[1.8.x] Kerbal Foundries -- Continued - Tracks, Wheels, and Gear

[flywlyx]

Is there a way to make track chassis?

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

19 minutes ago, flywlyx said:

Is there a way to make track chassis?

How do you mean a track chassis?,  a chassis with tracks on both sides as delivered,   like my 8x8 truck, wheels already built in sort of thing?    For tracks I recall the great one saying that it's not possible to do with tracks,  It's fiendishly fiddly with just 8 wheels , it'd be horrendous with twenty.   But chassis you can put tracks on are plentiful,  although i don't think thats what you want

Edited February 23, 2017 by SpannerMonkey(smce)

[Gaalidas]

Popped back in to see that things are progressing nicely.  Water propulsion, water spray... wow... coming along very nicely.

As for action groups... I remember doing a lot of those back in the day and, if need be, I can create as many of those as you'd like for anything that can be changed in-flight using a context menu.  I did, at one time, want to create a way to configure things in the editor and/or the part configs to modify what the action groups did.  For instance, an up/down adjustment that can be set to a custom rate of change.  That I never really got functional, but I never got a chance to test some of the ideas I had with editor-only tweakables allowing per-part adjustment of change rates when using action groups later on in the flight scene.  I'm a big supporter of action groups overall.

 

Chassis... I remember the old mod (Rubber-band Inc. I think) had the really massive tracks in a chassis format as a part... I don't remember if it was a multi-mesh part or a complete mesh though.

 

A steering module separate from the wheel/track itself is something I've had on my mind for a long time.  I would agree with previous posts that this is more in the realm of IR part manipulation, but there is a lack of ability to tie that in with the steering if KF so that it uses the rotation of the IR part instead of the track's native steering and stil lallows for the tracks to behave properly.  I'm thinking some kind of new module, perhaps even a new plugin, that relies on both KSPWheel and IR, to bridge the gap between the two mods will be needed to really make that type of thing a reality.

Edited February 23, 2017 by Gaalidas

[Citizen247]

I've been playing around with the adjustable landing gear and they seem to cause an awful lot of drag when stowed. They're cutting 40m/s or more off top speeds over stock gear in some cases.

[Shadowmage]

8 minutes ago, SpannerMonkey(smce) said:

How do you mean a track chassis?,  a chassis with tracks on both sides as delivered,   like my 8x8 truck, wheels already built in sort of thing?    For tracks I recall the great one saying that it's not possible to do with tracks,  It's fiendishly fiddly with just 8 wheels , it'd be horrendous with twenty.   But chassis you can put tracks on are plentiful,  although i don't think thats what you want

Actually I recently fixed things up so that multiple tracks should be doable within a single part, either pre-rigged, or using MODEL nodes.  Should absolutely be doable.  (Tested by adding two wheels to a part through MODEL nodes; both wheels worked properly -- tracks should only be additional config work for the setup).

But yeah, it would start becoming complex very fast for the configs.  Doable, sure.  Desirable? Probably not.

 

5 minutes ago, Citizen247 said:

I've been playing around with the adjustable landing gear and they seem to cause an awful lot of drag when stowed. They're cutting 40m/s or more off top speeds over stock gear in some cases.

What scale are the gear at, and is this using stock or FAR for aerodynamics?  (FAR has known issues in that it never updates for the retracted state).

Come to think of it... even stock aero likely has some problems with them as I don't think I added in any drag-cube updating for deployment state, so stock likely sees them as fully deployed at all times.  Honestly, I'm not even sure how to do drag-cube updating for some dynamic parts as those (aside from setting them up for procedural drag-cubes and/or re-rendering a single cube manually during animation updating); the standard tricks of rendering the cubes in advance won't work for those parts as the user is able to change their shape...

[Citizen247]

Just now, Shadowmage said:

What scale are the gear at, and is this using stock or FAR for aerodynamics?  (FAR has known issues in that it never updates for the retracted state).

