lo-fi

Hey, it's better than my Russian Thanks for sharing! Apologies to all for my lack of presence lately, I've been having a bit of time off. Reading back a few posts, and for those of you who were wondering why I was messing around with bulldozer blades, rather than more wheels or whatever.... Someone told me - I forget who - right at the outset: do you find fun and makes you happy. Which is pretty much what I was doing There is an added bonus that I now understand so much more about colliders, layers, wheel colliders, materials and many other things I didn't know before I started messing about with it. The dozer blade may or may not be useless, but that knowledge sure isn't. And I'd encourage anyone who has ideas or requests for parts I've not created (yet) to pick up the tools and see what you can do. It's within anyone's reach to create a part - just start at the beginning like I did I've been busy getting my texturing workflow sorted out, so some of the newer parts are now textured to an acceptable point for the next release. I really don't find it easy, but I don't think the results are too bad so far, and it'll improve as I learn more about the tools.

I can't answer them directly, but Nli2work's tutorials cover pretty much everything you'll need to get to grips with that sort of stuff: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/94871

Interestingly, I found last night that using an object that's spawned from a .mu and has a sphere collider applied works fine. Using the potatoroid model, even having forced convex on the collider does not, and would always drop through the floor. Creating objects entirely with code, as in evilreepers example (which creates objects with sphere colliders) also results in objects going through the terrain, so I'm thinking something is being overlooked there. I'll get back with any insights if I manage to find anything further, though, as I'm still tinkering. Thanks for the physicalobject hint by the way, that's really handy. FFR, physicalobject.maxdistance units are meters. Merry Christmas

You've pretty much described my working method In doing this (while I'm waiting on some other stuff to get done), I learn about things I previously hadn't know about, which opens up possibilities, generates ideas and improves my existing stuff. I'd get bored just turning out wheels and tracks (it's just a workflow now), so I tend to do it when I have a particular idea - it's really hard otherwise. Landing legs I will get to at some point, but setting the plugin up how I want is proving a challenge. The plugin framework for wheels and tracks is all there and stable now, so grab the tools and crank out some models if there's something particular you want to see in game. I'll put some effort into documenting it when the next release is out the door And, of course, happy holidays!

So I got this thing working this evening: It doesn't do anything other than look pretty for the moment, but it's quite fun to use sizes of rubble need randomising and all that kind of stuff, but I'd like to think it has some potential...

Excellent, thank you. Great to have some solid confirmation

OK, that all sounds perfect. I'll finish up what I'm doing (which is driving me nuts, but for very different reasons) and have a look.

The unity scene, if you import it, and the relevant models are there will have everything all nicely rigged up. Wait a minute, how are you animating the piston telescoping? Do you have a GO that's named as the suspensionTransformName with the piston as a child, and it's that that gets animated, not the GO named as suspensionTransformName? Feel free to send over again, though.

Ah, that'd be pretty cool... Ought to be an easy one with some FS magic.

*grin* Lots of stuff you hopefully won't even realise is there, because it just works. Well that's in intention, anyway, and part of the reason for the lengthy development cycle. But there are a good few new parts to play with, and the next project which sort of ties in is well underway...

Yep, that's perfectly normal. The wheel collider doesn't understand how KSP has attached it to a rigidbody, so it thinks it isn't attached to one and throws a warning. Maybe double check the animation length, etc? No warnings in the Unity console when you write the .mu out?

Hmmm, that's not ideal. No funnies in the logs when the parts are compiled or at start of flight?

I haven't heard from anyone who says it hasn't, so please let me know if you do run into trouble. We are, genuinely, very close to dropping the next version (which will also move to beta) on ya'll Seriously happy to be at this stage!

Awesome, that's great news. So many people have, and continue to help me, I'm trying to pay it forward as much as I can now I have some knowledge myself. Good call on the animation, I often do the same thing myself. Though I'm finding more and more that I tend to set up the hierarchy before I export, so all I have to do is add some colliders and whatnot, slap some materials on and write the part out. Having the prefab connection intact is really handy too. Good luck with the tweaking, you're on the home stretch now

Just updated the zip, it will have had outdated scene in it. Sorry about that!

No drama dude, I'm well used to messing about with all things wheel collider now, so pretty much seen it all before. I did mess about with some of the scale stuff a bit, but it didn't seem to matter here, so false alarm on that one. Shout if you run into any other problems, and thanks for the use of the model Oh, btw, you might want to tweak the friction values a bit. The defaults are like super glue - a bit of slip will prevent tripping and sticking. 300 extrem, 150 asym ought to be good figures. Add a little damping too; 5-10 percent of spring value normally works well.

Alright, APU running on LF and air is easy enough So you're thinking an electric fan? That would actually be pretty cool. I'll start the tidy and comment process to strip out all the debugging stuff, and the last job on the list ought to be changing to MODEL nodes for some texture sharing. Happy with TS support? It's been flawless for me so far, I'm pretty happy with it.

