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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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Haha! I did wonder if that was an OCD thing ;) In some situations you have to use the other method. In most of this, not so much. Though I've kinda got used to it now.

Also, 10^99999999999999 is way overdoing it. 10^99 is the usual replacement for the imaginary number "infinity" which means, basically, you're asking for "infinity ^ 6" which is just plain nuts.

Anyway, I'm going to start working on revamping my change-of-interval feature for the action groups using a GUI slider, and try to get some labels and whatnot to go with the sliders installed as well. You brought up a good point with the "parts getting out of sync" thing which, even though i accounted for that, has a few holes in it that I started to think about recently.

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I know, right!! frictionless Kerbals, but everything else sticks like velcro....

That's what we need someone to work on: adding friction to Kerbals.

Also, I had a moment of thought this morning (scary, I know) thinking about climbing those statics and such. The easiest fix for that is on the model design side of things where objects that could possibly be climbed by a large wheel of some sort should have a sloping collider that the wheel collider can interact with. So, when it comes down to it, we can't really do anything about the inability for large wheels/tracks to climb these low obstacles... unless we were to build a bunch of dummy objects (like the one used to make the VAB helipad launchable in KK by featuring a plane that side below the visual surface of the pad and a collider that sits just above it) with the various inclines in the colliders that we could embed into the structures/features that we want climbable. I'm doubtful that there's any way to do that without the tedious task of placing everything by hand (unless we build the collider dummies with the same origin as the object we want to make climbable, in which case we just set it's location in a config to be equal to the visible object's location). So it's all possible, just not something we can do easily.

Edited by Gaalidas
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I was testing that earlier, and found that the long tracks actually climbed a vertical wall perfectly because I've inclined the fore and aft colliders as you suggest. Is there a set of tracks I've missed doing that on, Sashan?

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:D

Kind of, but not quite. I'll probably make it so whatever you're picking up doesn't end up being docked to the vessel that you're picking it up with, but that comes with its own set of problems. I'm also learning better tricks with the joints which I'll be able to apply to the trailer hitch, which I'm hoping I can get to a releasable state some point soon.

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No, that's this:

I guess it's possible to have a free movement mode, yeah. Hadn't really got as far as thinking about that.

The hitch, if you haven't been following the thread that far back, free moves, but has some damping and limits on the rotation between vehicles. It's complicated, and there are some annoying persistence issues which I've never quite dealt with. Yet.

Edited by lo-fi
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no, that's this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycsqzp8iqs

i guess it's possible to have a free movement mode, yeah. Hadn't really got as far as thinking about that.

The hitch, if you haven't been following the thread that far back, free moves, but has some damping and limits on the rotation between vehicles. It's complicated, and there are some annoying persistence issues which i've never quite dealt with. Yet.

convoy!

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Thanks guys :) I think I need to start another thread..... This stuff doesn't really belong with the wheels and tracks, the plugiin modules are easily separated, and there's enough planned for a utility pack when it's all working properly.

Time for sleep, but I got it working:

Please handle parts with care!! Haha! I'm hoping this is the kind of thing people will find useful when building bases and stuff like that. Or just to have fun with clearing debris! Not too bad for an evenings work, if I say so myself. Most pleasing!

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At the moment, no... Or at least not without having the movement of the effector having no effect in the part that's been attached in the hanger. IR does some very clever stuff to make all that work, if that's what you had in mind?

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Ah, I see what you mean! I forget that there's no part in IR that does that as a single part. I think I can manage to make something like that work, but it will be a little different!

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Can anyone guess what this is going to be for? ;)

http://youtu.be/eg_uKUFMOzQ

Hint: The circles will be magnets once I've coded that bit.

Honestly... my first reaction was "what the fu..."

Is this related to your wish to make a canadarm type thing with more fluid controls? Cause that's the first thing I thought of when seeing the second video.

Edited by Gaalidas
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Yeah, same tech really, just a different visual representation. The trick is to use a single joint between the vessel and payload, not a series of joints, each with their own wobble and rotation to worry about. The cunning thing will then be moving the visible elements to look like a canadarm, rather than an invisible physics joint in the game, and that will no doubt involve some cunning vector maths.

