[WIP][1.8.x] SSTULabs - Low Part Count Solutions (Orbiters, Landers, Lifters) - Dev Thread [11-18-18]

[RedParadize]

1 hour ago, blowfish said:

You need to create color masks for each texture you use and assign the custom shader.  In this specific case Nertea would need to do some extra work to make that functional.

Indeed, but I suspect that if it would be released as a separated mod, some modder might pick it up. It only lack advertisement.

[Jimbodiah]

Nice job, Mage!   Now my second landing on Mars will not end up as an extra crater 

Any chance of an intermediate release?

[Shadowmage]

23 hours ago, Jimbodiah said:

Nice job, Mage!   Now my second landing on Mars will not end up as an extra crater 

Any chance of an intermediate release?

 

Re: release -- Not really, too much stuff in-flux at the moment.  But.... if you wanted the feature you could download the updated .dll from the dev branch.  Can't guarantee it doesn't break other things, but at least the parachute stuff is working/tested

I'm aiming to get the next release packed up/finished as soon as I can finish the recoloring work for the rest of the pods.  Got the SC-C and SC-B done, and started on the SC-A.

Since it obviously won't be this weekend, and I'm camping next weekend; seems like the earliest I could get the next release published would be ~2 weeks out.

[tater]

Totally off topic, @Shadowmage, how close to the eclipse path are you?

[Shadowmage]

33 minutes ago, tater said:

Totally off topic, @Shadowmage, how close to the eclipse path are you?

Looks like I'm a couple 100 miles north of the path; so I might get a partial eclipse?

 

Also....

(Upper-stage SRB nozzles with built-in RCS thrusters for roll/etc -- yes, the textures are.. not in place yet.... working on the plugin code to make it all work)

On 8/4/2017 at 7:49 PM, RedParadize said:

@Shadowmage Your the king! as always.

 

Now, if you could release your tool to everyone it would be awesome. I want to be able to repaint these nuclear reactor with orange stripe before Nertea release his radiation mod. Otherwise Jeb will die from radiation sickness for sure, don't you have any compassion for Jeb?

As @blowfish stated, it isn't exactly a 'drop-in' solution.  For every part that needs recoloring support added, you pretty much have to recreate the textures.  Its more than just the mask texture -- you also have to setup your diffuse and specular textures properly, as well as split the AO off into its own separate texture.

In short:  probably more work than most people would want to invest; and that is just the texturing end.  There is also a ton of plugin code needed to make it all work (load shaders, assign shaders to models, handle persistence of data, GUI code), as well as the corresponding configs to define all of that stuff (texture files, model and mesh names, etc).

Edited August 6, 2017 by Shadowmage

[CatastrophicFailure]

2 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

Looks like I'm a couple 100 miles north of the path; so I might get a partial eclipse?

Sounds like you're in the same boat as me. I'm about 300 miles north of the path of totality, and local news says 93% totality here, so you should still get a pretty spectacular show. Get your glasses now.  

[tater]

Everyone I have read or talked to who has seen partials (I've seen many), annulars (I've seen one), and totals says that the first 2 are not even comparable. If you can get a friend and split the driving, it's worth driving pretty far to see. I'm planning on driving maybe 10 hours as things stand right now, though we might split a rental vehicle with some friends and split the driving by 4 people (we'll also have 3 kids with us).

[Jimbodiah]

I think we had a full eclipse here (europe) about 15 years ago. Really worth the trip as it's ussually a once in a lifetime thing.

[The-Doctor]

On 7/25/2017 at 4:58 PM, Shadowmage said:

This Friday will be the second anniversary of SSTU.

I had really wanted to do something commemorative for the occasion.  Sadly my current workload is a bit past 'crazy busy', so I'm not sure what I'll be able to pull off.

 

How does adding recoloring support to the SC capsules sound (okay, so probably only one for now)?  Worthwhile?  (as I think it is mostly texturing work, I might be able to get it done Sat. morning prior to packing up the last weeks worth of bugfixes).

