Devnote Tuesday: Wednesday Edition IV

[Waxing_Kibbous]

1 hour ago, NathanKell said:

Also not sure what happened to this on the way to the devnotes, but we did want to specifically thank @ferram4 for the idea on the orbital drift fixes, and @eggrobin as well; we had mentioned that on the thread on orbital decay that @JJE64 started. The resulting method effectively cuts PhysX out of the application of gravity, instead using the rails calculation to figure out where we should be, and what our velocity should be, on the next frame.

I imagine it's pretty nice having a community containing quite a few brilliant people

[taniwha]

smjjames: no, by "spinning reference frame", we mean the rotating reference frame of the body you are orbiting. When below a certain altitude (varies by body), KSP stops the body's rotation and makes the universe rotate around it. This makes it so body-relative physics is much easier to do (eg, the ground colliders do not need to move), but complicates orbital physics (need to take Coriolis and centrifugal forces into account). That's for the old orbit physics. For the new system, we had to contend with the location the orbit said we would be getting rotated away from us, and the velocity not only getting rotated to point a different direction, but being offset by the rotation of the body itself (difference between surface and orbital velocities on the navball).

It's actually pretty easy to tell if you're below the rotation threshold: place a maneuver node with some delta-v on it (probably prograde or retrograde is best), align your ship with the node, and warp. If the maneuver node drifts on the navball, you are below the threshold (ie, flying through rotating space), if it does not drift, you are above the threshold (flying through fixed space). The reason for the drift is the orbit (and thus maneuver node) is in fixed space, but your ship's orientation is in rotating space.

Edited June 8, 2016 by taniwha

[smjjames]

5 minutes ago, taniwha said:

smjjames: no, by "spinning reference frame", we mean the rotating reference frame of the body you are orbiting. When below a certain altitude (varies by body), KSP stops the body's rotation and makes the universe rotate around it. This makes it so body-relative physics is much easier to do (eg, the ground colliders do not need to move), but complicates orbital physics (need to take Coriolis and centrifugal forces into account). That's for the old orbit physics. For the new system, we had to contend with the location the orbit said we would be getting rotated away from us, and the velocity not only getting rotated to point a different direction, but being offset by the rotation of the body itself (difference between surface and orbital velocities on the navball).

It's actually pretty easy to tell if you're below the rotation threshold place a maneuver node with some delta-v on it (probably prograde or retrograde is best), align your ship with the node, and warp. If the maneuver node drifts on the navball, you are below the threshold (ie, flying through rotating space), if it does not drift, you are above the threshold (flying through fixed space). The reason for the drift is the orbit (and thus maneuver node) is in fixed space, but your ship's orientation is in rotating space.

Sounds like Gilly would be a good place to test out whether it drifts or not.

[NoMrBond]

4 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

...and more visible? All I can tell is my reputation is some three-digit number in the blueish range. And also that when a contract gives me 10 rep, I for some reason get a non-integer amount of rep that is less than 10.

I understand (kind of) why the game does this stuff, but either make it more obvious or totally obfuscate it.

General consistency on this front would be nice, I mean the available funds and vessel cost bars in the SPH/VAB aren't even consistent and they're right next to each other

[Kerbart]

4 hours ago, Alshain said:

I think he was asking for the opposite of details, he was asking for a bullet point list because the dev notes do tend to be some good information mixed in with a very large amount of rambling about nothing (I could do without the poem for example).

Exactly. Also, the dev notes tend to be a snapshot in time. I'm not sure where the "cannot rename in tracking station" was mentioned but I know it is fixed. However, one wouldn't be able to divine that from this weeks' devnotes. Now, one can argue that “before you complain you should check all the dev notes to see if your bug is already addressed” but if everyone did that there wouldn't be so much complaining in the first place... So, yes, a bulletlist which gets updated every week with what is being addressed.

I'm happy to maintain it if would be turned into a sticky, but the Squad team can update it with insider scoops not available to me.

