lo-fi

Yup, that's kinda the idea Latest build has a tweakable. Button/action group to disable for the whole vessel is on the list and will be implemented shortly for those off-road situations, same as removing the rollbars from a jeep.

Exactly. Inspiration taken from here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/how-to-make-a-physically-real-stable-car-with-wheelcolliders.50643/ Tougher in KSP because you have to find the wheels and index their position in the vessel - you can't just reference the collider name in the model. Still a lot I want to do, but having some experience and a having had to mess about with all sorts of things to get this working it's a heck of a lot easier to code new features now. For the moment, I need to polish the existing ones.

Really nothing magic going on here, so no need for grav sensing or anything like that. Though you can reach sub-orbital horizontal speed with a flat enough run Just abuse of standard unity stuff, nothing fancy in code. Anti-roll is something every car has. Essentially a sprung rod that connects wheel pairs left to right. If one wheel is higher than the other, it transfers some of the force to the wheel taking more load and takes from the wheel taking less. The important things is it always sums to zero in the central plane - this is not simply add a magic force pushing the craft onto the floor! Simulated here, of course, and I need to iron out a bug or two in the control loop that's letting rounding errors creep in so they don't _quite_ sum to, but it is effective and I'll get it fixed.

Crab mode is a really nice fit for inclusion so I will definitely look into that one. Multiple colliders in one object is something on my list to look into too, but just out of curiosity really. Thank you, for both the kind comments and the sage advice! Very easy to lose sight of that

Possible on the crab mode, just running through how I could code it... Yup, think I can do that. Will take me a while, I have a LOT on my plate at the moment. Very cool idea, though - nicely fits with the extended functionality and the style of those wheels lends itself perfectly. You mean having two wheels on the same object and rocker type suspension? I have no idea, but I'll try out a proof of concept. Could be cool, I'll look into it. Again, don't expect anything quickly!

Visual studio is genius. All I've been doing is trying something like writing "this.part." and the moment you put the last dot you're given a decent list of stuff you can use from there. Use F12 to get more info on the definition. Also, this is invaluable: https://github.com/Anatid/XML-Documentation-for-the-KSP-API/blob/master/Assembly-CSharp.xml As long as you reference the DLL's and declare "using UnityEngine;" (which you have to do anyway) it all comes up. Not as good as full documentation, but that's what we've got. It's been the steepest learning curve I've ever been on, and I like to challenge myself! Unity tutorials are also an absolute blessing and the community here is incredible too.

That's WIP. There is some stuff in the API that deals with buoyancy, but it's WEIRD. I'm on it, but that's going to take some time I'm afraid

Cheers! Absolutely fair comments. I took the 'throw some RCS or small engines at it and it works fine' approach. Simply an anti-grav; the propulsion is up to you. Hillclimbing has not been an issue so far, you just need an appropriate amount of power I've been merrily hacking my way around the mountains, but they're really for low-grav where wheels just don't work too well and a little goes a long way. I wasn't aware of the rollcage version, I'll look it up. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the handling characteristics in wheel mode - that was the whole point of making a mod really. I too got fed up with silly flipping over, which is why I've gone to such lengths. I always used to use Rollcage wheels instead of stock, but I wanted tweakables. The only way was to bake my own... Then things got out of hand...

That's a real honour to be mentioned alongside that mod. Incredible piece of work, it's absolutely stunning. I've been working on a lot of stuff, need to move some things to utils. Yep, lots of stuff in the pipeline Including a Star Wars speeder bike for Kerbals.. Superb! You'll find some strange issues with the anti-roll in very low grav though, I need to create a bigger dead-zone. The control loop fights itself and gets KSP all in a tiz... Hell, I'll call it a 'feature' not a bug. Dealing with ant-grav, right Also some null-refs in VAB/SPH if you flick back to it, I'm still trying to figure that out. Had something go really strange with one of my saves too, so use with caution! Everything went in time-warp, speeds were all wrong and I had to start a fresh save. May just be a KSP thing and unrelated, though.. Go break stuff:D My testing has been limited and I tend to forget after adding new features. It's all very, very early stage with lots of finishing touches and bug fixes needed.

