Fengist

The short answer is, "I dunno and have no intent on fixing it if it doesn't." The long answer: I have stated this in the past a number of times. I am not a wealthy man. Truth be told, I barely survive at times. I never took up modding with the intent of earning a living doing so. I started modding because: I enjoyed playing KSP. I thot it was fun and learning a new language (C#) might come in handy. I thought I might be able to afford a cup of coffee knowing that someone who enjoyed my mods paid for it. Do those of you who don't mod realize just how cool this is? To drink a cup of coffee knowing someone... I dunno... in Albania maybe?... bought me this cup of coffee because they're currently having fun sailing around Laythe on boat parts I designed. None of those things apply any more. 1. I don't enjoy KSP any more because there's nothing to do. As far as I'm concerned the career mode missions are a pointless joke and sandbox offers no challenges any more. I still have not been to all of the planets or moons but I see no reason whatsoever to go to any of them any more. Once you get to those planets or moons, the game offers nothing in the way of motivation to stay there. And even the latest DLC offers nothing new. Squad assumes their game is still based on the fact that getting OFF Kerbin is the challenge. It is not. Not being bored stupid once you are off Kerbin is. 2. I am still far from being a master at C# but I see no reason to waste any more of my time learning it for KSP. Every single time that KSP comes out with a new patch, version, anything.... Squad seems intent on breaking every mod on the books. I realize that their code needs updating and as a result, some issues are going to pop up. But seriously, go back through these forums and look at all the busted mods that people got utterly fed up with fixing. And the ones they don't break they steal. Perfect example is the submarines for this mod. Infinite Dice gave me the code to make submarines work extremely well. I dressed up that code to make it even better, so that the deeper you went, the darker it got and the more 'pressure' built up. At the time, I had the only working submarine mod and Squad (Nathan Kell in particular) decided to screw with the way the underwater environment worked, thus specifically breaking my mod and stealing several of the ideas it incorporated in the process. And mine is far from being the only one. I've seen numerous ideas stolen from other modders and incorporated into KSP without so much as a 'screw you'. But it's not like I make a living off this mod anyway so, what's the problem? Right? 3. Again, I didn't do this for money, but let me be blunt. KSP draws intellectual gamers. It's a game of imagination. I know damned well there are rocket scientists, earning damned fine livings I might add, playing KSP and using my mods. Maritime Pack has been in the top 50 mods on Curse for years and has at times been in the top 10. It's still on page 3 of their listings even though I haven't touched it in years. Right now, it's sitting at almost 74,000 downloads. SEVENTY FOUR THOUSAND mind you and that doesn't count the 30,000+ downloaded off Kerbal-stuff. I've had SEVEN, I did not stutter, SEVEN people donate to Maritime Pack and the last one was years ago. NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON in the past 2 years has thot this mod worth a cup of coffee? I could stand on a street corner, hold up a sign that says, "Homeless KSP Modder, will code for food." and get a better return on my time investment. Strike 1. For a long time, I was modding even though I stopped having fun with KSP. I transferred the enjoyment of landing on planets, or docking to other ships into creating new things to play with. Everything else became boring and pointless. Strike 2. For a long time, I was modding even though I knew #2 existed. I dealt with it and realized I'd just have to fix my mods every time they busted them and that the potential existed for my mods to get incorporated into KSP and simply vanish. Strike 3. For a long time, I was modding even though there were 0 donations. I created new mods... several... thinking maybe I could get a donation or two out of those. Nothing. Not one penny in the past 2 years. A harsh fact, I ran out of coffee money a long time ago. I'm out. So long and thanks for all the fish.

Good idea. See the post above.

From the R&D Department - Mashed bugs! Before After And, as is the case with all my lights... you pick the color or select from a preset. And... they even blink The Details Ok, so this was just a bit more tricky than I imagined. When Slime Lights were requested I envisioned an emissive. Welll... there's one problem with emissives. Changing the color isn't all that easy as it's based on the texture. So, this took some behind the scenes trickery. Each of the parts is actually 3 parts. The base and 2 lenses. One lens is set to a diffuse shader and the other is set to an unlit shader. Depending on whether the light is on or off, the lens with the proper shader gets enabled and the other disabled. They all also have 1-3 point lights that match color with the lens so they have a slight glow. There will be 4 parts. A flat 3 section 1 meter slime light. A single section that's about .7 meters and two that have a working title of control slime lights. They're curved so they fit on most stock wings, rudders, etc. When? I'm putting in overtime hours this week so I don't have a lot of spare time to finish them up but hopefully within the week.

Well, I've never tried anything like this but I can imagine vessel.mainbody is going to be needed to find out which body is the dominant force and then vessel.gforce to get a vector 3 pointing toward the center of that mainbody. That should be a good starting place.

