[WIP] Coatl Aerospace ProbesPlus Dev Thread [Beta] 10/19/2020 (1.8-1.10)

[akron]

@macc92 @hieywiey Github Repository appears to be using the new module. I checked Meridiani and Xihe probes config 

If you don't have Mariner parts, you do not have the latest Git repository

Edited July 16, 2019 by akron

[macc92]

55 minutes ago, akron said:

If you don't have Mariner parts, you do not have the latest Git repository

I downloaded from the github, I can see the mariner parts, but still have the bad plumes

[akron]

6 hours ago, macc92 said:

I downloaded from the github, I can see the mariner parts, but still have the bad plumes

That's odd. All parts do that? What version of KSP are your running, or a log would help.

[macc92]

14 hours ago, akron said:

That's odd. All parts do that? What version of KSP are your running, or a log would help.

Whilst I havent exhaustively tested its just the cassini parts, the others i've used seem fine, on versions 1.7.1 and 1.7.3

output_log is here

https://drive.google.com/open?id=13tlRHyyCBaFkFqryVsFzaLzJ-2VLQghy

Edited July 17, 2019 by macc92

[akron]

4 hours ago, macc92 said:

Whilst I havent exhaustively tested its just the cassini parts, the others i've used seem fine, on versions 1.7.1 and 1.7.3

output_log is here

https://drive.google.com/open?id=13tlRHyyCBaFkFqryVsFzaLzJ-2VLQghy

Okay. I was able to replicate it. I am working on a fix

[akron]

Okay, I think I am going to slowly retrofit parts to use @JadeOfMaar's excellent PlumeParty effects. If anyone wants to help write up configs, I'd appreciate it.

[Guest]

Could you look into making the gold/silver foil look more like ReStock one? I'm not sure if there are reflections in these pics or not, but it doesn't look quite as shiny as ReStock.

[akron]

6 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Could you look into making the gold/silver foil look more like ReStock one? I'm not sure if there are reflections in these pics or not, but it doesn't look quite as shiny as ReStock.

Maybe. I don't know how much you followed the mod when I did the last foil texture overhaul. The foil textures are using shared generic materials swapped by Firespitter or TU. Restock uses a different way of doing its foil textures which involves doing foil materials per part for as many different types of foil as you want (Restock has roughly three per bus).

I don't mind giving it another shot but it will be a lot of work which is best reserved for a refit of the parts since it essentially involves rethinking and redoing the texture layout for all the probes. It also means that I would have to cut back on the number of material options to about three, like Restock, to keep the workload bearable. Right now I have about seven materials, so imagine doing textures for the probe parts seven times for each one that has a foil toggle. That's about 45 different texture sheets just off the top of my head.

Now, there is foily shininess on there but the pics don't do it justice; plus I am not using the foiliest of the foils I made  . It is using TextureUnlimited's shaders. I have never tried the new stock shader, but I think I will for upcoming soviet parts/remakes

[Guest]

I'm not sure if I ever used most of those texture variants. At least, you could probably ditch the FS switcher and go stock. However, overall, I find that fewer hand-tuned options tend to give a better experience than a larger number of generic ones. You could go with foil, blanket and (where applicable) bare metal. Foil could be switched between gold and silver, blankets could be a probe-specific mix of white and black.

[akron]

22 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

I'm not sure if I ever used most of those texture variants. At least, you could probably ditch the FS switcher and go stock. However, overall, I find that fewer hand-tuned options tend to give a better experience than a larger number of generic ones. You could go with foil, blanket and (where applicable) bare metal. Foil could be switched between gold and silver, blankets could be a probe-specific mix of white and black.

Stock texture switcher lacks some functionality that I require for some complex part shenanigans, so I have to use Firespitter or maybe B9 if I can ever get it to work.

