hoojiwana

If you want to make use of the updated part modules that almost all of the stock parts use then you will need to set them up in Unity. Things like engines, RCS, fairings, solar panels, wheels, lights etc. all need to be set up in Unity and then exported with Part Tools. Somebody (I forget who) was working on a plugin for Blender that allows you to export mu files straight from that, but I never tried it out myself. You can change the mesh that a Mesh Collider will use. In the image below, where it says "resistocollider" that is a custom mesh for one of my parts. The mesh collider component is still on the 3D model, I just changed the mesh it uses to a simple 12 sided cylinder rather than having Unity figure out a new one, or adding in a new object and fiddling with removing the mesh renderer.

Updated links to work with the new forum URLs. If you find any that are still broken please post here or PM me, thanks!

You can give it a try, I'm not sure if ModuleEngines is implemented in such a way as to allow that to work. Experiment!

The stock ElectricCharge resource has no density, and ModuleEngines will not work without one of the propellents having mass. It's impossible to have an ElectricCharge-only engine because of that.

Haha, glad you like it guys. I just did a very minor update that slightly changed the sounds on the two new little engines, hopefully they're slightly less annoying now. The monopropellent engines use the same sound as the Arcjets from Electric Engines, and thats essentially just the jet engine noise with the high pitch section removed.

I guess it's my turn now, and I know exactly what to add to that! 25 parts right? I think I can squeeze something in that.

Stockalike 0.7 is now available on Spaceport and includes some new probe scale parts. I've also cut the unnessecary folder from the download, thanks to Gaius for pointing that out.

Thanks for pointing that out, future releases will have a better folder structure, as well as improved installation instructions. Stockalike has no plugin dependencies or clashes with other mods that I know of. Could a post a screenshot of the full folder layout of your installation please? Below is what it should look like, ignore the green ticks, thats Dropbox. Hmm, the indentation could potentially be removed, but generally the parts intended to fit on it are ones that would completely cover the indentation anyway, since they can only be stack attached.

If it does work I don't know of any mod that currently uses it. Either no one has figured out how to get the effect working in game, or it simply isn't possible right now. If you want custom engine particles, you would have to use a plugin for it. The nuclear engines in LLL are just using a fancy combination of existing stock effects, if I remember right. Emissives don't illuminate anything around them, you need to add a light in Unity and the animation to control that light. Any part could have a light, assuming you don't hit some animation limit or similar. What do you mean by this? People using smooth shading but not using edge-splits or smoothing groups, or something else? I'm not sure about memory usage, but high poly parts don't cause much of a performance hit. The biggest problem comes from having complex physics colliders, something fairly easily solved by making a basic shape to use as your collider, or even using a box collider.

For today's progress update, I've got this picture here: A small radial decoupler and a small radial stack extender, both of which use the left over space on the existing stack extenders texture, so there will be minimal extra memory used. Continuing the trend of memory optimisation, I completely redid the textures for all the RCS parts and they are now on a single texture as well. That texture has a bit of room left over on it so if you have any suggestions I'm all ears. Thanks, I went with the thrust dependent emissive rather than heat dependent as a stand in for the blue flames that would be along the spike sides. Thanks! My recent parts have been much higher quality due to better UV unwrapping and my new tablet. Much easier than trying to do anything with just a mouse, and the textures come out looking far better for it as well.

Stockalike 0.6 is now available on Spaceport! I decided to release it without the 0.625m propellent tanks since I was taking so long! Well you can still use the nozzle section, and rebuild a new casing and mount for it. Yep, the MPD's are going to be pretty big, though how long I don't know just yet. The nuclear reactors and solar panel balancing, well I don't really know. How I compare electrical generators is mass compared to power output. The nuclear reactors will probably end up being worse than solar panels everywhere except past Dres. As for the Cutter ISP, go and try it out! It's pretty great for 1.25m booster stages I find.

Has that model and/or texture just been lifted wholesale from another source?

