UncleMateo

Alright, an update for everyone: As of today, all of the efforts of the Felota Project are going to be focused on conquering the formidable mods ReStock & ReStock+. @MrShelter started work on this a few days ago, and the time seemed right. These mods have a combined ~400 parts. It's tough for anyone to try and tackle that many alone, and I sure didn't want to do it all by my lonesome. So, together, hopefully we can take down this beast. But in order to do that I have to quite literally switch gears. I have right now two different installs of KSP, one for playing, and one for modmaking. I basically revamped my modmaking install entirely for this, and backed up the mods I was working on in their current states. A clean install, bareboned for minimal loading times. So, unfortunately this means the following mods are presently on hold: • Kerbal Foundries This one was about 60% complete but any of the parts which had both a 'Legacy' and a 'PBR' texture option from the original mod (which is like 75% of them) displayed 2 different TU texture sliders, which cause glitchy behavior. • Grounded I actually finished all the textures for this mod, and had most of the information compiled to do the configs for the remaining parts, I even managed to get the recoloring working through the variant selector for the many parts with variants in this mod.. but for some reason that broke the ability to toggle between the stock yellow, stock white, and deluxe white variants (only yellow would show for any of the three) This mod was about 85% done. • Fuji Only two parts were not yet working in this mod. One was a variant, though, and my attempt to make it work through the variant system did not meet with much success. This mod was probably about 90% finished. • MinistryOfSpace Aeronautics Division(MAD) So far I had not yet started on this mod, other than downloading it and looking into its files a bit. Since this one was a request by @Mudhen15 I think I will put an increased priority on it versus the other mods listed above, though, once I come back to mods other than ReStock again. Since this is such a huge undertaking, it will have its own thread, so I may not post too many updates to THIS thread for awhile after this, but have some faith in me, I will be back. In the meantime, feel free to pile on requests that aren't ReStock! Preferably not Tantares or BDB or anything else with more parts than the stock game LOL

The External Command seat and a few other parts are just like that, that's why I've been going through part-by-part and checking them.. Good idea to put it on the wiki, that makes more sense. I too don't really know how to use GitHub that well, I know I have to make a fork of your current build or something of that nature.. but I suppose I've always followed the philosophy of 'burning that bridge when we come to it', so I might just have to figure that out a little later. ReStock is actually kind of difficult to work with for making TURDS because its a little harder to see which parts are associated with it through PAW PartInfo, I've noticed the only way to be SURE is to check the MM patch history and see if anything is in there from ReStock. I understand this is because restock patches existing parts, but it just makes it a little trickier to identify from a thumbnail. Luckily, I have not really used ReStock that much and am so familiar with the look of the stock parts I can usually just look at them and say 'nah that one is way too cool looking to be stock'.

Alright Beratna! I am all in now, I've uninstalled my old TURD Testing Instance of KSP and replaced it with one with all the fat cut out. A fresh install with nothing but ReStock & ReStock+, the Stock, Making History , and the Breaking Ground TURDs, and the one's you've put up on GitHub so far. Well, to be fair there's a few other mods there like PAWPartInfo and QuickExit (both very useful), but it's just about as barebones as it gets. The old one had every released TURD on it so I could compare anything at any time, but this time around I'll probably do that only as needed. On my last modmaking install, I also had my favorite suite of visual mods going to make sure that everything looked good in those conditions, but in practice there's not that much difference between stock graphics and the fancy ones when it comes to making these configs, so perhaps that was me being decadent. A belter has to live lean, after all. Anyhow, I've set aside the other mods I'm working on for now, shelved them in duplicate on a few thumb drives. I had attempted to finish up one of the 3 or so I've got in the pipelines, but it didn't end up working out that way, each one had its own last-minute complication. Rather than get stuck in development hell with those three, I thought it was time to cut the cord. Fuji, Grounded, and KerbalFoundries will all be completed one day. Just not right now. So if you're excited about those, don't worry, I won't abandon them. But I am going to procrastinate on them. Currently making a comprehensive list of all ReStock & ReStock+ parts yet un-recolored, split into categories for parts with variants and parts without. My plan was to first get some of the non-variants out of the way, and then once I've got a dozen or so, to start gradually working on variant parts as well. I've got some learning to do, both with @MrShelter's config-maker, and actually using Blender for this sort of thing. Up until now I had been kind of flying by the seat of my pants. I'm sure both of these tools will be helpful. Thanks for your patience, @MrShelter, and also for making this thread. I will try and get some parts uploaded as soon as possible, hopefully even tonight.

Damn. Well, worth a shot, anyway. If I had a dollar for every harebrained workaround I've attempted and failed to employ making these configs, I could afford to buy KSP and all its expansions all over again, plus KSP2, Juno, and Kithack and have enough left over for breakfast, lunch, and dinner as well.

