Gaalidas

One thing to do is report on whatever gets printed to the log when you make an attempt to open the GUI. You might get some sort of null reference exception.

It's not that crazy really, as long as you don't make a duplicate entry for a certain body... unsure what that would do. Anyway, there's no parent node defined in the default configuration file, however the code in the DLL suggests that it looks for the file by name and location, so you cannot simply add a new file with the "CelestialBodyColor" node inside of it and expect it to work. You would basically need to append the new entries to the end of the file. An update to the code really needs to be done in order to let it load new color profiles from a parent node that the config manager in the DLL would look for, rather than the specific file path/name.

Basically, you need to think of the path to the variable/node you're referencing as very similar to navigating a file structure in a command-line interface like old DOS. If you wanted to move backward one directory, you had to reference it as ".." or, if you wanted to go several levels down from where you were "..\..\.." and so on for however many levels you wanted to descend.

You mean the mod that was mentioned in one of the source files as the main inspiration for writing it? Nope, never head of it... Honestly, that development line for the critter crawler was going so well, I was rather sad when it just... died out... - - - Updated - - - I'll put it up to my dropbox when I get a chance to give it a test. Gotta see if it actually works at all still. I'm drawing a blank of that wheel, so I'll just take your word for it. I never had much luck with stock wheels, so until KF came around I just didn't build rovers... ever...

And this all really comes down to the limitations of the IR parts as well as the engine's limits. I have, however, scaled them up to those sizes with no negative effects being noticed because I exported all of their specific scaling settings from the part configs to separate scaletypes. This allowed me to properly set up the exponential variables so that they functioned properly without having to sift through each and every part specifically. But... that's a lot of work for the casual user and not something everyone is capable of. I think, however, that issue would be one to take up with the developer of IR. Tweakscale is scaling the values it's being told to in the correct way, it's the IR code that isn't handling the range of numbers in a very efficient or correct way (theoretically, I haven't code dived into IR in a long time.) - - - Updated - - - I like this. I mean, I really freakishly like this.

What I'm gathering from this posting is that this new maintainer/developer did not change anything that would break support from other mods. This should, in effect, make all other questions regarding "does this work for this mod or that mod" completely pointless. I'm sure the last thing this developer wants is to completely screw over everyone who makes use of this mod in their own mods.

Remind me again, which wheel is that? Is that the one that caused the program lead to shout "WHY???" and then fall over dead, or am I thinking of something else? Anyway, if it produces the effect we want, with (maybe?) a toggle to deploy the spikes and, at the same time, impose some realism by lowering the maximum speed/torque/whatever-else-you-would-call-it, then maybe we do want another one of those. The question now is not whether we want it or not, it's "how completely psychotic are we, and do we want it badly enough?" For the answer to the first question, you'd need a picture of me after waking up from a mid-day power nap. I don't see the problem, but my mother just about looses her mind upon seeing it. You'd think I'd adopted an "Einstein hairstyle on acid" or something. I hear you on the magnetic thing, but I'm not one to give up on something until I've already swallowed my leg (adaptation of mouth-in-foot). So... I've already gone and grabbed the source for the SQUID system, updated the code**, successfully recompiled and will start fiddling around with it. It uses forces, so in testing I should be able to identify if KSP, in its current state of simulated gravity and force and all that, will react badly to this sort of thing. I gotta know what really happens before I leave it alone. especially considering all the time I spent working with SQUID before discovering your wheel project (literally by accident) and got hooked. **It was crazy. There wasn't even a namespace or anything, and SharpDevelop found all sorts of redundant code in there. I couldn't let it go until I'd made it beautiful again. On another note, if you do get the on-rails thing settled with the hitch, then a miniature hitch with a very small amount of "wiggle room" on the connection could definitely work for a non-KAS style tie-down. - - - Updated - - - I would love it if you would share more about those... um... interesting things... So, along the lines of those on-rails vessels and such, I still remember a plugin that was able to get around that... somehow... I think. I'm going to do a little research. I may know absolutely nothing about what it is you're asking the rest of the forum-gurus, but I have looked at and tested out billions (sorta) of mods for this space simulator we all love (and hate at the same time, usually) and while I don't have any sort of super-accurate memory, I do remember all sorts of strange things that I read in mod change-logs. I'll let you know if I find anything useful. Now that I've discovered ILSpy, I'm finding all sorts of cool stuff hidden away in the DLL files we get with some of the older mods from before source was so easily distributable and/or required. UPDATE: ah-HA! I found it. The mod was called "Burn Together!" and it allowed a lead vessel to command surrounding vessels to copy its movements, thus creating a formation-flying effect. I always wishes you could also force the vessels to try and maintain a specific formation relative to the heading of the lead craft so you could have a flying-V setup, but that would bloat the code to over twice what it is now I'm sure, since you'd have to account for the relative distance, speed, and vector of movement between every vessel and every other vessel in the formation, and get them all to move at different speed and angles to maintain the formation. Though, now that I type all that out, I have to wonder if an adaptation of the KF wheel calculations could have proved useful in such an endeavor. Oh well, we'll probably never find out. The last release for this mod was back during KSP 23.5. Back to the matter at hand though... The important parts of the change-log are these: alpha v5.1: [B]-timewarp lock occurs only if followers are within 0.1m/s of leader[/B] -fixed loss of followers during high timewarp alpha v5: -added some rudimentary rover support [B]-ships lock in position during timewarp[/B]So, I gather that the author found a way to lock two or more crafts, which are separated by longer distances than we are even trying to achieve, in the same relative spot during high time accelerations (which I would assume also includes the odd things that happen when exiting high time acceleration modes). I shall investigate further.