It's your engine, you keep it and make it your own. MPD's are a rare thing in KSP, so having a few more out there for people to choose from would be nice. As for how to improve it, give it a decent texture. Texturing a part can really bring it to life, and the more effort you put into that the better it will look. Even on simple low poly parts you can add a huge amount of detail with clever texturing. I wouldn't say my parts are a good example of this. B9 aerospace has loads of examples,the best of which is probably the S2 cockpit. Not planning to make any of the current EE engine types into 2.5m parts, or of making cluster engines for Stockalike.

So here's the finished engines next to what I based them on: Stats are done for them as well, using a similar TWR as the Stocklike linear RCS port (changed in SA 0.6) and the same ISP. All the monopropellent engines end up working pretty well, and far better than their abysmal ISP implies they will. If you're making a lander or short range orbital transfers, then they work pretty great for that. LFO engines are still superior for most things, and these are only a sidegrade at best! Thanks! Still not as high quality as KSPX though. Claira's parts look far more stock than mine do. There's a reason she was brought onto the team. Those things are planned for when I eventually update the PowerGeneration pack. The reason that update hasn't happened yet is threefold; I can't quite wrap my head around how solar panels work, balancing nuclear reactors is very difficult, and the tech tree stuff that was announced for 0.22 means I can try to fiddle with balance a little more easily! Indeed they could. B9 Aerospace uses (or used) ExsurgentEngineering plugin to do that. I've got an older version of B9 though, so things might be different now. Heh, certainly looks like how I might have done an MPD a couple of months ago. My design for them has always been slightly beyond what I'm capable of and I didn't want to try making them until I thought I might be able to do that design justice. I want to make the MPD's the centerpiece of the EE pack. Well, maybe not going that far, but I want to make something I can really be proud of. Making parts isn't a race either, especially when rushing something to "beat" someone else can have a severe impact upon the quality of your work. Look at stock textures and copy them! That's how I started out at least, fumbling about with a mouse, poor UV maps and no idea what I was doing. There's a huge increase in quality between the textures that will be coming out in future compared to what I have out already since I've been UV unwrapping things differently, and I invested in a tablet. I'll go over things in a bit more detail using the Cutter as an example, but take everything with a grain of salt, I barely know what I'm doing. If you compare my work to that of say helldivers, you can really see how much of an amateur I really am! Everything is done using many many layers, although I probably don't use them to their fullest potential. I tend to use a "fuzzy" brush for much of what I do with the tablet too. Step zero Examine related stock parts to see how they look. The idea here is to get a feel for how I should do the latter stages, as well as taking the same colours for use, like the orange paint used on Rockomax parts, or the shade of yellow some pipes use. Step one After UV unwrap, the first thing I do is to play around with block colours, getting the shades as close to the stock ones as I can manage. I also move colours around, seeing what works where. If you compare the first version of the Cutter to it's current iteration, you can see the pipe was originally dull flat grey and the orange was too bright. I think changing those really improves the look of it, and I hope you do as well! Step two Edge highlights! If you look at the stock parts, you see the edges of parts are a different shade of colour. This makes the edges appear worn, and helps make each face distinct from those around it. If you look closely at Bac9's parts you can see he takes this to another level of detail. The stock artstyle isn't quite the same as that though, which is why I don't take my highlights that far. If anything my highlights are still wrong because they're too thin. Step three After highlights I start fiddling around with other layers on the main colour blocks. Stock parts almost never have a simple flat face of one colour, they all vary a little bit. I try to emulate this by taking the original colour and making it brighter and darker by a few steps and carefully applying that. On the Cutter you can see that I went around the edges of the orange, and added some strips to the flat grey face of the nozzle. Step four The hardest part to do, faking shading. The goal of this is to add depth to the part by carefully darkening places that would be shaded almost all the time. Every change I make here I immediately go and see how it looks on the model in Blender, and I often totally scrap various areas in order to redo them. As you can see on the Cutter, there are areas that still don't look quite right. I also don't hand paint every part of these, sometimes it's easier to draw a straight line and blur it out. The 0.625m monopropellent rocket above uses this in a few places. Step five On top of everything else I add details, like the little warning sticker and the design that sits on the top that you don't see most of the time. Each detail usually takes a few steps of it's own, and almost always requires plenty of fiddling around to place right, or to get looking how I want it. As always, take design pointers from stock parts! Step six At the end of all that, I make a specular map of texture and stick that in the alpha channel of the one I'll use in Unity. If the part has an emissive, I'll do that at this stage, along with making a normal map if I feel the part could be improved with one.

