Gaming The Kerbal Space Program - Version 1.2.x

[HarvesteR]

That's not a bad idea. :thumbup:

I've been thinking about orbit instrumentation for UI for a considerable while now, but so far I haven't settled on a final design...

The other day Moach suggested I do something like a cross between a mini-map and an orbit MFD, by laying an orbital ellipse onto a spherical globe, much like the NavBall, but with situational awareness in mind...

I was thinking more along the lines of a dedicated full screen map window you could pop up, and it would show a 3D orbit view you could pan around and see from all angles... this of course would require pausing the game for a bit, but it would be the ultimate in situational awareness...

But it's not a bad idea to put up PeA and ApA readouts on the main UI... those are the most important bits of information for achieving orbit anyway...

This is gonna require some heavy thinking I believe

Cheers

 

[n72.75]

So did you actually enter a stable orbit, or was that just a very high parabolic trajectory?

<twitch>...elliptic...

 

[Jarvitä]

<twitch>...elliptic...

No, I meant a suborbital, ballistic, parabolic trajectory. The twitch is entirely on your end.

 

[n72.75]

No, I meant a suborbital, ballistic, parabolic trajectory. The twitch is entirely on your end.

No, suborbital trajectories are elliptical. Highly eccentric but less than 1.

If a trajectory is parabolic, you have the minimal amount of energy to escape the planets gravity.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_trajectory"]Parabolic trajectory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

[HarvesteR]

Hi again... new update:

I'm back to working on the camera code today... free-camera mode is ready, and I've started working on the other modes...

Then I got to thinking... does anyone at all use the Locked camera mode? it's the mode where the camera spins as the ship spins... I gave it a go today and got a little sea-sick :lol:

So I started thinking, what's the point of having a camera mode that no one's going to use? We could do with just a free-cam, and a chase cam that keeps oriented to the ship's heading...

But I wanted to first ask if there are any Locked-cam fans around... so I don't kill off something that people might like.

So, do I scrap the Locked cam? or do I keep it?

Cheers

 

[n72.75]

Hi again... new update:

I'm back to working on the camera code today... free-camera mode is ready, and I've started working on the other modes...

Then I got to thinking... does anyone at all use the Locked camera mode? it's the mode where the camera spins as the ship spins... I gave it a go today and got a little sea-sick :lol:

So I started thinking, what's the point of having a camera mode that no one's going to use? We could do with just a free-cam, and a chase cam that keeps oriented to the ship's heading...

But I wanted to first ask if there are any Locked-cam fans around... so I don't kill off something that people might like.

So, do I scrap the Locked cam? or do I keep it?

Cheers

It also makes me seasick. And I don't even get seasick at sea...

 

[jangofett287]

Its called simulation sickness. Its caused due to the eyes saying the body is moving, when the ears say its staying still. The brain thinks the explanation for this is that the body has been poisoned, so you get sick. The game Mirror's Edge ran into this problem. DICE's fix for it was to add a small reticule to the center of the screen, to give the player something to focus on, weather or not that will work here is another matter. Of course, you could always have the camera rotate slower than the ship, so that the effect is less pronounced. You could even have the camera "Tear off" and switch to free-cam mode if the rotational speed gets too high. Also, can we have an indication of which camera mode we are in? I would use locked cam if I could tell when I was in it.

 

[HarvesteR]

Yeah, there will be an indication of what camera mode you're in. I reckon a print to console isn't much help when you're playing the build

So, I've got the free cam, and I'm now coding the Chase cam, which behaves pretty much like the free one, but it rotates to always try and face the ship's nose heading.

And now it makes sense to have another Follow cam again... the Chase cam will look into the orientation, and Follow will look into your velocity.
Both of these cameras allow you to orbit it around, just like in free mode, but they also rotate on their own.

Hmm, actually... there are just so many possibilities with these cameras... I think I'll just drop a few new lines in the settings file so everyone can have their way

About the Locked cam, What I wanted is something like the target-dependent view in orbiter... But I think I can leave that one for last.

But there's been progress in an unexpected place now... In order to test the new cameras in orbit, under the weird rotations the ship goes through while orbiting, I had to put the ship in orbit... and as we all know that's not an exact science in KSP :lol: ...also, each test flight took about 5 minutes just to get into a stable orbit and way until the ship got into position... just to find out the code was wrong, and I'd have to stop the game, tweak the code and start the test all over again.

So I decided to make life easier and wrote a really quick and ugly saving and loading scheme to save the state of a flight, and resume it later. It made things SO much easier, it's beyond description! Right now it's just an ugly hack, and really shouldn't be used by anyone ...but it did open the way for saving and loading flights, which is something I hadn't attempted implementing before. Right now it's the very first iteration of what will end up as a new feature. You'll be able to save and load flight states. Which means there can be missions where you already start from orbit, and the possibility to stop a flight, return to the space center, do other stuff, and later return to it. :thumbup:

Cheers

 

[krashkart]

Question for HarvesteR:

Will the space center view be something like what BARIS had, where we select crews, perform research, and so on?

 

[HarvesteR]

Question for HarvesteR:

Will the space center view be something like what BARIS had, where we select crews, perform research, and so on?

Yes, that's the plan. :thumbup:

Although it won't be so complex... but then again, that's the whole game for BARiS. In KSP managing is just a part of the game.