Glad you like em. More coming soonTM

Thanks. Took a quick look at his code and I see what he did. He basically shortened his default light range... by a LOT. For his purposes, creating an engine glow, that will work. He was casting it out to 40 meters. When he shortened it to 9 it solved his problem. All of my point lights (the glows) are well under 2m. The spotlights go out a LOT further so that method wouldn't work nearly as well for me. Hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, I'll get out the first hovercraft beta to the public and I can refocus on this a bit. I may have to come up with some creative solution that checks the orbit altitude, does a raycast to see if it strikes a planet and adjusts range based on that. Or, just use @wasml's idea and play with masking.

And, I just updated the OP. There's now a link to a website with gobs of rgb color values listed so you can create your own presets.

Glad you are amused by it. Most aggravating for a modder to have spotlights shine through things. Yes, and from what I understand I could also make a bat signal with that. I will look into that when I get back to this mod. Taking a short break and getting hovercraft working in MP. I hadn't thot about it because I haven't seen them before. I spent several years on aircraft carriers and don't even recall noticing them. But, just looking at what you provided it seems they'd be easy to reproduce. The only problem is other modders. Any time I make a really thin light there's a very good chance it'll get buried inside a part because the collision mesh and the actual surface of the part you see are in two very different locations. Placing the small marker lights on the tips of the stock wings is one really good example of that. Edit * Oh, I don't recall them because they didn't exist 25 years ago... duh... God getting old SUCKS!

Well... as far as I know, KSP doesn't have electric engines... stock that is. Now that being said, the sub engine is electric. But, it uses Firespitter to achieve that. So, is it a stock module? No. Could it be done? Yes. I will think on it. Mostly tho, the clipper parts are done and don't really plan on adding any new ones (a few too many irons in the fire.) What I do plan on adding next is hovercraft... and it will definitely have an electric engine at some point not long after release. Speaking of hovercraft, I could use a few more beta testers! https://discord.gg/DYhKQmb You can also check out some screenshots of @Stone Blue flying one around.

Ok, so now, for some really odd reason, the hovercraft I"m working on are being considered debris even with a pilot sitting inside. Any ideas what the root cause of this is? And yes, I do have: MODULE { name = ModuleCommand minimumCrew = 1 } in the pod's .cfg

Lol, but now I have an entirely different problem. If the vessel is hovering, it's not considered a vessel!??! If I change the scene to say the tracking station while it's hovering... it vanishes. And even if it's landed and I switch to the tracking station, I can't select fly. And... if it exit out of the tracking station again... it vanishes.

Well, you were right. While digging around last night I also stumbled upon the vessel situation and decided to play around with that today. While this isn't a perfect solution, it does work. And I'm sure I'll have to add in some code to handle splashed as well. public override void OnLoad(ConfigNode node) { Debug.Log("[FS Hover] Load"); if (HighLogic.LoadedSceneIsFlight) { HEngineDeactivate(); var partHeightQuery = new PartHeightQuery(float.MaxValue); int count = this.vessel.parts.Count; for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) { var p = this.vessel[i]; partHeightQuery.lowestOnParts.Add(p, float.MaxValue); Collider[] componentsInChildren = p.GetComponentsInChildren<Collider>(); int num = componentsInChildren.Length; for (int j = 0; j < num; j++) { Collider collider = componentsInChildren[j]; if (collider.enabled && collider.gameObject.layer != 21) { partHeightQuery.lowestPoint = Mathf.Min(partHeightQuery.lowestPoint, collider.bounds.min.y); partHeightQuery.lowestOnParts[p] = Mathf.Min(partHeightQuery.lowestOnParts[p], collider.bounds.min.y); } } } count = this.vessel.parts.Count; for (int k = 0; k < count; k++) this.vessel[k].SendMessage("OnPutToGround", partHeightQuery, SendMessageOptions.DontRequireReceiver); this.vessel.situation = Vessel.Situations.LANDED; base.vessel.Landed = true; base.vessel.landedAt = ""; } } The part of this that doesn't work as well as hoped is that it still falls through the terrain... for a second or two. Without this code, it falls through the terrain and then, it's put about 50 meters above it and falls back down again, usually ending in a minor disaster. With this code, it still initially falls through the terrain but then, it magically appears where it should. And, if saved in a hovering state, it's still hovering. To answer your question I have 2 partmodules, one for skirt sections and one for the engine, and one monobehavour. The monobehaviour is where all the lifting actually takes place. The engine itself does no lifting but is required in order to run the monobehaviour. The skirts define a part where the monobehaviour looks for thrust transforms. The actual lifting is all done via raycasting from the transforms and adding or subtracting an impulse force based on the height returned. The lift engines also have a thrust rating so that it's entirely possible to overload the hovercraft to the point it won't get off the ground. It also looks to see if FlightGlobals.currentMainBody.ocean is true and cheats by creating a new "Plane" under the craft to raycast off of. Either way, thanks much SM! While not exactly the elegant solution I was hoping for, it does work. And in modding KSP, sometimes, that's the best you can hope for.

