[INDEV]-[1.4.3] - To Boldly Go | An external application designed to procedurally generate an entire galaxy for KSP.

[The_Right_Arm]

5 minutes ago, seanth said:

Just to clarify, like @daniel l. said, that galaxy.cfg on dropbox isn't a update to TBG: it's just a test galaxy I made using unreleased code changes and hand edits to try and fix the missing KSC/terrain glitches/physics wat. If the test galaxy works for people, the changes I made by hand will be worked into the code of TBG

<eagerly awaits an update from @The_Right_Arm> :nervous:

 

Ok, so just making sure I have all of the instructions completely correct, I copy galaxy.cfg into the current TBG folder, replacing the old one from 0.2.6.5.  Then, I do NOT generate a new galaxy, and just launch KSP from there?

[daniel l.]

Just now, The_Right_Arm said:

Ok, so just making sure I have all of the instructions completely correct, I copy galaxy.cfg into the current TBG folder, replacing the old one from 0.2.6.5.  Then, I do NOT generate a new galaxy, and just launch KSP from there?

Yes.

[seanth]

<Rocks back and forth with fingers crossed>

[The_Right_Arm]

No joy so far, however I think I've spotted the problem on my end.  I'm still getting the terrain glitch, but inspection of the galaxy in tracking station shows that TBG has loaded up my last generated galaxy despite my deleting the galaxyinfo file.  Going to reinstall that galaxy,cfg file and give it one more shot.

[daniel l.]

2 minutes ago, The_Right_Arm said:

No joy so far, however I think I've spotted the problem on my end.  I'm still getting the terrain glitch, but inspection of the galaxy in tracking station shows that TBG has loaded up my last generated galaxy despite my deleting the galaxyinfo file.  Going to reinstall that galaxy,cfg file and give it one more shot.

Chances are that @seanth probably changed a few asset addresses, You should check the config and see if all the textures are linked correctly.

[seanth]

8 minutes ago, The_Right_Arm said:

No joy so far, however I think I've spotted the problem on my end.  I'm still getting the terrain glitch, but inspection of the galaxy in tracking station shows that TBG has loaded up my last generated galaxy despite my deleting the galaxyinfo file.  Going to reinstall that galaxy,cfg file and give it one more shot.

Nope. No changes in asset location relative to 0.2.6.5

We need a slack channel for this lol

Edited March 9, 2017 by seanth

[daniel l.]

1 minute ago, seanth said:

Nope. No changes in asset location relative to 0.2.6.5

We need a slack channel for this lol

I've got a weebly account. How about I make a website for TBG with it's own forum?

[seanth]

1 minute ago, daniel l. said:

I've got a weebly account. How about I make a website for TBG with it's own forum?

A forum isn't really a real-time chat. An IRC channel or a free slack channel would be a better fit for real-time debugging and help

[daniel l.]

Just now, seanth said:

A forum isn't really a real-time chat. An IRC channel or a free slack channel would be a better fit for real-time debugging and help

I'll see what I can do

[The_Right_Arm]

Back to back crashes on loading so far.  3rd time's the charm maybe?

Edit: If either of you guys have teamspeak, I have access to a TS server that me and my friends use for world of tanks among other games.  Because I am an exo in my clan, I have the ability to get you guys the channel privileges you guys would need if you want to try that

Edited March 9, 2017 by The_Right_Arm

[The_Right_Arm]

5th attempt, just getting infinite loading screen now.  It's 3 am here, think I'm going to head off to bed for the night.  I'll continue my attempts in the morning.

[daniel l.]

50 minutes ago, The_Right_Arm said:

5th attempt, just getting infinite loading screen now.  It's 3 am here, think I'm going to head off to bed for the night.  I'll continue my attempts in the morning.

[seanth]

When I get a chance this morning I'll make a "lite" version of that galaxy; maybe it's too processor melting for your computer? I'll also provide some images and videos of the large galaxy on my dev computer

[The_Right_Arm]

Don't worry about that seanth.  I have an i7 in my pc plus 16 GB of ram.  What I may try however is stripping out some of the mods I currently have to make it a better test bed for testing TBG, just to make it take less time to load everything (currently it take the better part of 5 minutes to get to my start screen).  Maybe that will help.

[seanth]

Skip to 6:01 and 9:36 to skip my blablabla and see the lack of terrain glitching and the galaxies. Watch the whole thing for a peak at some things that will be in 0.3

 

[The_Right_Arm]

Looks good.  For some reason my mods are being a pain in the backside to remove, so what I'm doing instead is getting a second KSP client for running tests on TBG.

[The_Right_Arm]

Got the test client up and running.  I was able to load in, and voila, no terrain glitches.  Not out of the woods yet though.