Otherwise that's pretty much exactly how it is now. I have these materials: Thermal, Carbon, Silver foil 1, Silver foil 2, Gold foil 1, Gold foil 2, Gold foil 3, Coatl Gold Foil, Bare Grey

Obviously not all parts use all the variants, but it would be a tremendous amount of work to re-do. Hand tuning the foil to each part does yield a much better result but it increases the texture work since you have to tweak one sheet per variant. It also makes it more difficult to share textures, so the size of the mod's download would increase as would the number of textures that are loaded up with the game since KSP does not dynamically load textures by default.

The trade off here was the quality but it allowed new probe parts without adding any new foil texture sheets to the mod except once in a while. So yes, I agree with you, but I don't have a way of fixing it at the moment. If I go back to refit older parts I would probably just slowly remove the texture switching altogether for more mission-specific visuals. Like I can only think of one time I saw a screenshot where someone used the Voyager core *without* the default black thermal blanket. C'est la vie

[Guest]

I'd advocate getting rid of one silver foil and three gold ones, at least.  Don't think I've ever used carbon fiber, either. While it would certainly be a lot of work, I think it'd be worth it, not just for the foil. Some earlier parts could also be brought to a higher level of detail.

Another thing to consider is more texture sharing. If you can find a way to pack them up more efficiently (BDB can sometimes get an entire family of parts out of a single texture sheet), you could greatly reduce the overall number of textures in the mod, which could actually result in a net reduction of size.

[akron]

3 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Another thing to consider is more texture sharing. If you can find a way to pack them up more efficiently (BDB can sometimes get an entire family of parts out of a single texture sheet), you could greatly reduce the overall number of textures in the mod, which could actually result in a net reduction of size.

All the early parts are UV'd like a texture Atlas. If I am to improve quality, the texture size unfortunately can only go up. They're currently packed as tight as they're ever going to be. For example all the RTGs, batteries, and solar panels up to Juno all share a single texture (and I think it had room for more ). That style works better when you have larger areas that do not have overlapping AO though, like fuel tanks or engine nozzles (Which is why it works so well for LV mods). These dang probes though have too many intricacies. 

When I started the mod I had no plan to have entire probe part families like I do now, which is a reason why texture usage has changed. I really wanted to keep the mod light for folks with older computers who may already have big part mods installed like NFT, BDB, Tantares, etc. so they barely got room for other mods like mine. You'll actually see that so far the largest texture I have is probably a 1k texture. The recent Mariner probes are on 512px texture sheets (Mk2, Mk3, Mk4, etc), sharing a single 1k sheet for the solar panels. Viking will probably need a 2k texture and will be UV'd differently than my earlier stuff. 

[akron]

Some more updates for y'all.

A few more tidbits got modeled and some parts on the bus are slowly being tweaked to add more detail to haunt me later.

A good bit of time got put into the propulsion system, including finishing up the RCS, although the feed line is wrong, I found a better pic and will fix it eventually. You'll see some orange chewy bits; those are fittings for the wiring harness. 

This final low shot show off the ventral structure and the newly modeled landing radar stuff. The upside down cake/cheese wheel thing is part of the altimeter system, the big brown square is the TLDR (He he, not it's the TDLR, landing radar).

~Zzzz

Edited July 19, 2019 by akron

[MaeharaProjekt]

15 hours ago, akron said:

Some more updates for y'all.

A few more tidbits got modeled and some parts on the bus are slowly being tweaked to add more detail to haunt me later.

A good bit of time got put into the propulsion system, including finishing up the RCS, although the feed line is wrong, I found a better pic and will fix it eventually. You'll see some orange chewy bits; those are fittings for the wiring harness. 

This final low shot show off the ventral structure and the newly modeled landing radar stuff. The upside down cake/cheese wheel thing is part of the altimeter system, the big brown square is the TLDR (He he, not it's the TDLR, landing radar).

~Zzzz

MMMmmMmmmmmmm! Orange chewy bits! Omnomnom! 

[drtedastro]

looking great.

cheers.