[StrandedonEarth]

Yay for fixing memory leaks! Yay for feature lock!

9 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Brian (Arsonide) tackled an issue where  EVA’d kerbals interacted violently with wheel suspension raycasts. The Kerbals are now moved onto a special “EVA” layer

Does this also fix the issue with landing legs exploding if touched by a kerbal? For that matter, I also had a leg explode when the ship slid downhill (could we also get some stickum for the legs please?) over a flag, also destroying the flag.

 

9 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Career mode will receive some changes as well: in addition to the tweaks to contracts we talked about last week, Brian will look into ways to make reputation more valuable and useful in the game, and he’s also looking to give players more control over the contract weighting.

What if the administration building was used to select the focus (planets/moons) and business (tourists, testing, surveying, bases, stations, etc) of the space program, with contracts generated from the admin choices. Have a list of the bodies to vist, "Where do you want to go?" Each body that's picked opens another list of "What do you want to do there?"

[Caelib]

I really hope 1.2 has some beautification updates ... a new skybox and some clouds would be awesome.

[Joshwoo70]

"Progress has also been made with regards to the decaying orbits."

Yay!(it was a bug all along)

Edited June 8, 2016 by Joshwoo69

[pTrevTrevs]

I wonder, is anything being done to bust the bug where craft will slowly slide along the ground when landed (or slide really quickly should you anger them)? It can get really annoying and has caused a stalemate in construction of a few Duna landers of mine.

[p_gper]

• Decaying Orbits
• Kerbals on EVA and wheels
• Communication
• Wheels
• Re-balancing contracts

Great news!

[Arsonide]

6 hours ago, pTrevTrevs said:

I wonder, is anything being done to bust the bug where craft will slowly slide along the ground when landed (or slide really quickly should you anger them)? It can get really annoying and has caused a stalemate in construction of a few Duna landers of mine.

I found a regression that had global gravity enabled, and fixed it a few weeks ago. This might explain drifting in awkward directions.

9 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Does this also fix the issue with landing legs exploding if touched by a kerbal?

Yes. It also fixes the kerbal exploding when touched by a landing leg.

9 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

What if the administration building was used to select the focus (planets/moons) and business (tourists, testing, surveying, bases, stations, etc) of the space program, with contracts generated from the admin choices. Have a list of the bodies to vist, "Where do you want to go?" Each body that's picked opens another list of "What do you want to do there?"

Get out of my head!

Edited June 9, 2016 by Arsonide

[Capt Snuggler]

any chance we can get a sneak peak of porkjet's work with the parts revamp? my eyes need pretty pictures!

[eddiew]

2 hours ago, Arsonide said:

Get out of my head!

Requesting that the contents of your head make it into the game at some point plz   Being able to choose a focussed location in the admin building sounds like a great idea.

Space agency: "Hey, world, we're going to send a kerbal to Duna!"
Academics: "Mind taking along some experiments?"
Engineers: "Could you check out how our part performs in its atmosphere?"
Rich folks: "Can I come?"

[pTrevTrevs]

4 hours ago, Arsonide said:

I found a regression that had global gravity enabled, and fixed it a few weeks ago. This might explain drifting in awkward directions.

Glad to hear it! Having landed ships slide around like they're on an ice rink can get difficult and frustrating to deal with.

[beelzerob]

A little torn.  I like the idea that contracts will reward me for doing what I want to do, but I also like that they push me to consider missions I otherwise wouldn't do.  

Did I see somewhere that repeated mission types will have diminishing returns?  Conversely, mission types neglected could get more and more valuable over time?

I'd love some Kerbal and hardware recovery missions on Kerbin itself.  Recover science lab from pole, recover Edmund Kermin from top of mountain....

[basic.syntax]

1 hour ago, beelzerob said:

I like the idea that contracts will reward me for doing what I want to do, but I also like that they push me to consider missions I otherwise wouldn't do.

