[1.0.x] [V1.9f] Kerbal Foundries wheels, anti-grav repulsors and tracks

[Gaalidas]

Uh oh, ready the fire extinguishers... the servers are gonna get HOT tonight!

[Madrias]

So I should tell Jeb that he can't test jet engines in the server room tonight, I guess?

[lo-fi]

Hey Lo-Fi

Last night on my stream i took out my hovercraft and went on a mad KSC shooting spree so if your downloads increased recently I take blame for that!

Cheers! Always interesting looking at the stats; Twitch is often in the top ten. I'll take a look in on the steam, enjoyed watching your MLRS reload operation last time

Uh oh, ready the fire extinguishers... the servers are gonna get HOT tonight!

Might be a problem, Jeb took them out to augment his EVA RCS after running out between Mun and Minmus last time... Crazy fool

[Neutrinovore]

Hey there, Lo-Fi, and of course everyone else too, lol.

A few issues I'm noticing, and my apologies if these have already been noted and I just don't remember it, but here goes:

I was messing around with adding TweakScale to most of the wheels and tracks, and for the most part everything seemed to work okay, except for one thing - the wheels don't steer if the part has been scaled in any way. They WORK fine, it's just the visual steering animation that stops working. I was building an ASET ERS rover, and scaled the Alpha Medium Wheels down to 75%, and they fit that system like they were made for it. BUT, even though the rover drives around fine, suspension works, the wheels rotate normally, they appear to be 'locked' in position, steering-wise. They actually look like they're defaulting to 'tread' or skid-steer behavior, except that you can't turn the vehicle in place like you can with tracks, you have to be moving forward to turn, just like with regular wheels. Just for grins & giggles, I went out of the game and 'cloned' the Alpha Medium Wheel config file,called it 'Alpha Smaller Medium Wheel', and used 'rescaleFactor = 0.75' to see what would happen. Everything worked fine, but the same lack of steering animation persisted, so something in the code borks the steering visuals if the part is rescaled in any way. There you go, fwiw.

The other thing is this: I've been fiddling with the configs of most wheels and tracks to get the suspension, steering, and acceleration/torque/braking performance I'm looking for, but all of a sudden I'm encountering an issue where no matter what I change, the maximum speed of ANY rover I build is about 13-15 m/s. That's with tracks, wheels, everything! And every time, when I look at the GUI pop up window while at 'maximum' speed, it's indicating that I'm at the 'RevLimit'. Now, I've specifically changed the 'maxrpm' parameter to 1 MILLION - yes, that's a One followed by six zeros, "1,000,000" (of course no commas in the config)! So if that's the setting that controls how fast the wheels or tracks can spin, there's something broken there, methinks. If that's not the parameter, what is? What do I need to change to get the desired results? I would like to have the wheels, no matter what size they are, top out at 45 to 50 m/s on Kerbin around KSC, on flat ground anyway. Okay, maybe ~30 m/s for the small and tiny wheels, fair enough. Steering I don't have a problem adjusting, it's just the torque values as regards to max speed results that I'm having trouble with recently. Meaning that the last few dev builds have changed enough of the code that what used to be intuitive and self-explanatory (to me) is now... well, not so much. So, any info you might provide there would be helpful, thanks.

So, again, thanks for the awesome wheels, and of course tracks now too. They're quite literally the only wheels I want to use to build any kind of rover with anymore. The aforementioned ASET ERS rover is really cool, it's a great size and only needs a few parts to be complete, but the wheels... I mean, yeah, they LOOK great, but they have NO suspension to speak of, and the steering is… bad. Worse than bad. As bad as the stock 'ruggedized' wheel, which is so bad that they're unusable. The only advantages that the ERS wheels have is that they (sort of) retract, and that they don't break like the stock wheels do if you so much as look at them wrong. So, anyway, you wouldn't happen to have messed with those parts a bit to see if you could get KF code to work with them, would you? And if yes, would you still happen to have that config lying around somewhere, that you might post for us? Maybe? Perhaps??

Lol, so, wall of text over, I just wanted to mention the 2 issues that I've seen recently. Hope everyone has a great Sunday.

Later!

[lo-fi]

So I should tell Jeb that he can't test jet engines in the server room tonight, I guess?

But... But.... How else is he going to toast his snacks??

Hey there, Lo-Fi, and of course everyone else too, lol.