I guess the main difference is that there will be no programs. All astronauts will be visible from the Astronaut Complex Building, regardless of if they're assigned to a crew, training, or just sitting on their butts.

Also, R&D will 'discover' new parts as you go along, to make things more interesting. You can then keep researching the parts you have to extract some more juice out of them

But there will be no 'turns'... time is advanced through doing flights. You get money after each flight, and you can use it to research new parts, hire less stupid crew, and build new ships.

Cheers

 

[krashkart]

Cool beans! I had a feeling about that the other day when I looked at it.

Really looking forward to seeing the final product.

 

[Pyromaniac605]

One question about the R&D.

Will it be similar to Total War and a lot of other games with research where there is a large tree and you need certain things researched or developed to research and develop other things?

I think a really in depth R&D system like that would work great in a game like this.

 

[Ripley]

...hire less stupid crew...

I don't know why, but you made me think about him.

 

[jedimaster1214]

I have another question.

1.)Did you put random failures into this?
I tried to separate my final stage after Entry Interface, but won't seperate no matter how many times i press {SPACE}. (A bug?)

2) How is the planet's geography compared to Earth's? is it totally made up, or slightly different, etc. (cause i swear i flew over the united kingdom... :shifty

 

[diogom]

1. Did you put a decoupler? Happened to me yesterday, only to realize I had no decoupler.

 

[HarvesteR]

I haven't yet given much though to how R&D will function, but it'll probably be something like a tech tree I imagine. You can't discover the top-notch solid booster if you've only studied parachutes now, can you?

Also, the plan is to include tech tree info in the cfg for each part, so mod makers can make parts that must be researched. This way mod parts can be integrated with the gameplay, and not just add volume to the content. I think Total Annihilation was a game that did this. Modders could make new units, and decide in which construction facility that unit would be built, essentially integrating it with the game's tech tree (there was no research in TA).

Anyhow, about how things are going today, I've managed to add pages to the parts list this morning. So now whenever a category has more parts than the list can hold, buttons to flip through pages pop up. The limit is set at 18 parts per page ( 6 rows ), so it's unlikely this feature will be used right now, since we only have 11 parts so far

But since people are already making mods, I thought it'd be a good idea to put this in now, before the amount of user-made parts can overflow the list.

Now, I'm about to start on the fuel tank code... I plan to restructure it all, to make it simpler to keep coding, and also make them stackable.

Also, If there's time, I'd like to create a module for an Oxidizer tank... You may have realized that those engines will burn without oxygen now... with the oxy tank, you'll need them too if you expect to reach space.

After that, comes more bug fixes, like getting the Undo/Redo actions back in the game (it used to exist, but there was a bug with them and I disabled it because there was o time to fix it), fixing the part-poke-through problem in the VAB, and finishing up the indicators on the parts...

Hopefully all this can be done before the end of this week, so we can start working on the bonus features, which I'm itching to get to

Cheers

EDIT: double :ninja:'d!

I haven't put in any random failures yet... It seemed flying was already chaotic enough to have to deal with parts all of a sudden deciding they want to not work anymore or just explode ...I think your problem might be that your decoupler isn't actually a decoupler (the tricoupler is an adaptor, it won't separate the craft), or the ship might be crumbling under it's own weight (or g-forces), and the control linkage is severed.

Hmm, this is a good point... I should make the parts indicate if they become disconnected from the control feed for any reason.

The ship works like this: The command pod is the only part that receives input from the Input gathering systems in the game. It then sends a control update to every part that's connected, and they do the same, and so on recursively.
So if a part becomes disconnected from the ship (by decoupling or by, erm, accident :shifty: ), it will be cutoff from the control feed and becomes stuck at the last control setting it received. (that's why SRBs and engines will keep burning if you don't throttle down before separation)
But yeah, there's no visual indication that a part is connected or not to the control feed... Maybe the icons should change color to indicate that.

About the planet, yeah, it's totally made up. Although there are many parts of it that resemble earthly geographic features (I guess that's a good thing )

Cheers

 

[jedimaster1214]

1. Did you put a decoupler? Happened to me yesterday, only to realize I had no decoupler.

Yes, i did. at MECO had:

^ <---Parachutes
/ \ < ---- Command Module
{ }<----Decoupler
[ ]<----SAS Module
| | \
| | \
| | <-----Solid-Fuel Stage
| | /
\ / /
^ /
/ \

I pressed [SPACEBAR] maybe....50 times. All i'd hear is a click, then nothing.

EDIT: :ninja:'d
Then i have no idea why it didn't separate.

 

[HarvesteR]

Ok, new quick update here!

I've started reworking the fuel tank and liquid engine logic (which were a mess), and they're much better now.

Also, I've added the ability for fuel tanks to stack onto each other. So a single engine can drain as many tanks as you can pile on top of it.

The tanks now also update their mass as they are emptied. Through the cfg you can define the wet mass of the tank (standard 'mass' parameter), and it's dry mass as well.

Now, I have a question for you guys... about draining order... which is more realistic? to drain the stacked tanks top-down, or bottom-up? Think of how the CoM will shift as the tanks empty...

Cheers

 

[Fabri91]

I guess the top of the tank would empy first, since due to the acceleration the fuel flows to the bottom and is pumped from there to the engine(s).

 

[iamwearingpants]

I'd say top down, AFAIK the acceleration and gravity would force the liquid down unto the lower parts of the tank. Assuming it's not compressed.


EDIT: Yay, 200!