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Ishiaki edited this page Oct 20, 2026 · 1 revision

Building

The crew car's tug

The baggage tug is made by src/OnFoot/Model/tug.py in Blender (made with 5.2 LTS), run without its window:

/Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender --background --factory-startup \
    --python src/OnFoot/Model/tug.py -- src/OnFoot/PluginData

(elsewhere, the blender program with the same arguments). It needs nothing but Blender: no add-on, nothing downloaded. It takes about a minute and a half on eight cores and writes tug.mesh and five PNG pictures into the folder given, which the build copies into GameData/OnFoot/PluginData/. Players need none of this: the files ship with the mod.

  • --quick bakes with fewer samples at half the size (for trying a change; about half a minute).
  • --render FOLDER also draws pictures of the finished model from four sides, with kerbal-sized stand-ins, and of the booster seat with nobody on it, into FOLDER.
  • --seat X,Y,Z and --deck H put the driver's seat pivot and the load deck where the car in the game has them (metres: right, forward, up from the ground midway between the axles; the defaults are what the car has, 0,0.337,1.266 with its seat raised for the booster, and 0.842). How far the booster lifts the driver (BOOST, 0.15 m) and where the steering wheel is from the seat pivot (WHEEL) are at the top of the script; the craft's seat must be raised by the same BOOST.

The model is about 35,900 triangles as drawn for one car (the body 19,600, the cab's inside with its seat, booster and steering wheel 4,300, the four tyres 3,000 each, the deck 200), in 13 draws. Its pictures: the paint 2048 pixels square (with its gloss in alpha), the tyres' paint and normal map 512, the deck's tread plate 512 (tiled every 0.3 m). In the game the pictures are squeezed (DXT5) with their smaller sizes, about 7 MB of video memory in all.

The mod

./build.sh builds the mod and installs it into the game; ./build.sh check only compiles; ./build.sh dist builds into GameData/ here without touching the game. It needs the .NET SDK, a copy of the game (KSP_DIR=/path if it is not where Steam puts it), and Keystone.dll from Keystone: the copy installed in the game, a built copy of that repository beside this one, or KEYSTONE=/path/to/Keystone.dll.

This repository is made from a workspace that holds several mods side by side; changes arrive here from there.

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