Update Deepstar development

80mileshigh

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Alright. Deepstar vessel is now finished with UCSO except for the additional RCS thrusters and the MFD. I don't want to mess with that because it will be too complex to mess with the groups and exhaust textures (that took me ages!).

I am currently stuck at displaying the MFD buttons. It involves some work on mesh and texture, and I couldn't do that myself. Here is what you need to do (from API_Guide file in Orbitersdk\doc, page 43):

It would be great if you could do this for the Deepstar vessel, lander, and the aerolander. Send me the new mesh and texture when finished so I can continue with the rest of the process.

EDIT: Can you also make a group for each elevon in the aerolander mesh? I need this to animate the elevons. I also need a rectangular group on the top and bottom side of the elevons to animate the airbrakes. See the XR-2 elevons and airbrakes.
And why the landing gear is skids? Since it's designed to land in atmospheric conditions, it makes sense only to make wheels.

For the aerodynamic model, I will use the DG model. I tried several times to make a custom model, but I always end up with weird flying characteristics.

Also, it would be great if you added an autopilot panel in each vessel to control the Orbiter autopilot. Just make a panel with a button for each AP mode (You don't need to make them a separate group or a dynamic texture like the MFD buttons).

Brilliant! I'll get started on those mesh changes. I need a little break from this but will aim to have it in the next week or so.

RE: the aerolander skids, there were two considerations. The first was I imagined most landings would be completed vertically with hover engines. I did fly a reentry to the SLF at KSC in testing but I imagined most people would rarely do this.

The second was just a design nod to the the x-20 and x-38:

x20_landing.jpg

x-38.jpg


Thanks again for all your work!
 

predattak

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When I executed the symbolic link I get a message "Config: Ok, a non-empty config directory already exists". There are files in it.
Have you tried deleting the symbolic links folder and remake it?
Go to Orbiter 2016 install folder\Modules\Server\
Delete the Config folder
Now go back to Orbiter_ng - Video - Advanced and create the Symbolic links again. ( also before you create them make sure that your orbiter installation is not in a folder with special letters like é, ş etc)
After that go to Scenario - Deepstar3.0 and open the "All Vessels 1"
See if it works.
 
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yoda1952

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Have you tried to delete the symbolic links folder and remake it?
Go to Orbiter 2016 install folder\Modules\Server\
Delete the Config folder
Now go back to Orbiter_ng - Video - Advanced and create the Symbolic links again. ( also before you create them make sure that your orbiter installation is not in a folder with special letters like é, ş etc)
After that go to Scenario - Deepstar3.0 and open the "All Vessels 1"
See if it works.
Thank you, thank you. That took care of it. A side note: the config folder icon no longer looks like a standard windows folder, it now has a small curved arrow in the corner.
 

francisdrake

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Deepstar0009.jpg

A very nice addon and a whole populated Solar system to explore!
I took the Deepstar 3.0 for a flight from Earth to Mars orbit, and docking to the Mars station.

It is a good thing that the Deepstar has such a high dV, as my flight to Mars was high-energy, with a lot of braking necessary to enter Mars orbit. And to align orbital planes with the Mars station.

As mentioned in a previous comment, the RCS could use a little more balancing. The rotational thrusters are quite weak, while the linear thrusters seem a little overpowered. I had to use 0.1 time acceleration and <Shift><Thrusters> to achieve docking.

Looking forward to play with the landers in the next mission. (y):)
 

80mileshigh

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Looking forward to play with the landers in the next mission. (y):)

This is awesome, and exactly the kind of use I hoped to inspire. Orbiter 2016 is so visually impressive - it should be toured!

I'm interested to see your frame rates too, and glad no one has reported problems. My specs are probably towards the higher end and I was aware that luxury might lead me to indulge too much in smooth curves etc. Though I did work at mesh optimisation and low-res VC textures are used in external views.
 

francisdrake

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I played around with the Deepstar.ini file, to get a little more responsiveness on the attitude thrusters.
In the end, I deleted (commented out) the PMI line and reduced the Attitude_thrust.

[CONFIG]
...
ATTITUDE_THRUST=400000 ; reduced to 1% of main thrust
ISP=100000
; PMI=(15570.58,15510.20,466.25) ; commented out
...

Reason:
While the Principle Moments of Inertia (PMI) were determined with the Shipedit tool, this would also require setting the RCS thrusters accordingly. For example using multiple thrusters for rotation, but only single thrusters for translation.
By removing the PMI line, Orbiter assumes a 3-axis symmetrical distribution, which fits well to the default autopilot model.

