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

[lo-fi]

1.1.x & 1.2.x NOTES:

It is being worked on, but there is currently no 1.1.x or 1.2.x compatibility. Do not ask for an ETA or you will be slapped in the face with a fish. You have been warned..

 

We're working on it, but as Squad found, U5 wheel colliders in KSP are about as stable as a stack of ping-pong balls. It's being working on by some very clever people, so please be patient. In fact, we're working on an entirely new wheel collider (the bit of U5 that's given Squad so many problems). As you may imagine, this is not easy or quick, but progress is being made. Please do not ask when it'll be ready or badger us to update. Such requests will b met with a slap around the face with a wet fish. You have been warned - we have the Holy Mackerel primed and ready, and it won't be pretty.

By all means, stay tuned, offer encouragement, post what you're doing (in previous KSP versions) with KF stuff and do suggest whacky stuff we might be able to have fun creating when we've got working wheels again. 

DOWNLOAD: KF v1.9  which is 1.0.x compatible can be downloaded here.

1.9 Changelog:

New parts:

Giballed repulsor. Less crashy-crashy-boom-boom.

Simple track (quite small)

More to follow shortly when textures/IVA's have been finished!!

New features/enhancements:

DustFX! This is similar to the CollisionFX mod, but totally re-purposed specifically for wheels

Dust colour can either be updated by biome information, or in realtime by sampling the ground colour.

Repulsor effects. They throw dust too, as well as creating eerie blue light... New animated texture as well.

Gui: you can toggle various things like the repulsor lights, dust, VAB/SPH orientation marker from the simple GUI

Wheel acceleration is now affected by vessel mass. Bet you never noticed it wasn't before

Control input improvements. Hopefully you'll feel rovers are a little less.... arcade-ish.

APU now has configurable target battery state. Sound has been improved too.

Memory footprint reduction. It's about 40M. Less that a third of the previous release.

Various performance improvements, which I won't bore you with.

You may notice that the simple track is not an asymmetric part, which is not common in KSP. More like this will follow now the plugin stuff is in place to enable this.

Logging has been improved to show KF related things clearly.

TweakScale support has been vastly improved. Everything that should, I believe, now scales with the parts

Rebalance of cost/weight/speed/tech node (Community Tech Tree too) for all parts. This may need some more work.

Support for alternate resources added.

Information, description, EC usage is all now displayed in editor

Icon size fixes for the tracks is bow built in

Tracks no longer make the craft appear larger than it really is in the engineers report.

Track textures flip over to create symmetrical track patterns on opposite sides. Neat, huh?

Probably a bunch of stuff I've forgotten too, as well as stuff that enables forthcoming parts....

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Install Instructions:

Delete existing 'Kerbal Foundries' folder. Unzip new version into KSP folder. You will end up with GameData\KerbalFoundries. Enjoy the Kerbal mobility goodness

Optional:

TweakScale: No further explanation should be required. Nothing bad will happen if you don't have it.

FAQ & Troubleshooting:

This mod crashes my game. There are a few possibilities:

You're running KSP Win64. DON'T. It doesn't work correctly, Squad don't support it and neither do I. Some people manage; bad luck if you're not one of those.

You're running active texture management. It hasn't crashed, be patient while it compresses the textures for the first time. Startup will be quicker subsequently.

You're running too many mods and you're out of memory. Trim down your install, force OpenGL or run Active Texture Management (or similar).

I've yet to run into anything that isn't caused by one of those things listed about. Crashing is usually memory related.

The wheels don't work and sink into the ground:

You've put them upside down. Download 1,8d and you'll have nice orientation markers.

The repulsors behave a little quirky:

They're anti-gravity devices, what do you expect

Filing bug reports:

If you run into trouble, please do the following: Post an output_log. This can be found in the KSP_Data directory. Preferably stuffed into dropbox or similar, rather than pasted into the thread (between SPOILER tags please, if you must) as they can get quite lengthy. Screen grabs are helpful, as are craft if they're mostly stock apart from KSP parts. A detailed description of the problem too, please. Just saying 'hey, (whatever part) isn't working' is not helpful.

If you have an issue with odd behaviour, rather than something that's likely to be revealed by a log file, please post screen shots, KSP version & platform and KF version, along with as much info as you can give.

General release notes:

AGAIN!! Everything has changed. I've completely ditched the stock wheel module in favour of my own home-grown alternative. Some might say this is a bold move, and rightly so. There will be bugs, there will be certain situations where the wheels behave a little differently to stock. If you don't want to deal with that and file sensible bug reports should you run into something strange, please don't update for the moment. The new plugin is mostly helpful because it greatly simplifies creating new parts, as the stock modules are rather fussy. However, subtle differences do exist and you should find that the dynamics are much better now. Parts have all received a CoG tweak which has also helped.

