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[PLUGIN+PARTS][0.23] SCANsat terrain mapping


damny

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PMd Damny and didn't get a reply on my offer so I've put something together in Maya anyway and blocked in some colour.

I remember your PM, it was way too serious and I didn't have time to reply to it in the same style :P

A few people have offered to make models, but I haven't gotten any yet - so as far as I'm concerned, all spots are open if you want to contribute something, and there is no set style yet. Which sensor is this supposed to be? It could fit one of those that may or may not be optical, like biome detection. Maybe it could be animated to extend a bit away from the vessel when active? I think that could look interesting.

Speaking of people making offers

Advanced SAR sensor cluster..extends to 4meters to reduce backround 'noise' from spacecraft:

What happened to this?

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Like others said its Lazor's (and other mods probably) thingy doing stuff in the GUI, im guessing Damny uses stock code to invoke the interface, in which case the other mods that convert it take precedence ... (some times i feel real weird saying stuff in english lol)

Yeah, I gave my own explanation to the issue- mods that change the stock or use a custom UI "take precedence", as you call it, or are simply loaded first...

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Speaking of people making offers

What happened to this?

Well..the textures are all messed up...looks good in Blender and Unity....got this crazy two-tone thing going on in KSP...also cant seem to get the anim to play on activation....

Starting to think I need to reinstall either Unity or part tool..been over the textures 1000 times and cant find the issue.

I'll give it another go today..but if youd like the .blend let me know, its yours.

I got a couple other models kinda half done, whole house been sick for going on a week now, so honestly havent been doing much work on it.

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Ha! Sorry for the seriousness of the post. Like I told ya, I've done a lot of mods over the years and most people don't appreciate "Hi Damny, LOL, would like totally like to help with ur mod n stuff, LOLZ, PM me, I can use Milkshape". Probably was a bit formal though :P

Which sensor is this supposed to be? It could fit one of those that may or may not be optical, like biome detection. Maybe it could be animated to extend a bit away from the vessel when active? I think that could look interesting.

It's a Biome Stack Sensor. As for extending out, that's exactly what it does. I'll add a bit more detail to the Texture and export to Unity so you have something to play with. Might be a day or two.

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Well..the textures are all messed up...looks good in Blender and Unity....got this crazy two-tone thing going on in KSP...also cant seem to get the anim to play on activation....

Starting to think I need to reinstall either Unity or part tool..been over the textures 1000 times and cant find the issue.

I'll give it another go today..but if youd like the .blend let me know, its yours.

I got a couple other models kinda half done, whole house been sick for going on a week now, so honestly havent been doing much work on it.

Would you like for me to take a look to see if I get the same issue?

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Those are some beautiful animations and renders you have going there, Milkshake. Would there be anyway to have the array face the body it orbits, on a 160/180 plane?

Thanks very much. I believe I could make the array face the surface - I think it would utilise the animation transform that solar panels use. The last time I used Kethane I think Majiir had made a part where the scanner would face the surface. Once I've got all the parts behaving properly I'll certainly look to add this!

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For me it is no discussion.

I tried this ISA Mapstat stuff f****** 10 times to install.

Everytime it crashed my game or made it lag to death.

I did install this baby here, and it worked first time stable, lagless, performance nice, and many nice features.

^ What he said.

Good job, mate. Cheers!

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Well..the textures are all messed up...looks good in Blender and Unity....got this crazy two-tone thing going on in KSP...also cant seem to get the anim to play on activation....

No idea about the colors. Don't bother with hooking the animation up with the DLL events though, I'm working on a way to make the DLL play them.

I'll give it another go today..but if youd like the .blend let me know, its yours.

I don't think I could fix it if it's broken, but maybe someone else here can?

I got a couple other models kinda half done, whole house been sick for going on a week now, so honestly havent been doing much work on it.

No pressure, just wanted to check on it because I didn't want to just drop in someone else's stuff if you're still working on it. If you don't want to work on it anymore just say so, it's fine.

Damny, I've made a couple of parts so far. I'm texturing a second piece tonight. Have a look here. If you're interested, I'll send you any files you need.

I'm at least interested in trying them out. If you have working parts then I don't need anything else, but if you want to use an open source license for your work then it might make sense to put the blend files somewhere as well.

I don't think you can do much about animation, I believe the plugin has to be aware of it. Extending/retracting is easy, an animation that plays continuously while extended should be possible too, but I don't know how soon I can do any of the more fancy bits like pointing it at the planet.

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Modelers: please keep an eye on the poly count.

A fancy scanning part is nice, but it shouldn't have more poly's than the rest of the craft put together... (looking at you Milkshakefiend :wink::D)

I love those animations though, and an inline folded part is interesting too.

But: why the long arm on that first one? remember most people's probes are a LOT smaller than your bulky example. I'd get a sat looking like this: []---|

A small body with a long weird extension with no apparent reason.

