InfiniteDice

Bill had a heavy breakfast. eeek! Finally an engine with a built in gun! I'm working on updating ICE and it's gonna come packin!

Exactly. ICE engines are just an engine, for a vehicle you'll need an engine part, a transmission part (which will sit more like a differential) then the wheels. I might require all these be connected by drive shafts (half-shafts, etc) in order to operate. .......................................................................................Wheel ...........................................................................................| ........................................................................................shaft ............................................................................................| Engine -------------------- Shaft --------------------------- transmission ............................................................................................| ........................................................................................shaft ...........................................................................................| .......................................................................................Wheel This is all just talk, not sure how exactly I'll want it to operate yet. It's mostly already working, just haven't really added the driveshafts yet. There will be very large and heavy diesels for ships that output to a prop.

Hi Guys, just a quick note... I'm switching my attention to ICE again! My first priority will be getting the needed code in to support Skillful! This shouldn't take long, I'll then be looking at adding the following things: 1) more custom FX! backfires, smoke, sparks.... fuel leak trails... etc! 2) vehicle Diesel engines, also an internal variant for ships! - this means transmissions and driveshafts... and some ATV wheels! 3) Possibly another aircraft engine type likely an inline engine! That's all for now! ID.

Nothing but fixes for a bit... I'm changing over to ICE to get it up to date for Skillful, after that the Naval Aircraft pack. I've delayed that long enough There will likely be an Skillful r1.5 release - adding a few things 1) the limpet mines that used to be in BoatParts 2) air/ship deployed depth charges, 3) an artillery piece 88mm that can be used as artillery and/or anti-aircraft artillery. Possibly a kerbal dropped satchel charge for covert ops! - That's about it. - Look for this after the ICE update sometime. Skillful R2 will have the space oriented weapons. - Likely not starting this till after Naval Aircraft is out.

It really depends what made the fire. At the moment all the fires are broken down to two effects smallfire or largefire. But I plan on making these fires scale depending on the power of the explosion... or if there are 3 small fires within x metres... it will scale to one larger fire. Secondly... in some cases you have 2 or more fires in one general location, and the heat compounds. Rarely do I see heat affecting things 500m away, did you drop an incendiary tallboy or something? - - - Updated - - - I'd just leave those out, they are either depreciated or soon will be.

It's out guys! Post any issues here, above all... have fun!

1) For now yes that's the order. - Things are subject to change - as with all things. 2) Hard coded.

^ | | | I update that every day!

Sounds interesting, wood, hardwood, aluminum, aluminum2, lightsteel, hardenedalloys, steelarmour, compositearmour - for now wood is of course weakest and should be used for sensitive things like lights which might break easy,, or snjos ww1 aircraft parts aluminum is parts which rely on a light aluminum skin to perform their function like aircraft wings and normal fuselage. aluminum2 is a reinforced structural aluminum with stronger bulkheads, cockpits and some fuel tanks lightsteel is generally for steel parts aka mild steel, landing gears, ship hulls etc. hardenedalloys are for engines, or other parts made for specialized functions that are would require the extra expense. steelarmour is typical hardened steel, battleships, normal tanks, armour plates etc. compositearmour is the best combination of special steels, alloys, ceramics, and any other materials. The most high tech modern tank would use this. There will be reactionary code created, wherein choosing a harder material will increase the mass and cost of the part accordingly. Can't have compositearmour ww1 bi-planes flying around can we?

Lol, rest assured I haven't stopped on this, in fact I hit some snags and then had to go back to testing. I also had to fix some code with Skillful adding a new torpedo, it uses the same model as the Type 91 but is the American Mark 14. This torpedo is propelled, so it can be launched from a ship or sub, it has a gyro to maintain the fired heading, so nothing fancy but it seems to be working as intended. When??? Soon very soon I need to clear this out so I can get back to my aircraft parts. Whats new? Lots. I'll mention most of it when I post the update. Does it have the warship? No... that's on hold for the full R5 release.

AIM-120 would be radar guided. But yeah, there surely is room to expand! The rocket/missile hardpoint will have a totally different model eventually, I just scaled the ordnance hp for simplicity and to save some time. One thing I did add in testing is a second torpedo.. this one is propelled for shooting off the side of a ship or launching from a sub, I'm testing it alongside the boatparts update now. I'll see what I can do to get more variety in the next update. Really what I do is pick a hole, and then find a weapon to add to fill that gap, and write the code in to make it happen. Heat seeking is by far the most expensive of the lot in terms of performance loss, next would be the CIWS.

