Airlock/ladder obstruction

[raidernick]

I know this has been talked about ad nauseam but I am at the breaking point here with this nonsense. I spent the last 6 hours trying to get this stupid hatch to work and it is ALWAYS obstructed. I followed every tutorial in every thread on this forum and the wiki with no results. Every post has conflicting ideas which makes them useless for help. I CAN NOT get the stupid hatch to work unless I place the box colliders at y=0 and z<0. This is worthless because this is not where i want the hatch as it is in the center of my model not the top where to door is. Check the following picture, the top circular panel is where I want to airlock to be and the colliders are in the only spot it works. I can change x to any value and it works fine but y has to be 0 and z has to be less than 0 or it is obstructed. It DOESN'T matter what size the colliders are. I can make them tiny or huge, intersect them all the way into the mesh or place them out in the middle of nowhere as long as y=0 and z<0 it works otherwise it doesn't. I'm at the point of no return on my sanity here trying to get this to work and I need help. I would like to note that moving the entire station model down to the colliders does nothing as once I load the game the collider is at the same spot regardless of where the station is moved in unity.

[nli2work]

make sure the Airlock only intersects 1 collider mesh in your model, also try capsule collider as it has smaller footprint compared to box collider.

[raidernick]

That didn't work either. It is intersecting only 1 collider and I tried capsule and it made no difference. Once I moved it past y=o and z<0 it stopped working.

Edited July 24, 2014 by raidernick

[Porkjet]

Welcome to pain, friend. There's some serious b0ll0cks going on in the part tools...

What you say about y=0 and z<0 is very interresting, and I wonder why it seems to have those conditions on your model while the trigger boxes sometimes work in all sorts of funky locations on other parts. Maybe it has indeed to do with the size of the part, that thing is rather big afterall.

If you think moving the entire station down would be an OK workaround, you should be able to do this if the station mesh is a child object of the object with part tools script on it.

However, this would also mean the CoM would be at the very top where the hatch is which could make the thing act a bit strange in space.

[raidernick]

I tried moving it down as a child object and in the game the hatch was still in the same place, which doesn't make any sense because i had moved the station under it in unity.

[raidernick]

This has been fixed so I'm going to post the solution here that Sirkut helped me reach for anyone else having this problem. Ignore everything else posted about this in other threads as they are all conflicting ideas. It does not matter if its a mesh or box collider, convex or not. It doesn't matter how or if they intersect the model mesh. What matters is that it is below 0,0,0. You can achieve this by moving the origin of your model ABOVE where you want the airlock to be in your modeling program then reimporting into unity. Then when you place your airlock and ladder it will be below 0,0,0 and will work.

[nli2work]

I dunno... I've made 3 pods so far, and they don't follow a pattern at all that I could see. except maybe the collider name... Airlock placement is all voodoo as far as I'm concerned

1 has airlock above CoM of the pod; 1 below; and 1 at the same level. and they work just fine. The 1st pod gave me the most trouble, I got it to work eventually and it's actually clipping through 3 other colliders... so I was wrong about only clipping 1 collider.

there is probably some truth to it having to do with the pod's size. The 3.75m pod was the 1st and it took days of trial and error to find a working location of the airlock. The other pods are 2.5m and 0.625m and neither gave me any problems at all. worked on the first try.

Edited July 27, 2014 by nli2work

[raidernick]

It may just be random but I had this problem on both separate salyut modules I was working on. Skylab also gave me this trouble but I eventually got it to work above 0,0,0 so I guess it MIGHT be random on a per model basis. Just sharing my solution for others who can't find one.

[AlphaAsh]

The three things that have gotten me working hatches everytime (now) are:

1 - Make sure the origin is in the collider your hatch intersects with.

2 - This one I'm not 100% sure on but... make sure this is the only collider containing the origin.

3 - Make sure the hatch trigger only intersects with that collider.

[sirkut]

Adding insult to injury it's silly that you can enter a hatch just fine no matter where it is but if you want to exit the same hatch you get the obstructed message.

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Adding insult to injury it's silly that you can enter a hatch just fine no matter where it is but if you want to exit the same hatch you get the obstructed message.

I have to agree with you there, that bugs me senseless, surely if they can enter they can leave, but no, it leads me to believe theres something else going on here.

AS to location of hatches and ladders I tend to put them in the locations I want the rather than above below a certain coordinate, sometimes they work great and sometimes they don't , perhaps there is some magic involved after all.

[sirkut]

would be nice if this was either fixed or correctly explained where ALL hatches work.

[Justin Kerbice]

would be nice if this was either fixed or correctly explained where ALL hatches work.

Perhaps we, modders, should be more "visible", make more "noise", to Squad team, as the same people who ask for new release a few days/weeks after the last one. "Documentation" seems to be a censored word at Squad office.

By the way, I think Ohfive30 gives all the needed answers regarding this matter, the thread is just not very "easy" to reach.

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Do the hatch and ladder colliders need to be a certain size to spawn a kerbal correctly?

Should the hatch and ladder colliders intersect the node_collider or not? (I've seen conflicting answers to this already)

Screenshots below, I would really appreciate it if someone with a bit of know how on this could have a look and see if i've done something wrong.

Is how his post ends so perhaps in the end the 0,0,0 isnt the solution, and that wouldn't be the solution for many of my parts either, most being considerably larger than would be sensible to move the models origin that far, case in point , space dock, total hatches 20 and they all work both ways and its nearly 60mtrs tall and one part, whereas small rover pod approx 2mtrsq, no matter where i put the hatch it doesn't work, so I reckon its definitely magic!

[nli2work]

Is how his post ends so perhaps in the end the 0,0,0 isnt the solution, and that wouldn't be the solution for many of my parts either, most being considerably larger than would be sensible to move the models origin that far, case in point , space dock, total hatches 20 and they all work both ways and its nearly 60mtrs tall and one part, whereas small rover pod approx 2mtrsq, no matter where i put the hatch it doesn't work, so I reckon its definitely magic!

Ah, so you can get multiple airlocks on a single part! I tried that before and never got it to work and settled for single airlock per pod. good to know.

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Yup its single part in the sense that you don't assemble it , it is however something like 20 parts in total all under one game object, after all it'd be pretty useless if i couldn't fly a ship in

[raidernick]

Well turns out the stations aren't fixed. Just noticed for the first time in game that the center of gravity is at the origin for some reason, so you are rotating around the very top instead of the middle of the station. Looks like I'll have to move the origin back and settle for the broken airlock.

[sirkut]

Well turns out the stations aren't fixed. Just noticed for the first time in game that the center of gravity is at the origin for some reason, so you are rotating around the very top instead of the middle of the station. Looks like I'll have to move the origin back and settle for the broken airlock.

That is terrible to hear. Would be nice if there was some official word on how it can be done.

[nli2work]

Well turns out the stations aren't fixed. Just noticed for the first time in game that the center of gravity is at the origin for some reason, so you are rotating around the very top instead of the middle of the station. Looks like I'll have to move the origin back and settle for the broken airlock.

default CoM for a part is the 0,0,0 of the mesh. You can try using CoM Offset in config to put it where it should be.

[raidernick]

default CoM for a part is the 0,0,0 of the mesh. You can try using CoM Offset in config to put it where it should be.

THANKS FOR THIS! I was able to fix it for good, I hate constantly moving around the origin because it screws up any in orbit stations for anyone using the mod every time they update.