[1.0.2] B9 Aerospace | Procedural Parts 0.40 | Updated 09.06.15

[RainDreamer]

I don't even know how to verbalize my excitement but a lot of squeeeeeee.

Can't wait for this to complete. All my wings desire for lesser RAM.

[falken]

I haven't had a chance to test yet, but is there/will there be the option for heat shield undersides on control surfaces like the shuttle?

[bac9]

I haven't had a chance to test yet, but is there/will there be the option for heat shield undersides on control surfaces like the shuttle?

Mentioned in the first post, not implemented yet.

[Horus]

Purely awesome!

Looking forward to DRE support

[Horus]

Expanded control surface to span 5, moved it along wing edge and when released it for placement - the span size changed to 4. Same thing happens when the wing position with attached control surface was changed.

UPD: also, I guess showing wing or controls surface settings in context menu while in flight is not really necessary.

UPD2: flight revert also causes surface texture switching to a different one than it was set before.

UPD3: not stable with FAR at the moment. Just a note, not a blame

Edited December 27, 2014 by Horus

[bac9]

also, I guess showing wing or controls surface settings in context menu while in flight is not really necessary.

Those shouldn't show up in flight based on the settings I set, will investigate.

UPD2: flight revert also causes surface texture switching to a different one than it was set before.

Investigating that, heavy texture manages to take place of a medium one through some weird glitch.

UPD3: not stable with FAR at the moment. Just a note, not a blame

Can you elaborate? To remind, you have to use the latest version of FAR from the repo, otherwise FAR might trigger some attachment issues.

[bac9]

Fixed the issue with surface texture selection being incorrectly restored on craft loading and an issue with wing setup on attachment getting stuck in some scenarios.

As usual, download here.

https://bitbucket.org/bac9/b9_aerospace_plugins/downloads

[Alewx]

I was soooo close to posting my found bugs and problems, just to find out that you already made 3 new versions in that time, damn you

EDIT:Ok, but now: my procedural controlsurfaces get resized to their default spanwidth if I set them on horizontal wings, and make the span wider than the default 4m. They resize at replacing, reloading of craft, scene and launch.

What do you need? Logs, screenshots, name it and you get it tomorrow morning.

My Yaw controlsurfaces kept their values all correct.

Really cool feature, increasing the thickness over 0.48 to 0.8 would still be a good choise with the mk3 parts.

Edited December 28, 2014 by Alewx

[RainDreamer]

This is some amazing development and update speed! Thanks a lot! I hope we can see a release version soon at this rate!

[Kerboman]

Whyyyyyy

Whyyyy do you have to release such a good procedural wing? Now I have to use these to make beautiful looking/flying planes D:

[Horus]

Can you elaborate? To remind, you have to use the latest version of FAR from the repo, otherwise FAR might trigger some attachment issues.

I wish I could be more useful with that. It's a personal experience. I'm not FAR pro user, alas. Used latest FAR.

[Musuko42]

How nicely does this mod play with the part count limit in the hangar/vab in career mode? Does each wing counts as one part or, preferably, does it scale the part cost in relation to the size/complexity of the wing?

[bac9]

How nicely does this mod play with the part count limit in the hangar/vab in career mode? Does each wing counts as one part or, preferably, does it scale the part cost in relation to the size/complexity of the wing?

The cost of the part is scaled with it's size. Every wing only only counts as one part (obviously), but I'm not aware of any career mechanics making it a downside (performance wise it's an upside).

[skykooler]

It would be nice to leave this as a separate mod from B9 Aerospace, which I can't use (at least on this install) due to RAM limitations.

[sirklick]

Wow, these are lovely!

Minor bug within the VAB: control surfaces that are placed but not attached to anything (say floating in the air while you adjust some other part) become non-select-able. I am going to guess that attachment generates the collider, because this only happens if not first attached to something (dropped directly from inventory out into the VAB/SPH).

[bac9]

Some issues found and looked into so far, no need to report on those:

• Control surfaces becoming corrupted on symmetrical duplication
  
• Wings above 0.24 thickness becoming partially corrupted in certain circumstances
  
• Control surfaces clamping their span to 0.5 while allowing it's tuning to 0.25
  
• Stock tweakable slider UI preventing you from selecting 1m wing semispan and some other values
  

Wow, these are lovely!

Minor bug within the VAB: control surfaces that are placed but not attached to anything (say floating in the air while you adjust some other part) become non-select-able. I am going to guess that attachment generates the collider, because this only happens if not first attached to something (dropped directly from inventory out into the VAB/SPH).

Ah thanks, I prevented this on the wing but forgot to do the same with the control surface. Logic creating the collision shape only runs if you attach the part, which makes it impossible for KSP to grab onto it if you leave it in the air without first attachment.

[Musuko42]

The cost of the part is scaled with it's size. Every wing only only counts as one part (obviously), but I'm not aware of any career mechanics making it a downside (performance wise it's an upside).

In career mode at the moment, you're limited to how many parts you can have by the upgrade level of your hangar/VAB. So if this mod allows you to build large wings with a single part, instead of the multi parts you'd need with the standard wing parts, it cheats the limit a bit. Is that the case? And is there any way around that?

[bac9]

In career mode at the moment, you're limited to how many parts you can have by the upgrade level of your hangar/VAB. So if this mod allows you to build large wings with a single part, instead of the multi parts you'd need with the standard wing parts, it cheats the limit a bit. Is that the case? And is there any way around that?

There is no way to work around that (a part is a part, plugin-based part modules don't ever get a say in that) and to be honest I do not consider this a cheat as the stock game is very inconsistent with part volumes anyway.

