching the gears to use FS eventually. Which mod is the bendy F18 main landing gear from?

very cool mod, loads of possibilities.

Oh yea? which parts? the heatshields? *stupid me... of course the heat shields. LOL

as long as the shader has enough texture channels, they can be set to control different surface properties, direct swap or gradual blend is different ways to get to the same point. The current shaders are limited is because they are pre-compiled, you can't change what the texture channels control (Spec, Diffuse, AO, etc), and you can't add or remove texture channels if you need or don't need them. Empty texture channels are problematic often times during part compile. You have to write and compile a new shader if you wanted separate texture channels to control Transparency and Specular. This is main reason I'm looking forward to Unity 5 shaders; they work much more like material editor in a 3d app, and the in-game shader is compiled during game build. I expect PartTools will need an update to support Unity 5 shaders.

As long as the plugin is manipulating a channel that is in the shader it is less hard. RPM does it with the MFD screen, you can set the screen to use Emissive or MainTex depending on the shader you assigned to the screen object. FStextureSwitch2 can independently change MainTex and Bump channels. Hard part is getting a shader that has the proper channels to handle all the visual aspects you want to display. the current best option is Bump/Translucent/Specular; which gives you Normal Map; Diffuse; and Alpha channels; plus uniform Specular setting. KSP Emissive shaders don't use Alpha channel for transparency. rbray or Shaw would know more specifics and what is and isn't possible to extend the KSP shaders. Another option is use one of the Unity shaders; a bit of hit and miss from my previous attempts. of course we can hack around the limited shaders by stacking layers of mesh each using different existing shaders, works pretty well, if not the most elegant solution. the orbital tug pod has 3 window glass layers for example spaced 0.001 apart. JSISelectableFlag swaps any PNG in GameData/Flag or /Agencies, on 2 of those layers for pretty wide variety of effects.

I can handle some come 2015. I've been wanting to do some wheel parts for rover lovers. and I need your help exploring possibility for another part too.

Deployable is excellent idea. Take a look at KSPI's solar sail part. All you'd need is 1x1 pixel texture and KSP/Unlit shader for perfect color uniformity, when retracted the part can be as small as you want to make it. and deployed part can be large enough to contain any reasonaly sized ships stock or mod.

I read through the thread. It's a hard lesson for _Augustus_, but something that has to be learned sooner or later. Modding takes work, and a good deal of prior knowledge; creating a fork doesn't make one a modder or maintainer for a mod. It was clearly not within _Augustus' ability to maintain the mod and it was pointed out by several people nicely. RoverDude might have handled it a little better, but given the nice advice that came prior from couple highly respected modders, a firmer nudge wasn't completely unwarranted. I've made same stupid mistakes too here modding for KSP, and elsewhere before. if _Augustus_ is really serious about learning to make mods, he can get over this. There are plenty helpful people here and plenty of information, you just gotta show you actually want to learn the stuff. I think if you really wanted to kill the creativity and inflow of new modders, you would lay down explicit protocols governing every minute aspect of KSP modding. The sheer intricacy of it all would serve to deter all but the most determined modders.

good call! I forgot about that. now it is so. Orbital Tug DEV v0.2 http://www./download/sp63it2kugspcc2/OrbitalTugDEV0.2.zip Extract to KSP/GameData to install; requires Firespitter by Snjo, and JSIPartUtilities by Mihara, both included. use included windowsTemplate.png for creating your own window textures and decals. drop a PNG into OrbitalTug/Flags to use ingame. delete from same folder to remove a custom texture/decal. you will be able to use any PNG in any Flags or Agencies folder from within GameData as custom window color/decal and stripe texture. show with temporary IVA. you need RPM (TransparentPod Module) and NohArksPnP (IVA) for this to work.

I knew about the controlNode for ModuleDocking, never occurred to me to link it to an animation though!

Ok this is deprecated somewhat. newer options *should be compatible with TransparentPod module.

very true. I like the idea.

hm... now that I think about it... possibly! of course if you use TransparentPod, it won't make much difference. I think I can set it up with a second texture option for the windshield.