Project ISS A to Z, unique vessel
- Thread starter fred18
- Start date
my idea is to make it where the CMG is, so the station will rotate around it. I could also calculate it, but it will make things much more complicated.
I lost you for a second. At the current moment the vehicles will be:
- ISS
- 4 robotic arms: SSRMSD,JEMRMS, MBS, DEXTRE: these will be attached to the main vessel as it is now.
- Cupola
I haven't worked on the final vessel yet, so about lighting I haven't started. But in many other addons I made the light was working so I don't see why I should not make ti work.
Sure, and anyway as said my intention is to let the lights be customizable through the configuration file
So phase 1 is finally over:
I now have the entire set of meshes already animated saved and all their rotations and offsets saved and correct. In fact, I designed my plugin that works on the scenario so it directly writes the code of the final addon, I already tested it and it works perfectly.
I'd like to spend a couple of words on this phase, since it can seem simple but it was some kind of madness:
In order to get everything I needed, with so many vessels and such a complexity, I only had the option of proceeding through coding and not by hand. So I designed a plugin that allowed me to do the following.
Starting from a pivot vessel I had to find the way to get all the meshnames of the linked vessels, all their rotations and all their offsets, starting with nothing else than the scenario and the dockings/attachments between them.
So I chose the CMG which is a good starting point for this and I designed the plugin so connection by connection it is capable of identifying the rotation matrixes of the connections and store a global rotation matrix and global offset. So after this step I had a series of vessels definitions that I knew where they were and how they were rotated.
Then I had to get the meshes from them.
Even though this might look simple it was not so simple: for some vessels I could use the orbiter functions directly, for SC3 vessels I had to go and make the plugin directly parse the ini file of the various SC3 vessels to find all the meshes (vessels and payloads!) and store them correctly. But still there were some 30 vessels which I couldn't find the meshname, mostly the ISSR part, so I had to make the plugin recreate the first line of each mesh (knowing groups information from orbiter) and go and check for each file inside the mesh folder and subfolders if there was a matching mesh. Amazingly it checks the first 5 lines of more than 1230 files and also dumps out all the information for reference on a text file (huge one because in order to check the process I needed a lot of debug info) in just 2/3 seconds... modern technology still has the ability to surprise me... :lol:
So now I had all filenames, where they had to be put and how they need to be rotated.
BUT it was not over at all: for many vessels (almost all of them) I needed to have the animated mesh, not the base one, so for each group of each mesh of each vessel I needed to find out the vertexes position at the animation state that was currently in the sim. Jarmonik helped me with his special funciton in D3D9, but i was already well ahead in the process of developing the code for this so I used his function as a check. I basically had to recreate completely the orbiter animation structure to get correctly how each group was manipulated by each animation. Once this was done (after some time awake while the babies where sleeping
) I then could let my plugin rewrite all the mesh files (of course in a separate dedicated folder!!!) with the animated vertexes and have stored the rotation of each mesh and the offset of each mesh.
I also had to use some tricks... for example I found out that SC3 sets the animation state at every step so it was messing all my work. So I made the plugin set the simulation to pause as soon as all the animations were reset so SC3 could not set again all those.
So then I plugged in the new unique vessel the code I made my plugin write and ...
:woohoo::woohoo::woohoo:
That is a unique vessel with 229 meshes on...
The solar panels are not animated yet of course so you see them just in their base position. All the experts: please don't jump at me already if you see any imperfection because this is just the first step... please notice if anything is out of place of course but remember that now the fun part begins: preparing the vessel so it can work from a configuration file and can be highly customizable. for now anyway, I'm pretty happy because the phase 1 could seriously have been a show stopper due to its complexity!
I now have the entire set of meshes already animated saved and all their rotations and offsets saved and correct. In fact, I designed my plugin that works on the scenario so it directly writes the code of the final addon, I already tested it and it works perfectly.
I'd like to spend a couple of words on this phase, since it can seem simple but it was some kind of madness:
In order to get everything I needed, with so many vessels and such a complexity, I only had the option of proceeding through coding and not by hand. So I designed a plugin that allowed me to do the following.
