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Afaik CKAN is reliant on KerbalStuff, which is now closed, so I wouldn't be surprised if nothing at all works there for a few coming days.

It's a bit more complicated than KerbPaint - to avoid breaking the material into hundreds of unique instances across the differently tweaked craft parts, I drive the shader without modifying any material properties. Instead, color comes from the vertices of the mesh itself. Specifically, UV2 and vertex colors are used to drive color, opacity and texture layers the shader will draw. I think I had an image with a breakdown of that somewhere in the thread.

1. Make sure your light textures have a normal amount of space used for opaque elements. A texture with a tiny white star in the middle and huge black area on 90% of the pixels will very, very quickly fade to black on lower mips. You can see my light FX texture on one of the screenshots from my Gamasutra.com article of the KSC update, I think. 2. I use 3 intersecting quads (or six intersecting quads if shader is one-sided), not one horizontal quad per light, which probably makes addition on lower mips remain visible for longer. 3. Not sure about the shader, I think I used two quads per plane, which meant the shader was one sided - so it probaby wasn't Particles-Add but was some of the transparent KSP shaders. 4. Not directly related to your question, but to prevent lights from looking really, really ugly on quad intersections and from grazing angles, ideally you should use a custom shader with a fresnel based fade. Ask Porkjet for the one I made some time ago. 5. Again, not directly related to your question, but avoid huge quads at all costs, because every single pixel touched by a transparent quad has to be redrawn again by the Unity renderer. If you have three quads visible in a frame and covering most of it, that means that Unity has to do three more expensive redraws of the whole frame, which is not good for performance (ever noticed how particles in KSP never grow beyond certain size no matter how close you zoom in? that's why). If you have a low number of lights and low polycount, it's even advisable not to use quads and to use more complex topology, closely hugging the edges of opaque areas on the texture (star-shaped and circle shaped N-gons for lights, for example). Same goes for models like trees, it's best to use a few more vertices than to leave a completely transparent area unused by the texture anyway. _______________________________ You know what, just write a simple plugin that will scale KerbinSide objects depending on the distance to the player. KSP is not using HDR rendering, so it's absolutely impossible to get realistic non-linear light appearance over various distances. Get the matter into your hands and scale objects directly.

I'm alive, just swamped with work lately with no free time to dedicate to KSP. I have sent some fixes to new MK2 parts over to blowfish some time ago, tho, so hopefully they are still coming in an update. Not planning any HX updates at the moment, tbh I'd completely scrap them and start over with a different approach to modular design if I had an option. Even if I liked the currently existing parts, IVAs are just insanely time consuming to author, so yeah, not gonna happen. I made a simple new part to make ascents with FAR a little bit more feasible, though - ejectable aerodynamic shield for the hangar pieces. Nothing special, but should help a bit.

@blackrack, @rbray89 The change to the Material constructor we have talked about earlier just went into the first Unity release (5.2.0b1). Next version of KSP is unlikely to use 5.2 as it's unlikely to leave the beta soon enough, but it's worth reminding I guess.

Thanks, will do!