There is some residual rotation when using translating thrusters. This is probably due to the docked landers. This can be minimized with repeatedly pressing KillRot while doing translation maneuvers.
___
On the frame rates: Notebook with an i7 and a Geforce graphcis card.
60 fps in the glass cockpit, 40 - 60 in external view, 30 in the virtual cockpit.
 
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predattak

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I'm interested to see your frame rates too, and glad no one has reported problems.
I did some testing a few days ago:
(clean orbiter install no HD planets no reshade stuff nothing else)

On my kind of high end PC it works fine.
However on my oldish medium to low end i get only 50 - 60 fps at all time, a significant drop.
I also have an old old windows xp kind of PC but i have to clean it up and everything before i can boot that up after so many years so really low end.. i have no idea but i guess it only gets worse.

So, high end no problem
Medium ish PC users (which i think are the majority or at least a significant part ) will have FPS drop
Those with low end hardware .. direct x 7 or nothing :giggle:


Note that i didn't messed with the DX9 advanced settings, i left them default.. some more fps may be achieved if you tweak the settings maybe but i doubt it will have any significant impact.

-------------------------------------------
On the interesting anomalies part:

I was at the end on my Moon - Earth - Jupiter ( Ganymede ) flight.
on final at Ganymede base
on approach and before the touchdown i had normal fps no problem there
right after i touched down the FPS suddenly dropped to 30.
i thought WTF just happened, Ganymede in a clean install is a low res ball.
I restarted orbiter and bam - full fps again in the same scenario, same position as before. ( i loaded current state )
Weird stuff.
This may or may not be related to the base however it is the only place so far where i encountered this problem but i wasn't everywhere yet.
Mars bases are fine, Vesta base is fine ( i placed one on the moon and it's fine there too) not sure about the rest.


EDIT:
On my medium/pc i was trying to see which mesh has the most FPS impact, it's always good if you can tell the developer where to look or at least the general direction.
So i loaded the All Vessels 1 and 2 scenarios and started deleting things.
I selected the Deepstar in third person, watched the fps and i deleted all the depots, all the space stations, all landers - no changes ..50 - 60 fps ... then i deleted the rovers ..and i suddenly had 150 - 200 - !!300!! FPS :LOL:
I loaded again the scenario with all the vessels and i only deleted the rovers .. close to same result!
There is a major FPS problem with the rovers at least in that scenario.
Guys please test this out, if you have low fps in the All Vessels 1 or 2 Scenario .. just delete all the rovers. (The Vesta Rover has the biggest impact but all of them cut FPS big time)
 
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francisdrake

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Deepstar Mars Lander.jpg

I tried the atmospheric lander on Mars and had a lot of fun! After separating from the Deepstar enjoyed an orbital sunrise, before coming in hot and fast over the Valles Marineris. Underestimated the speed and had to fly a large circle with 100 km radius before re-approaching the base. The landing pad on the edge of the cliff seems quite challenging, so I touched down in the dirt beside the station.

- Pursuit MFD did not find the base, even after keying the name in. It defaulted to 0, 0 on the Martian equator.
Had to fly the approach manually, thats why I came in with breakneck speed :)

- The lander handles quite stiff when in atmosphere. Maybe reducing the pitch & bank moments and the rotdrag might help.

- Is there some terrain flattening required around the base?
 

80mileshigh

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- Is there some terrain flattening required around the base?

Yes, it should appear correctly if you have terrain flattening enabled in the d3d9 settings and 'linear interpolation' selected on the visual effects tab of the Orbiter launchpad.

Unless you use it with the latest hi-res Mars textures in which case the fix posted by @predattak on the previous page here is needed. But it looks like you might just need to check the settings?

Great shots!

Guys please test this out, if you have low fps in the All Vessels 1 or 2 Scenario .. just delete all the rovers. (The Vesta Rover has the biggest impact but all of them cut FPS big time)

Strange that the rovers should be causing problems. It's got to be the most low-poly model of the lot, around 15k, with separate mesh groups only as necessary for the materials and General Vehicle animations. Maybe a GV issue?
 

predattak

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Maybe a GV issue?
May be , not sure ..or it could just be just my PC maybe it doesn't like the rovers.
Someone else needs to see if he can replicate this. Francisdrake had some low fps so maybe he could try.
 

francisdrake

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A remark on the attached landers' propellant levels:
In the scenario "All Vessels 1" the landers and attached vessels have different propellant levels, e.g.:
PRPLEVEL 0:0.877655

The vessels are docked in pairs to keep the mass center balanced. If the prop levels are different, the combined mass is slightly off center, leading to an unwanted drift if the main engines are running. To avoid this, I set the prop levels of all attached vessels to PRPLEVEL 0:1 (full).
 