Starting from a pivot vessel I had to find the way to get all the meshnames of the linked vessels, all their rotations and all their offsets, starting with nothing else than the scenario and the dockings/attachments between them.
So I chose the CMG which is a good starting point for this and I designed the plugin so connection by connection it is capable of identifying the rotation matrixes of the connections and store a global rotation matrix and global offset. So after this step I had a series of vessels definitions that I knew where they were and how they were rotated.
Then I had to get the meshes from them.
Even though this might look simple it was not so simple: for some vessels I could use the orbiter functions directly, for SC3 vessels I had to go and make the plugin directly parse the ini file of the various SC3 vessels to find all the meshes (vessels and payloads!) and store them correctly. But still there were some 30 vessels which I couldn't find the meshname, mostly the ISSR part, so I had to make the plugin recreate the first line of each mesh (knowing groups information from orbiter) and go and check for each file inside the mesh folder and subfolders if there was a matching mesh. Amazingly it checks the first 5 lines of more than 1230 files and also dumps out all the information for reference on a text file (huge one because in order to check the process I needed a lot of debug info) in just 2/3 seconds... modern technology still has the ability to surprise me... :lol:
So now I had all filenames, where they had to be put and how they need to be rotated.
BUT it was not over at all: for many vessels (almost all of them) I needed to have the animated mesh, not the base one, so for each group of each mesh of each vessel I needed to find out the vertexes position at the animation state that was currently in the sim. Jarmonik helped me with his special funciton in D3D9, but i was already well ahead in the process of developing the code for this so I used his function as a check. I basically had to recreate completely the orbiter animation structure to get correctly how each group was manipulated by each animation. Once this was done (after some time awake while the babies where sleeping
) I then could let my plugin rewrite all the mesh files (of course in a separate dedicated folder!!!) with the animated vertexes and have stored the rotation of each mesh and the offset of each mesh. I also had to use some tricks... for example I found out that SC3 sets the animation state at every step so it was messing all my work. So I made the plugin set the simulation to pause as soon as all the animations were reset so SC3 could not set again all those.
So then I plugged in the new unique vessel the code I made my plugin write and ...
:woohoo::woohoo::woohoo:
That is a unique vessel with 229 meshes on...
The solar panels are not animated yet of course so you see them just in their base position. All the experts: please don't jump at me already if you see any imperfection because this is just the first step... please notice if anything is out of place of course but remember that now the fun part begins: preparing the vessel so it can work from a configuration file and can be highly customizable. for now anyway, I'm pretty happy because the phase 1 could seriously have been a show stopper due to its complexity!
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100%!!!
think of it like a sort of Space Station version of SC3.
In fact I am thinking of doing something I will regret but it really does the job here: a simple dialog so users can setup their configuration file for the station directly within the simulation... I hate dialog programming but in this case it can still be simple enough so it won't be a big headache.
sure, as long as you have enough patience to put all the meshes, the docks, the attachments etc at the right place
pappy2
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Hello everyone,
compatible for Orbiter2016 "Vinka" developed Spacecraft4
it is available on the Pappy's Hangar of the French forum of "Dan's".
http://orbiter.dansteph.com/forum/?topic=13656
The features are, among others:
UMmu & UCGO implementation
Support for OrbiterSound 4
LUA script interface
Spacecraft 4 is compatible with earlier versions and can now define more animations.
I do not know if this version will help in the realization of your project of "ISS A to Z, unique ship"?
compatible for Orbiter2016 "Vinka" developed Spacecraft4
it is available on the Pappy's Hangar of the French forum of "Dan's".
http://orbiter.dansteph.com/forum/?topic=13656
The features are, among others:
UMmu & UCGO implementation
Support for OrbiterSound 4
LUA script interface
Spacecraft 4 is compatible with earlier versions and can now define more animations.
I do not know if this version will help in the realization of your project of "ISS A to Z, unique ship"?
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So in the end this is going to be a Station Builder module with some special features dedicated to the ISS A to Z project.