Right, phantom forces and stuff... yeah... actually, I don't think I had those in mind when typing out my recent posts, but you make a good point there. I can still see the usefulness in something that attaches to a surface and doesn't let go. I might have to go have a look at those old mods now that I know more about what I'm looking at when diving into plugin code and see what makes that stuff tick. Having landing gear which could magnetically attach to a parent craft without needing to dock could be extremely useful, and could be the answer for any sort of non-docking tie-downs.

I suppose it could be a similar effect as what you get with the old Hooligan Labs Squid. It basically acted like a magnetic wheel that would keep the wheel on the surface it was planted on or rolled onto. Speed up as much as you like, go over that hill, you'll never catch air... ever. Apparently it also worked for landing small craft on bodies with little to no gravity, or even attaching landing gear to the surface of another ship. I'd think a spiked wheel/track strip would be similar except that it would basically add more friction against slippage, such as when trying to halt your motion against gravity when the surface you are touching rests at an extreme angle. Magnetic ones would all you to maintain friction and relative-downward pressure on a surface at vertical or inverted angles (within reasonable limits between craft weight and gravity factor). On the other hand, these types of wheel systems would not allow the craft to maintain or even attain any usable level of velocity. Think of it as trying to run a marathon with magnetic boots on which require a complete attachment with the surface, then take a second or so to disengage, recharge the capacitors, and re-energize the magnetic surfaces before reattaching to the next surface. You'll be running along at a whopping .02496843 steps per second or, in simpler terms, burning rubber for a snail on speed. A baby could crawl at a faster rate if it was carrying a 12 ton diaper. Don't think about that one too much, or you'll disturb yourself. Still... a system like that, which could be activated when needed, could be useful.

I actually had a play with the Skylon mod a while back and the control part actually had a switch on it for changing the control direction, though the change was very slight since it was meant only to compensate for the angle of the engines for the differences in atmospheric vs. orbital maneuvering. I wasn't quite as interested in the mechanics of this stuff back then, but now I'm really wondering how exactly it worked. Gonna have to go look that up again now. UPDATE: So, I took a look at it and it seems they used an animation. My guess is that the animation is set up to change a specific transform to face a different angle and, from my memories of playing with the part, the animation/transformation is smooth too, but contains no visual change as would usually come from an animation. So, to replicate this you would need a model with an animation attached to that transform (or whatever it is, I'm not model development savvy right now) that modifies the direction that is considered "forward" on that part, then activate that animation using your favorite animation module in the part config. I was hoping it was actually plugin-based, which would allow me to replicate the functionality to match the function in the control mode toggle plugin (I totally forgot what the plugin is called right now) to do more than just set flight mode. As it is, it wouldn't be very easy to adapt this for existing parts.

RetroFuture also has karbonite and stock resource hogging engines.

