B9 5.0 pre-release (with download)

[K3-Chris]

I can't say I've tried it. I'll take my plane and drive it around to the highlands on the ground when I get home this evening. But I don't dis-beleive you when you say it's going to have friction problems. I just don't use planes to land on the mun a lot. I may not need the patch as I get better at landing.

Yeah I haven no doubt you can make the wheels behave better if you only land on the runway/KSC flatlands, but making the wheels work a bit better on the runway in favor of making them pretty useless on the mun isn't an ideal baseline.

The only thing I can imagine that the pack is missing is a hollow connector between S2 and S2W cargo bays. It wouldn't even need to open, just be traversable.

What would the use-case for that be? sorry but I can't picture a use for it on the top of my head, my planes usually just use one size cargo bays, and having them connected doesn't seem overly beneficial.

[Mekan1k]

Since I seem to have one of the least stable builds around (no idea why... But anyway!), here is my modlist. Screen Left is x32, Screen Right is x64. Note- this mod only seems to work on x32- it causes x64 to crash on loading.

Hope this helps somehow.

[K3-Chris]

Read OP, x64 not supported.

[Woodstar]

Since I seem to have one of the least stable builds around (no idea why... But anyway!), here is my modlist. Screen Left is x32, Screen Right is x64. Note- this mod only seems to work on x32- it causes x64 to crash on loading.

snip

Hope this helps somehow.

It works fine on x64 it is ATM that is buggy on x64 and probably causing the crash.

Quick question Do i get the updates you guys are pushing to the build by redownloading the link in the op or do I have to DL each commit individually and overwrite files?

[How2FoldSoup]

Yeah I haven no doubt you can make the wheels behave better if you only land on the runway/KSC flatlands, but making the wheels work a bit better on the runway in favor of making them pretty useless on the mun isn't an ideal baseline.

What would the use-case for that be? sorry but I can't picture a use for it on the top of my head, my planes usually just use one size cargo bays, and having them connected doesn't seem overly beneficial.

I'll second that adapter and an additional one. I tried to make a plane once where I started with an S2W cargobay, used the S2W to HL adapter and then used the tail cargo ramp. A hollow adapter for those two would have saved me a lot of trouble. I wanted the ability to carry cargo for use in orbit but also wanted to be able to put things on the ground. The reasoning for me to have both was that in the S2W portion I had a small ssto with foldable wings that could dock inside the bay in addition to a rover in the back portion of the plane. It would have been nice to have more cargo space to use, even if it extended into the adapter.

[K3-Chris]

It works fine on x64 it is ATM that is buggy on x64 and probably causing the crash.

x64 unity on windows is highly unstable, KSP x64 can crash on it's own with no mods and no way to tell why, and we can't fix it, please drop the topic, B9 is not supported on x64 and won't be until squad/unity does work on it.

Quick question Do i get the updates you guys are pushing to the build by redownloading the link in the op or do I have to DL each commit individually and overwrite files?

You get latest files, but you you're left with old duplicates if we move/rename stuff, delete old version first if you don't want that.

[cy-one]

What is that RCS-Builder-Drone-Thingy in that promotional picture here?

[K3-Chris]

That's KSO's orbital tug.

[Sufficient Anonymity]

Played around with SSTOs a bit more this evening. The tweakable HL tails are an absolute godsend - they make building Skylon-esque craft a doddle.

Also, Tav, was that some plume expansion I saw on the SABRE engines?

[Entropius]

So… does anybody know exactly how much RAM the new B9 will consume relative to the old one? I ask because I've since realized my recent crashing on scene-changes is due to a memory error, and I was curious if B9 is going to be an option for me in the future.

[Raptor831]

So… does anybody know exactly how much RAM the new B9 will consume relative to the old one? I ask because I've since realized my recent crashing on scene-changes is due to a memory error, and I was curious if B9 is going to be an option for me in the future.

If you remove the legacy parts, the prerelease is close to the same RAM, I think. I haven't run any specific tests or numbers, but just based on my subjective experience it doesn't add any memory issues. It feels like it runs a bit lighter, but I can't confirm that.

I use ATM, so YMMV. But if you're hitting the memory limit and you don't have it installed, definitely give it a shot.

[Woodstar]

That's KSO's orbital tug.

Yup It's a pretty nice tug.

[AccidentalDisassembly]

If you remove the legacy parts, the prerelease is close to the same RAM, I think. I haven't run any specific tests or numbers, but just based on my subjective experience it doesn't add any memory issues. It feels like it runs a bit lighter, but I can't confirm that.

I use ATM, so YMMV. But if you're hitting the memory limit and you don't have it installed, definitely give it a shot.

WITHOUT texture management, it takes far more RAM than the previous version (IME). It alone will push a clean install of KSP to ~3000-3200MB RAM used - at least it did for me. With ATM, my experience is a little different: it seems (subjectively) to still take more RAM than the previous version, but not a huge amount.

[Entropius]

If you remove the legacy parts, the prerelease is close to the same RAM, I think. I haven't run any specific tests or numbers, but just based on my subjective experience it doesn't add any memory issues. It feels like it runs a bit lighter, but I can't confirm that.

