SpannerMonkey(smce)

sooo pretty dont you just love clouds Getting toasty Outward bound

Hi, just started a thread regarding rover wheels and suspension, there's info there I've not found anywhere except by trial and error, and a very neat alternnative wheel hierarchy by lo-fi, take a look if you're doing wheels, and comment if you have anything cool or useful to share, the aim is to make it easier to learn how to make rover wheels etc rather than the pain it is at the moment. Cheers Spanner

To arronlee goes the award for most off topic post of the month:D Meanwhile back on topic, loaded your addon just out of curiosity and I love it, finally something puposefull to do in sandbox, really enjoying trying for the full set of achievements, still not killed any kerbals though, just irks me treating kerbs as nothing more than a number. Great addon thanks.

I like that , very neat, only really just discovered the LOOKFX stuff and although nice it all seemed a bit arbitary, your layout clears that vagueness of where the rigs pivots are and from your vid gives very realistic movement. I've got another set cooking in max at the moment and am definately gonna spend the time to get it done your way, after all it's only tricky till you've done it a couple of times, I'm on my fourth (working!!) std group now and have finally got the hierarchy written on the back of my eyeballs!!!. Some great info there especially the wheel collider position as the edges of the wide wheels sinking below ground level was beginning to bug me a tad. Cheers Spanner

Hi, I know for sure that you can have several animations per part, I have yet to find a way of triggering all anims from one button press, it may be possible via a plugin. On that note Sirkut mentioned that he had developed a plugin that can operate animations in a similar way the Infernal Robotics. I must admit to being curious as to what you are planning, a few well placed questions may save you a lot of hair pulling, keyboard poundinng etc.

Thats lovely articulation you've got there, very interested in your method of hierarchy stacking

I think just putting that out therre like that is a bit off:sticktongue: , so share tell all, that'd make them move as they should, hopefully it resolves the push pull on the suspension arms that can create a gap between parts as well

Hi I've just made an animated suntracking emergency solar panel and it still uses the suncatcher, what I did notice though was that the parts have to be the default names or it just doesn't work, here's a shot of it folded up in unity base, solar pivot and suncatcher have to be parented through the animation, The scenes piston to object 02 are the animated parts of the leg that hold the panel , the two pivots not a child of base are just the closing cap halfs. This little fellow animates and sun tracks fine. and snap off if you treat it badly.