Come to think of it... even stock aero likely has some problems with them as I don't think I added in any drag-cube updating for deployment state, so stock likely sees them as fully deployed at all times.  Honestly, I'm not even sure how to do drag-cube updating for some dynamic parts as those (aside from setting them up for procedural drag-cubes and/or re-rendering a single cube manually during animation updating); the standard tricks of rendering the cubes in advance won't work for those parts as the user is able to change their shape...

Yes, it would have been useful for me to give you that information, sorry :). It's stock, and scaling between 1 and 0.75 seems to have the same effect.

[Gaalidas]

I think it's likely that you'll have to go procedural for drag cubes... I stopped coding for KSP before the drag-cubes became a real thing so I have no idea what the code for that looks like.

[flywlyx]

39 minutes ago, SpannerMonkey(smce) said:

How do you mean a track chassis?,  a chassis with tracks on both sides as delivered,   like my 8x8 truck, wheels already built in sort of thing?    For tracks I recall the great one saying that it's not possible to do with tracks,  It's fiendishly fiddly with just 8 wheels , it'd be horrendous with twenty.   But chassis you can put tracks on are plentiful,  although i don't think thats what you want

Yes, the impossible one is what I mean Where can I find your 8x8 truck? I would like to take a peak of the CFG build.

24 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

Actually I recently fixed things up so that multiple tracks should be doable within a single part, either pre-rigged, or using MODEL nodes.  Should absolutely be doable.  (Tested by adding two wheels to a part through MODEL nodes; both wheels worked properly -- tracks should only be additional config work for the setup).

But yeah, it would start becoming complex very fast for the configs.  Doable, sure.  Desirable? Probably not.

You the man!

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

20 minutes ago, flywlyx said:

Where can I find your 8x8 truck? I would like to take a peak of the CFG build.

I'll pm you a copy, i have two, one with  tr2l type straight up and down  suspension and a bigger one with the whole lookAT set up and constraints,  mind you once you see how easy it actually is to do. you'll be able to work out all the suspension gubbins,   it's  just like any other  KF wheel just lots more sets ( not forgetting the 700 line, no empties cfg )

 

50 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

multiple tracks should be doable within a single part,

oooo Brilliant, if that works, as well as everything else does that'll be a first, well rb did have it working for 30 seconds or so   but to make it really work is very cool, now where did i stash those ancient rb bogies still with the tracks on.......

..Adding wheels through model node , it'll take a while to fully appreciate what can be done with that. These arbitrarily placed wheels, what is their format,  a WC and the bare minimum of transforms that let the collider know where everything supposed to be?  or a full part meshes  an all  etc?

  While I'm here, back in days gone by it was possible to rig a group or replusors into one model  as I've done with wheels ,  and have them function as normal, been trying the very same thing with the latest versions and can't seem to hit the right arrangement to get them working as individuals or as a group.  IS it possible or am I just burning hours?

if i can't go with repulsors it'll  be back on the invisible wheels (poor mans repulsors   )

[Shadowmage]

1 hour ago, Gaalidas said:

I think it's likely that you'll have to go procedural for drag cubes... I stopped coding for KSP before the drag-cubes became a real thing so I have no idea what the code for that looks like.

I think I have a solution in place that should work acceptably.  Need to do some testing on it tonight.  It is basically procedural drag-cubes, but manually rendered only as-needed during animation updates (stock procedural cubes re-render every X seconds or so even if not needed, can cause in-flight hiccups if lots of parts are doing it).

 

8 minutes ago, SpannerMonkey(smce) said:

oooo Brilliant, if that works, as well as everything else does that'll be a first, well rb did have it working for 30 seconds or so   but to make it really work is very cool, now where did i stash those ancient rb bogies still with the tracks on.......

..Adding wheels through model node , it'll take a while to fully appreciate what can be done with that. These arbitrarily placed wheels, what is their format,  a WC and the bare minimum of transforms that let the collider know where everything supposed to be?  or a full part meshes  an all  etc?

