revamping the attachment node system

[Jiraiyah]

Ok, I was working on a station ring with attachement nodes all around it in every 30 degree, both on inside and outside, when the part was finished for testing, i ended up with tons of attachement nodes that would make the job of attaching anything to it like hell, at the time JSI Part Utilities was around and it was doing a semi hackish way of letting us toggle modules on and off and it would let me define group of nodes to be toggled on and off with each other, that had problems though, specially if you would combine it with tweak scale.

That is when the idea came to my mind, what if the way we define nodes in config change? take a look at this psudo config :

Spoiler

[NODES]

{

GROUP : top

{

old way of defining a node here

}

GROUP : bottom

{

old way of defining a node here

}

GROUP : out

{

old way of defining a node here

}

GROUP : in

{

old way of defining a node here

}

.

.

.

}

8

 

The way it would work is that after the [NODE] tag, the system would read the GROUP and then pars the text in front of it, for each group definition, we would get a toggle on/off button in right click menu on the part in editor with the name of the group in it. the way we would define the node itself would stay as before, but this would let the developers to pars the group properly, and when the node is toggled off and then back on, it could get it's proper offset by the scale change (not sure how tweak scale is handling it, but one way or another, localScale of the model should have been changed and that can be used here)

 

This is the idea, when i looked into the api class, it looks like each attachement node has an offset property, I am not that familiar with the api to sit and write my own mod, but i assume for main developers of ksp, compared to what they are struggling for updating to 5.x version of unity, this would be easier and smaller feature request that would give much more flexability.