Deadweasel

"Danger! Danger Will Kermanson!" ...oh wait, wrong robot

Huge designs fly just fine on what's there, IF you design it right. I'm just gonna leave this here...

Sign me up for one of these as well please! Awesome work!

I asked something similar to this a couple of days back, and the responses made a lot of sense. The runway and launchpad areas are elevated for two reasons: Kerbin's scale is small enough for the curvature to be noticeable over the length of the runway. Not a big deal for takeoffs, but a potential big pain for landings. The elevation allows the runway to be perfectly flat despite the curve of the terrain over the distance. Elevation prevents "z-fighting" (that funky jittering dance your parts textures do when you clip them into one another) with the ground terrain.

:/ Except for the fact that the game has those planet textures compiled into it, and replacing them isn't quite as simple as pointing to a different file, the way one would in 3DS or Maya. It could be simple if the textures were made swappable through a mod, but as far as I know, that's not really possible (yet?). More importantly, to your earlier point: While I'm certainly loving what he's doing with these, Squad would take exception to having their core product modified and re-distributed, and almost certainly would take legal exception to somebody taking payment to do it. Also, while I agree the default textures could use a little development lovin, I feel like it's a bit harsh to call then "awful", all things considered. There's also the little non-trivial issue that, for the game to provide the kind of detail rareden's putting into his renders, players would almost certainly have to sacrifice a great deal of performance from the game in the process. Unity just isn't hardy enough to provide that and physics modeling on every ship part as well. Well, not if you want to be able to play it at anything better than PowerPoint slideshow speeds. Having said all that, there's nothing in the world keeping you from opening up those parts and developing your own textures for them for your own use, or even developing a mod kit that provides those enhanced parts. Just remember that every additional byte of space those textures take up is that much more memory that those parts will have to take up when the game is loading, and since Unity is still only 32-bit, you're going to hit a limit at around 3.5GB, which any other parts and mods will have to reside within as well.

It's literally called Procedural Wings. Search at KerbalSpacePort.

You're moving it into GameData, right? If you're still putting the Aviation Lights folder into the KSP_win_20-2\Parts directory, they won't show up, because they've been adapted to the new file layout as of 0.20. You can also get a peek into what's going on if, at the Space Center scene, you hit alt-f12, go to the Database tab and Reload All. Part loading errors will show up there.

Man, I didn't realize KSP had been in alpha that long!

Which will not work as a straight iframe, as the forums don't allow for direct pasting of HTML code. EDIT: nevermind, you've fixed it. Sweet looking base! All these bases are making me want to work on one of my own again instead of just landing ships all over the place looking for easter eggs!

What's with the random capitalized words??

Juuuuust sit right back and you'll hear a tale; A tale of a fateful trip, That started from the rocket port Aboard this epic ship. The mate was a newbie sailing man, The skipper crazed and sure. Five passengers set sail that day For a three framerate tour, a three framerate tour.

Kethane... "It's the smell -if there is such a thing. I feel... saturated by it." Kidding, it's probably those solar panels playing havoc with the frames. Love the look of the design though.

I am simply floored by the complexity, detail and planning that went into this mission. This is the kind of thing I wish KSP was ready to do out of the box, instead of needing tons of mods. It tickles all the right places in my brain for creating a purpose for all the effort to get to another planet, as well as creating a base. The delivery craft designs, the robotic deployment process, all of it just looks like so much fun! Solid, stellar work! Thanks so much for sharing! I am now officially jealous that I'm not running Damned Robotics, Kethane or Mechjeb!!

Yes and no. The question has been asked so often that Scott Manley showed why it won't work in the game.

No, he doesn't re-texture the models in the game. He uses the part meshes from the game in a 3D editor and improves the textures for use in there. He is NOT replacing any game assets; he's using game assets as a starting point to create his own static artwork.

You have to actually provide a way for the kerbal to actually climb up to get near the seat. If it's a tall rocket on the pad, that means including ladders so it can scramble its green butt up there. Once close, right click the seat and click Board. The seats do not act like nor are they treated like capsules, in that they will not automatically populate with a crewmember. Also, bear in mind that kerbals sitting in a seat will impart weight to the craft, while ones in capsules do not. If it's a small vertical craft, that will mean an obvious tendency of the ship to lean toward the direction of the seat. If it's a small horizontal craft, you'll need to build it assuming the seat will be heavier than the CoM indicator in the SPH shows, (once there's a crewman in the seat).

Just finished writing chapter 4 of my story. Now to get some images put together for it!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA *wipes away tears and cleans off the keyboard* I'll have my kraken eggs over-easy please!