  While I'm here, back in days gone by it was possible to rig a group or replusors into one model  as I've done with wheels ,  and have them function as normal, been trying the very same thing with the latest versions and can't seem to hit the right arrangement to get them working as individuals or as a group.  IS it possible or am I just burning hours?

Well, in order to get the full setup working with MODEL nodes it requires quite a bit of config beyond what you were doing for the pre-rigged parts.  You need to setup multiple KSPWheelBase modules, one for each 'wheel' on the part, and use the recently added 'index-in-duplicate' support for the wheel definitions (which tells it which transform out of the duplicate transforms to use; works for suspension, steering, wheel rotation, etc).  Tracks have one final additional field that needs configured in order to tell it which skinned-mesh-renderer in the part to use.  Note:  Most of this stuff is only supported in the dev versions of KSPWheel (some of it just added today), and none of it has seen much, if any, testing.

Repulsors -- not going to work as simple as that.  Repulsors and ALG both use special module setups that are incompatible with multiple-duplicate-models-in-a-part (ALG more so than repulsors; could possibly fix repulsors to work, but never the ALG).  They are the 'red-headed-stepchildren' of KF parts and will only have limited support for some features and uses;  because they are so different than any other form of wheel, it would be extremely prohibitive time-investment wise to get the full feature set working for those parts (and with repulsors the fact that I do not actually use them in my games also limits my willingness to invest such large amounts of time).

You could however, in theory, rig your own custom part with uniquely named transforms and use multiple KSPWheelBase modules in combination with multiple KSPWheelRepulsor modules.  Or just use manually rigged models that have no suspension or wheel meshes and set the friction on them to zero (that is essentially the basis for the repulsors, with added support for EC draw and length/height adjustment).

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

4 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

snip

Re repulsor things,   As it something very few are ever likely to try, I'd never expect any time investment especially as you say the system is after all fairly esoteric. Asking the question saved me a lot of frustration retrying something that's not ever going to work. The last suggested solution is pretty much how i did it before except they had suspension, (and the tiniest bit of sideways friction,as hovercraft are not truly friction free )  , and have a couple of,  lets call them stock repulsors as it sounds better than invisible wheels, (including LoFi's  original mk2 repulsor)  that i use for messing around,  at least it's only six in one  i want.   

  Regarding that minimum set up ,  I read in the git page that WCs (wheelColliders)  will work placed, if I understand it without needing , as you say, all the other modules,  is this a simple case of making the WC a child of that which you want to mobilise and creating a basic cfg with a KSPWheelBase driving the WC:s?  Or am i oversimplifying it?  ( I'm at a point in the week when simple is good   )

Cheers

 

[flywlyx]

4 minutes ago, SpannerMonkey(smce) said:

Re repulsor things,   As it something very few are ever likely to try, I'd never expect any time investment especially as you say the system is after all fairly esoteric. Asking the question saved me a lot of frustration retrying something that's not ever going to work. The last suggested solution is pretty much how i did it before except they had suspension, (and the tiniest bit of sideways friction,as hovercraft are not truly friction free )  , and have a couple of,  lets call them stock repulsors as it sounds better than invisible wheels, (including LoFi's  original mk2 repulsor)  that i use for messing around,  at least it's only six in one  i want.   

  Regarding that minimum set up ,  I read in the git page that WCs (wheelColliders)  will work placed, if I understand it without needing , as you say, all the other modules,  is this a simple case of making the WC a child of that which you want to mobilise and creating a basic cfg with a KSPWheelBase driving the WC:s?  Or am i oversimplifying it?  ( I'm at a point in the week when simple is good   )

Cheers

 

If you are looking for an air cushion chassis, I can give you one build based on raycast. The only problem is you wouldn't get the inflate animation.

 

[DirkLarien]

Had bit of a KSP binge lately and i found that ALG to be quite bumpy by default if you try to land in terrain.

