Landing legs in 1.1

[sarbian]

3 hours ago, Jovzin said:

May I ask what is this private experimentals area and how can I access it?

You need to be in the experimental team and for that you need to be selected.

@nli2work I can't post it here since I would have to share the source and I need to clean some part of it that I can't share on a public forum. I ll try to do that in the next days

 

[Jovzin]

57 minutes ago, sarbian said:

You need to be in the experimental team and for that you need to be selected.

@nli2work I can't post it here since I would have to share the source and I need to clean some part of it that I can't share on a public forum. I ll try to do that in the next days

 

Hello sarbian. Aha so it is Q&A.

And yes if you can share with us this plugin it will be great for us/me to better find my stupid mistakes with wheels settings.

Edited March 31, 2016 by Jovzin

[NecroBones]

7 hours ago, nli2work said:

not sure if I understand that part... what does radius have to do with it? 0.6 radius is huge radius for lander legs which really only needs the suspension aspect. Did it eat into the suspensionDistance?

 

Yep, that's exactly it. The suspension distance adds onto the wheelcollider radius, instead of starting from the same center.

 

 

[nli2work]

@sarbian no worries man. 

@NecroBones hm, that's very good to know! I had set the radius in Unity to match lander leg, radius of 0.05. so it was never very obvious when I was testing.

[nli2work]

these were exported from Unity4?

[NecroBones]

1 minute ago, nli2work said:

these were exported from Unity4?

 

Yep. It doesn't look like the Unity version matters here.

 

 

[NecroBones]

 

Man, I thought once I had that leg figured out, my other legs would be easier. Well, not so much... The legs for Lithobrake Exploration are being a real pain. SuspensionDistance values too small result in a rigid leg. Too large, and the feet float over the ground. And for the first Lithobrake leg, I can't find a number in between that works correctly. So it makes me wonder if something strange is going on with the other colliders, but I can't find a problem there either.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

So, in the config, in the new modules, for animation it has

        animationTrfName = miniLeg
        animationStateName = probeleg

I assume the animationTrfName is the named animation from Unity, but what's animationStateName ?

[NecroBones]

1 hour ago, NecroBones said:

 

Man, I thought once I had that leg figured out, my other legs would be easier. Well, not so much... The legs for Lithobrake Exploration are being a real pain. SuspensionDistance values too small result in a rigid leg. Too large, and the feet float over the ground. And for the first Lithobrake leg, I can't find a number in between that works correctly. So it makes me wonder if something strange is going on with the other colliders, but I can't find a problem there either.

 

So I think what's happening here is that if you're scaling the leg objects down in Unity, to something below 1.0, this is OK. But if you scale upward above 1.0, something gets out of alignment, no matter how precise you are. The precision problems are probably still there when scaling down, but since it moves things together rather than separate them, it probably isn't as much of a problem. But anyway, for this leg I've tried dozens of configurations, and nothing has solved my "floating feet" problem (which is additionally amusing in that the feet have little to no traction, because they're not actually touching the ground). So the next thing I'll try is to rescale at the vertex level in Blender (so the transforms are all 1.0), and go from there.

 

37 minutes ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

So, in the config, in the new modules, for animation it has

        animationTrfName = miniLeg
        animationStateName = probeleg

I assume the animationTrfName is the named animation from Unity, but what's animationStateName ?

 

Actually animationTrfName is the name of the transform that contains the animation, and animationStateName is the name of the animation itself.

 

 

[TiktaalikDreaming]

5 minutes ago, NecroBones said:

Actually animationTrfName is the name of the transform that contains the animation, and animationStateName is the name of the animation itself.

 

Ah, OK.  Thanks.  That will help quite a bit.