I use ATM, so YMMV. But if you're hitting the memory limit and you don't have it installed, definitely give it a shot.

I've already got ATM. I was hoping B9 would eventually become smaller memory-wise, but if not, it looks like I may have to learn to eventually live without it to avoid semi-frequent crashing (although only on scene-changes, which is weird). I've bent over backwards to avoid this (even deleted Interstellar), but it's such a big mod it makes it difficult justify not-pruning.

[K3-Chris]

I've already got ATM. I was hoping B9 would eventually become smaller memory-wise, but if not, it looks like I may have to learn to eventually live without it to avoid semi-frequent crashing (although only on scene-changes, which is weird). I've bent over backwards to avoid this (even deleted Interstellar), but it's such a big mod it makes it difficult justify not-pruning.

It's more efficient, but it contains more content, you can pick what parts you want.

[Woodstar]

Thats where im at with no ATM I have texture replacer.

Edited August 29, 2014 by Woodstar

[AccidentalDisassembly]

It's more efficient, but it contains more content, you can pick what parts you want.

I was looking through the parts to see which ones would make the most impact if they were removed - I found that just 8 textures are responsible for 100MB on disk. Almost all the textures are 4MB or 3MB or less, but those 8 are between 10 and 16 MB. Are they supposed to be that big? Sorry if that is an idiotic question.

[Entropius]

This is mine:

But again, the crashing is only on scene-changes, like when you have the black loading screen between the VAB and launchpad.

edit: and until today, I also had Interstellar in there too.

[K3-Chris]

I was looking through the parts to see which ones would make the most impact if they were removed - I found that just 8 textures are responsible for 100MB on disk. Almost all the textures are 4MB or 3MB or less, but those 8 are between 10 and 16 MB. Are they supposed to be that big? Sorry if that is an idiotic question.

They're the few 2048x2048 textures, which is sometimes necessary to give larger objects or compound objects the resolution needed, IVAs are especially texture demanding, because you're inside a space that's fairly large surface area wise and you're quite close to it, you don't scrutinize external textures at the same distance generally speaking and the level of details is very different.

From personal experience I don't find it hard to keep KSP bellow ram limit with ATM, also -force-opengl drops it by 1GB~.

Combining the parts into one part with fuel tweakable has allowed us to merge some textures into fewer textures (with overlapping parts made redundant), but there are more parts and an additional IVA etc. Sadly the game doesn't make it very easy to re-use textures between elements, each mesh can only have one UV map and one main material.

@Entropius those b9 fixes are redundant/incompatible, I advise you to get rid of them and any other legacy stuff involving B9, oh and the K3 folder is also redundant.

[Entropius]

@Entropius those b9 fixes are redundant/incompatible, I advise you to get rid of them and any other legacy stuff involving B9, oh and the K3 folder is also redundant.

Actually this install isn't using any new B9 5.0 stuff, it's all old B9.

[Spike88]

So do I need the deprecated folder?

[Entropius]

So do I need the deprecated folder?

As I understand it, that's just for old B9 crafts to work.

[Taverius]

I made a module manager patch that simple changed sidewaysStiffness =2, which was how the last B9 pack I used in 23.5 had it. (Probably was one of the community patches)

That seemed to resolve the jittery effect for me. I can understand if the devs don't want to do that, but for me the wheels seemed unusable without it, so I modded the mod as opposed to abandoning the wheels. Between the old and new files, that was the only difference I saw other than the sound effects and things in the new one.

That sounds half-reasonable actually. The one I saw for 0.23.5 had it at 0.5, and it was like holiday on ice - steering did absolutely nothing because the wheels had no sideways grip to speak of.

Try out on hills and such and let me know how it runs.

[Rayder]

Just so everyone is on the same page, this B9 version is very RAM intensive. Just on its own will push your RAM usage close to the cap. The only way you're going to be able to use it in conjunction with heavily modded installs is Active Texture Management. In some cases, you might even need it only running B9.

Using the basic version of ATM drops the RAM usage to half - about 1.6 GB. The aggressive mode drops it by around another 300 MB. I've found no significant errors running either x86 or x64. ATM seems to work in both, but remember ATM has specific x86 and x64 versions.

So if you're having problems, step 1 is definitely get Active Texture Management. Step 2 is to completely wipe B9 and its dependencies from your directory, and re-install. That should fix most of the issues.

EDIT: Chris, you might need to be blunt and a bit more direct in your OP about the RAM limit. If you want to add the RAM figures to the post, I've got them here. These were taken at the main menu with only B9 (without the depreciated files) and ATM.

x86

3.01 GB - No Texture Management

1.58 GB - Basic Compression

1.30 GB - Aggressive Compression

x64

(Unknown) - No Texture Management

1.67 GB - Basic Compression

1.39 GB - Aggressive Compression

I couldn't get the usage from x64 without texture management, as it crashes on load for me. I'm assuming it's crashing due to RAM.

Edited August 29, 2014 by Rayder

[Andrew Hansen]

Just so everyone is on the same page, this B9 version is very RAM intensive.

Did you delete the deprecated folder?