I really, really need to make a new video.... That was a muck-about after literally five minutes in Unity to prove the concept. So busy trying to get everything debugged and out of the door. Yup absolutely hear you with the suspension travel - now fixed, will update video. Yep, it's tweakable alright! In-flight too... And thanks -really glad people are liking the concept. Makes all those hours worth it

That's probably the bit I'm dreading the most!!!! Comments appreciated. If I can do anything better, please, please, please chime in. Abject newbie, so I'm sure I've done some horrible things to C#. That being said, what a beautiful language! That's three weeks of 3am finishes and I learn fast, mind you

Sorry, I've been so busy coding I've not updated the thread. So, a more full explanation: I'm working with wheels and I want to find the wheels position relative to the vessel CoM to calculate how much it should steer. Wheels further from the CoM should turn the full amount, wheels close to it should turn proportionally less. I've figured out a way to do it simply using the length of the wheelbase, but being relative to CoM would be the icing on the cake. My dev thread is http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/84102-WIP-PARTS-PLUGIN-Kerbal-Foundries-wheelpack-anti-grav-repulsors so you can see what I'm doing. I've been poking around at what I can call from this.vessel, though the world co-ord from .CoM doesn't seem to help here, unless there's some way of inverting it to co-ords local to the vessel? Thanks for your time, appreciate it!

Thanks If you've got some ideas, that would be awesome! The Unity hierarchy changes from standard wheels are significant, and I've written no documentation on my plugin yet, but I'm trying to put together a live stream tutorial on how it's all set up. Again, watch this space! I have to get some meshes sorted for texturing this eve, after that I'll try and martial everything together for a soft release.

The joy of it is you don't have to keep the craft oriented! You can just have fun drifting around as you please, using tiny amounts of RCS. Private testing has been positive so far. I _never_ set out to create something like the repulsors; they're the result of a silly conversation, a 'hmm, what if' sort of idea, trailblazing through the KSP API while learning C# and abject abuse of Unity physics objects. I've loved every minute

Thanks guys I've got a few things to work through, but I'll post links up (hopefully) later this eve. It's actually quite nerve-wracking setting something up for public release... about a million thoughts of 'what if someone does this, that or the other'... But, Squad do it, and having a few other bods trying trying to break stuff will actually save me some of the testing, so here goes... Let's do this Kerbal style! Watch this space. Thanks for the heads up on the spelling btw