 But after a bit of tweaking i found a solution

So for anyone struggling:

You need to enable manual suspension settings in difficulty menu. And lower the load rating ideally to minimum. which is 1.

Had a bit of laugh landing in mountains with value around 6 ...just try it really

[Shadowmage]

2 hours ago, Gaalidas said:

Popped back in to see that things are progressing nicely.  Water propulsion, water spray... wow... coming along very nicely.

As for action groups... I remember doing a lot of those back in the day and, if need be, I can create as many of those as you'd like for anything that can be changed in-flight using a context menu.  I did, at one time, want to create a way to configure things in the editor and/or the part configs to modify what the action groups did.  For instance, an up/down adjustment that can be set to a custom rate of change.  That I never really got functional, but I never got a chance to test some of the ideas I had with editor-only tweakables allowing per-part adjustment of change rates when using action groups later on in the flight scene.  I'm a big supporter of action groups overall.

 

Chassis... I remember the old mod (Rubber-band Inc. I think) had the really massive tracks in a chassis format as a part... I don't remember if it was a multi-mesh part or a complete mesh though.

 

A steering module separate from the wheel/track itself is something I've had on my mind for a long time.  I would agree with previous posts that this is more in the realm of IR part manipulation, but there is a lack of ability to tie that in with the steering if KF so that it uses the rotation of the IR part instead of the track's native steering and stil lallows for the tracks to behave properly.  I'm thinking some kind of new module, perhaps even a new plugin, that relies on both KSPWheel and IR, to bridge the gap between the two mods will be needed to really make that type of thing a reality.

Indeed, have been quite busy as of late (well, when aren't I busy?).  Several new and cleaned up features in the dev versions that should be making it to the full releases hopefully this weekend.  The water-mode on the dust-effects is currently re-using the smoke particle effect, but it could easily be adjusted to use a more spray like effect instead of or in addition to the smoke one.  Doesn't look too bad as-is, but still room for improvement.

 

Action Groups -- for some reason they always escape my mind.  Probably because I always play career mode, and never upgrade the VAB past tier2, and so have never had unlocked AG's.  Well, that, and the fact that they get very messed up very fast when you start docking together different craft using the same action group #'s for different purposes (at least last I tested them, back in .90 or whenever it was).  Its not that they are difficult to code... its that I never get to see the benefit of the work.  Will likely end up doing a big 'Action-Group-ing' pass on things once I get most of the other features in place and stabilized.  Quite a few things that could be added to the AGs for these parts.

Well, at least now I know where the 'RBI' name comes from   Had always been curious as to its origin, but it was already long gone by the time I even started playing KSP.

 

External steering module -- certainly doable.  Probably the only way to get that kind of interaction between IR and KF/KSPWheel stuff (a separate plugin that has both as a dependency).  I haven't used IR much, but I would like to start playing around with it soon to investigate things like trailer hitches/etc.  So will probably know a bit more at that point.

 

16 minutes ago, SpannerMonkey(smce) said:

Regarding that minimum set up ,  I read in the git page that WCs (wheelColliders)  will work placed, if I understand it without needing , as you say, all the other modules,

Yep.  All that is -needed- for one of these wheels to function, at the physics/wheel-collider level, is a single wheel-collider transform.  The rest is just dressing on the model to make things 'look' like wheels.  (also note that you don't need to add Unity WheelColliders to the model in Unity; even if you do, the KSPWheels plugin merely deletes them when loading the model)

So, if you were interested in making a pre-rigged hovercraft setup, it would be as simple as adding the wheel collider transforms to your model and specifying those transforms in the KSPWheelBase module.  It would have no steering, no visible suspension, no visible wheel-rotation, no motor, and no brakes (as those are all the 'other modules'), but it should work for a hovercraft setup.

Alternatively, one of the next things planned as far as new parts go will be a set of ground-effect fans / electric motors -- intended specifically for hovercraft type setups.  They will use engine thrust rather than suspension, but the engine thrust will be increased when closer to the ground (so it will in effect work a bit like suspension).  Probably still a few weeks/months out on those parts though.