Apologies for breaking saves, I found that the old and new versions are simply not compatible and weird, weird bugs occurred. Forcing fresh craft files is about the only way to deal with this, so that's what I've done. If you want to re-use existing craft files, just remove KF parts and re-save before updating the mod, then add the new versions.

 

Groups:

You'll notice a UI slider called Group Number, along with an Apply Settings button. This does several things. For repulsors, it changes the hover height of all other repulsors on the vessel in the same group number as the selected part. For wheels, steering ration and direction calculation will happen for parts in the same group. Useful for multi vehicle vessels and those with docked rovers. Group 0 is special! A part set to group zero will only update its own setting, and will not receive settings from other parts (even in group 0). Sounds complicated, but it's easily udnerstood when you're in-game. Parts default to group 1.

Repulsor notes:

1) They do levitation. Nothing more!! Propulsion, braking and control are all up to you. Get inventive!

2) The height adjustment and retract/deploy function has now been rolling into one. Setting to 0 height turns the repulsors off. There are two action groups to change the height, as well as the UI slider to change individual units. The action groups change the height .5 for each activation.

3) Surface mount repulsors are now smaller and uni-directional. The have no stability of their own, so you'll want to use at least three if you want a self stable craft. I've added TweakScale support to facilitate easy placement. It makes them a little trickier to use, but much more flexible when using lots of them.

4) Effects are on the way. Lights and emissives are all in the works.

5) Energy usage depends on hover height.

6) Fixed a major bug where repulsors would randomly switch off due to low energy when there was plenty available.

7) You will need the TweakScale plugin if you don't already have it and would like to use this feature: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/80234-24-2-TweakScale-Rescale-Everything!-(v1-33-2014-07-28-20-00-UTC)

Wheel notes:

1)I've done some funky stuff detecting each wheels position in the vessel and calculating how much it should be steering. If you make a truly whacky vessel with the root part in a strange orientation this may not work correctly (Should now be fixed in 1.7).

2)Docking/undocking needs some attention, especially if rovers are mounted on a launch craft in an odd orientation. This will be fixed, I just need some time to work out how KSP handles the tree rebuild and get my code to recalculate accordingly. Groups will help with this.

 

Track notes:

1)There is a KSP bug in the bounds detection of the skinned mesh that the tracks are made of. This means the editor icon is _tiny_. It's a known KSP issue and something I can do nothing about at the moment I'm afraid.

2)Steering is slightly different to wheels. Pressing D, for example, tells the vehicle to rotate clockwise (looking down), rather than steer right. This might sound like the same thing, but you'll find the controls are reversed compared to driving with wheels. This is by design. Otherwise there is a nasty crossover region between forward and backward motion when rotating on the spot.

3)There is a UI slider and action groups to change the torque, along with an action group and button to disable steering. This hopefully opens up the design possibilities. Energy consumption is related to torque.

4)I've hopefully nailed the direction detection code. It works for all of my designs, I'll wait to here if it works for everyone.

A massive, massive thank you to the RBI guys for open-sourcing the originals. I can't tell you how helpful it's been

5) The steering on the re-released RBI unit can get a little funny when mounted upside down. I'll fix later. For the moment, enjoy them right side up, please

APU notes:

This is designed to be used alongside anything that requires ElectricCharge. By default, it will spool up and down depending on battery state and current load. Having too small a battery can cause problems, though, so take at least one small pack, rather then relying on tiny charge storage from command pods etc.

 

We could really use another hand with the texturing. Justin does a cracking job, but it's time consuming compared to everything else so there's now quite a backlog of untextured parts. Any offers greatly appreciated!

CC-BY-NC-SA

 

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR

IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,

FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE

AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER

LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,

OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN

The SOFTWARE.

To clarify licenses:

Publicly released parts, configs and textures are covered by Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA

Publicly released plugin code is covered by GNU GPL3.

Anything else to be considered all rights reserved.

 

Edited October 27, 2016 by lo-fi
Unlocked as per OP's request

[BrutalRIP]

wow i want NOW but think we wont see this released before .24;.;

im also offering to help test it for you

Edited June 25, 2014 by BrutalRIP

[Gaalidas]

So, I must say those wheels are really "purdy" and I really want them. The hover "wheels" are interesting. I worry about keeping the craft oriented properly for long-distance, but I sorta have an idea of what you did there. I looks like something similar to the omni-wheel, but without the visual element and with your new suspensions. Even as it is now, you've definitely filled the bill for something I've been trying to do for quite some times using other hover-related mods... and failed miserably.

Edited September 15, 2015 by Gaalidas

[Neutrinovore]

Hmm, I like the look of what you're doing here. I'll be looking forward to this release.

Edit: Thanks for fixing the spelling error. I don't like to be 'that guy', but it's simple things like that that can make the difference between a professional-looking presentation and an amateurish one.

