rextable

Is there? I've never used that mod - I'll be sure to go and check it out. In the meantime, I wait with interest on what Mr Neatea creates next. Carry on

Hairymuff

Oooh!!!! Very interdasting. Should you feel so inclined, It'd be amazeballz to finally get some decent landing legs? The ones in the old AIES mod remain the best looking and most versatile for KSP hands down but that mod died many moons ago. Ha, see what I did there... ha.... ha... I'll go now.

Agreed. Though I am intrigued at how moddable KSP2 will be and what that'll mean for the modding community. Who knows what might be possible if an enthusiastic modder put in the time and effort. I've never created a mod before but planetary detail is defo something I'd love to pursue. We'll have to wait and see

Bringing things back down to Earth for a moment (ha, see what I did there?)... I'm really hoping that each planet will have more distinctive regions and unique geological features. Extinct volcanos like Olympus Mons on Mars or Jupiter's great storm for example. I know these ideas are a little more pedestrian than doughnut shaped planets and alike but think of the views as you fly over them while doing SCIENZE. I believe the devs have already hinted at their plans to make surfaces more interesting and varied from region to region so I'm happy. On the subject of gas giants. I assume everyone has seen the latest and greatest pics from the Juno space craft? They're so mind blowingly intricate. Just imaging flying over that and peering down into the cloud layers as you pass by. Might give one more reason to get up close and personal with Jool - the great featureless green blob of nothingness that it currently is. There are sooooo many ways the devs could make the existing planets more interesting and detailed that wouldn't be asking the Earth (haha, I did it again) in terms of developer time and players' computers. Craters, lake beds, boulder fields, canyons, volcanoes, geezers, sand dunes, cliffs, cloud layers, mountains, spam etc. The list of real life planetary surface features is endless. just google surface of Mars or Pluto for inspiration. At the very least I hope the devs make planets more moddable in KSP2 so we can add surface features and detail to our hearts content X

Does anyone have any idea what time today peeps in the UK can expect Breaking Ground to drop? I'm getting board of constantly refreshing my Steam store page

I can't believe I actually laughed at that

I'm somewhere between klesh and you As RatchetinSpace says, "reposting ideas gives a current-affair look into how the community feels about a particular suggestion" and that's a fair point imho. Where I do agree with you is with thoughtless or way-beyond-the-scope-of-KSP suggestions. Galaxies, multiplayer, aliens and yes - black holes - are good examples. This is a bit tedious because they're just never gonna happen. However, as klesh says, no one is forcing me to read these threads. Personally, I really enjoy reading posts where someone has taken the time to express their thoughts on how x or y suggestion could be implemented (I did this recently over on the New KSC Building suggestions thread). Some of these are comical WTAF pie- in-the-sky nonsense - which is fun to read. There are also some very measured, well thought out and ingenious ideas out there too. So, please keep those coming people.

Erm, what?

Defo a test facility or gamey-fun-to-play-with-and-actually-useful representation thereof. ...Like a vacuum chamber building thingy??? NASA actually has one these in real life. I don't know about other people, but I very much enjoy building complex missions that actually work the way I intended them too (as opposed to going comically/disastrously wrong). At present, I test each stage of a mission profile by cheating the relevant sub-assembly to the location in the solar system it's intended to operate and then see how it behaves, go back to the VAB, tweak, rinse and repeat. The yawn factor of doing this in any other way just isn't fun in my opinion. Now, aside from having to use the cheat menu (which obviously compromises one's suspension of disbelief), it gets very tedious waiting for the game to load the entire solar system and all my preexisting mission detritus every time I leave the VAB. Furthermore, the satisfaction and sense of wonder when finally completing said mission is pretty much lost because I've effectively already done the mission many times over, all be it in a piecemeal fashion. Thus, I propose a vacuum chamber - KSP style. It would serve as a sandbox for testing the game-world physics on our creations. In edition to the launch button in the VAB, a 'test' button could load us into another building where the KSP laws of physics are active but nothing else. In this building (the interior of a huumungus pressure vessel with biiiiiiig flood lights), one could set the physical conditions (much like Kerbal Engineer does in the VAB) ie gravity, atmosphere density and composition. We could also set some comical but functional Kerbal style replica terrain, it's slope angle and resource composition - for testing lander stability and mining operations for example. Imagine little Kerbal scientists peering over from behind a replica Duna sand dune making notes on their clipboards while they observe your rover pootling about on some pretend Duna sand etc etc. I realise, being able to control gravity isn't possible in real life but lets not forget that we're playing a game. In KSP, any such test facility would be a magical vacuum chamber, wind tunnel, neutral buoyancy pool and computer modelling system all rolled into one. IMHO, the value of such a building to quality of life during gameplay, not to mention immersion (only without the tedium of hyper realism), is very large indeed. Apologies for the essay :-D