A few issues I'm noticing, and my apologies if these have already been noted and I just don't remember it, but here goes:

I was messing around with adding TweakScale to most of the wheels and tracks, and for the most part everything seemed to work okay, except for one thing - the wheels don't steer if the part has been scaled in any way. They WORK fine, it's just the visual steering animation that stops working. I was building an ASET ERS rover, and scaled the Alpha Medium Wheels down to 75%, and they fit that system like they were made for it. BUT, even though the rover drives around fine, suspension works, the wheels rotate normally, they appear to be 'locked' in position, steering-wise. They actually look like they're defaulting to 'tread' or skid-steer behavior, except that you can't turn the vehicle in place like you can with tracks, you have to be moving forward to turn, just like with regular wheels. Just for grins & giggles, I went out of the game and 'cloned' the Alpha Medium Wheel config file,called it 'Alpha Smaller Medium Wheel', and used 'rescaleFactor = 0.75' to see what would happen. Everything worked fine, but the same lack of steering animation persisted, so something in the code borks the steering visuals if the part is rescaled in any way. There you go, fwiw.

The steering is a weird one that I'm unable to replicate. I've not got TS installed currently (will try later), but setting rescaleFactor doesn't affect the steering for me. What does go wrong is the suspension movement doesn't take it into account, so the wheel meshes end up firmly stuck in the ground. A nice little gotcha I'm going to have to fix... Are you running a clean install of the dev version? The code for the steering visuals is pretty simple in that it just rotates and GameObject, and rotations aren't affected by scale in Unity, so something weird going on there. Anything in the log?

This is good info, TweakScale support is something I really need to look at, and it won't be completely straightforward.

The other thing is this: I've been fiddling with the configs of most wheels and tracks to get the suspension, steering, and acceleration/torque/braking performance I'm looking for, but all of a sudden I'm encountering an issue where no matter what I change, the maximum speed of ANY rover I build is about 13-15 m/s. That's with tracks, wheels, everything! And every time, when I look at the GUI pop up window while at 'maximum' speed, it's indicating that I'm at the 'RevLimit'. Now, I've specifically changed the 'maxrpm' parameter to 1 MILLION - yes, that's a One followed by six zeros, "1,000,000" (of course no commas in the config)! So if that's the setting that controls how fast the wheels or tracks can spin, there's something broken there, methinks. If that's not the parameter, what is? What do I need to change to get the desired results? I would like to have the wheels, no matter what size they are, top out at 45 to 50 m/s on Kerbin around KSC, on flat ground anyway. Okay, maybe ~30 m/s for the small and tiny wheels, fair enough. Steering I don't have a problem adjusting, it's just the torque values as regards to max speed results that I'm having trouble with recently. Meaning that the last few dev builds have changed enough of the code that what used to be intuitive and self-explanatory (to me) is now... well, not so much. So, any info you might provide there would be helpful, thanks.

I really need to get around to writing the documentation! You've pretty much got it figured out, though. maxRPM is really there to stop ungrounded wheel colliders running away to stupid RPM, and is also used to calculate pitch for the sound module. Other than that, the torque curves will work in the usual way. Basically, you'll want to set the value a little above the RPM you'll get at max speed for the given torque curves you've defined. Though I realise this may be a little difficult given you can't see the current RPM, so maybe I ought to enable it in the GUI. Hopefully that clears things up?

So, again, thanks for the awesome wheels, and of course tracks now too. They're quite literally the only wheels I want to use to build any kind of rover with anymore. The aforementioned ASET ERS rover is really cool, it's a great size and only needs a few parts to be complete, but the wheels... I mean, yeah, they LOOK great, but they have NO suspension to speak of, and the steering is… bad. Worse than bad. As bad as the stock 'ruggedized' wheel, which is so bad that they're unusable. The only advantages that the ERS wheels have is that they (sort of) retract, and that they don't break like the stock wheels do if you so much as look at them wrong. So, anyway, you wouldn't happen to have messed with those parts a bit to see if you could get KF code to work with them, would you? And if yes, would you still happen to have that config lying around somewhere, that you might post for us? Maybe? Perhaps??

Lol, so, wall of text over, I just wanted to mention the 2 issues that I've seen recently. Hope everyone has a great Sunday.

Later!

