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

[Horus]

Ah, sorry. Totally missed that part.

Btw. I've got also installed KerbalJointsReinforcement and the wings that are actually consist of 3 PW parts are quite wobbly at high speeds. The root part is firm though. Only next parts to it are wobbly. This can be clearly seen when making a turn on high speeds. Haven't noticed similar behavior with stock parts.

It doesn't affect greatly, but might be some hint for you.

I can upload a craft.

[bac9]

KJR ignores my wings just like it ignores pWings, I think, which might be the reason they are too wobbly.

[Gaalidas]

So, I have yet to test this new update, but it looks like you've basically reproduced, in a much more efficient and customizable way, both the effect of a texture switcher and the painting system that was previously filled by KerbPaint. What I think needs to be done now is to take just those parts of this mod and apply them to regular parts as well. the one thing we could never get with Procedural Wings and KerbPaint together was the ability to change the texture on the wing and produce the correct paint-regions when paining it. This seems to be the answer.

[bac9]

So, I have yet to test this new update, but it looks like you've basically reproduced, in a much more efficient and customizable way, both the effect of a texture switcher and the painting system that was previously filled by KerbPaint. What I think needs to be done now is to take just those parts of this mod and apply them to regular parts as well. the one thing we could never get with Procedural Wings and KerbPaint together was the ability to change the texture on the wing and produce the correct paint-regions when paining it. This seems to be the answer.

The approach I'm using is different from KerbPaint in that it's not reliant on material properties, which means that parts with different colors and textures are not in fact breaking batching, increasing drawcalls, or rendered separately. Performance impact is pretty similar to non-colored single texture wings from stock no matter how much configurations you use in your craft. You can also split insides of my parts into any number of independent areas with their own texture and color settings, because those properties are delivered into the shader through vertices and not through material properties. Here is a simple illustration of what I do to four vertices of a top wing surface:

Grayscale layers packed into RGB:

Color mask for those layers:

Theoretically, it's possible to make some sort of KerbPaint 2 using my approach, but I don't think I'll have the time to do that anytime soon.

Edited January 20, 2015 by bac9

[DaMichel]

Nice. This is really clever.

Replica (to some extent) of a plane i saw here on the forum.

Still using the old version. Will have to rebuild it now.

Regarding the GUI: I have an idea. There could be little gizmos at the corners of the wing with which you move the corners similar to how axis handles in 3d modeling software works. The movement of the gizmos would be restricted according to wing geometry. I'm not sure how well it would work, but i think it is worth exploring.

[Van Disaster]

RE Gizmos: 0.90 already has gizmos to either steal or duplicate if that was a thing that was wanted not a bad idea, might be some considerable work though.

[fatcargo]

... Aaaand above ideas about gizmos pretty much reflect what i thought : custom editor modes. Squad should expose some kind of API to allow plugins set custom editor modes, not just part placement editing. This kind of contextual UI approach would also eliminate some overlaps with keyboard shortcuts (i've already posted about that problem in July 2014) and other unpleasantries. Though users will have to remember which edit mode is active.

[bac9]

There is no API for existing gizmos so it's only possible if I implement them from scratch with will require far more time than I can spend on this mod. So nope, not going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately.

[DaMichel]

Oh i see. No problem. Looking forward to trying the new release

[DKnight54]

Hi,

Just wanted to say I'm loving the procedural wings. I find the sliders to be much more easier to use then my experience with the original p-wings.

That being said, would like to make a request. Is it possible to add the edge modifiers to the tip edge? I understand that the tip edge was probably left bare as a easy to connect surface, but an option to toggle on a edge that matches up with the leading and trailing edge would give, imho, the wings a more complete feel.

[starikki]

Thank you for this great piece of work ! I have been waiting for a parametric editing method for so long!

A few things I thought that could improve:

1. It would be great to reduce the minimum base section width of the control surface to be able to make a small control surface. the current min of 0.25 is a tad too big for elevator of a small aircraft, I know we can reduce the trailing edge section width to 0 but that would make a square end! If we could drop base min width it to 0, or near 0, then just control the trailing edge section width for a smaller control surface, that would be awesome !

2. Currently for wings, if we select trailing edge shape 1, the trailing edge disappeared but the TE area is still counted for, so if we add a control surface, the TE area are being calculated twice! Perhaps we can take that area and weight out when we select trailing edge shape 1?

[bac9]

Version 0.19

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

• Leading and trailing edge width is no longer taken into account when type 1 (flat) edge is selected
  
• Control surface main body width lower limit is now set to 0.125 (I'll look into making it lower in the future, but at the moment I have to snap it to the increment and it can't go to 0 without breaking geometry)

[Van Disaster]

Yeah, the pieces can be a bit awkwardly thick/large for small craft, but that's just tweaking. Am about to rebuild something so I'll see if I can trigger any menu problems.

Editor gizmos sound like a mod in themselves, or perhaps something for the API extensions. I wish those tweakable sliders had a way of directly entering numbers.

Edit: original tweakable menu folding is easy to bug out - I opened the base menu, adjusted a couple of parameters, pulled the wings off & reattached with symmetry and it's all folded up again but with it thinking the base menu is open. Alt menu looks fine.

Edited January 21, 2015 by Van Disaster

[fatcargo]

bac9, thank you for considering my idea, but i did not expect you to attack the custom gizmo idea on your own, despite your superpowers

[Van Disaster]

Ok, I converted this old pWing, which still needs a lot of fiddling given I'm getting used to these parts:

Notes:

* That's as much sweep as I can get - I actually wanted a lot more sweep but it seems that's the limit for that chord length.