[akron]

What a day to celebrate! Decades ago humanity cemented its place in the solar system with a historic touchdown in another world. On July 20th, 1976, Viking 1 safely landed on Mars at Chryse Planitia; marking the end its dangerous voyage and the beginning of a fruitful scientific mission. Viking 1 returned the first scientific data from the martian surface and performed numerous measurements to investigate the potential habitability and presence of life on Mars.

The lander was not alone. Its companion orbiter conducted its own science in orbit above and the Viking 2 duo was fast approaching behind; arriving on Mars in August of the same year. Viking 1 continued to operate on the martian surface for an astonishing six years until it finally shutdown in 1982.

Happy 43rd Landing Anniversary to Viking 1!

 

Oh, I guess Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong did a thing too. Whatever. /s

~ZZZzzzz

 

[MaeharaProjekt]

Ooo. I look forward to plopping your Viking 1 onto Duna! <3

[CobaltWolf]

7 hours ago, akron said:

What a day to celebrate! Decades ago humanity cemented its place in the solar system with a historic touchdown in another world. On July 20th, 1976, Viking 1 safely landed on Mars at Chryse Planitia; marking the end its dangerous voyage and the beginning of a fruitful scientific mission. Viking 1 returned the first scientific data from the martian surface and performed numerous measurements to investigate the potential habitability and presence of life on Mars.

The lander was not alone. Its companion orbiter conducted its own science in orbit above and the Viking 2 duo was fast approaching behind; arriving on Mars in August of the same year. Viking 1 continued to operate on the martian surface for an astonishing six years until it finally shutdown in 1982.

Happy 43rd Landing Anniversary to Viking 1!

Oh, I guess Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong did a thing too. Whatever. /s

~ZZZzzzz

 

This. This is incredible. I want it on my wall.

[akron]

On 7/20/2019 at 4:29 PM, CobaltWolf said:

This. This is incredible. I want it on my wall.

I want it on a fancy new BDB Titan. Soon-ish^TM

[Cavscout74]

On 5/3/2019 at 6:05 AM, akron said:

Is anyone else having the same issue as Cavscout? I can't replicate it

I had forgotten about this, but I thought I'd let you know in 1.7.3 all the Probes Plus solar panels seem to be working normally for me.

[akron]

13 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

I had forgotten about this, but I thought I'd let you know in 1.7.3 all the Probes Plus solar panels seem to be working normally for me.

Do you have the expansions installed? I think there might be a conflict somewhere. "Potentially", still trying to figure these little issues out

[Cavscout74]

7 hours ago, akron said:

Do you have the expansions installed? I think there might be a conflict somewhere.

I have both DLC's.   At this point, I suspect it was a conflict with another mod - when it started, none of my mods was updated to 1.7 since it had just come out.  Now, pretty much everything that needed an update has had one, and all the panels seem to be working normally.  If it started working at some point between 1.7 & 1.7.3, I missed it till now.  It was only 2 panels that were causing me issues, and then only when first deployed until I switched craft.  When I was using those panels, I got into the habit of switching craft right away after deploying the panels.

 

BTW, that Viking lander looks amazing!   Looking forward to it.

Edited July 24, 2019 by Cavscout74

[JediRangerkendor]

I was gonna just go see if the 1.4.* worked, but after seeing that, I think I will wait until I can get this update! Here is to hoping that it is coming out very very soon!

[vossiewulf]

I'm running Coatl in a 1.71 game with no noticeable problems. Just wanted to stop by to say thanks for your work, I've used Coatl in all my games and its parts always play a large role in my probe designs.

 

[akron]

On 7/29/2019 at 5:22 AM, JediRangerkendor said:

I was gonna just go see if the 1.4.* worked, but after seeing that, I think I will wait until I can get this update! Here is to hoping that it is coming out very very soon!

Viking is still a little ways out. If you want to get a head start with the current release, use the Github repo and not the last release.

4 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

I'm running Coatl in a 1.71 game with no noticeable problems. Just wanted to stop by to say thanks for your work, I've used Coatl in all my games and its parts always play a large role in my probe designs.

Amazing, thank you!