Unity is the "pre-packaged" engine on which KSP runs. It provides the basis for the sound, graphics and physics-handling capabilities of the game. As such, it offers a shortcut to getting a game idea off the ground much more quickly and easily than if they were to attempt to code their own core engine from-scratch (which requires the talents of a lot of people, not to mention money). Well, again, remember that the worlds we're currently playing with have terrain that was NOT generated by a program, but in fact hand-painted. Harvester has shown off some work he's been doing with generating more detailed craters using a programmed algorithm, which we may actually get to see on the Mün with the next update. You might be misinterpreting what's going on when people are talking about "dynamic terrain generation". See, terrain creation is done beforehand, during development. All that's being displayed is a surface mesh on a sphere that was created and exported during design time. What we see in the game is a terrain mesh that increases in detail as we get nearer to it (so the game doesn't have to bother with rendering polys that would most likely not be visible to the player from a distance anyway). Otherwise, that terrain detail is static and pre-defined. What folks are getting antsy about is seeing more details in the terrain, which would be made possible by creating an algorithm to produce more detail and taking the time demand of hand-painting heightmaps off the developers' shoulders, which can then be exported and applied to the planets/moons. Many things are *possible*, yes, but there has to be a balance struck between "realism" and play-ability. Too much detail can bring the game to a crashing halt just as certainly as a thousand-part ship. Every polygon requires computational time to render, and the engine's desire to work out current physics interactions with each and every part of a ship at any given moment only add to the load. My original point was that, because the planetary terrain meshes are static and pre-defined, and because those details aren't even loaded and displayed until the player comes near enough to one of them anyway, it's not as system-damning to add even dozens more celestial bodies as some people insist on claiming. At a distance, they're all just simple spheres with textures on them, if that. All that said, it's going to be interesting to watch the outcry when more detailed terrain does become a reality, and all those people already going on at-length about bad framerates on their 7 year-old business class laptops will suddenly see the game become almost unplayable because of the additional poly count when in orbit or at ground level. They're already having "issues" with frame lag in some cases just by looking at Kerbin.

Isn't porn against the forum rules?

I think, if you bought the game direct from the site, the purchase date will already have been recorded in their database, regardless of whether you transfer to Steam afterward or not. I don't know about new Steam purchases as far as Squad are concerned, but Steam itself (I believe) does record date of purchase for an individual account. It would be a necessary element to have available in the event a buyer is requesting a refund, and Steam would need to be able to verify the request isn't coming from somebody who's trying to "game" the system, so to speak.

Look up SpaceShipOne TONU (Tier One Navigation Unit). It looks and works almost exactly like KSP's navball, and those who have figured out its use in the game understand precisely how it makes it possible for a human pilot to commit a vertical landing without necessarily being able to see the ground. In fact, during one of SpaceShipOne's very first powered flights, it began to spin wildly. The pilot commented about how the view out the window was doing nothing but making him nauseous, so he focused all of his attention on the TONU and used that to get him stabilized. If you want to see some true awesomeness in privatized space engineering, go look for Discovery Channel's "Black Sky: Race for Space" & "Black Sky: Winning the X-Prize".

Rareden, how do you get your ship renders so clean? Do you work with the original part meshes to assemble them in the 3D editor, or do you have a means of exporting an existing .craft to a unified model beforehand?

Eh, while it's nice to think about, there are many reasons it's useless to discuss MP in this game: There's always going to be the one troll who figures out how to work HyperEdit's features into the mix, and warps his 1200 part monstrosity into somebody's area just to mess with their play. Script kiddies are bad enough in DayZ; I'd rather not have to deal with the idiots in this game too, thank you very much. It's a lot of fun as it is, openly supporting third-party expansions to the functions and parts. I have too much fun with the mod parts to be forced back to entirely vanilla just for the sake of being "social" (eyeroll) in this game. That's what these forums are for. MP would mean all the mods go out the window to ensure there's a common denominator to be found when connecting multiple players together. What happens in a collaborative build, where players are docking ships together to make a huge station? Who "owns" the assembly? Who gets to pilot it and decide its orientation or destination? What happens when one of the players turns out to be just another entitled XBox brat (you know the kind, don't lie) who flies off the handle and earns a kick or ban from the game? What happens to the parts he/she added to the build? What if their contribution forms the core of the build? Ban and *boom* it's all come apart? The logistics are fearful to think about on that aspect. Adding MP to KSP would almost certainly result in a completely different game, and probably one which would quickly find itself being compared (unfavorably and uncharitably) with Eve Online. No thanks.

The pseudo-science going on in here is hilarious.