* Fiddling with those control surfaces took a while, using the alt menu didn't seem to give any absurd memory increase. \o/

* I think parts really badly need a way to inherit their parent's attributes - two areas jump out, snapping the size to the parent's size at the connection and the surface & colouring. That last one might more easily be done by adding a brush to your custom window which lifts the attribs off a piece & lets you paint the others.

* The tooltip area of the alt window changing size drove me nuts, with the sliders jumping up and down - and at one point led me to click through & remove part of the plane. Please lock that area's size!

* Control surface size is a bit limited - I wanted bigger airbrakes, and had to make the ailerons out of two pieces to fill the gap up. Pity you can't procedurally generate the trailing edge to fill in gaps I guess that's for the far future.

Seems to fly fine once I'd reattached all the struts that just pretended to reattach - unfortunately I can't strut the outer panels because I don't have any struts long enough, which I think is going to be a problem in future....

Well done & thanks for this that shader in itself is quite a gift.

[starikki]

That's quick!

Thank you so much for the light speed update!

[bac9]

@Van Disaster

Why not use multiple wings in a sequence? You can get any sweep you want that way. There is no real need to always use one part per wing.

As about inheriting parent properties, I'm looking into it.

[Van Disaster]

Well that was two parts because I ran out of span. If you can get parts to inherit their parent attribs - at least the edge attribs - that would make life a lot easier for multiple panels, although then we end up with strut forests :S wonder if it's worth checking how pFairings struts itself.

May have stumbled on a new issue - went for a flight, ended the flight with a recover, went to the SPH and started a new craft, placed one of your wings and I can't get the H menu up. Left the SPH and went in again, still no menu. Will see if it's repeatable after a restart - doesn't appear to be memory related given I'm idling on 3.2GB atm.

[Gaalidas]

The approach I'm using is different from KerbPaint in that it's not reliant on material properties, which means that parts with different colors and textures are not in fact breaking batching, increasing drawcalls, or rendered separately. Performance impact is pretty similar to non-colored single texture wings from stock no matter how much configurations you use in your craft. You can also split insides of my parts into any number of independent areas with their own texture and color settings, because those properties are delivered into the shader through vertices and not through material properties. Here is a simple illustration of what I do to four vertices of a top wing surface:

http://i.imgur.com/fRxbFC0l.jpg

Grayscale layers packed into RGB:

http://i.imgur.com/y3itX4ll.jpg

Color mask for those layers:

http://i.imgur.com/owfJFFMl.jpg

Theoretically, it's possible to make some sort of KerbPaint 2 using my approach, but I don't think I'll have the time to do that anytime soon.

And unfortunately I am too new at all this stuff and I recently discovered that KerbPaint seems to have stopped functioning. I'm sure someone will come along eventually and try to recreate what we've lost. Awesome stuff though. I don't even really make planes, but I can imagine flying some downloaded crafts that will require your mod to be installed. Can't wait to fiddle with the coloring and such of those.

[kcs123]

Using multiple wings is possible, but also means more CPU usage when you use wings along with FAR mod, for example.

Not sure about stock aero, don't even remember how it looks like

60 to 70 sweep degree is not too much in my opinion, but everythings falls in area of personal preference.

If increasing possible angle couse too much trouble and litle gain then leave it as it is, otherwise it could be possible to swept more.

I hope that I will have more time to test this, make some decent crafts and give more feedback. This mod deserve it.

[bac9]

Using multiple wings is possible, but also means more CPU usage when you use wings along with FAR mod, for example.

Not sure about stock aero, don't even remember how it looks like

There are no real CPU costs in using 4 wings instead of two or 16 instead of 4, FAR being a CPU hog is a myth. No real difference in stock either.

60 to 70 sweep degree is not too much in my opinion, but everythings falls in area of personal preference.

If increasing possible angle couse too much trouble and litle gain then leave it as it is, otherwise it could be possible to swept more.

There is no way to dynamically limit the offset, so raising the upper limit to, say, 16 meters will allow completely ridiculous low-length wings with angles near 89 degrees with awful texture distortion. I'll investigate it later, but for the meantime +-8 meters seems like a good choice to me - you can always stack multiple wings for more sweep.

[starikki]

Well that was two parts because I ran out of span. If you can get parts to inherit their parent attribs - at least the edge attribs - that would make life a lot easier for multiple panels, although then we end up with strut forests :S wonder if it's worth checking how pFairings struts itself.

May have stumbled on a new issue - went for a flight, ended the flight with a recover, went to the SPH and started a new craft, placed one of your wings and I can't get the H menu up. Left the SPH and went in again, still no menu. Will see if it's repeatable after a restart - doesn't appear to be memory related given I'm idling on 3.2GB atm.

Got the disappearing H menu issue too.

[Van Disaster]

Can someone else verify this? seems to be an issue with surface mounting, I tried a vertical piece attached to a stack node on top of a stock girder with no issues.

Take wing piece - I'd edited this one already but it does the same with a fresh piece:

Surface mount it vertically:

And then mouseover and hit H:

Not too sure what it's trying to attach to...

Edited January 21, 2015 by Van Disaster

[RainDreamer]

I don't think trying to use vertical/horizontal centering is a good idea with procedural parts in general.

[Van Disaster]

I should point out it does the same with snap off. I'll try it in a near stock game without PAD or any editor extensions to be sure... I've been building craft with pWings for years using snap/align without any problems tho.

Edit: Issue appears to be an interaction with EditorExtensions, so... can anyone else with EditorExtensions confirm?

Edit 2: H key is EditorExtensions default for horizontal snap, so that clears it up.

Edited January 21, 2015 by Van Disaster