Edited June 25, 2014 by Neutrinovore

[YANFRET]

This looks great I'd like to test it out

[lo-fi]

Thanks guys

I've got a few things to work through, but I'll post links up (hopefully) later this eve. It's actually quite nerve-wracking setting something up for public release... about a million thoughts of 'what if someone does this, that or the other'... But, Squad do it, and having a few other bods trying trying to break stuff will actually save me some of the testing, so here goes... Let's do this Kerbal style! Watch this space.

Thanks for the heads up on the spelling btw

[Robotengineer]

These are really cool, especially the anti-grav repulsors. I would like to make some parts for this mod if that is all right.

[lo-fi]

I worry about keeping the craft oriented properly for long-distance

The joy of it is you don't have to keep the craft oriented! You can just have fun drifting around as you please, using tiny amounts of RCS. Private testing has been positive so far. I _never_ set out to create something like the repulsors; they're the result of a silly conversation, a 'hmm, what if' sort of idea, trailblazing through the KSP API while learning C# and abject abuse of Unity physics objects. I've loved every minute

[lo-fi]

These are really cool, especially the anti-grav repulsors. I would like to make some parts for this mod if that is all right.

Thanks

If you've got some ideas, that would be awesome! The Unity hierarchy changes from standard wheels are significant, and I've written no documentation on my plugin yet, but I'm trying to put together a live stream tutorial on how it's all set up. Again, watch this space! I have to get some meshes sorted for texturing this eve, after that I'll try and martial everything together for a soft release.

[nli2work]

3 weeks! Amazing! Looking forward to this. Will be reading your source codes closely.

[lo-fi]

3 weeks! Amazing! Looking forward to this. Will be reading your source codes closely.

That's probably the bit I'm dreading the most!!!! Comments appreciated. If I can do anything better, please, please, please chime in. Abject newbie, so I'm sure I've done some horrible things to C#. That being said, what a beautiful language!

That's three weeks of 3am finishes and I learn fast, mind you

Edited June 26, 2014 by lo-fi

[Pondafarr]

Those. Are. AWSOME. Just sayin.

I am a little concerned on having suspension movements on the anti-grav units, doesn't seem like it should be required, as the anti-grav field should be absorbing the suspension motion, not the mechanical support for the generator units.

also, is the ride height going to be tweakable? Sometimes, ya wanna ride low. Some times, you need more ground clearance....

Derp, saw the line in the code specificly calling out the tweakable...should read before speaking

Edited June 25, 2014 by Pondafarr

[lo-fi]

Those. Are. AWSOME. Just sayin.

I am a little concerned on having suspension movements on the anti-grav units, doesn't seem like it should be required, as the anti-grav field should be absorbing the suspension motion, not the mechanical support for the generator units.

also, is the ride height going to be tweakable? Sometimes, ya wanna ride low. Some times, you need more ground clearance....

I really, really need to make a new video.... That was a muck-about after literally five minutes in Unity to prove the concept. So busy trying to get everything debugged and out of the door.

Yup absolutely hear you with the suspension travel - now fixed, will update video.

Yep, it's tweakable alright! In-flight too...

And thanks -really glad people are liking the concept. Makes all those hours worth it

[Boomerang]

Those parts look great. The hover parts seem like they'd be fun and if the rover wheels perform like in that video sans bugs, I could see them becoming the go-to wheels for med-sized rovers for a lot of people. Can't wait to try them.

[Robotengineer]

Just downloaded the dev and played around with it, really like that all wheels switch between repulsor and wheel at once. These may have replaced BahamutoD's critter crawler as my new favorite ground transport

[nli2work]

That's probably the bit I'm dreading the most!!!! Comments appreciated. If I can do anything better, please, please, please chime in. Abject newbie, so I'm sure I've done some horrible things to C#. That being said, what a beautiful language!

https://github.com/Lo-FiOrbitalScience/KerbalFoundriesDev/tree/master/SRC

You'll be most interested in SteeringTest.cs. Enjoy

That's three weeks of 3am finishes and I learn fast, mind you

I am as a newb as you are! I've been thinking over how to take advantage of the wheel system for a while. trying learn up on all I can. between your system a bahamuto's there is a wealth of information.

Any reason why the deploy and retract code is in Wheel.cs; Repulsor.cs; and SteeringTest.cs? different versions of the whole system?

Edited June 25, 2014 by nli2work

[Robotengineer]

Here are some pics, I will take it to the moon next

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[Neutrinovore]

I'm surprised that so many people are interested in the hover repulsor thingies. The maker of the RollKage system had experimented with this exact same thing quite a while ago, and got absolutely ZERO interest on it. I still have the mod in my downloads folder, but I don't have it installed anymore because of one very simple reason: since there's no sideways friction or tracking of any kind, combined with no 'traction' for the hover system, it's virtually impossible to negotiate even a very gentle slope. It's like trying to push a ball bearing up a ramp with nothing more than the tip of a ballpoint pen. You end up going every which way EXCEPT up the hill.

