Rudolf Meier

it is, yes... I think I know the problem you have... that's just a bug. I've solved it and I will release new versions of IR and KJR soon. I'm currently testing them. They will be released as beta4 of IR next. In beta4 I will not change anything or test new features. The design and feature set is now stable and in beta4 I will only fix bugs so that the after beta4 we have the final product.

The KJR version I built doesn't use those lists anymore but relies fully on the IJointLockState interface.

I'll check that... ... sorry that I didn't react earlier. I had too much work. And thanks all for testing and the feedbacks.

Thanks for the offer. I don't know if it is that easy in this case to get into the project. This has to do with the facts that in a way it's a constant working around limmitations and problems of the game and its engine. And it took quite some time for me to figure out how those things work together. I often have those "ah, right, that's impossible because of that and this causes that error and doing it the other way round would run into the bug I found here...". This constant trial to avoid those problems and the constant modifications of the code is the reason why until now there is no documentation. That's something I think I can start now in the cleanup process when the system is more stable. The main problems currently are that I do have minor problems due to experimental code. I need to remove it, but some parts got messed up because of that... not good. I should have made more checkins. And then after that I'm working on the problem why some values end with NaN values after a while. All other problems I think are not really big issues I think. Sometimes a servo stops working and you need to reload the scene or things like that, that's stuff that shouldn't be hard to fix. But when the universe is destroyed in the game... that's something that ruins your day. ... about the KJR joint debugging. I've done this for 2 reasons. First: we had the question "why is everything locked up?" and the second was "why is everything that slow?" ... the idea was to answer both with those lines. Now you can see if KJR is locking the joints by building additional joints accross the movable joints and you can see if there are too many joints in your ship what could overload the computer. So far I don't see any bugs here. The only one I know of is the landing leg and auto-strut bug of KSP. But here we cannot do anything. You have to build your ships in a way that this doesn't happen. The debugging for the NaN problem is simple... xtreme-logging... I'm generating gigabytes of logs while the game is running and then I will try to find out when, why and how it started that those values moved towards NaN values. It's not the question of "if" I can find those bugs, but just "when" ... There are too many bugs in the current release... I know. But it's not because of the collision stuff. This code does nothing if you don't activate it explicitly for a part. The problems you report, that's because of something I messed up in the last release... I'm trying to build a stable version now. Why I renamed it to .v3. Thats because they are so different, that you can never convert a ship with version 2 parts to version 3 parts. And with those renaming, you can use both in the game at the same time. You can then keep your old ships and still use the new parts for new ships.

I know, the mod has some problems. In fact, it's almost unusable at the moment. My problem is, that I don't have the time to fix it at the moment. In march we found some design problems in the software our company wanted to release and since then we are working on re-designing parts of it. Highly complex stuff and... in the evening I don't have the power to deal with the problems of the mod. But I will fix it for sure... I still hope that we can fix our problems within the next some weeks. But at the moment the process works like this -> we find a problem, discuss it for 1 week, solve it and then... we think fine, everything solved now, but ... then we find the next problem ... no idea when it's going to end. But I will fix all the mod problems when I'm done with this projecect.

I know, that's the "Nan Problem"

I'm still cleaning up code... and I still run into problems because of wrong usage of some events... some came from me, some came from code I copied... sometimes everything is locked, sometimes weak...

Next thing... finding the still happening NaN-situations...

For those who want to see what KJR does (the optimized version I made), can download a special version here [Download link removed by moderator] In the "KJR"-menu you can select the joints you want to see and you can also turn on and off the joints (but this would need a sceen change to take effect). Oh and one thing about the autostrut bug in KSP. KSP is sometimes adding autostruts even when you don't want them. E.g. when you do have landing legs. To show them also, you need to open the KJR menu and press the "apply" button once after opening a scene. ... the darker part of the joint is the origin, the brighter one is the body to which the origin is connected to. I hope this helps all those who want to figure out why the frame rates are dropping. If you do have a ship with strange configurations/joints, then send me a picture and I'll analyze it.

Those who want to see what KJR does can download KerbalJointReinforcement_v3.4.1_p1_dbg_for_1.4.3.zip I added this version to the latest release. It has a menu that allows to make all joints visible. The only problem is, that it cannot distinguish between the default KSP joints and the autostruts (that shouldn't be there and are only there because of the bug in KSP... sometimes). To make those visible you need to klick "apply" after the scene is loaded completely. Hope this helps to sort out all the problems with KJR or at least to see them. It's by the way also thought to be a utility for those who want to find out, why KSP is slowing down massively when using KJR. Maybe someone can see what happens whith a specific vessel and give some feedback on that.

little update... I had more work to do for my job than I thought. We had to rewrite a whole project because of a design change and almost nothing worked after that anyway... I thought I cannot let you wait any longer. I'm now working on different things to improve those mods... at the moment I'm building a new debugging gui that I can later use for KJR and IR so that we don't have to guess and can see what happens plus we can also configure those things while in game. I think with this we will see an improvement in the speed of this development...

-> it's in the first entry of this topic

Well... what do you mean with "does not work with KJR?" ... it does. There is even a special version for it. Now, about the joint strength. Many seem to think that KJR is just modifying the joints and that's it. But that's not true. It's more complicated. KJR (and autostruts also) is creating a lot of additional joints. And with a lot I mean a lot... if your ship does have more than just some parts (let's say more than 20 to 30 parts), then you have more joints generated by KJR than you had in your unmodified craft (depending on the settings). I'm currently working on a version that can visualize this for debugging reasons. Now, those joints are conneting all kinds of parts. For example the top of your rocket with an engine of your first stage. Then a decoupler in the middle with your fairing... so, really a lot. That's how the stability is built (and that's also why it slows the game down... additional to just having a lot of joints we also have the problem that the joint-relations are pretty complicated for the solver, because it's not just a parent-child relation for all joints). If you do now have a ship with let's say 30 parts on one side of an IR part and 30 parts on the other side. Then normally you would have ... maybe 40 joints accross this connection. If the IR part should remain functional, then you'd have to move all those joints at the same time. And since they don't have the same angle, rotation axis and anchor points, that would be a very difficult task... that's why KJR (and autostruts) is told not to build those joints accross an active IR part (those that are locked are allowed to be reinforced). And that's why those joints seem to be weak. But, of course IR does build them stronger than normal joints. Still, it cannot compete with those huge amounts of joints you would have in normal cases.

