Starilex Nightstar : Better KSPartTools for IVAs

[Ailex]

Nightstar II

A Starliex product

"Guiding you through IVA even when it's dark"

 

Hello fellow kerbounats!
It is not a secret that making IVAs for KSP is not the easiest thing to do, and that's why I founded Starliex Coproration and developed a plugin used to make the life
of those who chose to dedicate their time to bring us awesome new IVAs much easier.

As of right now, one of the biggest problems is that even with the Official KSPartTools IVAs are somewhat broken, I've decided to address the following problems:

• Props have the wrong values: When an IVA is spawned in Unity through the KSPartTools, the props used in the IVA have wrong values for  Position,
  Rotation and Scale, this makes practially impossible editing an already made IVA, both stock and modded a like. It is also a big problem if for some reason
  while working on a IVA the original Unity project is lost and now to keep working on the IVA it's necessary to spawn it with the official Part Tools and welp,
  now the values are all messed up (that actually happened to me, rip)
   
• The textures don't work on the editor: The DDS file format used by KSP is not used by Unity to map the texture on the model, which makes all models appear
  white with no texture.
   
• The prop spawner can be tedius: While it's neat and convenient, once there are a lot of props (like RPM and ASET) searching for a specific prop becomes tedius
  and time consuming, especially because they are not fully ordered alphabetically, so looking for the right prop takes a lot of unecessary time, in addition it's also
  not possible to search by name, which again would make the IVA making process much easeir.

While I intend to resole all of these problems, I will do it step by step with the Nightstar Project, so far it has 3 different releases, which will be posted on this forum
once i finish developing them.

We're currently at release 2 !

Download
It's avaliable from my gitlab
https://gitlab.com/Ailex-/starilex-nightstar

 

Installation

A working unity project with KSPartTools is required, i'm too lazy to write another guide here, but it can be found at the Official KSPartTools thread.
The first step is to download the zip file, then copy the Starliex Nightstar folder inside the Asset\Plugins\ directory of the Unity project.

Once it's installed you should have on the top a Starliex button like so:

Spoiler

https://ibb.co/ssNS7Hz

Utilization

Coordinate Recalculator (also IVA Textures) - This tool allows to have working IVA textures for the capsules in Unity, it also recalculates the coordinate of every prop and place them in the correct position.

• Set up the GameData directory with the official KSPartTools
   
• Select the IVA model (not the props!)
   
• Click Calculate to get working textures (You will have to then delete and respawn the IVA)
   
• Click Calculate Coordinates to snap every prop in the correct place
   

Prop Tools

• Spawn the window by clicking on the Starilex menu at the top
   
• Spawn a Prop from the KSPartTools
   
• Select the Prop
   
• You can now copy and paste the position, rotation and scale between props, when the plugin is loaded the default values for all of those is 0.
   
• To use the Open Config feature you need to specify the GameData diretctory with the official Part Tools, otherwise it will not work.
  
   

License
AGPL

███

 

Edited June 29, 2022 by Ailex
Software Update & typo

[theonegalen]

magic!

[kurgut]

On 6/9/2022 at 9:23 PM, Ailex said:

the props used in the IVA have wrong values for  Position,
Rotation and Scale,

Thanks a lot for your work ! : )
I recently modified some IVAs with unity, but I hadn't ant problem with position and rotation... Maybe it has been fixed in the meantime ?
Was also able to copy and paste those value between props too.

But the prop search bar is......               I have no words < 3

Cheers

Edited July 21, 2023 by kurgut