[WIP] Universal Storage

[Daishi]

Oh I think everyone is just excited. I don't know how long you guys were working on this before you started this thread, but you guys have turned this out in an amazingly short amount of time. Kudos! Take your time, quality of finished product is something I think just about everyone would rather have over an early release.

By the way, did you guys look in to the KAS "Bay Snapping" at all?

I'm glad you are! I'm personally excited about the node-reworking to fix part wobble - releasing that with .23.5 co-incides nicely with potentially massive supply modules - food for everyone!

We've been working on this since the end of feb... so not too long. It was a combination of being sick of struggling with large inefficient inline life support containers on my old rocket designs, and wondering if Paul would re-balance ECLSS 2 when it was released. He showed me a concept he had planned and I asked if I could help It's worked out brilliantly I think! I'd say he's more the one to ask regarding KAS though, I wouldn't have a clue. Might be a goal for the final release, i'll pass it on the next time I email him if he doesn't see this.

I think everyone is just jumpy after seeing the KASPAR racks getting tons of hype and then being abandonded.

As long as you guys finish this (at a steady pace), we will all be happy

Course we will! You'll get the pre-alpha release in a few days on the mod release forum, and the Complete Packâ„¢ (sparkle sparkle) as fast as you see it develop on this thread. Things released in the pre-alpha are bound to change in the final version, so be warned!

Indeed, steady progress is better than lots at once followed by a burn-out, so take your time. This mod keeps getting better every time I check in.

Aw thanks guys, this is an awesome experience - first mod i've ever helped make, and its so well received by such a considerate community! I should have done this sooner!

Btw, just a little bit of dev on the food block. Pull zipper, get snacks!

Edited March 31, 2014 by Daishi
Pics and stuff

[Daishi]

Just chugging away at bugtesting and renders for the release thread. We've decided to call the upcoming release "Universal Storage Beta", version number 0.5, just so it's clear we have a ton of work to do yet

Edited April 1, 2014 by Daishi

[sharpspoonful]

I love it. I do have to say this though; Is there anyway to just make is circular, or more streamlined with the rest of a rocket's fuselage? This is brilliant, and incredibly utilitarian, but form does have a factor in some people's rockets.

[Horus]

How about poly count?

[Daishi]

I love it. I do have to say this though; Is there anyway to just make is circular, or more streamlined with the rest of a rocket's fuselage? This is brilliant, and incredibly utilitarian, but form does have a factor in some people's rockets.

I do agree its a very jarring transition, which is why I decided to make that decoupler to interface with the pods ( it looked the worst of the lot, being so bulbous). I'll make an adaptor plate eventually for the bottoms of these stacks.

How about poly count?

Reasonable - its high but not enough to cause any additional lag on an old 2-core laptop. Tested seven octocores full of wedges, and the game only lost a frame in a resting fps of 15. Each wedge is roughly 3000 tris (the same as a LVT engine), but the collision meshes are tiny so physics simulation is as optimized as I can make it The real bottleneck in KSP atm is ram, as we all know, so thats been my main focus in reducing during this dev. Final download of this mod when its done should be 4mb, with an unpacked ram footprint in-game of 60 megs.

[Horus]

Reasonable - its high but not enough to cause any additional lag on an old 2-core laptop. Tested seven octocores full of wedges, and the game only lost a frame in a resting fps of 15. Each wedge is roughly 3000 tris (the same as a LVT engine), but the collision meshes are tiny so physics simulation is as optimized as I can make it The real bottleneck in KSP atm is ram, as we all know, so thats been my main focus in reducing during this dev. Final download of this mod when its done should be 4mb, with an unpacked ram footprint in-game of 60 megs.

Each poly does really matter when it comes to a any vessel with several dozens of parts.

However, the parts are really eye candy. Will definitely download them upon release and if they satisfy from the point of pc resources usage - will use them with pleasure.

[PringleMan]

Each poly does really matter when it comes to a any vessel with several dozens of parts.

However, the parts are really eye candy. Will definitely download them upon release and if they satisfy from the point of pc resources usage - will use them with pleasure.

60 meg in game footprint is relatively small. How big are the textures? Cause the active texture reduction mod may shave a meg or two off that.

[Daishi]

Each poly does really matter when it comes to a any vessel with several dozens of parts.

However, the parts are really eye candy. Will definitely download them upon release and if they satisfy from the point of pc resources usage - will use them with pleasure.

