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

[PayadorPerseguido]

2 hours ago, Beetlecat said:

They may not have a home on there.

How can i get them on my on-going campaign then?

[Shadowmage]

51 minutes ago, PayadorPerseguido said:

How can i get them on my on-going campaign then?

There are no changes made for CTT on the regular tracks and wheels (at least no in the patches included with KF).  They will be in the same node as they are in a non-CTT campaign (advancedMotors mostly, 550sci node).

[PayadorPerseguido]

3 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

There are no changes made for CTT on the regular tracks and wheels (at least no in the patches included with KF).  They will be in the same node as they are in a non-CTT campaign (advancedMotors mostly, 550sci node).

I had an on going campaign when i installed this mod. Will i be able to get them anyway?

[qromodynmc]

I can confirm issue with Far.

Far shouldnt have business with landing gears but after installing it, stock wheels act bit different too, they're way too bouncy under far. But good luck convincing ferram to investigate issue.

[linuxgurugamer]

7 minutes ago, qromodynmc said:

I can confirm issue with Far.

Far shouldnt have business with landing gears but after installing it, stock wheels act bit different too, they're way too bouncy under far. But good luck convincing ferram to investigate issue.

I wonder if it might be because FAR is adding lift to the vessel, even while landing?  That would have the result of making the wheels bouncier

[Nansuchao]

1 hour ago, qromodynmc said:

I can confirm issue with Far.

Far shouldnt have business with landing gears but after installing it, stock wheels act bit different too, they're way too bouncy under far. But good luck convincing ferram to investigate issue.

Stock wheels are bouncy with FAR cause the landing speed of a plane is higher than in stock. This was an issue I reported during the 1.2 pre-release, still present in the bug tracker. FAR has no fault for the stock wheels.

[Fireheart318]

I'm having issues with the surface hoverpads. They don't float. Will send log in a few days because I won't have access to my computer for a few days 

[Shadowmage]

5 hours ago, PayadorPerseguido said:

I had an on going campaign when i installed this mod. Will i be able to get them anyway?

Why don't you answer that question yourself, and look in your tech tree.  Do they show up under the 'advanced motors' node?  That is your answer.

[PayadorPerseguido]

23 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

Why don't you answer that question yourself, and look in your tech tree.  Do they show up under the 'advanced motors' node?  That is your answer.

I'm not at home till sunday, and i'm curious. But i will do so, thanks

[Overland]

given these a go..they work lovely  but with a few issues regarding stress

on a 7 car fuel train.. the rear wagon always breaks its tracks on load no matter what the setting used?

im also having issues with stress breakage while turning the train.. never used to happen on the old rigs..i appreciate though we're dealing with an entirely different wheel system

anything i can do short of editing the cfg files?

 

[Shadowmage]

2 minutes ago, Overland said:

given these a go..they work lovely  but with a few issues regarding stress

on a 7 car fuel train.. the rear wagon always breaks its tracks on load no matter what the setting used?

im also having issues with stress breakage while turning the train.. never used to happen on the old rigs..i appreciate though we're dealing with an entirely different wheel system

anything i can do short of editing the cfg files?

 

You can go into the in-game difficulty settings->advanced settings; there should be a KSPWheel section.  From there you can turn off speed and stress related damage/breakage. (set the slider to 0 to disable)  (currently they only allow integer values, but in the next update they will properly allow decimal value selection, so you can turn down the damage without turning it off completely)

Will also be tuning the damage model a bit in one of the upcoming updates so that it takes a bit more of an 'impact' to break the wheels.

Would you mind providing a .craft file of the vehicle you are experiencing problems with and I can further investigate some of the issues?  (As long as it is all stock anyhow; I don't have time to track down a ton of mods for testing craft designs...)

[Overland]

Just now, Shadowmage said:

You can go into the in-game difficulty settings->advanced settings; there should be a KSPWheel section.  From there you can turn off speed and stress related damage/breakage. (set the slider to 0 to disable)  (currently they only allow integer values, but in the next update they will properly allow decimal value selection, so you can turn down the damage without turning it off completely)

Will also be tuning the damage model a bit in one of the upcoming updates so that it takes a bit more of an 'impact' to break the wheels.

Would you mind providing a .craft file of the vehicle you are experiencing problems with and I can further investigate some of the issues?  (As long as it is all stock anyhow; I don't have time to track down a ton of mods for testing craft designs...)

ill make one stock-ish with the only requirements being Infernal Robotics as a test platform when i get home tonight .needs the free docking washer as the steering drawbar. thanks

[Gaalidas]

Nice to see this taking off again.  I'm very curious as to how you got KF into the difficulty settings and such, and also curious as to how you got it all working again.  I'd love to dig into the code and see if you managed to fix other issues we were having before the KSP engine upgrade.  I only found out about this when BillyWinnJr (YouTube) mentioned the mod in his latest aircraft build.