Yup - new landing legs please. Also, folding, stow-able rover wheels. It surprises me that (IMHO) to date no one has ever surpassed the AIES landing legs. When combined with Tweakscale they were an amazingly versatile set and I used them on everything. I vaguely remember reading that folding legs - like the ones we see on real life landers - are very tricky to model. Is this true (question for anyone knowledgeable who cares to answer)? If so, this would explain the lack of any cool leg mods.

Aha!!! Just tried it. You're spot on - Thank you! Now then.... onward and upwards with my refuelling base

Yo Just a quick 1.6.1 gameplay related question: I can't figure out for the life me how to join pipes together. I've got an engineer with an electric screwdriver equipped, I can attach sockets to things, but when I left click the socket (as per the various video tutorials on teh intertube) the menu only has 'aim camera.' please help

Lander legs?! What?! Where?!

Hello peoplez How might one go about writing a patch to get GPO to work with Universal Storage I/II and SSTU tanks?

Brilliant! Thanks MeCripp. One more question: any idea on what rescale factor I should use to get the parts to desired size?

Chaps Love this mod!!! Visually, its top notch - well done all concerned. I've always been a little frustrated that it's not compatible with any standard parts on account of its '75%' real-life scale. I wouldn't dream of asking the authors for a vanilla-KSP-scale version as I appreciate how much work in rebalancing each and every part would be. Instead, could anyone suggest a quick and dirty hack to rescale the parts - at least visually - to a more vanilla KSP friendly state. Nanoo Nanoo X

Hey chaps This is just a quick request as per the title. I've always loved the AIES mod's lander legs - they look stunning and there's a good range of sizes on offer!!! However, AIES is getting very long in the tooth these days and, despite heroic attempts to update it, there are too many immersion breaking issues - particularly with the the legs - that pretty much put it out of the running for me personally. I'd love to see a mod offering lander-specific parts particularly a range of lander legs in all shapes and sizes. As you were X

If that were the case, wouldn't the shadow from the planet still appear on the ring itself?

Hey Poodmund I have checked and rechecked - I'm positive that all dependencies are up to date at my end.

I can confirm the above post. Something in the PoodsOPMVO folder breaks Scatterer and EVE on all planets including stock. By 'break' I mean effects from both mods simply don't render, but the game runs perfectly and there are no other visual glitches. Tested on a completely stock game - both x32 and x64 versions. The result is the same.

Heh It didn't take long to realise why no one else has released a mod that modifies the stock textures in this way - it's very tedious work and - as you say - will likely become redundant with Unity 5 anyway. However, if Squad do need a Photoshop monkey to fettle the alpha on there entire part list, I'm the man Never mind, onward and upwards. Here endeth the experiment R x

How about a paintbrush-style tool that allows for the procedural addition of ceramic tiling to the surface texture of a part on a per-model-face basis? This way you'd be free to create any manor of gratuitous and bazaar shaped contraptions and literally paint heat-shielding onto the surfaces that need it while leaving the rest of the vehicle unfettered :D