Edited by OrtwinS
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[*] It's not properly integrated with career mode yet. Currently, the parts should be hooked into "Science Tech". Obviously, the plan is that the better sensors should come much later. But those sensors didn't even exist two complete refactorings ago.

Was there a specific need to split the functions into different parts?

Flying to and mapping every planet and moon over and over again with new upgraded probes as we climb the tech tree ... well, just let me say I would always edit the parts to be available together at the same time. :wink:

Which one does provide the biome information btw.? I only had time for a short test yesterday buy slapping it onto my Mun mission.

[*] Parts don't use electrical charge yet. This is never going to be perfect, as I can't drain charge on inactive vessels. But I still want it at least for the active one.

I would leave it as it is - just assume that players that see this point as important will build their probes with batteries and power generation - and those who do not would find a way to hack the consumption out of the parts anyway.

If you really want something to wrap your head around, then try to implement the funtions of Remote Tech 2 into SCANsat, in a way the scanned data only becomes available as the probe resstablishes contact with mission control. :D

[*] Scanning isn't very realistic, and I don't know if I can ever change this because it's really important to me that this works as part of a game. One thing I'd like to do at some point is make the field of view dependant on the altitude of the scanning vessel. But the fairly low resolution coverage map limits this somewhat. And the amount I'm willing to blow up persistence files limits the resolution of that coverage map.

I think the most annoying thing with the old mapping mod was its impact on performance - I do not know any background details or why your mod is so incredibly faster while scanning with x sensors simultaneously, but avoid doing anything that slows it down again! :)

To anyone brave enough to try this, thank you, and I hope it's not entirely useless.

Definitely not useless, as it gives by itself a use for missions with probes and satellites! :)

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Was there a specific need to split the functions into different parts?

Flying to and mapping every planet and moon over and over again with new upgraded probes as we climb the tech tree ... well, just let me say I would always edit the parts to be available together at the same time. :wink:

I think it totally makes sense for better sensors to come later in the tech tree. Look at how we imaged things like the Moon, Venus, and Mars back in the early days of the space program compared to the imagery and data we get from the probes we're sending now, 40 years later.

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But: why the long arm on that first one? remember most people's probes are a LOT smaller than your bulky example. I'd get a sat looking like this: []---|

A small body with a long weird extension with no apparent reason.

Simple reason...

Many satellites, esp older ones, mounted sensor equipment on booms n such. This was mainly done because said sensor needed to be isolated from the craft in order to work properly.

Ntz0jrB.jpg

Like the Voyager17....

Personaly I love these old sat, with lots of stuff hanging way off em =)

Also, high-poly count is not as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be....colliders are more important. You can get away with using highish poly models as long as the colliders are few and very simple.

A 10k poly model with a single box collider will impact KSP the same as a 5k poly model that has several convex colliders.

That having been said though, it is best to keep poly count low...alot of small detail can be faked in the texture or via normal mapping.

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I think it totally makes sense for better sensors to come later in the tech tree. Look at how we imaged things like the Moon, Venus, and Mars back in the early days of the space program compared to the imagery and data we get from the probes we're sending now, 40 years later.

For once I was arguing from a gameplay perspective. :wink:

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I'm at least interested in trying them out. If you have working parts then I don't need anything else, but if you want to use an open source license for your work then it might make sense to put the blend files somewhere as well.

I don't think you can do much about animation, I believe the plugin has to be aware of it. Extending/retracting is easy, an animation that plays continuously while extended should be possible too, but I don't know how soon I can do any of the more fancy bits like pointing it at the planet.

Yeah I spent a while trying to work out how to trigger it and then deduced SCANsat would need to either send a trigger command or write my own plugin to trigger it - which is a bit overkill haha. I have some ideas for continuously rotating parts - if you're confident you can incorporate it, I'll keep that in mind. I'll be finishing off the second antenna tonight. Once they're tidy I'll PM you a link and publish these with a license on my WIP page.

Modelers: please keep an eye on the poly count.

A fancy scanning part is nice, but it shouldn't have more poly's than the rest of the craft put together... (looking at you Milkshakefiend :wink::D)

I love those animations though, and an inline folded part is interesting too.

But: why the long arm on that first one? remember most people's probes are a LOT smaller than your bulky example. I'd get a sat looking like this: []---|

A small body with a long weird extension with no apparent reason.

The poly count for both the antennas I've done so far has been between 1700-1800 tris, which as pointed out above is okay - the colliders I'm using are very simple boxes so there should be no problems. All of the surface detail in the SAR is from the normal map.

Simple reason...

Many satellites, esp older ones, mounted sensor equipment on booms n such. This was mainly done because said sensor needed to be isolated from the craft in order to work properly.

-snip-

That was one of the inspirations - unfortunately a mashup between that and a modern array didn't really work too well.

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Well..not to happy with the textures still...but if yall want to play around...I got 2 part done....ish=P

~link removed~

These replace the SAR and MapTraq parts. Just drop the unziped folder into your ksp GameData.

If you want Damny PM me your email ot something and I can send ya the .blends and image files.

Edited by KhaosCorp
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