hoojiwana

Exactly as NecroBones said. I use the Nvidia tools for Photoshop to make DDS files rather than DDS4KSP since I don't like the texture degradation that happens due to the multiple compressions/conversions that occur otherwise, it's not a big issue though. It doesn't particularly matter how you make the file, as long as the DDS has the same filename as the MBM. I seem to remember hearing somewhere here that if you export from Unity as anything other than MBM, the DDS file that replaces it may not be picked up right by the game. Not entirely sure if that's just something I'm misremembering though.

That's a good idea, I won't make such a change just yet since I prefer the completely smooth look rather than having that lip stick out from the stack where every heat shield is. I might try increasing the depth the shoulder on the current heat shield models to make that thin edge look a bit chunkier. In other news:

I'm a bit hesitant to work on engines, I'm working on the assumption that Porkjet is going to be doing those first for stock since they arguably need the most attention. That's why I stopped doing things from the start of the tree and am now doing command pods and such. I may still do some of those engines I dislike the most, the Poodle and Nerv I don't particularly like having to look at. The stack decouplers will be in the next version. I'm not planning to do IVAs right now. I don't use IVA myself very much, individually they take a long time to do and with 1.1 part tools the workflow will change for them. Thanks! I'm not going to be moving the hatch back, it made no sense where it was before. The sharp edge was something I was going back and forth on, but I stuck with it because now the pod doesn't look out of place when it's attached to anything other than a heat shield. The texture on the underside was made with 1.25m attachments in mind, but the triangle pattern may make it look too much like it shouldn't be exposed to space. The Mk2 Lander Can I'm working on has the same sort of issue so I may tone down that underside texture somewhat. The heat shield shape for the 1.25m and 2.5m looks like it was made specifically to fit the shapes of the Mk1 and Mk1-2 pods. They have sunken attach nodes on the top which means they clip through practically anything else you want to attach to them that isn't oddly shaped, including service bays, fuel tanks, whatever else a player might want to protect on whatever crazy design they have. They were also slightly oversized to be able to fit the shoulder of the heatshield over the rim of the pods, perfectly fine from a realism point of view but it was ugly and didn't fit the standard diameter of other parts. That's why I changed the shape, to better fit the standard diameters and the flat ends of the vast majority of parts. I do agree they may be too slim, though that's a side effect of the shoulder being lopped in half. Other parts need to be made to fit the shape of the stock shields because the stock shields are made to fit an odd shape. It's not a great situation, but it comes down to the Mk1 and Mk1-2 pod models being old, odd and not very well made. All the other problems stem from working around that.

I think you've got too many magnet rings and the shape and size isn't quite right. It looks like the magnets are where you want the nozzle to be, but the magnetic field around them is where it'll actually be and that can be differently shaped to the physical nozzle. You could try taking out the 2nd and 4th rings, shuffling the spacing between the rings a bit, and reshape the whole thing to be more conic and a little wider. Possibly replace the little cooled nozzle throat with another ring as well, it goes against the idea that the plasma is too hot to contain with a physical nozzle.

It's update time! As usual for my stuff, check the OP for actual download links, KerbalStuff and Curseforge downloads coming shortly. 0.2 Changelog:

Gorgeous emissives!

That's exactly what I was going for! I actually went and checked the hatch size against others already in KSP, you can't fit a Kerbals helmet through most of them. There are a few hatch types in KSP; there's the Mk1 Pod hatch, the Mk 1-2 Pod hatch, the lander can-style hatch (that's on a number of parts), the aircraft hatch (Mk1+Mk2 cockpits) and the Mk3 hatch. I'll be making a more generic hatch for the lander cans and station parts since those are all cylindrical. The Mk 1-2 is a tapered cylinder so the hatch ends up being a squashed shape so I already have to make a different type of hatch for it, so I went with something a little different and stuck that D shape on it. The handholds don't stand out too badly and the ladder has to run the full length of the pod anyway. I'll be redoing the heatshields since the stock ones (at least for Size1 and Size2) clip through the redone pods and need to be moved with the offset widget to look good. They're also wider than the standard diameter so they stick out. You can see both of these problems on the Mk1 Pod in @GregroxMuns post here, it's even worse on the Mk 1-2 Pod. I moved it to line up with literally every other hatch on the non-aircraft crewed parts, its the biggest problem on the pod.

