Kurld

I'm asking from the perspective of a software engineer and (non pro) game designer.

I understand it's a game (geez louise I've sure put in the hours on it). And I really don't have any problem with the weight or size of whatever. It's fun, after all. I am just wondering at the rationale. To put it another way, would the game somehow be less fun it the stats were more realistic? (of the parts at least... I understand and fully support the decision not to have a scale-size planet/solar system.. it would take forever to do anything.)

For instance, the Mk2 lander. It weighs, what 2+ tons? This seems too heavy to me. The Apollo ascent stage included RCS, liquid fuel and engine, etc. for 2200m/s delta v and was nearly 2x as large in every dimension and yet only had mass of 4.7 tons. The Mk2 can should only have mass of about 600kg even including an engine and fuel. Other parts seem similarly skewed. I'm not complaining, but really want to understand the design decision behind making parts have such mass. How would it impact gameplay if the parts had a more "realistic" mass. I put "realistic" in quotes because I am open to the possibility I am way off base in my understanding of what scaled down stuff "should" weigh.

How is this going? Being able to level things on uneven ground would be really nice.

Part of it is transparent (checkerboard). But part of it is black. The black part appears to be a mask for the visible areas of the texture. But this is true for parts that render correctly as well as those that do not.

I found an alpha threshold command... I'll play with that and see what happens.

I'm not sure what you're telling me to look for, exactly. The alpha channel is rendered in the checkerboard pattern, but also appears to have a mask (in black) on the areas where there are visible texture. It looks like this in either case (new layers added or not). Or are you asking me to look at some property of the alpha channel itself?

All I did was change rescaleFactor from 1 to 0.5, and rename the part.

It's weird. As long as I don't add any new layers (annoying but workable), it seems to accept my changes with no issues. As soon as I add a new layer, even if I merge it down, the texture somehow changes at a fundamental level so that it displays improperly in KSP.

Yeow, my bad. I'm not generally a necro, I swear.

I've fooled around with this some more. I'm not sure what I did to get it to work making edits in Paint.net, but I can no longer get it to work at all. Any edit causes some of the part to be rendered as black. With some experimentation (replacing the transparent section of the part with a solid color) I can change what color is rendered. I decided to try another editor (GIMP). I am now experiencing the same behavior as before. Any edit that involves making use of layers causes the body of the part to rendered as black. Reading some more around here, I've discovered that KSP will only use a bit value for transparent (e.g. it's either transparent or not, regardless of what is in the alpha channel). So now my theory is that somehow, whatever value is encoded in the alpha channel is being somehow altered by the export from GIMP and now KSP doesn't know what to do with that and punts and uses black. SO... how do you guys edit your textures?

That would be handy, as we can chalk this one up to PEBKAC. Not sure what I was doing wrong, but apparently as I got frustrated when I was looking at this before, I deleted everything. Upon CAREFULLY recreating it today, things work as expected. Thanks for everybody's responses (and patience!) And, now I have another question. After re-scaling the parts, I notice that the decoupler no longer sits "flush" against the fuel tank. As I'm looking at the config, it looks like I might need to adjust the node_attach by the same amount. Is this correct? Thanks again folks.

They'd have to be, if they both show up in the VAB menu wouldn't they? I'll check when I am back at the machine.

I read through the PNG spec and it appears that PDN is getting rid of the interlacing. Not sure if this is the cause or not. Will have to test later.

I know this. It's not the problem. The modified part shows up in the VAB. But it is clearly not rescaling. I added the original unmodified part. Now there are two parts in the menu in the VAB. They are both the same size when I stick them on a fuel tank.

Kind of a long story. I wrote a converter to read mbm files and write them as PNGs. I can open and edit these in Paint.net. For instance the stock 2.5 "32" fuel tank. I was wanting to re-skin this for an "empty fuel tank" part. Now... as long as I only edit within the png file's existing layer, it works fine. But if I add any layers and merge them down and save, when I open the part in the VAB, the body of the tank is black. The ends are still correct, and the rivets and rings, but the body is black. I'm guessing Paint.net is doing something to the PNG format when it merges layers. Any ideas? If it will help I will try to get screenshots.

I copied the part from my regular KSP "install" to one that has 90% of the parts stripped out so it will load quickly. It was unique within that instance of KSP. I am mostly sure I renamed it as well, but perhaps not. Would it be important in that case?

I'm trying to kludge a tiny radial de-coupler by rescaling the stock part, e.g. rescaleFactor = 0.5 in the part.cfg. However this has no effect in the VAB. Am I misunderstanding something? Thanks!

These parts do not seem to work in 0.2x. They do not appear in the VAB. Is it just me?