I agree with this, and don't think we need to worry - declining a contract should make that type pop up less often, but not turn it off completely. Check the discussion in this thread.

[beelzerob]

6 minutes ago, basic.syntax said:

I agree with this, and don't think we need to worry - declining a contract should make that type pop up less often, but not turn it off completely. Check the discussion in this thread.

Good link, thanks.  Glad to know the occasional contract will still show up out of my "comfort zone".  But it would also be neat if contract value correlated to frequency accepted.

[Dunbaratu]

> an issue where a faulty PartModule could kill all parts if it failed to load or start properly. A good old try/catch method now limits the damage in these cases

Yaay!

About time.  This one was really annoying for a long, long, long time, basically ever since the game existed.  One bug in one mod somewhere and your entire vessel was toast because when you load your vessel, it gets truncated at the point where it tried loading the one part containing that mod.  Half your ship just isn't there.  I wasn't privy to the code to know for sure, but it seemed like the problem was probably "A bug in a mod causes an exception when told to build its part of the vessel, so the entire rest of the loop that builds the vessel part by part just gets skipped because that exception isn't caught until 'higher up'."

[Andem]

1 hour ago, WildLynx said:

New game feature cannot be activated while stowed.

Of all the times to run out of likes...

--EDIT--

Can't use this feature - Contains locked or invalid parts!

Edited June 9, 2016 by Andem

[juanml82]

21 hours ago, taniwha said:

smjjames: no, by "spinning reference frame", we mean the rotating reference frame of the body you are orbiting. When below a certain altitude (varies by body), KSP stops the body's rotation and makes the universe rotate around it. This makes it so body-relative physics is much easier to do (eg, the ground colliders do not need to move), but complicates orbital physics (need to take Coriolis and centrifugal forces into account). That's for the old orbit physics. For the new system, we had to contend with the location the orbit said we would be getting rotated away from us, and the velocity not only getting rotated to point a different direction, but being offset by the rotation of the body itself (difference between surface and orbital velocities on the navball).

It's actually pretty easy to tell if you're below the rotation threshold: place a maneuver node with some delta-v on it (probably prograde or retrograde is best), align your ship with the node, and warp. If the maneuver node drifts on the navball, you are below the threshold (ie, flying through rotating space), if it does not drift, you are above the threshold (flying through fixed space). The reason for the drift is the orbit (and thus maneuver node) is in fixed space, but your ship's orientation is in rotating space.

Is that related, in some way, to the time warp limits? 

[JonathanPerregaux]

Take your time and make the patch right.

Any chance of adding the space telescope from Asteroid Day? I like having the other parts from that add-on in stock (the larger photovoltaic panels, for example) but the many "?" objects orbiting Kerbin taunt me with their ever-persistent questioning. Also, I had to manually hack one of my 1.0.5 craft files to remove the telescope so I could continue playing with that ship.

Edited June 9, 2016 by JonathanPerregaux

[NoMrBond]

13 hours ago, Arsonide said:

Get out of my head!

Being able to create our own custom orbital targets would be great too, like a no-reward contract which lets you specify altitude/inclination etc for OCD satellite placement

[Just Jim]

On 6/8/2016 at 9:04 AM, SQUAD said:

 

 

Career mode will receive some changes as well: in addition to the tweaks to contracts we talked about last week, Brian will look into ways to make reputation more valuable and useful in the game, and he’s also looking to give players more control over the contract weighting.

Oh cool!  I've already seen signs of the weighted system in my career, and I'd love more control over it.  

[StrandedonEarth]

15 hours ago, Arsonide said:

Get out of my head!

Of course, I would also like to see the Explore contracts permanently available. Or better yet, have the interplanetary Explore contracts show up after launching a Space Telescope (under contract, of course) to get a good look at them. Ideally, have the Explore contract for a given planet show up when the transfer window for that planet is opening.

In my current career, I'm just hoping I get an Explore contract for Eeloo before my probe gets there!

[Red Iron Crown]