OK, got it sorted I'll try and be concise explaining to ease future reference: Tiberion hit the nail right on the head for your situation with "wheelCollider is at the bottom of the piston travel, its origin closely matching where the origin of lowerPiston (the leg's transform and also the silver inner piston model) will be when extende" You had some interesting things going on with placement, so I've re-rigged: Set the WC transform to the position it wants to be in, rather than using the centre variable to located it. Added a GO called PistonMover, which sits in exactly the same location as the WC and has the piston as a child. The piston is rigged in its extended position by moving it it relative to PistonMover. This is why the feet were in funny positions. Most importantly: The Wheel Collider must not be a child of the piston. It needs to be in a fixed position. What was happening was the raycast was doing its job, detecting a collision and compressing against the spring value. ModuleLandingGear was doing its job and moving the piston a tiny bit to mirror the compression. The next physics frame, as the WC is a child of the piston that's just been moved, the cycle happens again. collision, compression, movement - every frame, the WC got moved further away from the floor until the leg collision mesh stopped things going any further, and this is why there appeared to be no spring acting. It's the most common mistake making wheels actually, I just didn't spot it in the screen grab. This should be everything re-rigged Sorry, I was lazy and didn't reapply the texture Would you mind if I used the model to do a YouTube landing gear tutorial please?

Info on spawning objects and applying gravity. Includes example code, links to more examples, and some useful hints.

Yup, I was over-thinking it, and quite possibly did forget the mass or other prerequisite for gravity to work Thanks for that little demo, there's loads of handy stuff in there, EvilReeper, and thanks for the extra references and tips JDP. I'll submit this for inclusion in the modding info links, I think, as it may prove useful to someone in the future. One thing I can't figure out, having messed with a lot of the collider and physics material settings, is how to stop the objects falling through the terrain. Colliders appear to work, as they interact with vessel parts, but no matter what I do I can't stop them falling through the floor. Any ideas? Also, class name really made me chuckle

The spandex was always going to be a risk, Darren The landing legs are sort of a tie in with the DSR3 I was working on with spanner, and needed a little pod adjustment to fit. Haven't heard from him in ages, and he was really ill last time we spoke, so that's sort of stalled for the moment. Hope he's ok and just taking it easy or having a break! I haven't heard from JC who was texturing small wheels and tracks in ages either. Might be worth sending over to Philotical who did the long tracks actually, as that's the last piece that needs putting in place before I can think about releasing. I fixed the suspension issue the other day with a new bombproof method, so that's all good. Other than that, I don't think there's anything show stopping that needs attention, and I'm thinking its time to take the opportunity to go beta. Any objections? I'm feeling the time is right

No worries I've not actually tried setting a landing leg up myself, but they're just wheel collider based and sort of within my areas of expertise (if you can call it that). Thanks for uploading, I'll have a nose through the assets tomorrow and see what I can find. I'm sure you're not far off! I just downloaded the part, so I see what you mean about the lack of spring strength - I'm still pretty sure this might be a scale issue, as those radius and distance values are odd to say the least. That the piston extension works is testament to the WC raycast doing its job, as the module is moving the piston, though the travel is way over the top judging from the latest screen grab, so that's kind of another clue. I've struggled with this myself, it can be a nightmare when exports have funny scales and you need an object childed to something that's way out of whack. Regarding the animation export issue, you can get some weird issues when you've got an animation in the export, then add some stuff in Unity. I've had part toolts throw a similar paddy myself, though your situation may be different.

Well, considering what else happens to them, that might be a kindness. Darren9 got reported to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Kerbals last week. I gather he's out on bail On a different note, I've been busy learning how to spawn rocks. Stuff is going crazy round here

Hello again I've been messing about with something for one of my project, and thanks to stupid_chris pointing me in the right direction, I can now spawn objects into game in flight. Great, I thought, I'll just apply rigidybody to it, set to use gravity and bingo! How very naive of me I gather from this post that gravity is handled by FlightIntegrator and applied to vessels. Sooooo, if I want to spawn an object and have KSP apply gravity to it, do I have to make it a vessel, and if so, how do I do that? Or am I missing something entirely? This works insofar-as the object appears, but then it's still on rails because rock.GoOffRails(); give a null-ref.: Vessel rock = FlightIntegrator.Instantiate(rockproto,_spawnPosition.transform.position, new Quaternion(0,0,0,0)) as Vessel; rock.GoOffRails(); I have a feeling this is entirely the wrong way to go about it :/ I suppose a crude way would be simply to rigidybody.addforce() pointing towards OceanNormal as this will be purely ground based and orbital considerations don't matter. All musing welcome! Thanks, as ever.

Oh, just noticed that the wheel collider is set to something other than scale 1. They do weird stuff when scaled, so that might be causing the issue too. Also, I've found that putting them in layer 26 sometimes results in non functional wheel colliders, so try it back at default if resetting the scale doesn't work. Feel free to package up and send over if you're still stuck after trying that, though.