 

So like, is this mod ok to be played with now?

[tater]

Works fine.

As @Shadowmage said, there are some possible save breaking things coming up, but start a new save and have at it!

Edited August 14, 2017 by tater

[The-Doctor]

I'm finally joining the SSTU hype train

[Shadowmage]

I'm hoping to be able to put the wraps on the SC/pods recoloring support later this week/weekend and pack up the next release.  Should also include a few other fixes from the past month, and a few feature enhancements (repackable parachutes).

Will be holding off on releasing the upper-stage SRB for a bit, as there is still both code work and texturing work that needs to be done for those parts.  I believe I have the code mostly working, but I'm sure it'll need a bit of cleanup/bugfixing/refinement.

Yeah, still insanely busy at work (and working late most nights), so my free-time and motivation are... less than usual.

[The-Doctor]

Any install instructions?

[Jimbodiah]

1st post?

Place the SSTU + CRP folder along with modulemanager.dll into your GameData folder.

[tater]

And welcome---soon you'll find you don't use any stock parts. 

[mechanicH]

13 minutes ago, tater said:

stock parts. 

Whats that???  

I keep saying they need to change the name of this game from KSP (Kerbal Space Program) to SSP (Shadowmage Space Program) 

[tater]

 

[Theysen]

6 hours ago, tater said:

 

are those the SSTU solar panels?

@Shadowmage I dropped the latest release in 1.3 and I wonder what happened to the nice node on top of the modular upper stages that made them snap perfectly into the fairing ring. Am I missing something or mixing things up? I am pretty sure they did that before.

[blowfish]

22 minutes ago, Theysen said:

@Shadowmage I dropped the latest release in 1.3 and I wonder what happened to the nice node on top of the modular upper stages that made them snap perfectly into the fairing ring. Am I missing something or mixing things up? I am pretty sure they did that before.

It's now disabled by default, you can enable it in the part action menu.  Note though I think there's a bug where it won't appear immediately when you toggle it, have to force it to update by e.g. changing the diameter.

[Shadowmage]

Yes, I'm still around, but also still extremely busy.  Didn't think things at work could become worse than they were a month ago, but somehow, somewhere, someone discovered a way to make it so.

But, I'm also still working on SSTU when I can.  This week I have finished off the initial recoloring textures (masks, diff/spec rework) for the SC-A (Soyuz) parts.  Also made up a new emissive shader that can be used for the pod windows and such, so as to not lose the window glow animations (due to the differences in texturing, I couldn't use the stock emissive shaders).  Have a bit of config work to do to enable the recoloring for those parts, but that is relatively minor compared to the texture updates.  Really hoping I can put the wraps on these over the next day or two and push out an updated release over the weekend.  (Will also be several other bug-fixes in this release, will be noted in the change log when available)

Upper-stage SRBs sadly have not made any progress recently; still some modeling/texturing work that needs to be done, as well as potentially a bit more code-side work to clean up/finish as well.

Additional SC pods have been delayed indefinitely, until I can sort through the scaling/sizing issues on the parts.  Some are obvious/easy to work on (Mercury, Dragon, VA to some extent; might continue on those sooner), others are much more problematic (Gemini).  I intend to return to working on these as soon as my schedule at work becomes less insane and I have time (and brain power) to think through the problems.
 

Also, I have made a couple fixes in KSPWheel (KerbalFoundries) code this week that should clean up several FAR compatibility problems.  Thanks to @ferram4 for helping me sort through them and testing the changes out.  Will be packing up an updated KSPWheel and KF release this weekend with those fixes in place (after a bit of testing to make sure I didn't inadvertently break anything; if anyone else would like to help test, grab the KSPWheel.dll from the KSPWheel repository dev branch).