Thanks, I'm really chuffed with how people have taken to all this crazy stuff I've been building the plugin to be flexible enough to drive just about anything you might call a wheel/track/screw etc. I've set up all the stock wheels absolutely fine with the KF plugin (sadly, the stock ruggedised still suffers from the mesh collider being too big and sticking in the ground - working on this), so I don't see why the ASET wheels should be any different. I'll have a play, it was on my list of things to do anyway. If I can find the animation name, I'll even be able to drive the retract function

Considering releasing a Module Manager patch or just a set of configs for stock wheels using the KF plugin if there is interest?

[Darren9]

An optional MM patch seems like a good idea. Have you got any plans for the crawler steer? It's quite tricky at the moment and I've been stuck not having a clue how to undo the turn/translates I did to get back to going forwards again. Do you think it would be better for translation if the wheels turned to point towards the four directions and stopped there if you held the key down, or at least have a "translate forwards" key that would reset you to a straight line forwards again?

[lo-fi]

Cool, I'll work on that as an optional thing.

The crawler needs a lot of work, it's still using the stock modules! Been totally neglected while I've been working on other stuff...

That's a good idea actually, I like that a lot. Agreed that you can get yourself in a right pickle currently.. Can do eight directions if you take combinations of key presses, and it would fit well with the normal way of operating stuff in KSP. Cheers for that, I'll work on it

[Gaalidas]

Alright, I'll weigh in. So, the tracks I have not tried to tweak the scale of because they're obviously a bit more complicated than the wheels. The wheels however, using the last known release of TweakScale, are working perfect with the steering even being maintained extremely well. Heck, even the repulsors work really well with scaling. And that's without any updated configurations for the scaling of operation values, just the basic size change. So, I really have no idea why that would change the steering. However, if somehow the wheels are getting attached in the wrong orientation after being scaled, that would be the issue to consider. A few minutes ago I answered a post about the ERS wheels not launching from the SPH to the runway correctly, clipping with the runway and not turning correctly. It's been an ongoing discussion and the last complaint on that issue was that they weren't steering right. He was turning the wheels and instead they were tilting sideways. Well, what happens when you take a horizontal steering mechanism and put it on its side? It tilts. Not saying this is the problem here as I'm sure you're careful to orient things right, but it's something I struggle with every time I use a wheel especially from the SPH where almost everything comes out at the wrong angle from the get-go.

I'm curious lo-fi, do the stock wheels, when hooked to the KF plugin, function like stock wheels? Or do they exhibit the steering and suspension effects (within their own extreme limits) like your specialized wheels do?

Either way, an optional MM config would be the best option I would say. If you need a hand at that, I can take a hand at writing some if you can make a template of what needs to change. Might even be able to re-use some of the data in the configs and make your MM patch be more universal instead of customized for each wheel. I've already got the KF wheels undergoing a few personal MM customizations (makes updating your latest changes a lot easier if I don't edit the cfgs directly) and have become rather proficient at making MM configs as long as no advanced (aka. Regex) commands are required.

Now, I must weigh in on the speed thing. I discovered the max rpm thing myself and what I've done is just use an MM config to multiply the current "maxRPM" by a small value to give the wheels some more breathing room. Yes, that produces some of the run-away wheels when not attached to the ground, but otherwise you loose out on being able to make a small rover with a super-powered engine that can make it catch air when going over the runway sideways... without using boosters that is. They still tend to limit me from getting too fast (unlike when I made a HUGE LLL-hulled rover using those giant stock wheels and found that if I held the key down it would continue to accelerate ever so slowly) but I don't run into the maximum rpm thing limiting me from going any faster and hyper-switching status in the right-click menu. They still have their curves untouched, which preserves how they accelerate, but they have the chance of flexing that to the limits without being held back as much. It works pretty well for me.

Okay, now the crawler stuff. Yeah, I like that idea better than my old idea of just having a "recenter" command in the action group settings. If they could just orient to the direction defined by those keys, like you were doing linear translation in space (except without the third dimension of movement) then it would become extremely intuitive. However, to gain fine control over that, the speed at which it aligns with the new heading should be slow enough that you can stop pressing that button and continue moving at whatever orientation they currently sit at, waiting to be re-oriented properly when the correct button is pushed. Personally, I'd rather have the standard rover controls as they are and put the other movement functions either in the numpad or require the alt key to be used to alter the functionality of the directional keys. Either way, I say we save this for another day and work on getting what we have at a release quality. Crawler steering could open up all sorts of new bugs that could drive us nuts, and lo-fi even nuttier considering he's doing all the real work here.

