Greetings from Nistur at Kerbal Kaos Industries

[nistur]

I think the first thing to do now is to introduce myself properly, then my project. This isn't my first post here, I've recently added a rambling post requesting help with my camera plugin.

My name is Philipp, although I tend to go by Nistur online. I've been playing KSP for a while now. I wouldn't say I'm good by any stretch of the imagination, I do enjoy it though. By day I'm a programmer working on predominantly iOS games, largely using Unity. To date I've got four (relatively successful) games out with my name on them, and one out which we weren't allowed credits for, mentioning no names *cough*EA*cough*. I've also worked on a number of other projects that haven't (yet) seen the light of day. In my free time, I used to game a lot, but now I tend to spend most of my time while at the computer coding and tinkering.

It's because of my love of space, tinkering, and also my inability to do much well in KSP that I've been wanting to make some mods. I have a larger goal for the project, which is to make a giant interplanetary ship in space, but in the meantime I'm building smaller components which will make life easier to achieve the goal. I will not be making cheating parts. The first part I'm making is a docking cam system to help me with (surprisingly) docking, which I'm particularly terrible at, but can also be used for general awesomeness. After that I think I'm going to be working on a fuel management system to help with refuelling. Maybe then some more "standard" parts like engines, fuel tanks etc. One thing that I've got planned for the (more distant) future is to be able to create a hull. This will almost definitely be via a ship mounted tool so will only be available in space. The player will aim the constructor ship and "fire" four points at a target ship, after the fourth one a quad will be created between them. The functionality of this will be that it will act as structs between the four points (six in total, two horizontal, two vertical, two diagonal) and probably a collision box. This should allow the creation of more aesthetically pleasing ships, as well as more structurally sound behemoths. Overall there are a lot of things I'm planning on doing which I'm sure will have been done before. I would like my mod to be standalone and "complete" as it were, so I don't want it to depend on someone having another mod installed to run mine. On the other hand, I definitely don't want to conflict with anyone else's work, so I will be looking for other similar work to mine, especially open source stuff so I can... be inspired by it (I will obviously credit anyone else's work) If there are mods achieving similar goals to anything I'm working on, I'll also try my best to make the functionality interchangable, so the mods can be used in conjunction with each other.

I have set up a project blog for "Kaos Industries" in which I'll be providing updates in character when they occur. I will also update this thread with OOC news when I see fit. Unfortunately this probably won't be progressing particularly quickly for a number of reasons, firstly, I am currently working as a freelance programmer for a while and the majority of my energy will be sucked up by that, and secondly, there is a significant amount of artwork that needs to be produced for me to be satisfied with my mods. I currently don't have an artist available to produce these, so it will have to rely on my rather poor artistic skills.

As a final note, all my plugin code will be released under an open source license on GitHub (probably zlib) when I'm happy that there's a functioning and useful mod. If I make any 3D models, they will be under a similar license, if I manage to find a contributor, that might change depending on their wishes.

If you've managed to read all of this and not got bored, you deserve a cookie.