 

Thanks to all for your help in answering support questions and keeping things organized during my extended busy schedule.  Very much appreciated

 

[ComatoseJedi]

This may be a stock bug or I am blind. When I go to set up an action group for the C Service Module to Jettison Panels and to Extend Solar Panels, the option to Jettison the side panels does not appear in the action group menu. I would assume if the ability to toggle the side panels in the VAB would transfer over to the Action Grouping menu. Is anyone else seeing this?

2 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

Thanks to all for your help in answering support questions and keeping things organized during my extended busy schedule.  Very much appreciated

We all know how busy you are and I for one am not demanding anything to be done in a specific time frame. You control all of that and as a fervent SSTU mod user, anything you do is well appreciated. If I had the money, I would just pay you several thousand dollars to take time off work for a month and complete everything you wanted to do with this mod. Thank you very much for your continued work. 

[Shadowmage]

2 hours ago, ComatoseJedi said:

This may be a stock bug or I am blind. When I go to set up an action group for the C Service Module to Jettison Panels and to Extend Solar Panels, the option to Jettison the side panels does not appear in the action group menu. I would assume if the ability to toggle the side panels in the VAB would transfer over to the Action Grouping menu. Is anyone else seeing this?

Certainly not a stock bug, as that module is 100% custom code.

Could be either the name of the AG is not what you are expecting (it might say 'toggle fairing' or something), or it could be that I somehow broke the AG from displaying properly (entirely possible with some of the recent changes to that module).

Hmm.. the code says that there -should- be an action group called 'Jettison Fairing':

        [KSPAction("Jettison Fairing")]
        public void jettisonAction(KSPActionParam param)
        {
            jettisonFairing();
            updateGuiState();
        }

But it might be that I internally disabled that AG through the module incorrectly.

Can you confirm that there is no 'Jettison Fairing' action group (might also be named 'Jettison Side Panels')?  (config for the part specifies the AG naming)

	fairingName = Side Panels
	actionName = Jettison

 

If you can confirm that it is not present/not showing up, I'll open an issue ticket and look into it fixing it up for the next release.

 

Edit:

Ahh.. erhmm... hmm...  Apparently I had a logic fail while updating that modules' code...

Events[nameof(jettisonEvent)].active = Actions[nameof(jettisonAction)].active = HighLogic.LoadedSceneIsFlight && currentlyEnabled && canManuallyJettison && (numOfSections > 1 || String.IsNullOrEmpty(nodeName));

That line specifies that the AG (and PAW button) should only be active in flight scene, when configured to be manually jettisonable, and a few other inputs.  Notable though is the 'flight scene' requirement, which is where it is failing out.  Technically if you use one of the AG mods you could probably assign the AG in the flight scene, as it is enabled there... it is just disabled in the editor...

I'll have to update the code to fix that particular problem.  Thankfully the fix is simple.  You can track the progress on it through this issue ticket:  https://github.com/shadowmage45/SSTULabs/issues/546

[ComatoseJedi]

2 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

Apparently I had a logic fail while updating that modules' code...

You're not HAL 9000. And if you were, I'd be very concerned. But, thank you for confirming I'm not blind. 

[mg1142]

I have just installed SSTU mod and using Real Fuel too and I have the following bug.

 

When using the SSTU - SC TANK - MFT-A - Standard Tank amount of fuel in the tank will stay at 2kL liter instead of increasing when size or diameter is increased. 

Do you know why is that? Am I missing something? 

 

EDIT: Btw, same happens with the Spherical Tank...

Edited August 25, 2017 by mg1142

[Nightside]

7 hours ago, mg1142 said:

I have just installed SSTU mod and using Real Fuel too and I have the following bug.

 

When using the SSTU - SC TANK - MFT-A - Standard Tank amount of fuel in the tank will stay at 2kL liter instead of increasing when size or diameter is increased. 

Do you know why is that? Am I missing something? 

 

EDIT: Btw, same happens with the Spherical Tank...

Welcome to the forums @mg1142, the RealFuels mod totally changes how fuel tanks from other mods function and may be incompatible with SSTU, unless RealFuels includes special config files for SSTU.