Currently I don't have much time. But I will work on all those problems next week (when everything goes as planed)... I see them here too, so reproduction isn't a problem. Some bugs are obvious, some others not. That's why I will have to add some kind of "extreme logging" for all values to find out what happens. If you are dealing with normal software, it's easier to do... if you are dealing with stuff that's generating random values, then it's more difficult (because you cannot replay the crash-cases easily) ... anyway. I'll find it. ... and I will also build a new KJR that allows to see what's going on. Why it's slow, what joints it generates... things like that. We don't have enough information at the moment. The debugging versions of both mods will get a lot of new functions... but that's the only way to find the problems. I know those 3 problems. I think I have solved the phantom part bug already (not released), I know the presets problem and this should be solved in the next version (that's because the gui is using real positions instead of commanded positions) and the first one... that's the bit more difficult one. That's why I need the extreme logging ... (or "xtreme logging" ™).

if you are interested in doing those tests (and I would appreciate this if someone would do them), then I can build you a version that would allow to activate and deactivate the options in the game... as well as activating the analyzer tool (show's the struts like KSP shows the active struts if you activate the option)... tell me and I'll build it ... ah, forget it. I will build this version and report when it's ready.

nice :-) ... normally I would say "I don't like this game engine", but this one could be my bug... I'm playing a new career currently and I'm now testing all those things in my own game... I should be able to fix a lot of them... because when I see those in my own game it's much easier to figure out what happend and what I did before it happend

One thing that is and remains very interesting is, that if you attach an IR part via a "Modular Girder Segment", then those elements are almost not connected. Like with a rubber band (especially if you down scale those segments. That's something I don't understand at the moment... could be that's something I need to fix, could be it is "just a KSP problem"... I'm not sure yet.

this shouldn't happen... it should store/load the positions... and quicksave should do it the same way round, but I never explicitly tried it with quicksave... I will go through all the reported bugs soon, when I've again some time to work on this project that's because the original KJR is another KJR... the original KJR isn't updated (I don't know if they will ever)... you need to remove it and install my KJR (that's not on CKAN yet)... and then it's also not outdated, because I allow all 1.4.x versions from 1.4.0 to 1.4.99

sounds like you have KJR installed, but an original version and not 3.4.1-p1 (see first page)

Joints and strengths of joints... old topic in Unity and the problems with them won't end soon... First: A joint can never ever be made strong in a Unity based game. That's impossible. ... even with infinitly high strength values or stuff like that. If you exaggerate, the best you can get is that your crafts explode. The solution? Well, the only solution is to use more joints. That's how KSP does it internally (they use 3 joints built with some distance of each other), that's how autostruts work (they build additional joints between objects and ancestor objects) and that's how KJR is working (this one modifies values of the existing joints, adds additional ones to ancestor objects and adds joints ... well, not randomly, but let's say it is random for the moment, because it's a little bit complicated... in the craft). What you can try is to build multiple joints and still have a movement. Try to use non-controlled joints or things like that. The only other option here is, that we build some sort of special joint that internally builds multiple joints. (of which all but one would be non-controlled... maybe, if we form them correctly, it could be possible to achieve some strengthening). But it would require special solutions for special tasks. Maybe it could be done for one special part that then could be used for heavy loaded hinges or something. But it may require even it's own module. I don't think it would be a good idea to do this in normal IR joints. (allthough, the translational ones do something like that). But... let's get to the problems of those solutions: The more joints (and especially the more non-parent-child-joints), the more computation power is used. Framerates could drop dramatically when using too many joints. That's what already is happening for large ships when you use KJR. There are simply way too many joints involved. And the complexity for the solver isn't linear. That's going up very quickly... so, in the end I think it's a huge problem and remains a huge problem. I think you'd have to rewrite the game engine and the game itself, if you really want a good solution (if there exists one... I haven't thought about this yet).

well... somehow it is... (at least to make this clear -> everybody can use it ... it's not some kind of special version just for situation xy or something... but, it's not really the "offcial" one) and I'm working on a performance improvement right now... if someone wants to send me a ship that shows those problems, then I will look into it and analyze why it slows down

just to mention this: that's not the right thread to ask for 3.4.1 and 3.4.1-p1 ... this is a version I built to use with IR Next and it's supported via Infernal Robotics Next thread

looks good... I've done that too and I've the same problems to tweak out you have but I first need to finish IR Next to have a stable base to work on with the IK module My approach was to allow all arms. Sometimes that's a little bit tricky.

There is the KSP bug and sometimes (I'm not sure if that's still happening... I never saw this in the last week) we had the problem of those NaN's showing in the rotation of objects. But I cannot say anything about it at the moment. But I think Beta 3 is working just fine. Mostly... About the rotators. If the angular speed is higher than 180° per frame. Then you run into the problem, that Unity doesn't know in which direction to rotate, because it takes the shorter way round.

The idea is to implement IJointLockState and to call CycleAllAutoStrut when you changed the value returned by the interface. (that's at least how KSP does it for the Klaw) And, did you know that internally they do have motors and actuators? But they never made it into a part. Some classes are even called "test".