Greetings all So... I think many of us would admit to having done the '@PART [*]' trick to experiment with Texture Replacer's Reflection Plugin, right? For those of you who haven't, I can tell you this: the results are mixed especially with the stock textures (we'll talk about mods in a second). The reflection shader it self looks amazing, but all the parts look like they've been shrink-wrapped in shiny shiny plastic - not a good look! The reason for this is that the alpha channel in the stock textures (which the reflection plugin uses as a mask to determine reflection strength) was not optimized to be used in this way. Indeed, in many cases there isn't an alpha channel at all, thus, shiny plastic wrap death. Out of sheer curiosity, I started experimenting with a few textures to see what it would take to get the reflections looking like they actually originated from the surface of a part and weren't painted over the top of it. It turns out, that's quite a lot of work:P. It's not very skilled work, it's just tedious, repetitive and time consuming. But the results are promising so far. At this stage I would simply like to show you the fruits of my labour in the form of an Imgur album and share what I have learned. Because I am modifying stock textures and not creating new ones, I'm sure I would not be allowed to setup a link to anything downloadable as I would be redistributing copyrighted material. Clarification on that subject would be much appreciated please. I'll return to this subject in a moment but for now, I'll move on. The Results Of My Efforts What I have Discovered Like I said, it's all very experimental at present so please, no slagging off my artistic abilities just yet. I discovered that even once you've redrawn the alpha channel, the life like appearance of the reflections sits a little oddly with the cartoonish style of the stock textures. I ended up overlaying a fine metal texture from real life and factoring that into the alpha channel too. This can be seen most clearly on the Mk1 Lander Can and the Mk 1-2 Pod in the images above. I probably went too far with the grunginess but it was just to see what effect it would have at this stage. Flat surfaces look mirror like no matter what you do to the alpha channel short of adding mountains of noise. Altering the normal map (by adding noise perhaps) could help here but due to the low resolution of the existing normal maps I have yet to find a way of doing this that doesn't look totally pants . Furthermore, altering an existing normal map (or creating a new one) without the original Photoshop file is very very fiddly indeed. Perhaps a subtle application of a layer of the same pre-rendered, hi-passed noise on both the diffuse and normal map might remedy the issue but I have yet to try this. Ultimately, the best solution to mirror like flat surfaces would be a configurable parameter for the plugin itself that scatters the reflection (or something to that effect). Ideally, this should be controllable on a per part basis in addition to the already existing configurable parameters (Shaw, are you reading??? ). Some Mods fare much better without any alterations to their textures' alpha channels. KW Rocketry is an example: All that is needed is a config file for the KW parts and they'll look decent enough. But even here the alpha channels could be further optimised for getting convincing reflections. Conclusion So there you go - sorry for the text slab. In short, making parts reflective is possible if extremely fiddly, but well worth the effort (IMHO). Depending on the level of people's interest (please make it known below) and, subject to licencing, I'd like to develop things into something my fellow kerbanaughts can download and use (I'd be hesitant to call it a mod because it'd really just be a load of textures and a config file... but there you go). If I can't do that with stock textures then perhaps a mod like Ven's Stock Part Revamp, or KW, or... something else??? Suggestions? All subject to Licence of course. Now, I shall continue my experimentation and report back further. Laterz Rexable x

So... I've been playing around with this mod for a while now and can confirm that it works as well as it ever has. Yay! Thank you and well done Atomicfury for keeping us all in recourse overlay loveliness. However, some of the long standing issues still remain. I know they've been raised before but I'd like to summerise them again to mark this mod's progress as of Atomicfury's latest patch. Height map obscures orbit path overlay of the active vessel in map view. No opacity setting for height map in cfg file Resource maps obscure orbit path overlay of active vessel in map view. Reducing the opacity of each resource in the mod's cfg file reduces this problem but does not solve it. Switching focused body causes the tooltip to fail to appear on the newly selected body. Clicking 'Resource Options' tab doesn't close any existing instances of the 'Resource Overlay Options' window (as one might expect) but instead opens a new instance, with infinite instances possible. Clicking the MRO icon in Blizzy's toolbar does not close the map overlay window but instead moves it to its default starting position on the screen None of these problems are catastrophic game breaking bugs but rather niggles that impair the mod's presentation and functionality a little. I have not tried this with other mods other than Scansat and Karbonite (and it's associated bits and bobs) so, who knows how it'll behave with a heavily modded game. Finally, for what it's worth, my thoughts on how I feel the mod could be further refined: Have the MRO Icon in the toolbar toggle the map overlay as well as ALL associated windows. Record and recall the state of said windows so that when they are closed and re-opened they are in the same place and look the same as before. Move all gameplay options to a right click menu available through the MRO toolbar icon. Make it so the tooltip only appears when held momentarily over a point on a body surface thus removing the need enable/disable it so often. Reduce the default size of the 'Map Overlay' and 'Resource Overlay Options' windows Further integration with Scansat - utilizing its anomaly markers and its new colour palette options for example. The ideal being to never need to open Scansat's 2D map windows improve the resolution of all maps Add option to use stock toolbar Add ability to designate and name landing sites??? R x