[K3-Chris]

Playing around with em atm, really like em, has features I begged DYJ for ages to implement like edge variants (control surfaces vanish into the trailing edge of large pWings), heat-shielding on the bottom etc.

Might I suggest some changes to the text labels of the tweakables menu? "Height root/tip" would make more sense labeled "thickness" I think, more descriptive at least imo. "offset" might work better labeled "sweep" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swept_wing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-swept_wing)

[Musuko42]

There is no way to work around that (a part is a part, plugin-based part modules don't ever get a say in that) and to be honest I do not consider this a cheat as the stock game is very inconsistent with part volumes anyway.

Not a problem, then. It only really makes a difference in the early game anyway. Looking forward to giving this a try!

[Van Disaster]

Will bugtest when I have enough uptodate mods to do a 0.90 install with my usual aircraft - only issue is the control width setting atm which is probably old FAR.

Suggestion - if you don't want/is not a good idea to have bigger spans than 16 per wing part, could we get the ability to edit ( toggleable? ) the wing as one unit? would be handy if we're making a complex shape & want to change it's sweep as a whole, as well as the obvious example of simple shaped spans longer than one part. Not looking for anything crazy, just to say, be able to change the tip width & have any joins in the middle of the span also change width proportionally.

[bac9]

Version 0.5

https://bitbucket.org/bac9/b9_aerospace_plugins/downloads

Updated procedural wings with tons of stuff. Bad things first:

- Some existing crafts saved with older versions of the mod will have width and semispan tweakables locked

- You have to manually remove all .mbm textures from B9_Aerospace/Parts/Aero_Wing_Procedural

Fun things next:

- Implemented shader-based surface type switching. No two separate surface materials per wing, no performance hit, no draw call inflation no matter the combination - wings are textured from one RGBA image containing four layers, depending on vertex colors I embed into the mesh.

- Surface type switching now available for control surfaces

- Surface type and edge type selection is now done through the same convenient slider as other tweakables

- Reordered/renamed some stuff for convenience

- Allowed catalog-created parts that were not attached immediately after creation to be picked again

- Switched UI for wide-range variables like wing semispan to sliders from KSP API Extensions (stock tweakable sliders would not allow you to pick some values, being imprecise)

- Fixed geometry corruption on reattachment

- Fixed some other bugs (hopefully introduced less new ones)

Next time:

- Texture switching for trailing and leading edges

- Got to investigate strange behavior of symmetry counterparts, causing tweakable UI on them to work slightly wrong

- More precise aerodynamic value calculation for control surfaces

- All-moving canards?

- - - Updated - - -

Might I suggest some changes to the text labels of the tweakables menu? "Height root/tip" would make more sense labeled "thickness" I think, more descriptive at least imo. "offset" might work better labeled "sweep" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swept_wing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-swept_wing)

The former is not possible as the label is extremely limited in allowed character count. That's why parameters are labeled "Edge L" and not "Leading edge", etc. The latter will fit onto the label, but I'm unsure about it - sweep is typically understood as an angle (per edge) and this parameter is a distance between root and tip cross sections, not an angle.

Edited December 30, 2014 by bac9

[Naf5000]

Just tried the latest version, and it's not working. There are three outcomes to me trying to place a procedural part:

I click to attach, and it doesn't attach. I try to throw it away, and the game works fine... Unless I try to do anything with the part the procedural wing was attached to, in which case the game stops accepting input from my left mouse button. The right one works fine, I can rotate the camera and open the stats on parts in the item selection, but the only thing the left mouse button is willing to do is change which part tab I can use.

If I drop the procedural wing in open space after trying to attach it, the game acts sort of like I attached it. If I pick up the part it's "attached" to, then it moves along like a child part would, but if I try to reattach the parent part, the relevant connection nodes vanish without an actual attachment forming. I can throw away the still-selected part and everything returns to normal, but if I try to drop it it takes on the pseudo-attached state of the wing and the left mouse button does the same thing it did in the first glitch if I throw the entire broken assembly away. If I try to move the ghost part, the entire ship moves.

Nothing untoward happens if I just drop the procedural part in space without trying to attach it, but doing so does not prevent either of the above glitches from happening.

EDIT: And the logs mention a bunch of "NullReferenceExceptions" taking place before I quit the game, all referencing engine transforms. All they say about the procedural part is that it is being deleted.

Edited December 30, 2014 by Naf5000

[bac9]

Just tried the latest version, and it's not working. There are three outcomes to me trying to place a procedural part:

I click to attach, and it doesn't attach. I try to throw it away, and the game works fine... Unless I try to do anything with the part the procedural wing was attached to, in which case the game stops accepting input from my left mouse button. The right one works fine, I can rotate the camera and open the stats on parts in the item selection, but the only thing the left mouse button is willing to do is change which part tab I can use.

If I drop the procedural wing in open space after trying to attach it, the game acts sort of like I attached it. If I pick up the part it's "attached" to, then it moves along like a child part would, but if I try to reattach the parent part, the relevant connection nodes vanish without an actual attachment forming. I can throw away the still-selected part and everything returns to normal, but if I try to drop it it takes on the pseudo-attached state of the wing and the left mouse button does the same thing it did in the first glitch if I throw the entire broken assembly away. If I try to move the ghost part, the entire ship moves.

Nothing untoward happens if I just drop the procedural part in space without trying to attach it, but doing so does not prevent either of the above glitches from happening.

EDIT: And the logs mention a bunch of "NullReferenceExceptions" taking place before I quit the game, all referencing engine transforms. All they say about the procedural part is that it is being deleted.

This is not very helpful without the text of those exceptions.

[bromanche]

Are procedural wings that act like control surfaces in the works? Some big elevators or canards for MKIII planes would be great!

Edit: nvm i learned to read