I've downloaded the source and will be looking at it quite extensively in the future.  I would love to try re-implementing some of my various features from the old mod that I was working on before I had to throw in the towel.

Edited January 27, 2017 by Gaalidas

[Shadowmage]

4 minutes ago, Gaalidas said:

Nice to see this taking off again.  I'm very curious as to how you got KF into the difficulty settings and such, and also curious as to how you got it all working again.  I'd love to dig into the code and see if you managed to fix other issues we were having before the KSP engine upgrade.  I only found out about this when BillyWinnJr (YouTube) mentioned the mod in his latest aircraft build.

Hehe... blood, sweat, tears, lots of swearing, some magic pixie dust and maybe there were a few sacrifices to the PhysX gods....

On the back-end (wheel-collider) it is all based around raycast/sphere-cast/other-sweep types, using rigidbody.addForce() for suspension and friction, with a fair bit of math to calculate the suspension and friction forces to be applied for the current state.  Might be a couple bits of anti-jitter code in there, but I've overall found the system to be quite stable as long as it is given sufficient room to work (speeds, suspension lengths, spring forces all setup appropriately).  Currently using simple Euler stepping/integration, which has a few intrinsic problems, but it also works acceptably for most uses.

The front-end (part-modules), well, nothing really revolutionary there; its all UI stuff and hacks to work around quirks in KSP.  The settings menu bit -- it was a new addition to stock code with KSP 1.2 to allow mods to add game-settings menu options and fields.  Figured it was better than using config files for some of those settings, and not too much different to implement from a code perspective.  I did use the original KF repulsor and DustFX code for some references as to how to do some specific things that I was unfamiliar with, but the new modules are almost entirely new code.

It is not all perfect, certainly still some problems in some areas, but at least tracks and stuff are usable now (which is simply impossible with the stock modules and Unity wheel colliders).  And I'm slowly figuring out and fixing the remaining problems one at a time.

[Overland]

Sorry it took so long to get back to you mate, I'm using a non-stock train at the moment so making one that is stock under the same forces seems a little hard -

one things constant though more or less.. steering stress.. because wagons are steered by their drawbar on the bogey and the rear set of tracks is fixed, it seems to break under cornering a lot in the wagons further along the train. hence any track suddenly changing direction seems to = stress and broken

ive taken to turning off damage.. but its leaving a half-experience wise immersion. being invincible in honeybadger mode

I'll get more data when I can..

btw whats the half track button about?

[damerell]

2 hours ago, Overland said:

btw whats the half track button about?

Steering in reverse, IIRC. If you press left, a tracked vehicle rotates the same way whether it's going forwards, in reverse, or stopped. A wheeled vehicle rotates to the left when going forwards and to the right when going in reverse. What should a half-track do? Probably not have the wheels try and guide you around one way while the tracks try and rotate you the other way, anyway.

[Shadowmage]

Updated KSPWheels release is available:

Nothing else has changed in KF, but there are quite a few fixes if you update the KSPWheels plugin (.dll).

[TK421d]

was pleasantly surprised when i opened up ckan this morning to look for updates, and flipped over to "new in" to see this.  love all these wheels/tracks, have missed them!

[Gaalidas]

So... I did a bit of poking around at the code and I found something that I can't make sense of.  It's the "nameof" method.  It doesn't register as a valid method on my end.  Where's that coming from?

 

The rest of the code is beautifully done.  I'm saddened by the demise of the in-flight (so to speak) GUI I worked on, but I hear that whole system changed with the engine upgrade so it was probably unusable.  I was pleasantly surprised that the dust color camera was still being used.

I'm thinking about trying to get the DustFX portion of the mod also available to stock colliders/wheels somehow.  The original mod that module was based on (CollisionFX) ran on complete stock colliders, so it shouldn't be too bad trying to get it functional with that again.  I'd just have to strip out everything that related directly to the KFWheel modules.  I need to go dust off the old code from my repo.

 

One thing in particular I wanted to address back in the day was the over-water repulsion effect in relation to the DustFX module.  As it is, using the camera, you'd get colored spray that looks like whatever the water looks like.  In reality you'd get more of a white-ish spray effect.  Then school got in my way and... well, you know the rest of the story.

Edited January 28, 2017 by Gaalidas

[Shadowmage]

26 minutes ago, Gaalidas said:

So... I did a bit of poking around at the code and I found something that I can't make sense of.  It's the "nameof" method.  It doesn't register as a valid method on my end.  Where's that coming from?

