electronicfox

I hadnt realised normals had such an effect now, so yeah that will kinda bum out the quick and simple joints method. Is there a way to overwrite the drag-cubes system? Maybe have an invisible mesh around the parts that is used to generate the drag cubes? It would most likely require a new plugin that tells KSP to ignore the visible mesh and calculate from the invisible one and I have no idea how difficult that would be to create.

When I did morph animations for an unfolding blimp part, I managed to bake the blend animation to a number of joints. It ended up being like 200 joints, but it didnt seem to affect performance too badly. With the parts I've seen for this mod, you could probably use a similar setup. Alternaively, I believe these inflating animations can be replicated with just a few manually animated joints (If you'd be willing to send me just one of the models, I can confirm this for you). Its far cheaper than many joints baked from a blendshape animation, and I believe will have near enough to the same results.

I think Kerbals are just accidentally locking the keys inside the pods whenever they leave.

The tracks are still in the works, and for the most part actually work just fine. Theres just an odd bug I need to address with the retraction animation in which the game decides that wheels can float several meters away from the actual ship.

This is now more-or-less out of prototyping for the main sets of parts, it all works just fine so now I need to think about what parts I actually want to make for this. What I can think of so far: Jet engines (with the ability to allow bottom stacked parts). Discreet radial engines (rocket, nuke, ion and atmospheric). Solar panels (big ones, big folding ones with proper casings). Rover wheels (small, regular and large, all folding). inflating floaties (for them water landings). Different blimp designs. Different wings (smaller and larger variants). Any other ideas will also be considered, this is just a quick splurge of what I currently have in mind.

Just updated the pack. New part now included, and all textures switched to DDS.

I can only assume it is conflicting with another mod somewhere. What it is, and how it conflicts is another question.

It uses the Firespitter plugin, and like most other FS propellers, it has reversable thrust.

They were originally stack mountable, but I came to the conclusion that if I gave every discreet part a stackable body, people would end up with very long noodle-ships. I opted with surface mountable with extra weight instead. As for figuring out the problem, I may need to call in help from more experienced modders to work that one out.

Ah well with a hugely modded game, thats a risk that has to be taken. Though finding if my mod is conflicting with another mod, or just reaching a memory limit is a bit difficult to work out I think. ANYWAY, just to prove this isnt going the way of the dodo, I have a new design in the pipelines. (I vanish a lot because my work is only ever either nonexistent, or taking all of my time). The tracks are also on the way, but there are some odd problems I need to fix with those before showing them off. They mostly work, theres just some bugging out. - - - Updated - - - I wanna see the tracked blimp.

Its not a huge deal of work, no. Just gotta get the time to do it.

Good to know they work! Although it looks like the parts only export their first frame in their animations. In the case of the larger wings, that is their stowed state.

That is an impressive airship. You can probably reduce the weight and part count by replacing the structural fuselages with one or two long poles from the IR parts. You can probably cut down on the SAS parts.

Thats a lot of mods. Now when you say they wont load. Does the game hang on the loading screen, or do the parts just not show up in the parts list? And does it do the same in a clean install?

I have just tried with ATM, and its loading for me without any problems. Do you have other mods installed?

What wont load? The game? The download? edit-- I did not read that properly. I'll check out the requirements for ATM.

Ah that'd be amazing! It would also help my (currently collider-less) wings.

I am thinking about regular wheels. The whole purpose of my mod is to make parts that can fold themselves within the profile of a rocket, or within a decently sized fairing. Wheels, engines and more discreet large solar panels are in the box of ideas at the moment. I might even tackle some mining parts later. - - - Updated - - - I'm not sure exactly how KSP handles moving objects but if its anything like my folding wings, a little plugin work might be needed. Another thing I still havent figured out is how to stop parts colliding with each other when retracted. Things get all twitchy and explodey, if I can work out how to disable certain colliders at runtime when stowed, I'd be golden.

Don't worry about the optimizations, they'll be taken care of before I start unwrapping things. This was literally put together in about an hour, I wanted to get something looking good before messing with cleanups.

I've been putting together something that is kind of a mashup of my deployable parts, and Lo-fi's tracks here, and I know it's been wanted by a few people way back when I was developing the tracks myself. Finally, here they come. I'll be handing them to Lo-fi when they're about ready, and he will be getting them running.

Fueled ones are in the works. The current ones do work at about 1 third thrust using a full charge from the deployed blimp. Enough thrust for a decent airship. Some fuel cells would work too. As for planes, yeah they weren't designed for high thrust purposes. - - - Updated - - - I concur. They need just a simple axle that snaps into place when deployed.

I kinda wanna see that monstrosity. In other news, I gave the tracks concept a little polish, I'll be handing them over to Lo-Fi soon to get them up and running, but some work is needed before that.

I havent tested with many airship parts, but I know the propellers are prone to lag when 5 or 6 deploy at once (I'm not sure what craft you have that needs that many, but I congratulate you). Once the animation is finished the lag will cease. I'm not sure what specific data in the animation is so intensive, but I plan to track it down and reduce that lag.

It seems the source was rejected by Curse (invalid archive), I have uploaded to my Dropbox, the link is on the OP.

Did someone want deployable tracks? No? I dont care, you're having them! Have a roughed out test animation.