Rover Wheels the black art. So I've challenged myself to make at least one of every type of part, mostly because in a couple of years of modding KSP there are a couple of items that I fail on. The most annoying of which are rover wheels and landing gear, in fact any wheel has confounded me, and I've tried many times. It seems that no real info on wheels exist apart from the stock rover wheel pic thats linked to every time this subject comes up and really for a complete noob it's not a lot of help. Important info that you need to know, most of the object in the hierarchy are colliders or bare named GameObject transforms, the rotation of the models transform/pivots is critical to a wheels functioning. EDIT Much later still More info you need to know, I was troubled by gaps in the suspension arms on one of my latest tests, so as usual i began tweaking and reloading. I have now discovered the suspensionTraverse, transform sets the apparent arc of the suspension, my trouble was due to the wheels having a large offset, that is that the dish and mounting face of the wheel was set way out toward the front face of the wheel on a wheel half a meter wide so placing the suspensionTraverse transform on the bottom bracket (see item bracket in labelled pic) had the effect of increasing the arc, spreading the suspension joints to far apart, the remedy is to move the suspensionTraverse transform closer to the center of the wheel. Experiments continue....... NewEdit Further hours past.... So it's been a productive week, i've got this wheel thing pretty much nailed now, now to experiment. Notes on transforms As mentioned earlier on in this post you need several game object transforms for various parenting jobs, my preferred method , now I've learned sumfin:P , Once you have your model in the scene and you have the wheel at 0,0,0 , and before you do anything else create the transforms you will need by selecting GameObject and selecting create empty, set this game object at 0'0'0 which should be the center of your wheel, if it's not find out why, rename that game object to suspensionNeutralPoint, steering, suspensionTraverse, trackSteering or whatever transform you need, and leave them outside the hierarchy until you need them. This way they all be done, they'll all have a 0,0,0 origin to start and trust me it'll make the whole job a lot quicker NOTE, although these transforms all start at 0,0,0 you will move the trackSteering position after this to another location, but all the others stay at that point in space, note also that they will be moved into different parts of the hierarchy for use, It seems all transforms are quite happy with the std rotation applied by unity except those parts named susp1-1, 1-2 etc these will need to be rotated so the the Z axis face each other along the component, this is due to the LOOKFX that is used to ensure the alignment of these parts Before you combine these transforms with your GameObject make sure that the all all correctly rotated and scaled, scale should be 1,1,1, . Once combined into the hierarchy it can be a real pain to sort out, and will make things very weird if the error makes it into game Notes on Brakes and Braking speed Hi all brake torque is one of those many things that will never be perfect for all occasions, ideally it would be adjustable for each rover you built. However watch this space, as in the near future the standard ksp rover will be rebuilt to use a very special and very clever custom wheel module, that makes the wheels behave so much better than the standard module that is controlling the wheels currently . In the meantime you can either (A) alter the brake speed and brake torque in the cfg, by altering the following brakeTorque = 10 brakeSpeed = 0.5 Brake torque is fairly obviously the amount of torque applied to stop the wheel rotating, and brake speed less obviously is the speed at which the braking torque goes from 0 to full on, tests have proved that altering the brake speed is a better adjustment than brake torque, as it still allows firstly for a decent stopping power, while creating the effect of heavier vehicles taking longer than light vehicles to come to a stop and a much nicer effect of adjust brake speed is that you can safely apply small amounts of braking in low g without taking off or flipping. ( build heavier rovers or of course © put up with it for a little while Below is my original post left here just in case somebody else runs into the same issues and by following the tips and steps above will soon achieve wheel nirvana Now this is my problem I have created after many hours, working, steering etc all functions are there, rover wheels, the snag is the suspension seems way too soft, I ve tried, setting the wheel colliders spring rate to some stupid high figure but this just makes the wheel behave bizarrely, I've tried moving the models origin from the center of the mount being set on zero, setting the wheel center mount as zero, the bottom of the tire as zero and apart from more weirdness it's been very unproductive. I'm fairly convinced that its something to do with the wheel transforms/pivots but can't work it out. My hierarchy differs only in the position of parts susp3-1 and 3-1 I changed this from the example as they did not move in the manner i wanted but that aside I have two other similar models that have exactly the same layout and behave in the same way. You can see that in the pics of the wheels fitted to my spacecab that the vehicle seems to hover even though the wheels rotate , steer and propel the vehicle, even the brakes work. It's as if the suspensions 0 point is not where I think it should be and rather than extending the wheel collider suspension etc is contracting to place the wheel at zero, moving the model in max didnt help, could the bounds be still there ? is my hierarchy right? what am I missing??? PS yes the cab does have an IVA EDIT.... sometime later YAY Fixed Fixed it , turns out all my transforms are right and the wheels position really needs to be centered 0/zero, 0/zero, 0/zero, your life will be so much easier. What does matter though is how you generate the wheel collider and collision enhancer objects, I'd been using a sphere then deleting the mesh