1.1.x & 1.2.x NOTES: It is being worked on, but there is currently no 1.1.x or 1.2.x compatibility. Do not ask for an ETA or you will be slapped in the face with a fish. You have been warned.. We're working on it, but as Squad found, U5 wheel colliders in KSP are about as stable as a stack of ping-pong balls. It's being working on by some very clever people, so please be patient. In fact, we're working on an entirely new wheel collider (the bit of U5 that's given Squad so many problems). As you may imagine, this is not easy or quick, but progress is being made. Please do not ask when it'll be ready or badger us to update. Such requests will b met with a slap around the face with a wet fish. You have been warned - we have the Holy Mackerel primed and ready, and it won't be pretty. By all means, stay tuned, offer encouragement, post what you're doing (in previous KSP versions) with KF stuff and do suggest whacky stuff we might be able to have fun creating when we've got working wheels again. DOWNLOAD: KF v1.9 which is 1.0.x compatible can be downloaded here. 1.9 Changelog: New parts: Giballed repulsor. Less crashy-crashy-boom-boom. Simple track (quite small) More to follow shortly when textures/IVA's have been finished!! New features/enhancements: DustFX! This is similar to the CollisionFX mod, but totally re-purposed specifically for wheels Dust colour can either be updated by biome information, or in realtime by sampling the ground colour. Repulsor effects. They throw dust too, as well as creating eerie blue light... New animated texture as well. Gui: you can toggle various things like the repulsor lights, dust, VAB/SPH orientation marker from the simple GUI Wheel acceleration is now affected by vessel mass. Bet you never noticed it wasn't before Control input improvements. Hopefully you'll feel rovers are a little less.... arcade-ish. APU now has configurable target battery state. Sound has been improved too. Memory footprint reduction. It's about 40M. Less that a third of the previous release. Various performance improvements, which I won't bore you with. You may notice that the simple track is not an asymmetric part, which is not common in KSP. More like this will follow now the plugin stuff is in place to enable this. Logging has been improved to show KF related things clearly. TweakScale support has been vastly improved. Everything that should, I believe, now scales with the parts Rebalance of cost/weight/speed/tech node (Community Tech Tree too) for all parts. This may need some more work. Support for alternate resources added. Information, description, EC usage is all now displayed in editor Icon size fixes for the tracks is bow built in Tracks no longer make the craft appear larger than it really is in the engineers report. Track textures flip over to create symmetrical track patterns on opposite sides. Neat, huh? Probably a bunch of stuff I've forgotten too, as well as stuff that enables forthcoming parts.... Install Instructions: Delete existing 'Kerbal Foundries' folder. Unzip new version into KSP folder. You will end up with GameData\KerbalFoundries. Enjoy the Kerbal mobility goodness Optional: TweakScale: No further explanation should be required. Nothing bad will happen if you don't have it. FAQ & Troubleshooting: This mod crashes my game. There are a few possibilities: You're running KSP Win64. DON'T. It doesn't work correctly, Squad don't support it and neither do I. Some people manage; bad luck if you're not one of those. You're running active texture management. It hasn't crashed, be patient while it compresses the textures for the first time. Startup will be quicker subsequently. You're running too many mods and you're out of memory. Trim down your install, force OpenGL or run Active Texture Management (or similar). I've yet to run into anything that isn't caused by one of those things listed about. Crashing is usually memory related. The wheels don't work and sink into the ground: You've put them upside down. Download 1,8d and you'll have nice orientation markers. The repulsors behave a little quirky: They're anti-gravity devices, what do you expect Filing bug reports: If you run into trouble, please do the following: Post an output_log. This can be found in the KSP_Data directory. Preferably stuffed into dropbox or similar, rather than pasted into the thread (between SPOILER tags please, if you must) as they can get quite lengthy. Screen grabs are helpful, as are craft if they're mostly stock apart from KSP parts. A detailed description of the problem too, please. Just saying 'hey, (whatever part) isn't working' is not helpful. If you have an issue with odd behaviour, rather than something that's likely to be revealed by a log file, please post screen shots, KSP version & platform and KF version, along with as much info as you can give. General release notes: AGAIN!! Everything has changed. I've completely ditched the stock wheel module in favour of my own home-grown alternative. Some might say this is a bold move, and rightly so. There will be bugs, there will be certain situations where the wheels behave a little differently to stock. If you don't want to deal with that and file sensible bug reports should you run into something strange, please don't update for the moment. The new plugin is mostly helpful because it greatly simplifies creating new parts, as the stock modules are rather fussy. However, subtle differences do exist and you should find that the dynamics are much better now. Parts have all received a CoG tweak which has also helped. Apologies for breaking saves, I found that the old and new versions are simply not compatible and weird, weird bugs occurred. Forcing fresh craft files is about the only way to deal with this, so that's what I've done. If you want to re-use existing craft files, just remove KF parts and re-save before updating the mod, then add the new versions. Groups: You'll notice a UI slider called Group Number, along with an Apply Settings button. This does several things. For repulsors, it changes the hover height of all other repulsors on the vessel in the same group number as the selected part. For wheels, steering ration and direction calculation will happen for parts in the same group. Useful for multi vehicle vessels and those with docked rovers. Group 0 is special! A part set to group zero will only update its own setting, and will not receive settings from other parts (even in group 0). Sounds complicated, but it's easily udnerstood when you're in-game. Parts default to group 1. Repulsor notes: 1) They do levitation. Nothing more!! Propulsion, braking and control are all up to you. Get inventive! 2) The height adjustment and retract/deploy function has now been rolling into one. Setting to 0 height turns the repulsors off. There are two action groups to change the height, as well as the UI slider to change individual units. The action groups change the height .5 for each activation. 3) Surface mount repulsors are now smaller and uni-directional. The have no stability of their own, so you'll want to use at least three if you want a self stable craft. I've added TweakScale support to facilitate easy placement. It makes them a little trickier to use, but much more flexible when using lots of them. 4) Effects are on the way. Lights and emissives are all in the works. 5) Energy usage depends on hover height. 6) Fixed a major bug where repulsors would randomly switch off due to low energy when there was plenty available. 7) You will need the TweakScale plugin if you don't already have it and would like to use this feature: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/80234-24-2-TweakScale-Rescale-Everything!-(v1-33-2014-07-28-20-00-UTC) Wheel notes: 1)I've done some funky stuff detecting each wheels position in the vessel and calculating how much it should be steering. If you make a truly whacky vessel with the root part in a strange orientation this may not work correctly (Should now be fixed in 1.7). 2)Docking/undocking needs some attention, especially if rovers are mounted on a launch craft in an odd orientation. This will be fixed, I just need some time to work out how KSP handles the tree rebuild and get my code to recalculate accordingly. Groups will help with this. Track notes: 1)There is a KSP bug in the bounds detection of the skinned mesh that the tracks are made of. This means the editor icon is _tiny_. It's a known KSP issue and something I can do nothing about at the moment I'm afraid. 2)Steering is slightly different to wheels. Pressing D, for example, tells the vehicle to rotate clockwise (looking down), rather than steer right. This might sound like the same thing, but you'll find the controls are reversed compared to driving with wheels. This is by design. Otherwise there is a nasty crossover region between forward and backward motion when rotating on the spot. 3)There is a UI slider and action groups to change the torque, along with an action group and button to disable steering. This hopefully opens up the design possibilities. Energy consumption is related to torque. 4)I've hopefully nailed the direction detection code. It works for all of my designs, I'll wait to here if it works for everyone. A massive, massive thank you to the RBI guys for open-sourcing the originals. I can't tell you how helpful it's been 5) The steering on the re-released RBI unit can get a little funny when mounted upside down. I'll fix later. For the moment, enjoy them right side up, please APU notes: This is designed to be used alongside anything that requires ElectricCharge. By default, it will spool up and down depending on battery state and current load. Having too small a battery can cause problems, though, so take at least one small pack, rather then relying on tiny charge storage from command pods etc. We could really use another hand with the texturing. Justin does a cracking job, but it's time consuming compared to everything else so there's now quite a backlog of untextured parts. Any offers greatly appreciated! CC-BY-NC-SA THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN The SOFTWARE. To clarify licenses: Publicly released parts, configs and textures are covered by Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA Publicly released plugin code is covered by GNU GPL3. Anything else to be considered all rights reserved.