This is neat! Nice to see the monopropellant engines being so widely used.

It's not final, just experimenting with something a little different, same with the circular hatches on the top and bottom (which you can see below). I'm not hugely fond of the circular hatch myself just yet but that may be because the grey surrounding it is totally unfinished. I think the round shape is a nice way to differentiate between aircraft cockpits and rocket command pods, but it may be unnecessary. The black was a touch too dark, and the previous screenshot lacked any of the highlights or shading to add some contrast, it fits a lot better when those are added. As before, this is unfinished:

An early look at a much requested part, the Mk 1-2 Pod! The black+white D shape between the windows is the relocated door, which lines up with the doors on the Size2 Lander Can, Science Lab etc. when stacked. Changes slated for the next version; New Mk1-2 Pod art New Size1 Nosecone art New Size1/2/3 Heatshield art Possibly new Size1/2 decoupler art Altered Mk1 Pod texture/emissive Altered Size0 Parachute model (more aerodynamic shape) No overriding drag cubes then, the values are close enough to stock that it shouldn't even be noticeable.

It was more a question in general about model-replacement drag cubes rather than then parachute specifically. I did do some quick and dirty tests of the parachute model to compare it with the stock one and it seemed like the canopy was providing roughly the same amount of drag when fully deployed. My version does provide a little bit more drag than the stock when partially deployed, I wouldn't go so far as to say its "cheating" to use it though. Are people okay with different drag? The differences will only be minor. Thanks! I noticed that as well, the stock heatshields are all a little bit wider than the parts they attach to, this is less obvious on the stock pod since its got a bulging bottom and the cone ends higher up than the attachment point. Good to know there's an easy workaround for it though. I did make the canopy white/orange rather than white/yellow originally but switched it over to better match the stock colouring, it is a lot less saturated though. I hear you both on the shape of the container itself, but what about the canopy? Drag cubes are based on the visible mesh, not the collider. Did you try out the SRB glow at higher response speeds? That orange tank comment is a bit controversial.

Here we go! Check out the new OP for a download link and other info. My MM-fu isn't the best but I think I've managed to make something workable that switches the stock parts over without breaking everything, could more experienced people give my patches a look over? My folder structure splits all the patches down into the individual parts that use them (for now), so it should be easy to see what does what. It's obvious but this probably isn't compatible with Vens Stock Revamp. Specific feedback/help wanted: Is the parachute canopy model/texture okay? It's fairly heavy on the polys (for such a simple part) to try to give it some better definition. SRB heat-glow effects currently can't go much beyond a dullish red. If this doesn't look hot enough to you, increase the response speed in the MM configs and let me know which you prefer. I have no idea how my method of replacement effects drag cubes. Does the game use the cubes from stock parts or those from the replacement models? Any other feedback or suggestions for future parts are always welcome!

I am so happy to finally be getting these parts in game! And (thanks to this wonderful communities excellent tutorials) the EVA hatch and ladder worked almost perfectly first time and the glow looks pretty spot on I think! You may not be able to see it but there is also a flag decal right above the window on the door. Does the text need replacing with something better do you think? So far it's just this pod as a standalone part for testing purposes. The RT-5/10 SRBs need a heat glow texture, the Size0 parachute needs an animation and perhaps some texture tweaks, and they all need exporting to the game for testing. Then its a matter of bundling the Porkalike Rapier, cooking up an MM config and doing a test release sometime this week. @GregroxMun the idea of colour-coding was mainly for containers since different engine manufacturers have different schemes and such as well. If you check out the redone Mk55 Thud in 1.0.5 it has orange paint on it to show it as being a Rockomax engine (at least I think that's what @Porkjet was going for). What do people think of that idea? There's already arguments that it may end up being confusing since people familiar with RLA Stockalike tend to associate blue with monopropellant engines despite only two of them using it. @Beano and @Starbuckminsterfullerton fear not, I won't be using yellow hazard stripes anywhere since they are ugly. Decouplers/separators will only have the little arrows that show which way they separate.