render and mesh filter, although this looks OK it turn out its not, for some reason unfathomable the radius of the sphere is listed as twice its actual size, so it's really showing the diameter. Do this instead duplicate your wheel and drag it out of the hierarchy, you must do this otherwise if you have already attached the part tools script ,unity may start throwing nre errors, now depending what object you want, you rename your wheel to wheelCollider or collisionEnhancer, in the case of the former now select physics and wheel collider, now remove other colliders from the duplicated wheel, also remove the mesh render and mesh filter, and lo you now have a transform with a wheel collider attached and its in exactly the right position, for the collision enhancer just add a capsule collider and remove the mesh render and mesh filter as before. Updated hierarchy and multiple wheel setup in my last post, I will get this tidied up once i get a moment August 23 2014Adding unity wheel package For all those looking for an easy in to making Rover Wheels I have created in UNITY3 a DIY wheel package using a Squad KSP TR 2L reworked to suit. In the package you will find a complete ready to build project. IMPORTANT To use this package create a new project in unity version 3 upwards, Once you have created an empty project access the menu at the ASSETS tab in select import package, then select custom package, Having done this browse to the location of your downloaded and unzipped unity package and select it, Unity will now import all thats needed for you to start understanding and building basic rover wheels. Plus a full set of the transforms unused for reference. AS always any questions I'm happy to help when I can. The package is complete you will not need to add anything all Part Tools, models textures and scripts are already in place, all layers are set all tags are set, I have set all the layers I know, along with tags so this would make a starting project for anyone from novice to experienced. The model that can be produced has been thoroughly tested in game and is suitable for 23.5 onwards Possibly asked questions Why unity 3 I use unity 4.x? I made the package in unity 3 as it is a fairly common to creators version and unity 4 will open unity 3 packages without issues. Why a TR 2L it's horrible? Mainly because its the simplest most effective design to learn with , it has the basics of suspension and steering without the complication of added extras like torque arms and shock absorbers, and the quality of wheel function that you will produce with this package is far from the TR 2L's behavior and performance. The little yellow rover in the gif animation shown in the gallery above has very similar setup to this project Will you make a package with a more funky suspension so I can see how that works? Watch this space THE Package A tested in game version of the wheel with CFG that you can use in your project And when you've worked it out you'll have a wheel that can do this Fault finding information Now that so many people are able to and actually are making wheels now, I thought a little section on how to find a fix common wheel faults. Problem. Wheel sinks into the ground. possible cause and most likely is that the actual wheelCollider is not l on the wheelCollider layer ( layer 27 ) , If that fails always check the transforms in unity and your cfg for correct names, they are case sensitive. Problem. Wheel and suspension are slamming up and down at launch and whenever weight is taken off the wheel. The primary and only known cause for this behavior is that the wheelCollider is interacting /hitting with another collider that is not on the wheelColidersIgnore layer (layer 26) simply sorting that will stop the cycle. Important to note that adding to this layer stops things interacting with wheelColliders, but also makes them invisible. In the case for example that one of your colliders on the base/mounting part of your model is being hit by the active wheelcollider, do not set the bases collider to the ignore layer, instead temove the base parts collider , create a GameObject in the correct location , name it base_Collider or something, and add a simple box collider to the transform, then set your base_Collider as a child of the base/mounting. Problem. Wheel hover or gaps in the suspension arms or dampers. This is simply because you have transforms, that the wheel requires to be in a certain way, set up incorrectly. Or you have not allowed sufficient mesh in your model to allow for the unusual way in which stock suspension works. Unlike real world suspension which moves in an arc around it's mountings, stock KSP suspension simply moves up and down, which means the pivot points at full compression are very different to those at full extension, being much further away, the model should be built to allow this to happen. There are plenty more I'm sure but they are the most common faults I am asked about. A little soap box bit tl;dr here so tune out if you want. Wheel building and Transform naming I've read recently a lot of people asking if "X transform has to be called jellybeans and why can't it be called furball? " You can obviously call it what you want as long as you set the appropriate values in cfg , so that the game knows where to look. But, it may be a personal but, you are just making your own life difficult. I always use exactly the same set of transforms and part names every time I build a wheel, sounds dull maybe? But this is the but it means I know exactly what everything does, where it goes and that every wheel I do will be easy on the cfg, as the parts names dont change, only requiring small changes from cut an paste. and perhaps more importantly behaves in a predictable way . Also it makes finding glitches easier because you know the x transform is always called x it should not be called X in the cfg. I can't exactly say how long it takes me to put a new wheel through unity and into game but it's minutes not hours, through no other reason that a routine has been developed that works, without having to dig around for info or reference images. So do yourself a favor get something you are happy with and stick with it and of course profit! Happy rolling.