What exactly is going wrong with it? The issue might not be in your config.

Try deleting all the Unity assets and reimport and rebuild the project. Sometimes redoing things can solve mystery problems like this.

What do they say if you right click on them? What does the debug menu (Alt+F2) say?

It's been a slow week on the parts modding front since I was fiddling with my contribution to the Kerbin City project. That and I had a week off so was enjoying some other games as well! There's been some interesting discussion on the KSP modders IRC about optimising part memory load, and there's an awful lot I can do with texture sharing on most of my parts that should help lower their memory footprint. If you want to see just how awful my memory optimisation currently is, go look at my RCS blocks. There is some texture sharing there, but I can easily get them all on one texture rather than the four they currently use. My newer parts are being made with texture sharing in mind, as well as simply having better textures overall since I now have a tablet to paint with rather than using my mouse! Right now the Cutter stats are as follows: [table=width: 350] [tr] [td]Mass[/td] [td]Thrust[/td] [td]ISP (Sea level)[/td] [td]ISP (Vacuum)[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]1.5[/td] [td]210[/td] [td]340[/td] [td]342[/td] [/tr] [/table] That puts it between the stock Aerospike and LV-TXX engines in effectiveness at sea level, though it is pretty much the worst inline engine for use in vacuum however due to the low ISP. At one point it actually had ISP that got lower as altitude increased, but that seemed too far from stock to go into a stockalike set! Not without some sort of plugin, as far as I'm aware. Yeah I've been looking at a few plugins that might be able to do it. Firespitter is currently my favoured option since I'd be allowed to chop out the modules I want and recompile them. Thanks, but my parts are nowhere near as high quality as KSPX.

The materials limit is personal materials. So you can use the shared ones and they won't impact on your limit.

It looks cool yes, but I'm concerned about the potential number of materials, the poly count and how complicated your collision meshes are going to be. You might want to go back and try to optimise things, especially from the point of view of colliders.

They're residential, not really the place for company logos. Being residential, they have an awful lot of room available as well! Each one has 704 windows, making 5632 in total. I tried them out with everything using a mesh collider and I've encountered no real framerate drop, so they might be good to go as they are. I have no idea how to do the ground plot for them, there's room for some roads but I'm not really sure I want to use the space for that. I might stick a park in the middle instead or something using those plants nothke has mentioned.

How complicated should I make the colliders? Because it could probably be done with 3/4 box colliders per building at the simplest. At the most complicated it would be 8 mesh colliders and 12 box colliders per building.

3 personal material limit stopped my initial design of this since I have my own roof texture, so the shared concrete material will have to do for the body of the building. Now to arrange a bunch of these and some other things to go with them!

I don't recommend using my RTG's since they are literally just multiples of the stock one in their stats. As others have said, use solar panels. RTG mass is too high to be of efficient use on ion probes.

That cannot be done with the stock RCS system without using a very inelegant solution with multiple generators and things on the part. That's not something I want to do. It's exactly as Nutter said, it needs a plugin to work. You're almost right. I used the MODEL{} tags since the RCS blocks share textures, but the scale was incorrect. That has been fixed on my version and so will be fixed come the update. If you want them fixed now, just change the scale = 1.0, 1.0, 1.0 to scale = 1.25, 1.25, 1.25. Here's some WIP pics; First here's the new Cutter (on the bottom), since I wasn't happy with the old ones shape (on the top); And a gif showing the various stages of the MP engine. I might redo some of this part, I'm not sure.