I very much doubt that the tracks/wheels would even be separated from the repuslors, since they're all sorta connected in function and part type. I'm unsure if I'd even ever use the DSR bodies. They're a bit lacking in the modularity that you get when using parts that aren't necessarily build for rovers. Of course, together or apart the plugin really doesn't do enough to really bog anything down on your system, and you're all free to remove parts you don't want from the installation. For this reason alone, asking someone to fix their mod so it doesn't crash your individual computer because of an over-sized texture, one of which comes in an easily editable format is, in my opinion, absolutely ridiculous. Heck, I'm dug in pretty deep with this mod and I don't even run everything in my game the way it comes. Every single freakin' texture and part config that goes into my Gamedata folder gets combed though to ensure that performance on my end is maximized. This includes resizing, often by hand, every texture that I download. However, I do not recommend you go nuts like that. I'm just a bit over-sensitive about my mod installs. You should see what I do when installing mods for games like Skyrim. Lets just say every single record in one of those mods, and every texture, model, and script gets a very fine sweep before it ever gets loaded into the game. That includes comparing changed records against every other mod currently installed and building compatibility patches if necessary. I'm just a bit nuts that way. At least for KSP I can do half of the stuff I do with automated batch files.

That's interesting. I'm going to have to go take a look at that mod for coding inspiration as well. Lazor definitely had some pretty neat stuff, it was just a bit too cluttered for my taste... and the arms moved too slow... I'm not that demanding am I? Don't answer that one... Interestingly enough, I was looking through the DLL files running in KSP today (using ILSpy, awesome little utility) and I came across the utility plugin released with that tug ship with those engines you worked on, and it that utility DLL is a module named "Hitch" or something along those lines. I wonder if one of your WIP modules got trapped in there. Anyway... I agree that you probably should start separating things out into different files. While it's great having everything available in a single plugin, we also don't want this mod to end up being "that mod with the wheels/tracks and a plethora of other things with little in common."

...And it never will.

That's quite the beast you've got there. Hope it runs well.

There are a lot of mods out here that should be all merged together. We've got destruction effects, collision effects, smoke effects, flame effects, and variable explosions coming out of every orifice here on the forums. While it would be awesome having them all in one place, it would also become a serious chore to maintain. For instance, take a look at the mechjeb source if you ever feel like getting a nasty head-splitting headache. It took me 40 minutes to scan through just one of the source files in that project, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg.

Or a better option: load up the texture and it's accompanying normal map into your favorite image editor (one that can export to the same file format) and resize them to 50% of their standard size. This shouldn't ruin the detail too much, and will probably improve your loading time a ton. If you're still having problems, resize it again by the same factor and you'll be at the texture resolution that most of the stock and modded parts tend to use, which will probably not even cause a noticeable pause. You've gotta release an update for that, lo-fi, or we'll continue to have this same issue brought up over and over. - - - Updated - - - I have two words that will change your life, then. A great quote from a guy who I forgot the name of... but he's awesome, so listen up. Are you ready for them? Here they come... "STOP IT!" There, you should be cured now. If that doesn't do it, then I'm afraid we might have to lock you in a small box and bury you alive. We're not too sure if that actually helps, but we've had no complaints so far. Come to think of it, we've had no survivors either. Oh well... - - - Updated - - - That just sounds so wrong... is "man flu" any worse than "woman flu" or are they pretty much evenly severe?

It's getting to be a daily occurrence of someone putting them upside down, and not attempting to flip them before posting here. It reminds me of a study between dogs and wolves. The wolf will attempt to get the meat out of the cage until either the cage is in shreds, or it is in shreds. The dog will try for a few seconds and then look up at the human for help. - - - Updated - - - Now that is hilarious. Make us a video. I wonder how they manage to deal with these issues when you attach things to each other using KAS. I also remember a mod that attempted to introduce formation flying of separate crafts and implemented a lock for the separation between the two crafts even under time warp... though I am unsure if it was standard warp or physical warp. If I were to try and figure out how it might be done, I would say that you might be able to detect the time warp mode, then detect the offset position/rotation of the hitched craft(s) in relation to the one in focus at the beginning of the time warp and continually reset those various crafts to those offsets in relation to the focus craft and it's own rate of change while the warp is being done, with a final reset when you break out to be extra sure they're all in the same relative spot. With a high number of crafts hitched together, this would probably cause a bit of a freeze in the simulation for a second, but that may just have to be the price you pay for making a space train long enough to touch the ground from orbit. How to go about this is beyond my ability at the time though. It's just my interpretation of whatever the other mods implemented to deal with the drift issue.