Hi not familar with your method of animation, however i notice that in the inspector window the animation size is 0, in a normal unity animation or inported fbx dae etc this would mean that the anim isn't correctly attached to your part or it contains no pertinent information, I also note that the animator window has no named animation loaded or selected. Did you actually animate the object using the animator window? If so i would have expected to see the animation curves and named transforms etc when you game object/model is selected. does the anmiation run properly in unity?. Is there, a particular reason you chose this form of animation rather than the usual method? Im guessing that the base would be fixed and the heatshield expands out from the fixed base, why couldn't you just scale the heatshield to simulate inflation/deployment? I know this works as I have a couple of huge animated heat shields for my colony ships mod and they work really well animated as I described.

Tip if you export from blender/max using fbx it can scale the object 0.01 (tiny) to avoid theses issues use dae, that will use the existing scale unmodified The model size can be altered by checking the model import settings in the inspector window of unity, simply change scale from 0.01 to 1. Congrats on your first part, i remember making my first game asset it was a such a buzzthen and still have a buzz everytime it all goes to plan. This is certainly a good place to get help with any issues you may have .

You shouldn't need a plugin as all you are doing is making and animation, which can be controlled in game using generic animation module or one of the excellent third party plugins already available which allow for advanced animation control (Firespitter etc) . Although not a Blender user(it melts my mind) animating as you require in any other 3d software is quite simple, A google search for blender animation tutorial brings up hundreds of how to videos, I reckon most people on here learned how to animate this way, i know I did. Once you have the animation done to your satisfaction, just export to unity in the normal way, a note however, unity 4 can be a bit buggy with animations so I suggest only using unity 3 for KSP, although it's really only emissive anims that are buggy, it'll be easier to learn if you stick to one version. The attachment points shouldn't be a problem unless the face that the node is attached to is animated, normally just set it up exactly as you would a fuel tanks nodes

HI, first I've got to say congrats for attempting to make a workable failure sytem, a feature thats been a regular request ssince the early days of KSP. Next well by trade I'm a multi skilled engineer, as such part of me hates this mod and part of me loves it. I'm sure other engineering types have come across the wierd, if you stand and watch it, it'll perform faultlessly, but the moment you turn your back it all turns to %$£^. Now back on topic in my job many machine and vessel operators have basic skills to repair their faulty machinery, But and it's a big but, it's not the same level of repair in most cases that can be performed by an experienced and trained specialist, and planned preventative maintenance is a part of every engineers life. so if it's possible within the confines of your code, perhaps the average dumb kerbal could wrap a broken antenna with gaffer tape or apply a composite patch to a damaged tank, as such such repairs would restore functionallity, a get you home type bodge, but these repairs would be of a lower standard with less durability than a Jeb style fix, even with communication the standard of repair would be restricted within that kerbals understanding of the sytems or structures involved. I know this as I have many times diagnosed faults on vessels at sea while I was sitting in front of a PC in the office, and in reality sometimes you just can't win, the parts to repair aren't available on site to carry out the repair or the repair is way above the comfort zone of the operator (this is the part of this mod that I hate btw) so they just limp on at 5knots emergency speed until an engineer can get to the site. Now I've laid this out , it may be fiendishly difficult to accomplish, and brings us back to the believable or realsitic discussion, is it believable that average kerbal can bodge anything, yes, but 100% repair? nope, it's not really believable or anywhere close to reality . Which is of course why space agencies have specialists. Hope i've not rambled on too much and you get the general idea of what i'm on about. Spanner.

Heres a pic with dimensions of Squads command seat hope this helps, plus a pic of the seats i make for my IVA stuff, the dimensions of mine are approx 0.3Mseat base, 0.5m seat back the rest is a style choice. Once i have something that worked though i tend to reuse it over and over again in most IVA's the joy of unity being that as long as its somewhere close in your modelling you can mess around with the scale etc to your hearts content. A kerbal analog block is always useful though, I find that 0.75M x 0.3M x 0.3M is close enough for me.

Have you checked out THIS POST a lot of the info may be outdated but the basics of unity are there and still current

Most animations apart from emissives are usually done in the 3d modelling application rather than unity, it is s possible to make an anim from scratch in unity but it's a lot easier in blender, max , maya or whatever modelling tools you intend to use, and if you get it right in the modelling the unity part and part tools is easy, . There are hundreds of animation tutorials on you tube and others, thats how i got to grips with animation

If you are using unity 4 you'll have a horrible time with emissive animations, I had same issue, only way I resolved it was by getting an earlier Unity 3 install and doing all emissive anims from there, in fact it's a lot easier to do all anims in unity 3 although the curve editor can be a fiddly thing

H , I do large stuff as well so frequently run into the 255 polygon convex hull problem, I usually deal with it by simplifying the mesh or the collider, you can generally make a collider roughly the right shape with a lower poly count , in your modelling software, A snag however is that the lower the polycount on the collider the less it conforms to your model shape, in the case of large cylinders and objects like yours is that parts will seem to be placed below the object surface in VAB/SPH , The only other option is to reduce the amount of individual elements you cut the original model into, but you then lose some functionality. With your model I'd be tempted to see if was possible to assemble quarters in the VAB/SPH, as a last resort you can miss out colliders that are not important, i do this all the time, if its just deco and out of the way, and wont affect the intended use, or make for wierd playability , like walking through walls. You prob have worked all this out anyway by now, but you aren't alone in having theses probs

YAY thanks chaps that did it, seems that 3ds max adds an extra transform when exporting multi part objects via fbx removing that got it all working