The handler there in the video is easy - all those cylinders and pistons are just setup with LookAt controllers, just like suspension components; they're not actually doing anything other than looking pretty. A canadarm has more complicated joints with certain restrictions, so it will probably be a bit of a challenge not making it do movements which make the visible bits move and rotate in an impossible way. Should be fun! Either way, I've now totally mastered the configurable joint, so this can be turned into handlers, grabs and arms of all shapes and sizes. And no, it doesn't wobble unless you apply massive forces to it.

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It's been discussed at length a few pages back; yes it was a bug with the first variant. It looks like you're running 1.9a.

Try this, it should work far better. I've not released it yet, been waiting to see how it fairs.

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It's been discussed at length a few pages back; yes it was a bug with the first variant. It looks like you're running 1.9a.

Try this, it should work far better. I've not released it yet, been waiting to see how it fairs.

Strange i did a clean install last night,downloaded kf from kerbalstuff supposed to be 1.9b (or 19.B)

will try the one in the link you gave.Thanks

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Alright, lo-fi, I've revamped the suspension increment slider, and revamped the positioning for the GUI elements so that everything fits correctly along with labels for the sliders that include a readout of the current value the slider is sitting at. Hopefully the slider in the GUI will update the interval in which the action groups change the ride height for the incremental up/down actions in real time. I have yet to truly test that because it's all been about GUI positioning. I separated out the first few elements which were applying to two scenes at once, so that now all scenes that show GUI elements now explicitly define all of those elements separately. This makes positioning thing in the window a lot easier. I still plan to look at GUILayout to see if that would simplify things, but this is good for now. I've also restored some of the configurations in the parts relating to DustFX that got overwritten during the panic over that stuttering bug. That includes fixing one part that ended up with two DustFX modules in it.

That magnetic arm thing looks awesome. How is it controlled? Using keyboard input, or did you manage some form of mouse control? Or GUI?

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Strange i did a clean install last night,downloaded kf from kerbalstuff supposed to be 1.9b (or 19.B)

will try the one in the link you gave.Thanks

I wouldn't put it past BDArmory having some issue somewhere that could conflict. All I know is that we handled our side of the problem which occurred even with BDArmory not installed.

One thing I noticed is that during all of our code merges, somehow the line that makes that collider visible keeps being set to "true" when it should really only be set to "true" if you compile with a debug argument (we still need to separate some stuff into debug defines so we don't need to comment them out or delete them). So, even with a more recent release of the plugin, you can't guarantee that the white box won't show up. Somewhere down the line we might even think about building some GUI elements to activate debug visuals/readouts if a "debug" toggle is switched on.

Edited by Gaalidas
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At the moment, it's mapped to the numpad. 8,2 4,6 1,9 move it around linearly, then if you hold alt, 8,2 4,6 1,3 rotate. GUI is too fiddly, mouse control might be a little too inaccurate. I don't like explicit mapping, but will be tough to get around. I'll merge into the dev branch later so you can have a play, but it's still to be considered "experimental".

Moving the increment slider to the GUI sounds like and ideal solution! A debug toggle would be good too - could make a lot of use of that! Adding some extra methods into the KFLog class which only print to the log if it's enabled could be really useful.

That's definitely a KF bug, I'm sorry to say. I thought b had at least fixed that, but apparently not. I'm happy with the temporary one, which I've been testing myself, so I think I'll send that out to KerbalStuff and put and end to the wayward vessel modules and random colliders!

I keep enabling the water slider because I want to see where the damn thing has ended up! I'm quite glad I did, it's been handy knowing that it's been appearing where it shouldn't, though the GUI debug toggle would be perfect for that.

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Ah, I see. I guess maybe is the answer! I'd look at putting a wheel collider on each of the buckets if I were trying to do something like that myself I think, then it'll all just work. Do you code? I've got some rock spawning code you might be interested in if so - could do some cool stuff with that as well.

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