In this view, I developed a small tool inside the module to see where coordinates are. Imagine you have to set an attachment point and you don't want to check and recheck in your mesh file, you just activate the tool and the red 3D cross appears, so ou can go and check (see the string below where the coordinates are reported). I suggest to watch the video in full screen/HD or the cross might not be visible in low quality/small size
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFMr0zzA-TI"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFMr0zzA-TI[/ame]
I knew about SC4, and I have a copy of it. It is a remarkable work actually! thanks!
In this view, I developed a small tool inside the module to see where coordinates are. Imagine you have to set an attachment point and you don't want to check and recheck in your mesh file, you just activate the tool and the red 3D cross appears, so ou can go and check (see the string below where the coordinates are reported). I suggest to watch the video in full screen/HD or the cross might not be visible in low quality/small size
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFMr0zzA-TI"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFMr0zzA-TI[/ame]
I knew about SC4, and I have a copy of it. It is a remarkable work actually! thanks!
Hi fred,
The video looks great. I wonder would you have a use for a mouse callback function returning:
- Clicked Vessel
- Clicked Mesh and Group idx
- Normal vector for the surface
- Coordinates for the surface
The video looks great. I wonder would you have a use for a mouse callback function returning:
- Clicked Vessel
- Clicked Mesh and Group idx
- Normal vector for the surface
- Coordinates for the surface
Hi Jarmonik,
thanks I think I see where you're heading. For this particular project it doesn't seem necessary but I see it as a big thing for many ideas. The first is relevant to another project that I was developing: if you can get the click coordinates you can implement touch screens!
In the meantime for my tool I implemented rotations (green is direction, blue is rotation) and I made a small test with a big annotation on screen to see the result.
A few words on this tool: I tried in many, uncountable, ways to let the CameraMode API work but there was no way. So the system uses a dummy vessel and updates its status dynamically so it remains fixed relevant to the station. The station remains the focus vessel but the camera is attached to the dummy vessel. In order to prevent the user from messing up with the procedure, the dummy vessel keeps the camera attached to itself, so the only way to get rid of it is to exit the "tool mode" that means to delete the dummy vessel.
All right guys... I almost completed the mesh part of the module.
It will be called StationBuilder1, since it can be used not only for ISS AtoZ (which will have some dedicated special options) but for any station.
The video depicts the insim settings of the meshes of the station (just the first 4 of the ISS) and shows that everything can be done IN-SIM! It starts with a completely empty vessel and everything is set on the go. I used the coordinates that I had saved for the unity module and then I placed all the others. Note the use of the coordinates tool to keep the camera centered on the important stuff and the fact that meshes can be easily rotated and placed!
The module automatically saves a "safety" configuration file everytime the sim is closed (so if you forget to save you'll have your information stored!) and if you start to modify an existing configuration (so not from scratch as I was doing in the video) it makes immediately a backup so if you messup anything in the sim you can always revert to your old setup...
I will now proceed with the rest of the options. I have to say that this enviroment could be a really good starting point to create a Vessel Builder, even though animations and airfoils could be quite a challenge there...
Let me know your comments guys,
It will be called StationBuilder1, since it can be used not only for ISS AtoZ (which will have some dedicated special options) but for any station.
The video depicts the insim settings of the meshes of the station (just the first 4 of the ISS) and shows that everything can be done IN-SIM! It starts with a completely empty vessel and everything is set on the go. I used the coordinates that I had saved for the unity module and then I placed all the others. Note the use of the coordinates tool to keep the camera centered on the important stuff and the fact that meshes can be easily rotated and placed!
The module automatically saves a "safety" configuration file everytime the sim is closed (so if you forget to save you'll have your information stored!) and if you start to modify an existing configuration (so not from scratch as I was doing in the video) it makes immediately a backup so if you messup anything in the sim you can always revert to your old setup...
I will now proceed with the rest of the options. I have to say that this enviroment could be a really good starting point to create a Vessel Builder, even though animations and airfoils could be quite a challenge there...
Let me know your comments guys,
gattispilot
Addon Developer
Looks good!! Now if an interface for all the arms could be done
