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


lo-fi

What to work on next?  

1,282 members have voted

  1. 1. What to work on next?

    • More wheels
      123
    • More tracks
      453
    • Rover bodies
      241
    • Landing gear
      137
    • Landing legs
      108
    • Something completely different
      193


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Yeah, I've tried the torque thing. It certainly helps but these things are still extremely touchy. I was hoping there was something with the suspension or other settings I could adjust that might help further. I know these things will never be graceful. They really only have tracks so I can land the seperate parts and dock them together. Just trying to find ways to make them slightly more stable when positioning them.

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Indeed, Kenobi has it nailed. This demonstrates quite well, and it's a cool video: http://youtu.be/40pS_Q63K2M

As Madrias suggests, up the damping a little bit, that may help.

Going to take a little work to turn the hitch concept into something really workable, but should be worth it.

Edited by lo-fi
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Trust me, I can't wait to be able to actually use hitches. Infernal Robotics and KAS just don't cut it. One, you often end up inside your trailer when trying to turn aggressively, and two, you just don't get the feel that you're towing something. You can't feel the weight.

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Another cool thing to come out of this is I can now make little tie downs for rovers in transportation. Going to make them aim-able, so once configured, you fire them to create a solid joint between themselves and whatever they're aimed at within a configurable distance. So you can drive a rover onto a ramp of a cargo plane, fire up several tie-downs and fly the plane away with the rover solidly fixed in place, just like in RL. No messing with fiddly docking port alignment, everything stays as a separate vessel and the rover won't fall out. Lots of unknowns like vessel and scene switching, how the on rails part is handled and stuff like that to work through, but that's the plan.

Lots to do with the hitch before I even release it to you guys, and still a lot of unknowns there. Switching between tractor and trailer is fine - the joint stays intact - but it will need rebuilding every time focus is swapped away out of physics range, which could be a problem. Needs rebuilding before and physics kicks in too, or things will go out of alignment before the joint is rebuilt. I think KAS and IR can probably point me the way. One cool thing about this method, is that as tractor and trailer are still separate vessels, they actually collide with each other rather than folding into themselves! I'm going to try and create some limits to swivel range of the hitch anyway, but this might be tricky dealing with the orientation not being perfect when hitching. I'd also like to give the option to activate the drive and brakes on the trailer, so maybe I'll have to look at Burn Together or similar. Maybe I can hack around with some of the auto pilot functions.. Oh, and I need to make some nice hitch and coupling models... I'm literally just typing stuff as it comes into my head now, maybe I should stop!!

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It sounds great, I really hope you can get something that can withstand timewarp. The closest thing at the moment seems to be the KAS grapple which disconnects at warp or leaving full physics. If you're looking at code for ideas Smart-Parts also has the match throttle/heading in the smart radio, I just don't have slightest idea how useful it may be to you :)

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Yes, that's the bit that worries me :/ Still, the only way to find out is to give it my best shot! It's possible there is some kind of intractable issue that the (extremely clever) KAS guys found, or it's possible they didn't feel it was worth it for the grapple. Thanks, I'll have a look at smart parts, not heard of that before.

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Hi, I'm running ActiveTextureManagement basic and it hangs at RepulsorSurface\RepulsorSurfaceDiffuse. As in, no log, the program freezes. Any ideas?

How long did you leave it for? It took ages for me the first time ATM crunched up the new Kerbal Foundries, I thought it had hung and it showed "not responding" but it eventually completed. Check the CPU use, if it remains high leave it longer to complete.

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Odd that it'd be the surface repulsor, though. Unless the progress indicator is lying and it's actually stuck crunching the rover body texture, which is massive and I still haven't got around to fixing. I think it's probably next in the loading order after RepulsorSurface, so that may be it.

- - - Updated - - -

Alright, I got this:

Imposing limits on the coupling is easy, and I can even make it tweakable. Next up is to see what I can do about recreating the joint when the scene changes back to flight or physics kicks in. This will, no doubt, be harder, but after that I'll release it to dev so you guys can do what you do best and break stuff ;)

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Imposing limits on the coupling is easy, and I can even make it tweakable. Next up is to see what I can do about recreating the joint when the scene changes back to flight or physics kicks in. This will, no doubt, be harder, but after that I'll release it to dev so you guys can do what you do best and break stuff ;)

That is better than cool, if x y and z limits can be tweakable separately it would be possible to do i.e. all kinds of truck-trailer connectors \o/ edit: It would be sweet if .cfg had some kind of switch like: eva-configurable: true / false, SPH-VAB-configurable: true / false

Edited by riocrokite
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Ewwwww. Stats. Horrible.

I'll get back to you on the configurability, still working through how to set it up. All axis of the joint can be independently controlled, though I'm currently dealing with issues related to the joint being created while the tractor and trailer are not perfectly aligned. The limits are relative to how things are when the joints are created, so some measuring and calculation is required to make it behave properly. But it is freakin cool!

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Indeed! Though this kind of vector maths is really, really hard :(

Find the angle between two vectors in one plane: Sounds easy, doesn't it.

Yarp it does :) (bearing in mind that the stuff I do in my day job is far more complex :P). Find the magnitude of each vector to the normal of the plane (something dot product related), and subtract it from your vector. Then normalise your vector. Do this for the other vector. Then use another dot product between your two vectors and convert the resulting value into an angle. That's how I'd do it from memory at least.

Here's some links:

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AmountVectorMagnitudeInAnotherDirection.html

http://www.fundza.com/vectors/normalize/

http://www.euclideanspace.com/maths/algebra/vectors/angleBetween/

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Well, for us mortals who don't do this kind of thing in the day job ;)

Thanks, I'll have a nose through the links and see what I can figure out. I was surprised I could find so little (and damn the joint for not revealing the data to me when I know damn well it must have it), though I was possibly searching the wrong terms!

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