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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!

We can't see your screenshot, sorry. Try to upload it to imgur.com

Shader loading is one of those rare things where "Unity not us :^)" can be said unironically, so nope, I doubt that. Nope, they are automatically included by Unity into any build containing scenes using those shaders, so no special Squad-side system for loading them exists at the moment, afaik. They are just there in the game. Their own game never needs that system as they have full control over builds themselves and require no sideloading. And if Asset Bundles indeed work, then there is no need for a system like that anyway on the modding scene side either.

I don't think so. The cause for removal was the fact that this constructor was initially created with fixed function shaders in mind and the fact that FFS support is being removed, yes - but the string-based constructor is removed entirely, as far as I understand. It makes no difference what you actually intend to pass into the string when string-based constructor is removed.

Size has absolutely nothing to do with performance impact and all HX parts use just one texture, so their impact is equal to one janky shuttle part. If HX will be removed from the package, it won't happen for that particular reason.

I'll update the AVC and remove the warning on Kerbalstuff then, thanks.

Mike (Mu) suggested that using AssetBundles can be a workaround. They should not be locked behind the Pro license in Unity 5.x in contrast with 4.x, so any modder might be able to build them with a Unity Editor and it might be worth to start trying them out. http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/BuildingAssetBundles5x.html

By the way, not sure how much of problem would that pose for you and rbray, but it looks like Unity plans to deprecate the Material object constructor with a shader source argument, which will render an approach used to sideload shaders from plaintext library resources used by many mods right now impossible. Material constructors will only accept Material references or Shader references going forward, and a string-based Shader constructor doesn't exist either. Not sure how to work around that. http://aras-p.info/blog/2015/04/27/optimizing-unity-renderer-3-fixed-function-removal/ As far as I understand, it's just marked as obsolete at the moment but still works on Unity 5.1, but it won't anymore once 5.2 lands. This spells trouble for any shader mod should KSP move to that release. There might be a way to load Assets containing Shaders as an alternative, but I never looked at it before. Asset Bundles were a Pro feature before, if I'm not mistaken, but with Unity 5 unlocking all previously Pro-only features, it's worth a look

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/05/28/atmospheric-scattering-in-the-blacksmith/ Unity released neat free asset showcasing their new implementation of atmospheric scattering with occlusion, might be useful as a reference in the future.

Uh-oh, looks like some engines will need to be rebalanced in 1.0.3 again due to changes there. @blowfish, I have given Mario write access to KSP_Plugins repo with the switcher plugin, thanks!

Okay, I have some unforeseen issues at work and unfortunately I'll have to spend most of my time there in a crunch until we ship our project on June 20th. New MK1 and MK2 parts along with new switcher plugin are probably delayed until then. In the meantime I'll appreciate if someone will test the files I have posted earlier and report any issues via PM or here in the thread. The parts included there have almost final art, but the plugin itself is in verbose logging mode, so expect some minor FPS drops from the strings being constructed - on the bright side, logs should contain enough information for me to pinpoint sources of issues should you encounter any.

Stock has no proper part interaction and stuff like wing occlusion, and B9 is mostly about building huge crafts so yeeeeah, I can't really recommend stock. It technically works and things technically fly, but not always like you expect them to.

I forgot to mention that in the changelog, but CrossfeedEnabler was updated to the latest version in 0.40. Just mentioning in case it will turn out to be relevant later.

Yay!

SketchUp. Okay, I use 3ds Max often too, but rarely for modeling from scratch - basic lowpoly is usually always imported from SketchUp. On top of that: UVLayout for UVW mapping (godlike tool that boosted my productivity by an order of magnitude) and SketchUV plugin for moving parts of my mesh between SketchUp and UVLayout XNormal for bakes from one mesh to another Knald for AO/normal/concavity generation from heightmaps and for mesh AO Handplane for converting object space normal maps into tangent spaces of different engines Quixel Suite for turning bakes into completed maps

Whoops, never realized ferram4 is so slow with release versions

Version 0.40 Includes all changes from the maintenance fork by Crzyrndm (lots of bugfixes and improvements to the code) Full compatibility with KSP 1.0.2 Full compatibility with development version of FAR 0.15.x Aerodynamics calculations no longer restart on every slider change, editor performance is improved New stock-alike texture (old texture is available optionally) Textures converted to .dds Improved shader and material settings

Alright, I have improved the default material settings to be exactly in line with stock parts (in terms of shininess and specular color) and changed gloss output of the shader to generate a specular map consistent with stock specular maps on the fly, using some tricks. Results look like this: This fixes the issue of wings becoming washed out and overly bright under lighting in comparison to other parts. - - - Updated - - - Crzyrndm, sounds great, thanks for fixing it so fast! To keep the things on your side in sync, can you replace the two following lines in your WingProcedural.cs? private float materialPropertyShininess = 0.4f; // old value: 0.078125f private Color materialPropertySpecular = new Color (0.62109375f, 0.62109375f, 0.62109375f, 1.0f); // old values: 0.5f, 0.5f, 0.5f, 1.0f I'll upload new textures and SpecularLayered to the repo shortly.

Definitely replace heat with emissive module, emissive maps were authored to visualize working engine state, not to visualize overheat - old heat mechanics just happened to shift the animation high up very fast, but fundamentally weren't really doing the intended thing.