Edited October 26, 2014 by Gaalidas

[lo-fi]

Alright, I'll weigh in. So, the tracks I have not tried to tweak the scale of because they're obviously a bit more complicated than the wheels. The wheels however, using the last known release of TweakScale, are working perfect with the steering even being maintained extremely well. Heck, even the repulsors work really well with scaling. And that's without any updated configurations for the scaling of operation values, just the basic size change. So, I really have no idea why that would change the steering. However, if somehow the wheels are getting attached in the wrong orientation after being scaled, that would be the issue to consider. A few minutes ago I answered a post about the ERS wheels not launching from the SPH to the runway correctly, clipping with the runway and not turning correctly. It's been an ongoing discussion and the last complaint on that issue was that they weren't steering right. He was turning the wheels and instead they were tilting sideways. Well, what happens when you take a horizontal steering mechanism and put it on its side? It tilts. Not saying this is the problem here as I'm sure you're careful to orient things right, but it's something I struggle with every time I use a wheel especially from the SPH where almost everything comes out at the wrong angle from the get-go.

I'm just working through this, playing with the ERS wheels at this moment in time. I have a theory, though won't comment until I know more. I think I know what's going on, particularly given the the problem starts when launching from the SPH. Just setting KF up to drive them and see what happens, though the odd surface attach symmetry is annoying.

The latest changes to the suspension movement in my code will probably mean that TS configs will break the wheels for the moment. I'm adapting the plugin so TS can tweak a value to fix this, though I need to get myself up to speed properly with it. I know it was working fine before, but I changed it about because it set limits on design I wasn't happy with, so opted for a different method. All to do with whether the suspensionTraverse object is moved within its parents local space using transform.localposition, or moved using transform.translate, which moves it locally on its own axis. This difference is subtle, but important. What seems to happen if TS or RescaleFactor is applied is the translation moves the object a set amount, not an amount appropriate for what the RescaleFactor is set to. It won't be hard to fix, but just so you're aware.

I'm curious lo-fi, do the stock wheels, when hooked to the KF plugin, function like stock wheels? Or do they exhibit the steering and suspension effects (within their own extreme limits) like your specialized wheels do?

You'll get the full range of goodies you get with my wheels in terms of steering, tweakables etc. It would also be possible to modify the suspension distance up, though it might make some of the visuals look a little odd on some of them.

Either way, an optional MM config would be the best option I would say. If you need a hand at that, I can take a hand at writing some if you can make a template of what needs to change. Might even be able to re-use some of the data in the configs and make your MM patch be more universal instead of customized for each wheel. I've already got the KF wheels undergoing a few personal MM customizations (makes updating your latest changes a lot easier if I don't edit the cfgs directly) and have become rather proficient at making MM configs as long as no advanced (aka. Regex) commands are required.

Yes please!! I have no experience with MM, so a hand with that that would be most welcome. I think it's definitely a separate optional download sort of thing, it's not something I'd want to bundle up and force on people downloading the mod parts.

Now, I must weigh in on the speed thing. I discovered the max rpm thing myself and what I've done is just use an MM config to multiply the current "maxRPM" by a small value to give the wheels some more breathing room. Yes, that produces some of the run-away wheels when not attached to the ground, but otherwise you loose out on being able to make a small rover with a super-powered engine that can make it catch air when going over the runway sideways... without using boosters that is. They still tend to limit me from getting too fast (unlike when I made a HUGE LLL-hulled rover using those giant stock wheels and found that if I held the key down it would continue to accelerate ever so slowly) but I don't run into the maximum rpm thing limiting me from going any faster and hyper-switching status in the right-click menu. They still have their curves untouched, which preserves how they accelerate, but they have the chance of flexing that to the limits without being held back as much. It works pretty well for me.

I'll revisit the maxRPM thing, and enable the GUI RPM readout again to make tweaking easier.

Okay, now the crawler stuff. Yeah, I like that idea better than my old idea of just having a "recenter" command in the action group settings. If they could just orient to the direction defined by those keys, like you were doing linear translation in space (except without the third dimension of movement) then it would become extremely intuitive. However, to gain fine control over that, the speed at which it aligns with the new heading should be slow enough that you can stop pressing that button and continue moving at whatever orientation they currently sit at, waiting to be re-oriented properly when the correct button is pushed. Personally, I'd rather have the standard rover controls as they are and put the other movement functions either in the numpad or require the alt key to be used to alter the functionality of the directional keys. Either way, I say we save this for another day and work on getting what we have at a release quality. Crawler steering could open up all sorts of new bugs that could drive us nuts, and lo-fi even nuttier considering he's doing all the real work here.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head there. It's a nice to have, but there are other priorities right now. The controls are indeed going to take some wrangling out...