 

9 minutes ago, DirkLarien said:

Had bit of a KSP binge lately and i found that ALG to be quite bumpy by default if you try to land in terrain.

A couple easy things to do that will increase the ALG stability (with the current versions) --

1.) Keep the strut angled as straight as possible; angled strut results in changing wheel-base with suspension compression, and the sideways friction can cause jittering.  This will be fixed with the next KF release, which includes updated rigging for those parts (and an entirely new plugin....)
2.) Mount the wheels directly to the fuselage and use the stock offset widget to position them.  This gives the greatest simulation stability from a Unity Joints perspective.
3.) Use auto-struts on parts that have large mass discrepancies.  Auto-strut those wings to the fuselage, strut the fuselage pieces to each-other.  Anything that you can do to reduce joint flexing between parts on the craft.  Ideally there would be zero joint flexing, which is where you will see the greatest stability in the wheels.
4.) Go into your difficulty settings and disable the 'advanced suspension mode'.  This will allow for auto-calculated spring and damper settings which are often more stable and reliable than the manually specified ones.  (the load-rating slider will change to a 'spring rating' slider that does much the same thing, but with some other behind-the-scenes tweaks and optimizations.  (Note, the advanced suspension mode will likely be removed with the next release anyway)

[rasta013]

1 hour ago, Shadowmage said:

(Note, the advanced suspension mode will likely be removed with the next release anyway)

Personally I hope we could keep it as I like the challenge but if it isn't truly needed for anything I understand the decision to remove it.

[DirkLarien]

3 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

4.) Go into your difficulty settings and disable the 'advanced suspension mode'

Thank you for all the tips.

Hmmm, about the advanced ... that was actually only thing that allowed me to land the vehicle.

In automatic mode no matter the wheel setting it was too bouncy....i guess it might have been due to angle of the rear wheel struts.

Anyway the mod is great. Thank you for all this.

 

Edited February 24, 2017 by DirkLarien

[Shadowmage]

14 hours ago, rasta013 said:

Personally I hope we could keep it as I like the challenge but if it isn't truly needed for anything I understand the decision to remove it.

 

11 hours ago, DirkLarien said:

Thank you for all the tips.

Hmmm, about the advanced ... that was actually only thing that allowed me to land the vehicle.

In automatic mode no matter the wheel setting it was too bouncy....i guess it might have been due to angle of the rear wheel struts.

Anyway the mod is great. Thank you for all this.

 

 

I'll see what it would take to keep it around (I haven't tested in in months, and wasn't even aware it was still working).  If it is still working as it is supposed to, then it shouldn't be too hard to keep it around in one form or another -- I just had so many complaints when it was first rolled out, I would rather not deal with that again, at all, ever.

[rasta013]

I will say this - as part of testing I haven't been including that bit at all to verify all the baseline functionality first. I am running it in my career game but there I'm still pretty limited in what's available to me (I use a custom patch to throw KF parts all over my customized tree now ) and so haven't really had many opportunities to see if I'm encountering problems there.

[Shadowmage]

11 hours ago, DirkLarien said:

Thank you for all the tips.

Hmmm, about the advanced ... that was actually only thing that allowed me to land the vehicle.

In automatic mode no matter the wheel setting it was too bouncy....i guess it might have been due to angle of the rear wheel struts.

Anyway the mod is great. Thank you for all this.

 

BTW, is this a stock craft that I could get a .craft file for?  (or at least get some pics of it?)

So far I have not found any craft designs that aren't fixable one way or another to get the bounciness and jittering cleaned up.  I would think that this is likely not an exception.

[DirkLarien]

2 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

BTW, is this a stock craft that I could get a .craft file for?  (or at least get some pics of it?)

So far I have not found any craft designs that aren't fixable one way or another to get the bounciness and jittering cleaned up.  I would think that this is likely not an exception.