Everyones PCs are different - but I've modelled them as conservatively as possible. In any case, Paul's rebalancing will mean you'll only need 8 parts or so for trips inside Kerbins SOI (with the recyclers, of course). The fuel cell itself is rated to last 100 hours on its own internal fuel supply, and 500 hours per tank of hydrogen. We're keeping this as sensible and close to real life as possible

60 meg in game footprint is relatively small. How big are the textures? Cause the active texture reduction mod may shave a meg or two off that.

None go over 512px, with the decoupler and quadcore using a 256px map. They're also compressed outside of unity, which reduces file size more (and does a better job with artifacts and color depth retention). You shouldn't have to use any re-compressors with my stuff

However, all these textures originate from massive source files, so if people are gluttons for punishment I can release a high def pack one day.

[Paul Kingtiger]

I've just finished part 3 of the Universal Storage blog over at my website.

Universal Storage blog

In this entry I talk about calculating capacities for the parts, with a view to realism but keeping things simple for the user.

You can also find part 1 and part 2 of the blog with these links.

[DMagic]

How about poly count?

If you're worried about poly count try out a few of Justin Kerbice's 100k triangle thing and see if it makes any difference. At some point I'm sure poly count will start to effect performance, but a handful of 20-30k triangle parts probably isn't going to have any noticeable effect.

[TimMartland]

This looks so awesome! Keep up the good work guys!

[CobaltWolf]

If you're worried about poly count try out a few of Justin Kerbice's 100k triangle thing and see if it makes any difference. At some point I'm sure poly count will start to effect performance, but a handful of 20-30k triangle parts probably isn't going to have any noticeable effect.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the killer in KSP is the physics between parts, correct?

[Daishi]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the killer in KSP is the physics between parts, correct?

Yep. Either the parts themselves (collision meshes) or the nodes they use to attach with. Each 3000tri part has a collision mesh of 28. The doors have their own CM's too for Kerbal EVA shenanigans, and they stack up at 12 each. If you guys experience serious lag with the Beta release i'll consider removing the door CMs alltogether. I have no idea what the average players PC is capable of :\

Buut i'm pretty sure nodes are the main component of part-to-part calculations. Unfortunately the only way this concept can work is with multi-node parts, so its nothing i can optimise. If you're coming from stock ECLSS and are worried about the massive partcounts needed to go anywhere useful, you don't need to be. Universal Storage is built upon Paul's work with compressed gasses, so you don't need a lot of parts to do big things any more

[PringleMan]

Yep. Either the parts themselves (collision meshes) or the nodes they use to attach with. Each 3000tri part has a collision mesh of 28. The doors have their own CM's too for Kerbal EVA shenanigans, and they stack up at 12 each. If you guys experience serious lag with the Beta release i'll consider removing the door CMs alltogether. I have no idea what the average players PC is capable of :\

Buut i'm pretty sure nodes are the main component of part-to-part calculations. Unfortunately the only way this concept can work is with multi-node parts, so its nothing i can optimise. If you're coming from stock ECLSS and are worried about the massive partcounts needed to go anywhere useful, you don't need to be. Universal Storage is built upon Paul's work with compressed gasses, so you don't need a lot of parts to do big things any more

For anyone who has KAS, a good test of this would be to simply mount 8 bays with 8 part containers (can be empty of course) and see how your flight handles that. That would still be 8 node interfaces of two nodes each, which should be the same number of node interactions as your compressed unit. I dunno where the poly count will land in the grand scheme of things, but I imagine your parts will net lower. As well, it is fewer actual physics calculations since it is 1 "bay" with 8 "containers" as opposed to 8 bays with 8 containers

[Daishi]

For anyone who has KAS, a good test of this would be to simply mount 8 bays with 8 part containers (can be empty of course) and see how your flight handles that. That would still be 8 node interfaces of two nodes each, which should be the same number of node interactions as your compressed unit. I dunno where the poly count will land in the grand scheme of things, but I imagine your parts will net lower. As well, it is fewer actual physics calculations since it is 1 "bay" with 8 "containers" as opposed to 8 bays with 8 containers

Someone with KAS and time (lol i'm so tired) try this out and put our minds at rest I don't think it will really have a huge impact on performance considering .23.5 has improved part node connections quite a lot. Then again most of you guys are probably playing it right now :|

Anyway, currently unwrapping the food wedge. To save UV space i work out what sections of the mesh i can duplicate, and what sections can be mirrored. The less surface area i have, the more texture space is allocated to whats left. I then delete what i don't need, and scale the UV co-ordinates to match the amount of space i want them to have on the texture map. Small areas at the front that need to be crisp (like the label, which will have text) are enlarged, while areas that you wont likely see, or will have a solid color with no noticable pixels (like pipes, or the bottom of the bag) are heavily reduced. Then once its textured, i put it back into Maya and re-assemble it back together, hiding seams away in secret places...