I have an idea: I noticed they each have a slightly different shader specified, so I thought you could try including a 'shader = ░' for each respective material tab and see if that defines which mesh is which for TU in other words the one without shielded in its materialName would have 'shader = KSP/Emissive/Bumped Specular' and its associated texture filepaths, the shielded one would have 'shader = KSP/Bumped Specular' and its associated filepaths I'd put that one first in the material tab before all the meshes, and see if that works. Not 100% it will but its worth a shot.

Those are quite simple, actually. Well, usually, that is. If you declare Stock TURD as a dependency for your recolor mod, you can just reference the appropriate files in your config. There's one I've had on the verge of doing for some time, SciencePancake, that is the perfect example of this: it's a squashed version of the stock materials bay. So to make a config for that mod, all one would have to do is reference the appropriate filepaths for @Manwith Noname 's stock recolor mod for the materials bay, you'll probably want to use TexturesUnlimited itself to give you those filepaths, meshes, etc. That's simple! Just go into GameData/000_TexturesUnlimited/ and find the general config file in that file, set the parameter for exportUVs = true go ahead and load the game with the mod in question installed once you get to the main menu, TU will have generated some files that will help you in KSP/exportedUVmaps/ You should be able to just build a config that references the stock TURD by @Manwith Noname and with that you'll be set. He did all the stock parts.

Wow.. with Fuji that would have saved me a lot of effort. The texture files for that mod were a little more difficult to interpret than most. I can sometimes be unintentionally stubborn about such things.

I kind of forgot about that one! I used to have a lot of the airplane cockpit mods, but unlike most folks, I used them mostly to make behemoth flying machines on Duna using kerballoons to get aloft, launching them from my mobile Extraplanetary Launchpads construction base. On a similar note, SXT was one of the mods that I've wanted to do since I started this, but it has a lot of parts- this, not so much, only about 30. But they have kind of a similar aeronautical-stock vibe. I will definitely add that one to the list, but (full disclosure) I've been piling a lot onto my plate of late and it probably will take awhile. I was planning on trying to focus my efforts on ReStock & ReStock+, (but that being said, the way I've been doing these configs is both scatterbrained and chaotic- if I run into a lot of problems with one mod, often times I switch gears and work on another in my frustration). So there is potential that I might be able to work it in, but again, it will probably take time.

Awesome! I will analyze this more completely tomorrow, I have no doubt it will teach me something new Admittedly I've never used Blender so far, believe it or not, so that part will probably be quite informative!

Six months... All dis jus BONUS time for me sasa ke!

First off, I need to point out that @PyjackMeat has already put a little work into ReStock, and from the below-quoted message, seems to indicate that they may be open to others taking up the torch on that which is finished so far. I don't think it would hurt to ask if you could use and improve upon their work. There are a painfully huge number of parts in this pack, only Tantares, BDB, and maybe RSS RO are in the same league of number of parts. Anything one could do to minimize the total work left would marginally increase the odds of eventual success. I'd also like to hope that OrbitalPhoenix comes back one day, but last I checked he hadn't said anything since late june, early july, and he had originally indicated he would give updates on the weekly.. Secondly.. I have been preparing to face the colossal beast known as ReStock myself. I did not look forward to facing it alone. I have looked. I counted some 398 parts between ReStock itself and ReStock+, and to me, it seems like if you're gonna do one, you might as well do both. Based on other mods I've done, the absolute fastest I could do this mod would be, at an unrealistic and unsustainable rate of ~97 parts per week (the speed I finished PlanetaryBaseSystems, which had no variants whatsoever, and quite a few shared texture files between parts), at least a solid month. But realistically, I have no hope that ReStock will be as easy on a part-by-part basis and I'm relatively certain its rife with variants, and I don't believe I could maintain that pace for that long. The reality is, I think my goal would be to try and finish it by the year's end. That might actually be possible. So you may be dismayed to realize you've done only about 1% of the total parts in that pack.. but you shouldn't be, and let me tell you why. First off, you seem to be getting the hang of recoloring parts even faster than I did. You're asking intelligent, well though out questions that show me you've already made prodigious progress in making these things. I'm impressed with what you've made so far. Yes, this is tedious work, and yes, especially at first, it takes a long time to do everything you need to do. But let me say this: you are a freakin' madman for going after this mod first.. in fact, maybe that too impresses me. Your audacity is legendary. The embedded image best captures my feelings towards the matter. On that note... Perhaps you would be willing to join forces?