[NecroBones]

1 hour ago, NecroBones said:

 

So I think what's happening here is that if you're scaling the leg objects down in Unity, to something below 1.0, this is OK. But if you scale upward above 1.0, something gets out of alignment, no matter how precise you are. The precision problems are probably still there when scaling down, but since it moves things together rather than separate them, it probably isn't as much of a problem. But anyway, for this leg I've tried dozens of configurations, and nothing has solved my "floating feet" problem (which is additionally amusing in that the feet have little to no traction, because they're not actually touching the ground). So the next thing I'll try is to rescale at the vertex level in Blender (so the transforms are all 1.0), and go from there.

 

 

...And I'm apparently wrong about that. I reworked the model, got rid of all transform scaling, and it's doing the same thing. I'm really confused. I may have to work on the other leg in that pack, and see if it does the same thing.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

Thanks @NecroBones and @nli2work for your work on this.  I now have functional legs, even if the feet dangle off the end and they have strange spring constants.  That's just a tuning issue.

[NecroBones]

On 3/31/2016 at 9:46 PM, NecroBones said:

TsubSys appears to affect the deployment animation. Very low numbers (closer to 0) result in the piston teleporting to its deployed position and back, rather than animating smoothly.
 

 

I think I see the purpose of this. TsubSys values close to 1.0 result in the entire deployment animation playing, before the suspension is activated. If you were to have a lander sitting directly on the ground, with the legs folded, and then deploy the legs, you could have a scenario where the lander is pushed upward until the legs are fully extended, then the suspension would activate, and the vehicle would sink back down into the legs. I think the purpose of using something less than 1.0 is to allow the suspension to activate earlier, so that it compresses while the animation is finishing, and you're less likely to throw the vehicle into the air.

 

13 minutes ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

Thanks @NecroBones and @nli2work for your work on this.  I now have functional legs, even if the feet dangle off the end and they have strange spring constants.  That's just a tuning issue.

 

My pleasure!

 

[nli2work]

2 hours ago, NecroBones said:

 

I think I see the purpose of this. TsubSys values close to 1.0 result in the entire deployment animation playing, before the suspension is activated. If you were to have a lander sitting directly on the ground, with the legs folded, and then deploy the legs, you could have a scenario where the lander is pushed upward until the legs are fully extended, then the suspension would activate, and the vehicle would sink back down into the legs. I think the purpose of using something less than 1.0 is to allow the suspension to activate earlier, so that it compresses while the animation is finishing, and you're less likely to throw the vehicle into the air.

Makes sense... except the cryptic variable name doesn't help at all. haha

[NecroBones]

15 hours ago, NecroBones said:

 

...And I'm apparently wrong about that. I reworked the model, got rid of all transform scaling, and it's doing the same thing. I'm really confused. I may have to work on the other leg in that pack, and see if it does the same thing.

 

So I'm probably going to release the legs as-is, and give up for now. There's some funky thing going on with the suspension in which the suspension is either too long, touching the ground before the colliders, and you get the "hover-foot" problem, or you shorten just a hair and it doesn't get past the collider, and you have a rigid leg. It's almost as though after protruding to the ground, the wheelCollider's suspension magically adds another 0.2m or so. All of my legs are doing it, except for the MRS leg I tested with first, and I have no idea why the others are different. But since it's almost right, and I can't figure out a work-around for it, I'll just have to call it "good enough" until I can think of something.

[sarbian]

The tool is out. If you need it to display more stuff just ask in the thread

 

[NecroBones]

3 minutes ago, sarbian said:

The tool is out. If you need it to display more stuff just ask in the thread

Thanks! This tool has been super useful!

[TiktaalikDreaming]

Quick query regarding an "anybody else see this weirdness?" type question.

I've got my legs basically working.  Not really tuned, cos their for craft big enough to cause the launchpad to explode, but they basically work.  I have noticed that when you've landed somewhere, if you EVA/rover/whatever away from your legged craft, when you come back within "let's enable physics again" range of your craft, the legs seem to trigger some strange behaviour.  It's a bit like while you're away all the legs compress, and the moment you come close again, all the springs are released and the craft bounces up (and tips over usually).  I'm probably seeing an exaggerated edition of the effect due to the scale of my legs.  And I haven't checked stock legs yet.  Just wondering if others are seeing similar stuff.