[MoneyMan12Q]

I'm working on the repulsors for initial release. Haven't quite got the hang of action group toggling yet, but I'll get there shortly. Other than that I'm happy enough with them.

I did a little side-project, I know this was something that got requested fairly early on:

Lo-Fi, i was wondering what happened to the crabbing wheels you introduced, but never implemented? i was looking forward to them.

[loler43214]

Are there going to pre-made rover chassis or track body?

[lo-fi]

Lo-Fi, i was wondering what happened to the crabbing wheels you introduced, but never implemented? i was looking forward to them.

We were just talking about them, actually, see post #1208/9. The short version is I got embroiled in writing a new wheel module from scratch, partly because I couldn't make them work as well as I wanted. They will appear at some point, but getting all the building blocks in place has been a long, long road. However, it's pretty much done now, so I can revisit the idea and do it properly. They will be released at some point

Are there going to pre-made rover chassis or track body?

Yes, I have a couple of parts on the go and a whole bunch of ideas. I want to do a range, available as a separate parts pack that has bodies ranging from little probe cores, through single seat rollcage type things (thing the cool tracked buggy from Prometheus) that you can strap wheels or tracks to, right up to this and bigger:

Working hard to get things all polished up for the next release, then I'll get back to some serious part creation. Inspiration is always welcome!

[Voculus]

Can't wait!

[lo-fi]

Me either, even I'm excited about some of the part I haven't yet created

Any of you guys good with Python? I'm trying to use a script to mess about with the wheelCollider parameters in the ASET wheel, but I'm absolutely stuck. They're set at Unity default in the model and over-ridden to sensible values with FireSpitter (which I'm not using, or course;) )

https://github.com/taniwha-qf/io_object_mu/blob/master/wheel.py

I can get it to spit out the current settings, but I'm absolutely baffled by how to get it to do anything else

[Hookswords]

I made a Speeder Bike replica. I thought I should share it with you.

More images here http://imgur.com/gallery/9xBYB/new

Thanks for the awesome mod!

[lo-fi]

Really nice job, thanks for sharing!

Are they Jebi Knights, by any chance?

[Madrias]

Those speeder bikes wouldn't happen to have anti-collision systems needed for a little adventure through the local woods, would they?

[lo-fi]

That would be quite something, wouldn't it...

I had a play with the ASET wheels last night, and have them working nicely. The only thing I'd like is more suspension travel, but I'm not really far off getting that sorted.

[drtedastro]

Jebi????

Really????

LoL.........

Great job.

[lo-fi]

You're clearly not used to the twisted humour round here

It was simple too terrible a gag to resist!

[drtedastro]

I have been around long enough.... Problem was not enough coffee.....

That was the first thing I saw today....

I loved it...... And wish I had thought of it....

Great pun, great parts, great mod....

cheers....

Jebi, what's next.......

[lo-fi]

...and the dark lords of the Kith?

[Gaalidas]

You're clearly not used to the twisted humour round here

It was simple too terrible a gag to resist!

Those are what we call Kerb Troopers. They're quite expendable and hit trees on a regular basis. those bikes are rigged to explode in a spectacular fashion when hitting anything made of wood or stone. Oddly enough, they just bounce when hitting anything organic. We hope to have that bug ironed out in the future and the Jebi Knights are currently conducting testing to make sure that expendable Kerb Troopers are killed in a spectacular fashion and on a consistent basis. We appreciate your understanding during these trying times of survivable crashes and less-than-amazing explosions.

[lo-fi]

^ Hahahahaha! Come to think of it, do you think Kerbals are actually evolved from Ewoks? They're about to right proportion,s just seem to have lost the hair..

By the way, for those looking for rover bodies, here's a little teaser of what's to come:

SpannerMonkey is to thank for this little box of Kerbal goodness, I'm just releasing and supporting on this one. Release soon once we've got all the details sorted out.

[drtedastro]

OH, I want one of those.......

Great looking ...

Cheers.