The Zephyrs were meant to be A-G missiles, you're right they are not terribly fast. The Kerbenders should do what you need... I'm wondering how you were firing them. They should track a forward heat source, if they are having issues I could give them a secordary air-air mode that will make them behave slightly different if launched while flying.

Module manager can't be used, the first version of Skillful I wrote my own module that injected the module on all parts in the game at load time... essentially using the same method as module manager (KSPAddon). The issue with that is none of the parts will then save the persistent values that skillful needs to keep track of to know what was damaged on the last mission/flight. Then I made my own part save code that wrote a save file for the parts so they could re-load all that persistent data.... it worked for the most part but was really buggy and all that writing to disk slows the game down a bit. I decided to tank that because of all the issues and just make it cfg edits. Adding the 5 lines for each part will not prevent the use of module manager for other things, nor will it do anything horrible if you decided to remove the skillful directory, if it doesn't find the module's dll then it simply doesn't run the code for that module. Hopefully more part-mod authors will jump on board and just add the 5 lines required by skillful to track any damage. Plugin Authors can also msg me and I'll tell them what to add to allow for their custom modules to react to the parts skillful damage state. Snjo is doing this for firespitter, and there are a few others that are interested. Thanks for the comments guys. Hey when you get a moment go thumbs up SKillful on Curse, I have 0 thumbs and over 500 downloads! Later!

I do have some limits yes. I'll review the conditions in the next release. The issue is, nobody can afford 30 particle effects for burning parts... so there has to be a limit to the effects. What I might try doing is fx grouping/scaling. So if there are x number of small fires in x proximity, then make it one effect and scale it larger. And so on...

They can at times hit your own vessel and cause a fire. Sometimes you don't notice it and the heat takes a while to build up till it reaches critical. Heat drops exponentially with range, so that can't be it. To test. Fire an incendiary tank or battleship round at the ground, then slowly drive up to the fire. You can observe how the parts facing the fire are super hot the closer they get. Parts inside or at the back of the vessel will remain cooler. You're welcome I'm glad you like it.

Are you saying the wheels just automatically heat to 3000 on launch? I haven't seen that before. Some times near misses cause ground fires that are actually under the terrain level slightly, this could cause it.

If you remove the turret and toss a damned robotics rotator on the hull then pop the turret on that, you can then add armour panels/guns to the turret body... (the body not the turret barrel). That's a LOT of armour parts man! LOL

10-4 that.

Yes and soon. Tonight likely.

Skillful has changed... as I mentioned before - It NO LONGER adds the module to every part. You need to unzip the skillfulmanager.bat and run that, there is a menu option in it to edit all the stock part cfg's to allow for the damage system to operate. This has to be done there is no way around it. If for any reason the bat doesn't work, you'll need to manually copy over the cfgs included with the mod OVER the original cfg's. Yes this is a pain, but doing things the other way had far more issues than it was worth. Once you have Skillful applied to all the parts, it's smooth sailing after that (keeps fingers crossed, holds breath and knocks on wood). Post your findings here. Thanks again!

It's up on Curse for download guys - It's just pending approval, so check there for it. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

The Skillful update is almost ready to be kicked out the door! Gone is the vessel falls apart issue. Also expect better frame-rates. I'm looking at an issue with procedural wings support... once that is sorted or deemed non-fixable I'll release.

Well I tried sepratrons on decouplers... lol I dropped two pairs, in two groups (total of 4) and they seemed to deflect the incoming missiles. So that works! I have tweaked the code more, built in some speed relative triggers and it seems to have all but eliminated fly-bys and 180's... not saying it can't happen... probably will 10% of the time but I think that's acceptable, Generally the missile flies towards the target, then once at a certain range it will begin to regulate it's thrust to + match it's closing speed within a specified range. The faster the target the more closing speed it has. Lastly I've updated the auto firing so it now arms the next missile on the ship/vessel. Example: If you place 4 Kerbenders on the ship and set 1 to guard, once that missile fires it will wait 7 seconds then arm another of the 3 remaining missiles. It does this until all missiles have been fired. Just a side note: these are short range defensive missiles - the guard mode for them works only if the vessel is uncontrolled and when a target of the opposite team flies within 500m. To use manually you can place on any vessel and fire as a normal missile... this missile doesn't radar target lock... it heat locks, so you'll need to fire it in the direction where something is a little hotter than ambient air temperature. The missile does look forward so it shouldn't double back on the firing aircraft.

Cool reference. IRL there are 'loiter' missiles that will basically fly a circle till it picks up a signal... these tend to be the radar-homing or HARM anti-radiation missiles, they can also remember the last known position and be programmed to strike that location. Modern torpedoes also can behave the same way.