Crazy career mode people! I'm a traditionalist. Game play with no point, goal, or reason is the way to go. If there's something to gain from doing it, you're doing it wrong. Unless you actually like feeling that sense of accomplishment. In that case, good for you. I've been beaten into submission by the screwed up public school system and no longer have any sense of accomplishment or any wish to become anything other than "positively indifferent" about my existence, pointless and satisfactory as it may be. Don't take that one too seriously. I'm not suffering from depression... indeed, I am enjoying every minute of it.

Your inspiration is exactly why we have been brainstorming ways to further motivate you. Both real and unconfirmed-to-be-real (aka, totally fake). Right now, the best proposal is to hurl a giant asteroid at your favorite fast food joint and tell you to hurry up or we'll end your future enjoyment of fast food for all eternity. Unfortunately the costs of doing this, plus the possible end of humanity if we get the size/mass ratio wrong and accidentally cause a catastrophic extinction level event across the globe, and the political fallout while the world slowly dies and the remnants of society degrade and devolve into a cannibalistic society of irradiated and malformed subspecies of what was once thought to be an early developmental form of the species known as "human being" while fighting off the advances of the new dominant life form which resembles something from a bad science fiction movie... ... well, you get the picture. I'm still working out the details.

If you're willing to merge in a new class into your project, pizza, I've been working together with some people on the KF thread to get just dust effects for KF wheels/tracks. I've managed a completely and utterly successful extraction of the dust generation code under a new module that I called (not in a very unique way) DustFX. It includes the ability to adjust the minimums/maximums for dust strength and emissions, and the multipliers/divisors for the equations used in generating the dust based on speed, all through module parameters. This also allowed me to scale the strengths along with the part size using TweakScale. Though not extensively tested yet, it hasn't caused any overly negative effects. Also untested is an extension to the settings to allow for a sandy color dust on Duna. i wanted to export all of those color settings to an external settings file, perhaps through a new node, but I've been struggling with the logic behind the code required for that. As for the grass around the KSC, it's the grass that's part of the modeled landscape which causes the sparks/non-dirt-colored dust. Technically it's not grass, it's just a model which translates to the same material as concrete, or in fact any other "part" model in the game. Thus, you get the effects that would be attributed to another part that you're colliding with.

At least with a guaranteed "boom level" you never have to worry about how you're going to initiate a self-destruct system without having to build the required system first. You just never know when blowing your crew up could prove handy.

YES, I love those. Well, the style of them anyway. I suck at precision flying, so I can't really use them too effectively. However, with some configuration bashing, I bet we could make them into repulsor lookalikes while still maintaining the prop spinner. I also just downloaded a mod that I have no idea when was released, nor how nice the models are (haven't loaded KSP since installing them) that were meant fir VTOL craft training. Those things might be cool to convert as well, especially if the engine portion could be maintained so you could still take off afterwards. Unfortunately, due to the way that colliders are used with the repulsors, we couldn't simply bash the configs together. Likely we would need to weld a surface repulsor part into the original part, and then find a way of making the physical representation of the repulsor invisible. I think the modules for these things might actually exist within the KF program itself. I'm going to have to do some research now. Thanks a lot people, I was planning on getting some sleep someday in the near future. I sure hope you're all happy now. -grumbles-

Ihave a certain level of experience with this. I'll start out by saying "it's not exactly easy" but... it's not exactly hard either. There are two ways to achieve the results depending on the reason you want to remove the objects. I had an issue with the memory requirements for some of the really detailed models, and so my procedure was doing a search (via Notepad++) using "find in files" to locate the model references and remove either the entire configuration file or just the parts that were relevant to the object in question. If, however, you have no issue loading the models/textures into your game and want them to continue to load elsewhere in the world, then you can actually clear the objects in-game by launching a craft and entering the mod's edit mode "Ctrl+K" (I think?) and locating the object in question in the editor followed by clicking whatever is necessary to delete the object. Alternatively, if the object in only ever spawned in and around the KSC (if it's that obvious) you can simply remove the configuration file that corresponds to that object. So, it's like I said above. It's both easy and difficult at the same time.

Then you make it obvious... somehow... okay, so I may not have any suggestions of how but at least it's the beginning of a solution... sorta...