I'm not sure what system library it comes from, and I had no idea it even existed at first until @blowfish pointed it out to me in a PR.  It merely returns a string of the name of the passed in field; for uses in referencing Fields[xxx] or Events[xxx] it makes sure that you have the proper field name, and also allows for IDEs to properly handle renaming of the field (previously you would have to go back in and update the string manually).  I'm using VisualStudio, so it might be a library that it adds/includes by default.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn986596.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

35 minutes ago, Gaalidas said:

The rest of the code is beautifully done.  I'm saddened by the demise of the in-flight (so to speak) GUI I worked on, but I hear that whole system changed with the engine upgrade so it was probably unusable.  I was pleasantly surprised that the dust color camera was still being used.

Thanks   Quite a few bits are based on KF code where I was stumped or unfamiliar with the territory (track and repulsor texture animation, camera setup).  Couldn't have done some of the features without those references.  Still lots of room for improvement in some of the modules though, several areas only have rough outlines of the functionality implemented or simply a stub saying //TODO...

Sadly I must have never seen the in-flight GUI (I was not aware that one existed); the last time I really got to play with KF much was back in the 0.90 days, before the dust-fx came about.  I'll have to take a look at the existing code as I would like to have a nice centralized control GUI for everything; it might still make a comeback.

That color camera code was pure genius , no easy way to replace that functionality.  The biome color lookup from the config file looked okay in most cases, but using the camera setup gives very good results in nearly all cases.

 

29 minutes ago, Gaalidas said:

One thing in particular I wanted to address back in the day was the over-water repulsion effect in relation to the DustFX module.  As it is, using the camera, you'd get colored spray that looks like whatever the water looks like.  In reality you'd get more of a white-ish spray effect.  Then school got in my way and... well, you know the rest of the story.

Indeed, I want to go back in and manually adjust the colors a bit when water mode is enabled.  Probably keep the base color of the water, but ramp up the color and/or alpha channels proportionally to bring it closer to white and make it more pronounced; possibly even adjust a few of the other parameters to make it more spray and less dust.  I also intend to use that water mode effect for wheels in general as several will have water-propulsion enabled as soon as I can write up the code for it.  One other bit I was thinking on was using a second particle effect for water mode like the stock spash down effects, replacing or in addition to the existing effects.

 

32 minutes ago, Gaalidas said:

I'm thinking about trying to get the DustFX portion of the mod also available to stock colliders/wheels somehow.  The original mod that module was based on (CollisionFX) ran on complete stock colliders, so it shouldn't be too bad trying to get it functional with that again.  I'd just have to strip out everything that related directly to the KFWheel modules.  I need to go dust off the old code from my repo.

Yeah, wouldn't be too hard to adapt it to work for generic collisions (collider-collider).  Collision data is available to part-modules, and that can be used for figuring out the necessary speed/force inputs.  Adding support for stock wheels would also be possible with some additional code to check/reference them for the grounded, speed, and force inputs.

 

Let me know if you run into anything puzzling in the code.  I try to add comments where needed, but sometimes they get skipped on prototype code and forgotten about later.

[blowfish]

nameof is a language feature included in C# 6.  You will need Visual Studio 2015 or higher to use it (not sure what the requirements for MonoDevelop are).  My understanding is that it's evaluated to a string at compile time.

Edited January 28, 2017 by blowfish

[Virtualgenius]

Its awesome ALG has been added to your pack and I understand its still a WIP is the auto align feature coming back as i couldnt see it under wheel control options

[komorka45]

Many thanks for updating this mod, great job!

One question, is there any way to disable that dust effect? It hit really hard on my GPU performance. 

[Shadowmage]

3 hours ago, komorka45 said:

Many thanks for updating this mod, great job!

One question, is there any way to disable that dust effect? It hit really hard on my GPU performance. 

(if it doesn't work, please file a bug report...)

 

4 hours ago, Virtualgenius said:

Its awesome ALG has been added to your pack and I understand its still a WIP is the auto align feature coming back as i couldnt see it under wheel control options

I was not aware of any such feature.  I do not have access to the original working 1.05 ALG setup in order to test, and I had never used them in prior versions, so no idea what feature-set was present.  I do not see a need for auto-alignment though.  Feel free to submit a PR with some code though.

[Beetlecat]

The auto alignment was borrowed from firespitter, I believe. The effect was that you could slap the gear on (almost) any-which-way, hit F2, and it would rotate the wheel joint to face exactly down and forward.

It also showed lines in the VAB indicating how far from 0 degrees they were in each direction.