2010 Add-on Blues

[jholley309]

Okay, so I'm thinking the list of "working" add-ons for 2010 seems to depend on your idea of "working"...

For instance: the SpaceX Falcon1/9/Dragon add-on. Okay, the rockets seem to work okay (except for the fact that the payload fairing just winks out of existence when you jettison it on the 9 and 9H, but that's not as bad as the disappearing stages on the Francophone Proton), but the scenarios direct you to use Kev Shanow's highly detailed (and quite beautiful) Canaveral LC40/41 add-on. And that's where the trouble begins...

Now, I haven't loaded any of this to 2006 to see if it functions as designed there, so in all fairness to Mr. Shanow the saga I'm about to describe may not be entirely his fault. And to be honest, I'm a born tweaker so it's really not such a huge big deal; after all, I did successfully hack Mr. Shanow's LC39 add-on to get at least Pad 39B in the correct position for the 2010 surface tiles (which took most of a day, but really...have you seen that thing? It was worth it...). So I faithfully unzipped the LC40/41 archive into the Orbiter folder and fired up a Falcon 9 scenario. Whereupon I found a lonely (but lovely) rocket standing on...nothing. No pad. No tower. No HIF. A quick look around revealed LC 39 still in its place, but LC40? Nowhere to be seen. Let the reverse engineering begin...

Thankfully, I had read part of the Orbiter SDK that mentioned not modifying things like the default earth.cfg and other common files, and instead putting a text file in the distribution that contained the necessary information to merge withthe default files, along with instructions on how to do that. Well, there were no instructions but I did find the supplemental config files, which I promptly merged with the defualt files. Back into the scenario and presto! I had LC40. Only now, some surface tiles seem to have disappeared, and LC39 is way out in the Atlantic. Apparently I have some additional hacking to do...

More on this when I don't have to go to work...

Cheers!

 

[PhantomCruiser]

If I may, I'd recommend this one... [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=4727"]Falcon 9 - Dragon spacecraft[/ame]

It's by glider, and I'm sure there is work still to be done, but it's most excellent. Here is the development thread.
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=17160

Also, there was no need to mess around with the base/canaveral.cfg file, this add-on takes care of the LC40 (need a bit of texture, but that's nitpicking).

On a separate note. Have you gotten WideAwake International already? It's highly recommended.

 

[Shinrar]

Just a thought:

Fairings winking out of existence sounds to me like you're missing stage.dll...

With a lot of the "2010 Compatible" add-ons, they overwrite it with the 2006 version, so you have to keep replacing it with the 2010 version.

Won't fix your other problems, but sounds like you're well on your way to figuring them out yourself!

 

[jholley309]

As it turns out, I think the surface tile thing was a result of the way I merged the canaveral.cfg info; after trying to get rid of a duplicate VAB (by commenting out pretty much everything I merged) the tiles came back. I also tried another scenario and LC 40/41 are prettty close to where they should be IRT the stock tiles while leaving my tweaked LC39B where it should be; I'll have to tweak a little more to get the pads centered over the textures but that's not hard (just tedious).

Hmm...obsolete stage.dll sounds about right, since they work fine in 2006P1. I'll have to try that. Thanks for the tip!