New Orbiter Beta Released (r.13, Mar 7, 2015)

[Quick_Nick]

It probably doesn't help that jroly is on the opposite side of the planet.
(or maybe bandwidth is much less affected by distance than latency these days?)

 

[jroly]

I am getting about 350kbps for Mars, Moon is abit slower.

My connection is 1MB/s+ down. The direct downloads were too slow as well, a bit slower than the torrents.

Just adding edit in, Mars has finished, now getting 600kbps for the moon. My max speed is 1.2MB/s thou, not sure where the bottleneck is, I think underpowered seeds.

Thanks Bixil, I did notice a speed up.

But these files are massive, I waited an hour for earth to unpack, then got a message saying not enough free space :0, Unpacked Earth is 50GB!!!

 

[jangofett287]

Your ISP may be throttling Torrent Traffic. A lot do but none will admit to it.

 

[Hielor]

Your ISP may be throttling Torrent Traffic. A lot do but none will admit to it.

If you suspect this is the case, check your bittorrent client to see if the traffic can be encrypted.

 

[Xyon]

This isn't helped by some random issues out on my server I'm working on fixing; it's not seeding at present but HTTP downloads are working (again).

 

[RisingFury]

If you suspect this is the case, check your bittorrent client to see if the traffic can be encrypted.

Don't you know? TORRENTS ARE EVIIIIILLLLLL!!!!!

:facepalm:

 

[Quick_Nick]

I'm seeding.
speedtest.net shows 245Mbps up (and also down).
Moon was just uploading at over 300kB/s. (2.4Mbps)
I don't know if the firewall here will interfere at all. Also, Malwarebytes blocked a few connections and I haven't done anything about that. If someone knowledgeable informs me that it would be safe to do so, I may get Malwarebytes to stop blocking these connections given that they are only outbound and I've already finished all downloading. Though, I would expect that Malwarebytes has good reason for blocking these IPs.

Unrelated edit: Holy cow. I just updated Vuze and the amount of hidden buttons I had to find to not install 9000 toolbars was incredible...

 

[martins]

Orbiter Beta SVN commit #7

Bug fixes, API extensions, feature additions:

• Planet surface render resolution now takes into account zoom level
• New VESSEL::GetAltitude method: choose altitude over ground or over mean planet radius.
• New config entry PanelMfdHudSize (to set VC HUD and MFD sizes)
• VC HUD now uses by default a 512x512 texture.
• Surface HUD: now displays radar altitude only below 10km and indicates with 'R'.
• Surface MFD now always displays altitude over mean radius

 

[astrosammy]

Finally can use it:

Jaw-freaking-dropping!

Something seems to be wrong in my area. It looks like the textures are off by some kilometers, starting at longitude ~8.78°E:

This includes Bielefeld (EDLI) and Oerlinghausen (EDLO) airfields:

East of this longitude everything (e.g. Porta Westfalica) is OK:

I'm afraid this is a Landsat data problem, as textures downloaded via Orbiter Base Maker also show big errors in the area:

EDIT1: The western border of the error is somewhere between Münster-Osnabrück Airport and Nordhorn Airfield.

EDIT2: The northern border is south of Damme Airfield.

EDIT3: The southern border is between Attendorn Airfield and Siegerland Airport

The other thing I observed is that Düsseldorf Airport (EDDL) seems to be cloned:

 

[Ripley]

Just noticed this (maybe it's been there ever since).
DG with airbrakes extended: if you move the rudder, the two surfaces intersect.

 

[Phoenix]

When landing on planets like the moon, it is difficult to get a sense of lateral velocities without the use of an instrument. It's much better now than it was, with the introduction of terrain, but it's still a bit difficult.

Would it be possible to incorporate some kind of repeated, micro-texturing of the planet's surface to give a immediate sense of speed without having to refer to a MFD?

Thanks.

 

[Urwumpe]

Astrosammy: Did you check if you are using geocentric or geographic coordinates?

 

[astrosammy]

Hmm, the 8.78E are from the camera dialogue. I guess those are geographic.

EarthHi_12_16.zip\Textures\Earth\Surf\10\000013\000066.dds seems to be the level 13 version of the affected area.

 

[Quick_Nick]

To the Austrian downloading the Earth from me at 700kB/s, you are our lucky winner. After today, I will unfortunately not have my 200 Mbps to offer.

 

[Arthur Dent]

When landing on planets like the moon, it is difficult to get a sense of lateral velocities without the use of an instrument. It's much better now than it was, with the introduction of terrain, but it's still a bit difficult.

Would it be possible to incorporate some kind of repeated, micro-texturing of the planet's surface to give a immediate sense of speed without having to refer to a MFD?

Thanks.

I totally second that. It would also improve visual quality by a lot. All landmasses need something like a random noise microtexture spread over it. I think Artlav implemented it with his old OpenGL based graphics/terrain client (I could be wrong, though).

Water masses could have a bigger, maybe animated wave-pattern "microtexture"?

 

[Harald_Harfager]

I totally second that. It would also improve visual quality by a lot. All landmasses need something like a random noise microtexture spread over it. I think Artlav implemented it with his old OpenGL based graphics/terrain client (I could be wrong, though).

Water masses could have a bigger, maybe animated wave-pattern "microtexture"?

The flight simulator Flightgear can use a separate orbital render engine (Earthview) to get nice visuals at high altitudes. Maybe something similar can be used in Orbiter for detailed low altitude textures?

It was the lack of terrain & ground details that made me uninstall Orbiter a few years ago. Now It´s definately back on my harddrive when I saw the new terrain preview video. Testing the beta now.

 

[Ripley]

We have a developer from Flightgear team here on board.

 

[Harald_Harfager]

We have a developer from Flightgear team here on board.

Nice! Looks like the new version of Orbiter will be added to my list of favorite sims together with Flightgear.

I haven´t used Orbiter for some time & don´t know anything about new features or addons so my feature requests below may be silly, not wanted or already exist, but here we go:

• A "First Person Mode" that lets you enter/exit vessels & explore space stations & planets like in a game.
  
• Be able to change a simulation on the fly by selecting a vessel from a list in the top toolbar & then a "start point" from another list. For example: Select "Space Shuttle" & then "Moon Orbit" as starting point. Or "Delta Glider" & "Mars surface" etc...

I´m I just being silly here or...?

 

[jroly]

The textures expand greatly when unpacked, the Earth textures are 16GB compressed & expand to almost 50GB. This is pretty big, too big to fit on my SSD if I include other planets. Perhaps orbiter could load the textures directly from the zip file? Or the zipfile could unpack the same but all the little textures already compressed too. This could be faster as well as there is less data needs to be transferred from the disk. The CPU would take a hit but most people have quad cores and orbiter only uses one, the other cores could be used to unzip textures on the fly?

I love the look of the new beta but the size of the detailed textures is a drawback, Hard Drive space is not a concern but I like to keep my favorite games on the SSD which this is too big for.

Another thing, when I unpacked the textures I thought they would not expand out much, arn't textures/images usually difficult to compress further?

 

[Ripley]

Nice! Looks like the new version of Orbiter will be added to my list of favorite sims together with Flightgear...

Just to avoid misunderstandings, I only meant that a Flightgear developer is an Orbiter Forum member, not an Orbiter developer!
Sorry, my fault.

http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?p=467682&postcount=1
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?p=454878&postcount=1