Turning advanced off again with already customised wheels wont reproduce it. I had to remove them and put a new ones with preset values. What seems to be the issue is default setting for those wheels.

1 is customised 2 is with default :-)

 

Edited February 24, 2017 by DirkLarien

[Shadowmage]

41 minutes ago, DirkLarien said:

Turning advanced off again with already customised wheels wont reproduce it. I had to remove them and put a new ones with preset values. What seems to be the issue is default setting for those wheels.

1 is customised 2 is with default :-)

 

Interesting -- I've never seen responses like that when I was doing landing tests, even on intentionally poorly built craft (planes that jittered like mad on the ground; they were always more stable once moving or landing).  It is also strange that it is working with 'load rating = 1' -- that tells the wheel that it can only support 1 ton maximum... so on your 9 ton aircraft, those wheels should be so badly overcompressed and unusable; it really shouldn't be working at all with that setup (going back to the 'advanced suspension mode' being more than likely broken).

I'll see what I can do to duplicate that craft setup as close as I can to do some debugging on it, but it will probably take a bit.  Alternatively you could try out the dev versions of the ALG (KF+KSPWheels dev branches) to see if they have improved the situation at all with their new rigging.  Or if you could provide a stock+KF craft file that exhibits the problem the likelihood of me being able to duplicate the problem, and thus solve the problem (or at least know what is going on), increases infinitely.

Thanks for providing the video though, that at least gives me an rough idea of what is going on.

[V8jester]

2 hours ago, DirkLarien said:

"Stuff"

Hey! It's you! The original KSP badass I learned from  good to see you.

[DirkLarien]

11 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

Interesting -- I've never seen responses like that when I was doing landing tests, even on intentionally poorly built craft (planes that jittered like mad on the ground; they were always more stable once moving or landing).  It is also strange that it is working with 'load rating = 1' -- that tells the wheel that it can only support 1 ton maximum... so on your 9 ton aircraft, those wheels should be so badly overcompressed and unusable; it really shouldn't be working at all with that setup (going back to the 'advanced suspension mode' being more than likely broken).

I'll see what I can do to duplicate that craft setup as close as I can to do some debugging on it, but it will probably take a bit.  Alternatively you could try out the dev versions of the ALG (KF+KSPWheels dev branches) to see if they have improved the situation at all with their new rigging.  Or if you could provide a stock+KF craft file that exhibits the problem the likelihood of me being able to duplicate the problem, and thus solve the problem (or at least know what is going on), increases infinitely.

Thanks for providing the video though, that at least gives me an rough idea of what is going on.

Ill provide you the craft file once i have acces to my PC in 4 days.

It might be caused by one of the parts of some obscure mod or perhaps the wheels are bit confused by tweak scale.... 

10 hours ago, V8jester said:

Hey! It's you! The original KSP badass I learned from  good to see you.

Howdy .

But i am not such a badass, these folks like Shadowmage here, who create all the mods are the real badasess. Anyway good to see you too. ;-)

[0111narwhalz]

Hey, @Shadowmage. It's been a while since there was a showcase of success on this thread.

And what a success I have to show you.

You remember the Magnus, right? Well, I took that technology, made it better, and only put two of them on. Now we have a leaping speed demon.

Are you proud of this mod yet? 'Cause you should be. I've been working on this sort of thing for years, and it wasn't until now, until KSPWheel, that I have been more than technically successful.

The trailing arms handle the real suspension stuff, while the wheels themselves help moderate jitter. The suspension takes almost two big fuel cell arrays, while the motors take another three or so. It seems appropriate; trophy trucks are insanely powerful anyway, and this is a trophy truck that gets up to 85m/s on the hills.

Something I've discovered: Scaling down wheels makes them slower. Scaling up wheels, on the other hand, is fast.

[MacLuky]

Hi Shadowmage

This looks very good. I want to start a new mod for foldable wheels, kind of like the lunar rover. Can I use your project as a starting point? It seems like the best (and only) example out there.

Regards

Chris