Doing it this way means i can squeeze a ton of detail out of a smaller map by re-using sections of the UV that people arent normally going to notice. This map here is a 256 pixel one, which is one quarter of the 512 map used in the wedges. The other 3\4's are the hatch, the black corrugations, and the internal structure.

[rottielover]

If you are looking for game testers I volunteer. I've been wanting this since I saw Flexrack and that seems to have died... I a self proclaimed mod hoarder with 66 currently, but have been known to install 80 depending on if I can fix them into the RAM limitations (yes using active texture management heavily).

[Mecripp]

Any chance on get the texture's for Universal Storage Mk1 ?

[Paul Kingtiger]

Any chance on get the texture's for Universal Storage Mk1 ?

The Mk1 uses Squad models and textures and I'm not sure what the deal is with releasing mods that use those. The EULA says no, but there are plenty of mods that use stock models, and Squad doesn't seem to mind.

I've asked for clarification from the devs and if they say it's ok then I will release. We are working on creating radial tanks from scratch but that's taking a back seat while we finish the wedges.

[Paul Kingtiger]

So I've built and tested KAS functionality for all the parts. If you have KAS installed you will be able to grab wedges and place them back on the hubs. This should make for some fun resupply options.

We've also created a prototype Universal Storage container for you to place other parts in. Still need a proper model for it though.

So yeah, Universal Storage is KASable!

[Daishi]

If you are looking for game testers I volunteer. I've been wanting this since I saw Flexrack and that seems to have died... I a self proclaimed mod hoarder with 66 currently, but have been known to install 80 depending on if I can fix them into the RAM limitations (yes using active texture management heavily).

We're almost ready to release anyway, we'll chuck a post on here to let you guys know, and then start a official release thread in the right section of the forum

This first release is what we're calling the fuel cell pack, with further releases lined up...

The "Fuel Cell Pack"

Soon-to-be-released, version 0.5. This includes the core equipment and focuses on the fuel cell as a defining feature. Hydrogen, Oxygen and Water parts are included.

The "ECLSS Pack"

Unreleased, version 0. Will include parts ECLSS requires for proper functionality - Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide and Converter equipment. Water will be added for ECLSS 2.0 if required.

The "TAC Pack"

Unreleased, version 0. Will include the full array of TAC equipment. Food, water, waste water, solid waste, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and several recycler and converter parts are included.

The "KAS Pack"

Unreleased, version 0. Although every Universal Storage segment works with KAS by default, the KAS Pack will include storage boxes and other KAS-exclusive features.

Please place feedback in the official release forum once you've had a play, and tell us what you think or what could be tweaked. Things will change over time so naturally be cautious with your installs and savegames, and be warey that everything is in Beta until the version numbers are all "1.0"

Edited April 5, 2014 by Daishi

[Paul Kingtiger]

And we've live with the first release!

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/75129-Universal-Storage-%280-23-5%29?p=1065781#post1065781

Please post feedback in the release thread so we can easily track it.

[VaporTrail]

Idea/possible request:

KSPI pack including resources like Xenon, Cryo Helium, Reactor fuels (Fusion mostly, but I guess fission might be considered), Monoprop (for plasma thruster)... possibly even small antimatter bottles?

[Daishi]

Idea/possible request:

KSPI pack including resources like Xenon, Cryo Helium, Reactor fuels (Fusion mostly, but I guess fission might be considered), Monoprop (for plasma thruster)... possibly even small antimatter bottles?

Maybe right at the end of development - we don't want to lose focus on the original lifesupport goal of this mod

[Daishi]

Hope you guys are enjoying what we've done so far - we've decided to redo the nodes on everything so they don't flicker around and make your life hell (quadcore and seperators esp.). Decided to clean up my file structures and organise things at the same time, so things have been pretty slow content wise.

Refocused on ECLSS (like i should have been), so i'm putting the TAC food wedge on hold and working on containers for that instead. Seeing as its only a few models, we can also use the ECLSS parts as a springboard into the mountain of dev we need for TAC storage.

Started on the proper hydrogen wedge model, modelling it off spherical real-world designs instead, to differentiate it at a glance from the other tanks.

[Daishi]

Hydrogen model almost done. Trying to keep everything in the same kind of style.