[nli2work]

5 hours ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

Quick query regarding an "anybody else see this weirdness?" type question.

I've got my legs basically working.  Not really tuned, cos their for craft big enough to cause the launchpad to explode, but they basically work.  I have noticed that when you've landed somewhere, if you EVA/rover/whatever away from your legged craft, when you come back within "let's enable physics again" range of your craft, the legs seem to trigger some strange behaviour.  It's a bit like while you're away all the legs compress, and the moment you come close again, all the springs are released and the craft bounces up (and tips over usually).  I'm probably seeing an exaggerated edition of the effect due to the scale of my legs.  And I haven't checked stock legs yet.  Just wondering if others are seeing similar stuff.

Physics getting turned on/off is probably the cause. When physics is off, when a vessel is "packed", all the physics related stuff are probably inactive. When Physics is active again, it's as if the leg is being created again, and all suspension physics activates. I'm seeing this quite a bit with wheels too. Lower suspensionDistance? I tried increasing damperRatio and things got worse.

Edited April 2, 2016 by nli2work

[Jovzin]

8 hours ago, sarbian said:

The tool is out. If you need it to display more stuff just ask in the thread

 

Thanks will try it.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

1 hour ago, nli2work said:

Physics getting turned on/off is probably the cause. When physics is off, when a vessel is "packed", all the physics related stuff are probably inactive. When Physics is active again, it's as if the leg is being created again, and all suspension physics activates. I'm seeing this quite a bit with wheels too. Lower suspensionDistance? I tried increasing damperRatio and things got worse.

That seems like the cause.  Switching to and from the craft does similar things.  Stock landing legs are giving a small twitch, so I suppose you can tune it to non-hazardous levels.

[NecroBones]

6 hours ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

That seems like the cause.  Switching to and from the craft does similar things.  Stock landing legs are giving a small twitch, so I suppose you can tune it to non-hazardous levels.

 

The tuning seems really strange at times. Part of the problem I'm having with those last few legs I made, is that it's not possible to make the springs weak enough for the vechicle to settle in with a partially compressed spring. If I weaken the Spring setting to something like 4, it'll behave more how I want, except the vehicle gets phantom oscillations. Different legs are showing different strengths and tunings, even with the same settings, so I don't know what the difference is. KSP must be adding some sort of secret voodoo to it.

[nli2work]

spent last night experimenting with wheel side of things... seems like targetPosition should be reversed in the configs... 0 being full extension (0 compression), 1 being no extension (full compression). For wheels it's usually near mid way point so it's not an issue. but for lander legs, setting to targetPosition to 1 amounts to fully compressing the suspension from the start, and you end up with what appears to be rock solid legs with no suspension at all.

wheel traction still feels very slippery. but I think it's just because we've gotten so used to the old unrealistic wheels. Dirivng with WSAD is like have 0/1 gas pedal with no throttle... if your car had only that you'd be spinning your tires a lot too.

Edited April 2, 2016 by nli2work

[NecroBones]

39 minutes ago, nli2work said:

spent last night experimenting with wheel side of things... seems like targetPosition should be reversed in the configs... 0 being full extension (0 compression), 1 being no extension (full compression). For wheels it's usually near mid way point so it's not an issue. but for lander legs, setting to targetPosition to 1 amounts to fully compressing the suspension from the start, and you end up with what appears to be rock solid legs with no suspension at all.

 

My legs behave like the stock ones-- 0 is compressed, and 1 is extended. Doing it that way also requires me to set the offset to the negative of the suspension distance, just like the stock legs. I'm wondering what's different from your side that it's opposite of that? Strange.

 

[nli2work]

might be because wheelcollider has to be oriented correctly for wheel mesh to spin the the right direction. for lander legs that's not as much an issue. 

Also you can see the wheel collider settings in Blender after importing MU; in the tab with the yellow cube icon, scroll all the way down and there's a Mu Properties section. I just found that out last night. maybe worth checking out the settings in the lander legs.