Aha, that would explain it. It's in the OnStart override so yes and no. I'll have to use a different method but the sound of it. Thank you, I'll run some further testing

Hi I'm having some trouble reading the centre of mass of a vessel. It always gets returned as (0, 0, 0). I can't quite figure out what position it should return relative to, but part.orgPos always gets returned in relation to the root part, so I assumed it would be similar to that. Vector3 thisVesselCoM = this.part.vessel.CoM; Have I completely lost the plot? Any insights would be appreciated - I'm trying to figure out a parts position relative to the CoM. Managed to figure most things out now, but this has got me stumped. Cheers and thanks in advance

I keep surprising myself with what I'm able to code! Makes a huge difference not having digital steering Next up is anti roll bars, which will be a challenge in ksp, but I _think_ I can do it. Still tidying steering code and will send for you to test before release. Ah, glad you're having fun with the bits from the skinkworks (well, they're green, right?)! Do send me over some screen grabs, I'd love to see what you're up to. Landing gear is on the list too, I have some wicked ideas for effects and retract animations. Another forum user is kindly texturing ad fast as he can, but I've been so busy modeling the pipeline is already rather large! Cannot wait to get this lot out there.

Awesome, nice work. I struggled too, you have to be careful about the position constraints, they will hold the moved object to the targets transform position, not keep it the same place relative to the resting position. If you've got it working, great! It does need tailoring for each rig, but with it for the results, I think much head scratching... Also, I've just written a plugin to smooth the steering input and make it progressive, so no more flick left and right suddenly. Looks so much better and makes for more stable dynamics. Small plugin which you're welcome to use/distribute and a trivial hierarchy change. Details to follow

Well, that would be sweet if its that simple

I wonder if we can get KSP to run a simulation which will yield the data. Hmmm...

It's the way to do it, I think. I'm busy too this weekend, so maybe agree on an evening next week? Gives me a little more time to prepare.

Actually, quite a few of us are UK/Europe based (SpannerMonkey, ZodiusInfuser and myself at least), yes? In which case, time zoning isn't an issue, so how about a live dev stream via twitch? Can be recorded for posterity, and should be more productive as you guys can ask questions/give input realtime as I'm going through it.

Superb, will check it out. Can always just run Audacity or something alongside to record the voiceover and dub in after. Thanks guys