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

[Jimbodiah]

Not to disrespect Squad, or blow Mage's horn, but a lot of Mage's ideas could be integrated into stock ksp parts/functions. A modular fuel tank would be the most obvious candidate, seeing how many tanks there are in the game, not even mentioning all those in mods.

There are a lot of cool ideas out there by modders. I would love for squad to pick up on some of them.

Edited February 23, 2016 by Jimbodiah

[ComatoseJedi]

I am glad you got a handle on what you want to do with this. All I know is what I've been reading about how buggy wheels are. If you know a solution, by all means go for it :). 

[Shadowmage]

Nose-gear deploy animation, minus the doors.

[ComatoseJedi]

I can't even model a booger (don't even get me started on texturing), but this right here.... smdh... lightyears beyond me dude. 

[Autochton]

1 hour ago, RedParadize said:

Soon, Shadowmage will rewrite KSP.

Yeah, I've many times mulled over what it'd take to, let's say, get some people together, build a C++ or the like based game that's kind of like KSP but fixes the many problems with it, both in terms of code and game design. KSP is a brilliant idea, but the implementation is less than perfect. But in the end, such a project just seems unfeasible. The game I'd want would be pretty niche, in the end.

[RedParadize]

To squad defence, they started with nothing, and thats realy hard to start with nothing. I am convince they will do KSP2 or alike sooner or later and I will gladly pay another 35$ for it.

But soon I will have a good enough list of parts that you could mostly delete the stock ones and never even notice they were missing   That is almost as good as rewriting the game

I deleted most of KSP original parts, thanks to you. Unlike stock, SSTU realy feel like the rocket have been engineered, its more versatile and balanced.

Edited February 23, 2016 by RedParadize

[davidy12]

AWESOMENESS!!!
 

I can't wait to see this shuttle fully textured.

 

PS: @Shadowmage did you base the apollo capsule off of this?

 

 

[Shadowmage]

2 hours ago, Autochton said:

Yeah, I've many times mulled over what it'd take to, let's say, get some people together, build a C++ or the like based game that's kind of like KSP but fixes the many problems with it, both in terms of code and game design. KSP is a brilliant idea, but the implementation is less than perfect. But in the end, such a project just seems unfeasible. The game I'd want would be pretty niche, in the end.

Fun fact... about 3-4 years ago (while KSP was in its infancy) I did start writing a full 3-d n-body space simulator.  Got right up to the point of floating-point origin problems while setting up the initial solar system, and could never devise a clean solution.  Granted, that was near the start of my programming experience... so I know of several solutions now.  But anyway.. yah, it is a ton of work, and certainly a niche product.

 

2 hours ago, RedParadize said:

To squad defence, they started with nothing, and thats realy hard to start with nothing. I am convince they will do KSP2 or alike sooner or later and I will gladly pay another 35$ for it.

I deleted most of KSP original parts, thanks to you. Unlike stock, SSTU realy feel like the rocket have been engineered, its more versatile and balanced.

Nothing against SQUAD; they have done excellent work with limited assets, on a game engine that was never designed for such a large scope.  I would gladly buy a KSP2 were it a thing, and this is one of the few games I would be willing to help crowd-fund were it ever available

 

4 minutes ago, davidy12 said:

AWESOMENESS!!!
 

I can't wait to see this shuttle fully textured.

 

PS: @Shadowmage did you base the apollo capsule off of this?

 

 

Still going to be a few weeks likely before it is done, have a ton of work ahead of me.

Apollo - nope, 100% original modeling work from multiple diagrams and about half a gig of images, with minor adaptation for low-poly setup.

[davidy12]

3 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

 

Apollo - nope, 100% original modeling work from multiple diagrams and about half a gig of images, with minor adaptation for low-poly setup.

Okay, here's a question, are you ever going to make a different docking model?

[Autochton]

9 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

Fun fact... about 3-4 years ago (while KSP was in its infancy) I did start writing a full 3-d n-body space simulator.  Got right up to the point of floating-point origin problems while setting up the initial solar system, and could never devise a clean solution.  Granted, that was near the start of my programming experience... so I know of several solutions now.  But anyway.. yah, it is a ton of work, and certainly a niche product.

I'm sure you've seen @eggrobin's work on Principia, right? He's pretty far along and has fairly nifty results to show for it.

[Shadowmage]

Semi-final geometry for the nose-gear, minus the big fuselage in the way (not shown is the steering rotation or torque arm compression; both of which are rigged/animated):

Got a good bit of progress done on the wing landing gear last night as well (mostly rigged), will likely have it modeled and finished rigging it today.  Also added in the payload and docking windows to the fuselage; one step closer to fuselage geometry being done (still need lots of cargo bay stuff).

Wheel module is working, and mostly done.  Suspension works, steering works, rotating wheel mesh (rolling wheels!) work.  Need to add support for brakes and motors; both of which should be quite simple to do for this implementation.

-May- have an updated testing release tonight if I can get the wing wheel model finished up enough to be worth exporting it.