WolfAngriff

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Hello everyone !
I didn't touch Orbiter since Fryday, and don't have a lot of time for it at the moment, so i did'nt go that far with Deepstar. The only framerate loss i noticed, on low earth orbit, was in the cockpit view (F8). I did'nt look at the framerate number, but i think it should have been around 20 fps. Not enough to complain, so i only say that here because it's what you're talking about. But everything else was amazing and smooth. This addon is realy wonderful, thanx a lot for that. If you need more info, i should be able to run Orbiter tomorrow.
 

predattak

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If you need more info, i should be able to run Orbiter tomorrow.
Can you pls try this for me?
Disable the vertical vsync from the video options so you can see the full frames number.
Load the "All Vessels 1" scenario
Select the deepstar (i think it's selected by default)
Write down the fps that you get in third person and virtual cockpits
In the same session, open the ingame scenario editor and delete all the rovers. (Rover-01, Rover-02, Rover-03, Rover-04)
Look at your fps again.
If i'm right it should go up by a substantial amount.

I'm curious if this works for other people.
 
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francisdrake

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I did the framerate check as mentioned above, with disabled vertical sync:, full-screen windowed mode, Saturn in view:

FPS in views with Rovers
External 58 - 63
Glass Cockpit 59 - 65
Virtual Cockpit 64 - 65

Without Rovers
60 - 62
74 - 76
64

There was slight gain in the glass cockpit view (~12 fps), but no significant gain in the other views.
Only the min-max spread of the fps-values seemed to be reduced a little.
 

Urwumpe

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How much GPU memory do you have? Maybe the rovers simply overwhelmed memory and forced the GPU driver to swap textures from CPU memory.
 

predattak

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How much GPU memory do you have? Maybe the rovers simply overwhelmed memory and forced the GPU driver to swap textures from CPU memory.
4GB, In that PC the graphic card is a few years old but i doubt it's a problem. Who knows..
 

DaveS

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4GB, In that PC the graphic card is a few years old but i doubt it's a problem. Who knows..
Anything more doesn't really matter as Orbiter can only address 4 GB being a Win32 application. I have an EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER with 8 GB of VRAM and only half is visible to Orbiter. We would need an x64 version to be able to address more than 4 GB.
 

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Anything more doesn't really matter as Orbiter can only address 4 GB being a Win32 application. I have an EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER with 8 GB of VRAM and only half is visible to Orbiter. We would need an x64 version to be able to address more than 4 GB.
Thats wrong - you are mixing many terms up there.

One thing is GPU memory, the RAM exclusively onboard the GPU itself. This is usually the fastest way to get data onto the screen - once the data is there, after passing through the bottleneck of the PCI-Ex-Bus. This can be as large as fits physically, the GPU driver handles it.

Next is the physical RAM itself - this is traditionally slower than GPU RAM and especially slow for rendering on a GPU. It can be of any size that the operating system can handle. A 32 bit windows can still handle more than 4 GB Ram (16 times more, since the effective adress space on all contemporary Pentiums was 36 bit large), but it can't make use of the full address space, because of historic reasons - everything above 4 GB is only available to RAM drives using the 36 Bit address modes.

Finally, there is the process memory. This is always maximal 4 GB large for a 32 bit process - it is essentially a virtual RAM created by the operating system using the capabilities of the MMU without the historic ballast. This also applies to Orbiter: All add-on modules share the same address space of a single 32 bit process, so all has to fit into 4 GB of process memory - even textures, if you store them in the process memory for manipulation or if they are loaded with a DLL as resource (like used for the old 2D panels).

So, your 8 GB of VRAM are cool - but are not known to Windows or your process, only the GPU driver knows about it. On the other hand, for example, a notebook with 16 GB RAM and shared VRAM would require windows to know, how much GPU memory is reserved and where it is - your windows process on the other hand will never know. If you could write to this address of the shared GPU memory, it won't get there physically. The Memory Management Unit (MMU) will translate this address into another real address, by dividing the virtual memory of the computer into many small fragments, that can be put anywhere in physical RAM.
 
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