So, I thot I'd get smart. I took this basic idea of OnPutToGround and perform it duing the OnLoad. Well, that didn't work. It tried to put it to a negative height. So, I tried it in every other event I could think of. Those that didn't produce a kraken gave the same net result. The events seem to be firing after it passes through the terrain. So... I thot I'd get smarter. I went through every rigidbody on the vessel and tried setting isKinematic to false. Didn't work. So, I tried setting every rigidbody to to useGravity = false. And that didn't work either. Is there some other way to turn the effects of KSP gravity off? I was hoping I could turn it off during OnLoad and put it back on at a later event.

[LOG 18:59:17.022] Untitled Space Craft loaded! [LOG 18:59:18.976] [FS Hover] Putting on ground. 9.595714 [LOG 18:59:18.978] putting ship to ground: 9.595714 Yep.... launching from the SPH it seems to do what is intended. Doing a quicksave and a load with it hovering, it does not. I attempted to deactivate the hovering during OnSave and it does drop to the ground, but apparently not fast enough to actually make ground contact before the save is complete. Actually, it's only running that code after launch. It doesn't run it when loading a quicksave.

Ok, I do have one partmodule that is a 'lift engine.' Without it, the vessel won't hover so that sounded like a good place to put this. public void OnPutToGround(PartHeightQuery phq) { float pos = part.transform.position.y; phq.lowestOnParts[part] = Mathf.Min(phq.lowestOnParts[part], pos); phq.lowestPoint = Mathf.Min(phq.lowestPoint, phq.lowestOnParts[part]); Debug.Log("[MPHover] Putting on ground. "+phq.lowestPoint); } I put a vessel on the runway, quicksaved, reloaded, checked the log and... that log entry doesn't show up, From what I've gathered that's an undocumented function. Do I need to call it from somewhere or is it called automatically by Unity? One issue that may make a difference is this: [LOG 18:09:23.370] Active Vessel is in atmosphere. Cannot save. Whenever the ship is hovering, it's considered to be flying even though it's a lot less than 10m.

Anyone know how to bypass this? If my hovercraft get quick-saved while still hovering, they end up falling through the terrain on reload.

Sorry Nils, I didn't even mess with the shader. It worked so I didn't even look to see what options were available.

My good man, I was merely walking down the road and stubbed my toe on a rock. When I started digging, this is what I unearthed. If you would like this rock for a door stop, it is yours. Thanks for the offer to be a collaborator but I can barely figure out how to upload my own source to Git. A minor note saying I was the one who tripped over this will be most adequate. That way, should someone look at your code and then mine, I won't be accused of being a clumsy oaf and a thief. Also, @InfiniteDice, who doesn't do much modding any more, had a fair sized hand in helping me figure this out. Noting that he helped me unearth this thing would be appreciated.

Looks great! That mean you're gonna write the plugin?

Precisely my point. Software should adapt to the human and not the other way around... bass ackward.

Just did a test. I modified the part.cfg to this: screenText = #autoLOC_500245 and got this:

I hadn't actually considered that but, yes it could do that very easily. Here's the link I meant to put in the OP with instructions on how to create and load fonts (that I can't get to work well). I believe you should be able to find out from the fontloader or the localizer used in that link's examples, which language is currently set. From that you should be able to get the language specific font from the fontloader which you can set any TMP component to. A plugin for this could have an option to automatically switch to the current language font. The only problem then becomes translating your text which you could do with a Localizer .cfg file. Setting the TMP text to an #autoLOC_XXXXX should also work. One thing to kinda keep in the back of your mind is that this MAY become a good bit easier to do if Squad can sort out the issues with TMP and PartTools. Should they get it so that you can write a .mu with a TMP component on it, this all becomes rather moot. You'll just be able to add your component in Unity. So, for now this method is a patch to get text attached to parts. The good news, even if they do get PartTools to work with TMP, this method should still function and you shouldn't be forced to rework any parts that use it. And, if a plugin were made robust enough, it might even give modders more options for creating dynamic text rather than hard coding the TMP component into the part.

Ummm because it's bass ackward???

Thanks @Li0n, I know next to nothing about MM. I'll add that to the next release.

And if Blender didn't feel bass ackward when you try to do anything, I'd probably be using it. Unfortunately, I'm right handed and right brained and Blender is left handed right brained. At least when I right click in Wings, it brings up a menu like it's supposed to. And if you don't have the time to resinstall Wings then you definitely won't have the time to install Blender. It's much larger than Wings.