[akron]

Cool! That top shock does some jumping around during the first few animation frames though. Might not be visible in the final part, but just wanted to mention it

[Shadowmage]

7 minutes ago, akron said:

Cool! That top shock does some jumping around during the first few animation frames though. Might not be visible in the final part, but just wanted to mention it

Yah, thats just due to it using a dependency-loop for its active constraints for rendering in blender;  won't be visible in the final animation as it'll be properly keyframed for export (dependency loops do not update properly when jumping to a specific frame in blender unless you force it to update the graph a few times after the frame change; none of which is possible during automated multi-frame rendering).

[blowfish]

Saw something of note in this week's dev notes:

18 hours ago, SQUAD said:

cluster engines can have varying output across their thrust transforms

Hopefully that will simplify things on the RD-107/8 and the RS-68 a bit

[Shadowmage]

2 hours ago, blowfish said:

Saw something of note in this week's dev notes:

Hopefully that will simplify things on the RD-107/8 and the RS-68 a bit

Aye, NathanKell was talking to me about it a bit.

The changes will make those engines usable with stock modules only, and a single engine module; sadly it will require completely re-rigging and exporting the model due to the change in gimbal operation (need gimbal z-axis aligned properly; mine are oriented arbitrarily to whatever the default was for that empty as it never mattered up until now).  Ohwell, likely need to re-export everything for the shader changes anyway.  Going to be a long couple days/weeks of finding old files and re-exporting stuff.

 

And here is a render of the WIP wing/main gear.  Mostly done, but still a bit of cleanup to do, and still need to add the torque arm (not visible, in-between the wheels).

[Stubenbube]

This is definitely one of the best modpacks which exist for KSP 

Great Work !

[Shadowmage]

19 hours ago, Stubenbube said:

This is definitely one of the best modpacks which exist for KSP 

Great Work !

Thanks,  I'm glad you are enjoying it in its current rough/unfinished state.  Lots of good stuff yet-to-come.

And congrats on your first post

 

 

Got the wheels finished rigged/modeled/animated/exported last night, and in-game and working.  Also got brakes working plugin/module/code side.  Was late in the evening though, so did not have time to pack things up for a test release.

First glide-and-land test ended well; though I must say it takes a ton of fuel to get that bird off the runway, turn around, and try and land   (or in this case, two giant SRBs strapped to the side of the orbiter, and a cargo bay full of LH2/O2; gives you about a minute of powered flight).

Also spent a bit of time working on cleaning up the docking adapter / docking port geometry.  Getting close to finished on the geometry work for most stuff; still a few detail bits to add, and a couple places to clean up.  Hoping that I'll be able to work on texturing next week.

Should I add a second docking port (model+module) for the cargo bay internal rear node?  I'm thinking I would like to have one there, though it may wait until I can create some dedicated 2.5m docking port geometry.

 

 

On Wednesday, February 24, 2016 at 6:39 PM, davidy12 said:

Okay, here's a question, are you ever going to make a different docking model?

 

It is planned during work on the station core parts (after 1.1 is released and the mod is fully updated).  But likely will not be what you are looking for (I will be making dedicated 0.625m and 2.5m docking ports); I will not be making any alternate 1.25m docking ports in the near or foreseeable future.  If you don't like the existing ones, you are free to change them out with config edits or patches.

[Shadowmage]

Shuttle geometry coming along nicely.  Nearly done with the initial first-pass geometry; will then take a pass or two over for cleanup and adding perhaps a few more details and fix some shading.  And then on to the texturing!

[davidy12]

8 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

Shuttle geometry coming along nicely.  Nearly done with the initial first-pass geometry; will then take a pass or two over for cleanup and adding perhaps a few more details and fix some shading.  And then on to the texturing!

Looks FANTASTIC!!!!!

 

Though, you forgot to add RCS jet wholes. IE: Nose and OMS or are they going to be textured?

Edited February 25, 2016 by davidy12

[Shadowmage]

24 minutes ago, davidy12 said:

Looks FANTASTIC!!!!!

 

Though, you forgot to add RCS jet wholes. IE: Nose and OMS or are they going to be textured?

No, I didn't forget; those will be part of the texture (normal map).  Adding them as actual cut-outs in the geometry would likely double the poly count, and would result in terrible shading artifacts.

[ComatoseJedi]

If I may ask for a small request, if not, that's alright I can find a way to do it. But is there a possibility to put in an attach point in the cargo bay, next to the airlock or somewhere on the back panel behind the cockpit for Canadarm mod?

[Shadowmage]

27 minutes ago, ComatoseJedi said:

If I may ask for a small request, if not, that's alright I can find a way to do it. But is there a possibility to put in an attach point in the cargo bay, next to the airlock or somewhere on the back panel behind the cockpit for Canadarm mod?

Sure; may need some help / feedback in finding the proper positions and orientations for them, but adding some attach-nodes isn't hard at all (is a purely config based thing...so as easy as it gets for KSP modding).

[Jimbodiah]

Looks awesome, Mage!!!!

[Svm420]

25 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

Sure; may need some help / feedback in finding the proper positions and orientations for them, but adding some attach-nodes isn't hard at all (is a purely config based thing...so as easy as it gets for KSP modding).

Maybe this would help not sure if you already ahve this or not.

[RedParadize]

It looks great! And I think I might even fly it. I always through that carrying a plane in space was a bad idea. Unless its SI-FI, then its totaly legit.

Thinking about it, In the world of Kerbal Space shuttle is a valid design, there is no maintenance cost or reliability issue.