Enable Collision on Terrain Scatter

[John FX]

I`d like scatter collisions, I remember avoiding them for ages until I realised they just were not there.

Obviously due to the performance hit this should be optional even with scatters on.

 

EDIT : As there is already a mod which does this then Squad don`t have the excuse that it would be too hard, especially if the mod maker is willing to let them use the same code.

I know it would not directly translate but it proves the viability of the concept and shows a possible solution.

Edited February 3, 2016 by John FX

[StarManta]

The last two pages of this thread can, with Unity 5, almost certainly be classified as overthinking the problem.

Many of the efficiency issues with collision of scatter are exactly the kind of problem that multithreaded PhysX would be expected to perform beautifully on. PhysX running one ship, with every force interacting back to all other parts of the ship, is very difficult to multithread. Checking one group of connected parts for collision against a hundred or a thousand stationary, non-interacting-with-each-other colliders? That task is born to be multithreaded. No tough optimizing or clever problem solving needed on Squad's part - just add the collision mesh, flip the switch, and see how it performs. Smart money says that all those collision checks would be correctly offloaded to other CPU cores, and they're good to go.

The QA testing and gameplay balancing (and maybe a cosmetic refresh of the scatter itself) needed for this would make it reasonable to not include for 1.1, but I'd be surprised if a soon-to-come minor update didn't have collidable terrain scatter.

Edited February 4, 2016 by StarManta

[wafflemoder]

I think this is a wonderful idea. Although it would be nice if the scatter was properly attached to the ground. (no more floating rocks/trees) It would also be really cool if you could pick up terrain scatter with the docking claw, although I'm sure that would be way more complicated to add. 

[RangeMachine]

On 02.02.2016 at 2:26 PM, Thomas P. said:

*cracks knuckles*

Let me clarify some things: Terrain Scatters in KSP are procedural, not random. That means that the positions are not hardcoded, but the same in every savegame you start, unless you edit the PQS Tree of the respective Body. Collisions on Terrain Scatters are really easy to make, and they are far from laggy (Kerbin's surface uses Millions of Colliders, some Terrain Scatters are cake), and I already implemented the collisions, together with Science experiments when a Kerbal is within the range of a Scatter object, in Kopernicus. So it's just the devs, who have to decide to implement that particular feature - I would happily donate my code

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Wow, it's amazing! Can you give me advice, how you enabled mesh colliders? Exacly, I can not understand, how to find tree/rock/etc GameObject in scene.

[Wjolcz]

I'm pretty sure the scatter is actually random everytime it gets loaded. I have found myself in a situtation when a vessel/lander would load and it would be inside of a rock that was never there before. It happened a few times, so it seems like the scatter objects change their positions.

[J.Random]

I'm pretty sure the scatter isn't even generated properly at the moment. Example. It was like this in 1.1-pre, it was reported, it's still like this. Sure, colliding into invisible tree may be fun for some people, but I still don't think it's a good idea.