Me again, thanks for the reply, checked my cfg and it's all good, no case errors that i can see, I compared my cfg to one from the pack and it's the same 'cept for the names of course, had another go at it this morning, messed around with transforms and hierarchy (parent/child etc) and the results are exactly the same, It's as though it's moving the mesh collider but not the mesh, I did try removing any default animation and/or animate physics component that was default added by unity but still the same results, Couple of pics below 1 showing before and after translation and the other the unity layout, any further input welcomed, cheers PS checked both logs and there are no related errors I thought posting the cfg may help also so here that is, PART { // --- general parameters --- name = HydraulicRam module = Part author = r4m0n (code) ||Sirkut (code) SMSE (model) // --- asset parameters --- mesh = model.mu scale = 1 rescaleFactor = 1 // --- node definitions --- node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.0002, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0 node_stack_top = 0.0, 2.013642, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0 // --- editor parameters --- TechRequired = advConstruction entryCost = 0 cost = 100 category = Utility subcategory = 0 title = HydraulicRam manufacturer = SMSE FluidPower description = Hydraulic Cylinder. Pushes stuff away. Right? // attachment rules: stack, srfAttach, allowStack, allowSrfAttach, allowCollision attachRules = 1,0,1,0,0 // --- standard part parameters --- mass = 0.2 dragModelType = default maximum_drag = 0.2 minimum_drag = 0.2 angularDrag = 2 crashTolerance = 15 maxTemp = 3000 breakingForce = 999 breakingTorque = 999 MODULE { name = MuMechToggle translateJoint = True translateAxis = 0, -1, 0 keyTranslateSpeed = 0.30 translateLimits = True translateMin = 0 translateMax = 1.8 stepIncrement = 0.01 translateLimitsRevertKey = False jointSpring = 0 jointDamping = 0 onActivate = False translateKey = revTranslateKey = fixedMesh = B invertSymmetry = False servoName = New Cylinder motorSndPath = MagicSmokeIndustries/Sounds/infernalRoboticMotor // Motor loop sound path } }

Hi , Thanks for the pointers, I get that its painfully simple to do and was quite prepared to kick it around until it works but I'm still kicking after 3hours, and that leads me to believe I'm doing something stupid or am missing something, I could also be having a senior moment The issue, made a simple ram, initially it was more complex but I've stripped the extra parts off just in case it was those causing the wierdness, the problem is that the whole object moves, even though i've tried setting both cylinder and base to be the fixedmesh it makes no difference, the whole object piston and cylinder translates instead of just the piston( named Base as per your tut) heres a piccy , erm, do both parts have a convex mesh collider, should the parts have an empty Game Object transform in unity? any clues would be helpfull , going to put it away now and go and do something I know i can make work Cheers in advance

Hi, diifficult to work out the orientation from the pic But if that visible transform is the origin/pivot for your interior then it's completely different to the way i set up my IVA's I've moved the exterior from over the interior for clarity of view you can clearly see the alignment, this alignment is set before importing to unity. AS for the internal camera transforms I dont use them as i found that it didnt matter where i put them the camera's always at the same distance, it may have been a requirement of earlier releases but it now works quite well without them INTERNAL { name = DockPodInternal MODULE { name = InternalSeat seatTransformName = Seat1 allowCrewHelmet = false } MODULE { name = InternalSeat seatTransformName = Seat2 allowCrewHelmet = false } MODULE { name = InternalSeat seatTransformName = Seat3 allowCrewHelmet = false } MODULE { name = InternalCameraSwitch colliderTransformName = Window1FocusPoint cameraTransformName = Window1EyeTransform } etc etc Gets you this

I have the actual seats themselves on the kerbal layer and have a separate game object for ex, named Seat1 or whatever for the seat transform and this transform is in the default layer, my face is begining to match match Bills but without the tash. What is the range of the lights set at?, as i noticed just while fiddling that it makes a huge diff to what does and doesn't get illuminated, i leave mine at default which is.... 10, just checked

pretty baffeled then I've just checked my last IVA opened unity up just for you and my set up is as above, erm are your seat transforms on Default layer ?

Hey , it's one of those things that i just do and forget to mention, anything i want illuminated has to be in the Internal space layer , layer 20, and anything that you want to see in the camera , lemme get a pic hang on, has to be in the Kerbals layer , layer 16, so the hull and consoles are all in the Internal Space layer and the computers etc visible in the camera are all in the Kerbals layer