I've been just running my _Paint file through gimp, stripping out the saturation, deleting any black in the image, and setting transparency in the remaining portion to somewhere between 70% and 88%.. I never actually used the original files at all, except maybe as a template. Maybe I've been doing it wrong, and it will show when I go back through to add 'Its All Shiny' to my mods, but I reckon you may be able to use that as a workaround to avoid any legal faux pas. If your paint file is a completely new creation, and you use it to make a metallic file, isn't that also a new creation? In fact it's my understanding that even the most restrictively licensed mod can have TURD capabilities added to it, because the _Paint and _Metallic files can be made without actually using a single pixel of the original image and instead drawing a new layer by hand, meticulously. Yes, that layer is (loosely) based on another file, in the same sense a painting can be base on a real image. I believe that a texture file that is a derivation of another texture file, drawn by hand, piece by piece, and containing none of its original pixels would be technically covered by the 'Fair Use' doctrine, especially since the to images will by, by any standard, vastly different in everything but associated patterns. By extension, I further declare that there is no mod safe from TURDification, save for those whose configs were written in such a way as to make it too convoluted, frustrating, and difficult to complete. In all honestly it was this aspect of the TURD that appealed to me the most: how many mods were there out there left in a state of incompleteness? A helluva lot, that's how many. Many of these that fell by the wayside did so because they have licensure that didn't allow for adoption or continuation, and usually because the creator also fell out of the KSP community and could not be reached for permission for such things. Instead of letting these mods die, those that are still functional can be given a resuscitative breath of fresh air, legally, above board, just the same as making a community tech tree compatibility config for a mod.

An update: with great exasperation, I feel I may be on the verge of finally conquering variants. I've got at least proof-of-concept working variants for both Grounded (where almost every part has yellow, grey and black variants), and Kerbal Foundries, (though in that case I have two TU texture bars showing up for some ungodly reason and selecting anything on the second one messes up the recolors, so it's not exactly ready to be distributed) Also, Fuji (which only has a single variant part), is pretty much done except for that part and one other that's just not cooperating. I have ONE working recolor variant for Grounded, but it has some issues of its own.. however, it WORKS. That alone gives me hope. I just now have to reverse engineer what is working there by comparing it with the other MH variant recolors and contrasting it with the (several) parts that are malfunctioning. It is only a matter of time, now. Well in case you need some more substantial proof of life for ol' Uncle Mateo, here it is: some progress for you to analyze and critique:

Hmm... I've had that problem crop up from time to time, I believe that generally, it's caused by the filepath to the _Paint texture file being wrong in some way. Never hurts to double-check it wasn't installed incorrectly.. basically the way these configs work, changing the filepath will break everything. (If I had a dollar for every time I accidentally put a GameData folder inside the GameData folder I would be a very rich man). The correct filepath for that one should be KerbalSpaceProgram/GameData/TURD/TU_Stowaway/ I'll reinstall this TURD, downloading it from my own link, and attempt to replicate your issue. I will hopefully do that this afternoon. If I can replicate the problem, I will then try to track down the cause and get it all fixed as soon as I can. In the meantime, some information as to the future of the Felota Project; it is entering a new phase. I'm planning on taking what I've learned so far, especially after PlanetaryBaseSystems, to create more polished versions of the configs I've already released. Basically, my plans are to renovate the TURDs you already see here by touching up some of the texture files and adjusting the color parameters so the Red/Green/Blue more or less matches the same such colors in other TURDs. Additionally I plan to add the 'It's All Shiny' coloration to all my mods for overall consistency, and to prepare them for CKAN. I also plan on trying to fix any issues, the glitchiness with the DropTank mod's decouplers for example, before an updated version is made available. I am still working on several TURDs but am having various issues with each on in turn, so if these issues are resolved, they'll be released when they're available. What I'm really trying to do is gear up, and prepare. I think I am almost ready now. It didn't take a hundred mods. But before I can even commit to that which I infer, I need just some marginal success in dealing with variants. Right now Grounded, Fuji, and KerbalFoundries are all well enough along I should be able to finish them at some point, but each has given me a headache or two, and KerbalFoundries in particular has been quite irksome. TrackingLights has a mere two parts, but it's given me so many hours of trouble I'm not entirely sure I will ever get it working. I tried doing configs for Kerballoons in order to allow the balloon to be recolorable, but I think ultimately you could only change the colors of the base, and that one might have to create specific variants and their textures to recolor the balloon part of this mod, so I've kind of put that one on hold as well. There's a few smaller part mods that I've been vaguely working on as well, any one of those could pop out of the woodworks if the stars aligned properly. In all honesty, I think my focus right now is on Grounded but so far I've been focusing on the nonvariant parts, so I have no real bearing on the magnitude of the difficulty in tackling the parts with variants (which is the majority for that particular mod).