For those who just wanted something to match the updated spaceplane parts in 1.0.5 without anything else. Plus I could release it earlier if its by itself. Thanks! I did tick the box to put it on CKAN when I uploaded to KerbalStuff, so hopefully its on there.

Cheers, updates going through now to fix this. Not quite sure how that model.mu sneaked its way in there since my install didn't have it in the folder. Apparently the game will load a .mu if its the only one in the folder with a config even if not pointed to. You learn something new every day! EDIT: If anyone is wondering why I'm now also hosting on CurseForge, its because it just took more than 40 minutes to upload the file to KerbalStuff, and less than 10 for a moderator on Curse to approve the 13.3 file.

A re-imagining of the stock R.A.P.I.E.R. engine, with brand new art to match the fantastic style @Porkjet has created. It's a separate part from the stock version, but it has the same stats and is the same size. Download from SpaceDock (1.2) Download from CurseForge (1.2) Download from Dropbox (1.2) 1.2 Changelog 1.1a Changelog 1.1 Changelog This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Updated! Check the OP for download links, including (soon) CurseForge. Changelog I did a fair bit of fiddling with the heat glow effects on the engines (changed every single one), and I kinda guessed with the new part test contract configs, if you spot something with those that looks out of place I'd appreciate a heads up!

You can now download AB Launchers from CurseForge. Hopefully I've set up the page for the project correctly, this is the first thing I've ever uploaded there!

Updated! See the OP for download links. Changelog Let me know if there's anything funky with the engine heat glow animations or the part test contract generation. Thanks!

This is what fixed it! You have no idea how happy I am to have a solution to this, even if it is a little fiddly. Thankyou so so much!

EDIT : The solution can be found in @NecroBones post below. I'm having an issue with getting FXModuleAnimateThrottle to correctly animate an emissive animation on multiple meshes within a single part. The animation plays correctly on ONE mesh out of however many there are that have the animation component in Unity, mostly it seems to be the first mesh in the hierarchy. The incredibly frustrating thing is that all the stock engines that use this work completely fine, as does another mod part from a different author (the Zenit-style engine in AB Launchers that @Beale made). ModuleAnimateHeat also works completely fine on the exact same part(s). I have tried all sorts of crazy Unity hierarchies including copying exactly what the stock Rapier uses. I have updated my Unity client (up to 4.2.2) to see if that was causing issues. I reinstalled the part tools, I've tried renaming everything over and over to see if an underscore or not capitalising something was breaking it. I did find a related report on the bug tracker, but there are a number of stock parts that simply are not having this problem so I don't know how relevant it really is. This is driving me completely up the wall and I have no idea what to do about it, has anyone else seen this? Does anyone know a way to fix it, or am I going to be stuck with using ModuleAnimateHeat until 1.1 and new Part Tools come out and hopefully fixes this? Here's a few pictures to illustrate the problem:

Here you go! Just drag and drop right into your KSP install and overwrite anything it asks. The only things in the download are replacement .mu files for the two 45* blocks with slightly altered UV mapping that uses a different part of the same texture. Let me know if anything is wrong with it but it looked okay in my quick testing. @komodo you're right as well, the diamonds are to help differentiate the 45* from the regular blocks.

How well does this transfer in-game? Does the mu converter in Part Tools strip this data or does it show up alright? @Beale made a thread recently on a similar topic, there are some other options available there for those interested.

Luckily Bac9 posted it on Gamasutra as well.

I'm pretty sure everything works as it should. The only things really different is the part test module (which seems to be backwards compatible), the core heat for the RTG (the mini RTG is small enough this doesn't really matter) and the way engine emissives (heat glow) works. There's some difficulty with the emissive animations I'm having that need to be sorted out before I can do an update, but its not a desperately needed one.