Try it. Drive your experimental hovercar thing out into the hills west of KSC. You'll see what I mean.

I'm not trying to discourage you btw, lo-fi. I'm just pointing out some potential pitfalls that you may want to take into consideration.

Anyway, I'm VERY much looking forward to the wheels. I hope that they'll have some sideways slip like the RollKage wheels do, so that one doesn't instantly flip their rover over when steering at speeds above 5 m/s the way the stock wheels do. I find the stock wheels to be utterly useless for this reason alone.

So again, good luck, and I'm eager to see what develops next.

Later!

[Mekan1k]

I volunteer for testing! (I use most mods, so if there is an incongruity, I will probably find it)

[lo-fi]

Just downloaded the dev and played around with it, really like that all wheels switch between repulsor and wheel at once. These may have replaced BahamutoD's critter crawler as my new favorite ground transport

That's a real honour to be mentioned alongside that mod. Incredible piece of work, it's absolutely stunning.

I am as a newb as you are! I've been thinking over how to take advantage of the wheel system for a while. trying learn up on all I can. between your system a bahamuto's there is a wealth of information.

Any reason why the deploy and retract code is in Wheel.cs; Repulsor.cs; and SteeringTest.cs? different versions of the whole system?

I've been working on a lot of stuff, need to move some things to utils. Yep, lots of stuff in the pipeline Including a Star Wars speeder bike for Kerbals..

Here are some pics, I will take it to the moon next

http://imgur.com/a/YgpqX

Superb! You'll find some strange issues with the anti-roll in very low grav though, I need to create a bigger dead-zone. The control loop fights itself and gets KSP all in a tiz... Hell, I'll call it a 'feature' not a bug. Dealing with ant-grav, right

Also some null-refs in VAB/SPH if you flick back to it, I'm still trying to figure that out. Had something go really strange with one of my saves too, so use with caution! Everything went in time-warp, speeds were all wrong and I had to start a fresh save. May just be a KSP thing and unrelated, though..

Go break stuff:D My testing has been limited and I tend to forget after adding new features. It's all very, very early stage with lots of finishing touches and bug fixes needed.

[Robotengineer]

Another thing, (if possible) could you make it so that in repulsor mode it can go over water?

[lo-fi]

I'm surprised that so many people are interested in the hover repulsor thingies. The maker of the RollKage system had experimented with this exact same thing quite a while ago, and got absolutely ZERO interest on it. I still have the mod in my downloads folder, but I don't have it installed anymore because of one very simple reason: since there's no sideways friction or tracking of any kind, combined with no 'traction' for the hover system, it's virtually impossible to negotiate even a very gentle slope. It's like trying to push a ball bearing up a ramp with nothing more than the tip of a ballpoint pen. You end up going every which way EXCEPT up the hill.

Try it. Drive your experimental hovercar thing out into the hills west of KSC. You'll see what I mean.

I'm not trying to discourage you btw, lo-fi. I'm just pointing out some potential pitfalls that you may want to take into consideration.

Anyway, I'm VERY much looking forward to the wheels. I hope that they'll have some sideways slip like the RollKage wheels do, so that one doesn't instantly flip their rover over when steering at speeds above 5 m/s the way the stock wheels do. I find the stock wheels to be utterly useless for this reason alone.

So again, good luck, and I'm eager to see what develops next.

Later!

Cheers! Absolutely fair comments. I took the 'throw some RCS or small engines at it and it works fine' approach. Simply an anti-grav; the propulsion is up to you. Hillclimbing has not been an issue so far, you just need an appropriate amount of power I've been merrily hacking my way around the mountains, but they're really for low-grav where wheels just don't work too well and a little goes a long way.

I wasn't aware of the rollcage version, I'll look it up.

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the handling characteristics in wheel mode - that was the whole point of making a mod really. I too got fed up with silly flipping over, which is why I've gone to such lengths. I always used to use Rollcage wheels instead of stock, but I wanted tweakables. The only way was to bake my own... Then things got out of hand...

[Drew Kerman]

DO WANT! Great work on getting all your goals accomplished with so little coding experience. Coding makes you feel so powerful doesn't it? You can do ANYTHING! MWAHAHAHAHA!!

Anyways, the KSA will be putting in an order for your parts for sure

[lo-fi]

Another thing, (if possible) could you make it so that in repulsor mode it can go over water?

That's WIP. There is some stuff in the API that deals with buoyancy, but it's WEIRD. I'm on it, but that's going to take some time I'm afraid

[nli2work]

How did you get to look at the KSP API? adding the KSP dlls to your project?