This is what I was greeted with when trying to inspect the galaxy in the TS for the first time.  I found out a bit later that clicking on the Core to focus on it clears this bug and the corona sits behind all of the stars, allowing them to be viewed again.

This is what I got when I attempted to launch my starfighter from the runway to go have a look around.  Launching from the launch pad produces a similar result.  Basically, I was thrown backwards off of the runway, and because I never landed and got settled, I can't control my craft.  Attempting to hyperedit anywhere results in the plane being sent into the upper atmosphere and the cockpit exploding.

A few other things I spotted while inspecting to see if anything was broken:

Mun is stationary (no longer in orbit).  No other bodies in the Kerbol system appear to be affected.

Despite having extremely cut my mod count down to speed things up, my pc seems to really be struggling with running it.  It takes a long time to load between say entering the SPH from the command center view and actually entering, and the fans are running high off and on a lot when it is running.

 

Things I want to try:

Reinstalling Kerbal Konstructs and Kerbinside to see if I can launch from other runways (probably not, but worth a shot).

 

 

 

[seanth]

49 minutes ago, The_Right_Arm said:

This is what I was greeted with when trying to inspect the galaxy in the TS for the first time.  I found out a bit later that clicking on the Core to focus on it clears this bug and the corona sits behind all of the stars, allowing them to be viewed again.

Heh. That is a _galactic_ corona. It's not coming from "Core". It's the sum of all the stars present. I agree it is pretty overwhelming, though. I am not 100% sure how to dial that down, but it's on my list.

Confirmed the Mun isn't orbiting anything. Funnily enough, Kerbin is orbiting the Mun (wat?). I will look at that right after I finish typing this.

Confirmed launching problems. 

I suspect the launch problems are somehow related to Kerbin orbiting the Mun...which I can't easily explain. Looking into it right now, though.

 

[seanth]

@The_Right_Arm: fixed the Mun/Kerbin orbit problem, and launch pad/runway launches work again. To explain, it's time for another letter to Koogie

-----------

Dearest Koogie,

The bug where the Mun was stationary was an odd one. I ultimately traced the problem to how we make star names.

As you know, in To_Boldy_Go/Data_folder/ there are two files used to make names: TBG_Prefixes.txt and TBG_Suffixes.txt. The process is probably obvious in that there are a series of short letter combinations in Prefixes and short letter combinations in Suffixes. You concatenate them and get combinations of names. The good thing to this approach is that, since they are text files and not hard coded, the player can add or remove to the lists and customize their potential names to their heart's content. What happened in this case was that a generated name just happened to be the name of a stock planet: Mun.

The prefix was "Mu" and the suffix was "n". The resulting cfg tried to make a star called "Mun" and make it orbit the Core. What we ended up with was the stock Mun orbiting the Core, and since it was supposed to be a sun, there was no orbit line shown. This explains a whole slew of reported bugs regarding the orbits of stock planets. For example, the bug where Jool doesn't seem to be orbiting anything and has moons named in TBG style. Turns out there is a "Jo" prefix and a "ol" suffix. Put them together and you get the attempt to make the star "Jool". There are several other potential naming problems. Ker/bin, Su/n. There could be others, but I stopped looking once I understood the source of the problem.

The solution is to add a bit of code that looks at the generated name and makes sure it doesn't match a template name, or any previously used name in the galaxy. It has to be at the code level because there's no guarantee that players won't accidentally(intentionally?) put in prefix/suffix combos that might be galaxy breaking.

As a fix for testing purposes, the "Mun" star was renamed "Munn" and the new tester galaxy is at https://www.dropbox.com/s/p93pg5atzh8hvv6/galaxy.cfg?dl=0

Yours,

seanth

Edited March 9, 2017 by seanth

[daniel l.]

3 hours ago, seanth said:

Skip to 6:01 and 9:36 to skip my blablabla and see the lack of terrain glitching and the galaxies. Watch the whole thing for a peak at some things that will be in 0.3

 

 

Very interesting. A few things i noticed needed done though... The SunAU of those stars needs to be increased so the flares won't just be tiny dots in the centers. Also, The planets are currently too far from the stars.

[The_Right_Arm]

Seanth, I would like to extend my congratulations from one Sean to another, on successfully getting TBG into a fully functional state.  A few screenshots of my initial exploring:

Here's my exploration craft of choice, the Dean Avionics SS-72-B run 14 Starfighter.

Landed on Tatneb I.

And scaring the locals.

 

I'm off exploring for a bit, if you guys have anything else you want me to test let me know.

[seanth]

4 hours ago, The_Right_Arm said:

Seanth, I would like to extend my congratulations from one Sean to another, on successfully getting TBG into a fully functional state. 

YAY! We still have some tweaks that need to be made regarding star colour and how far from stars planets are spawning, so we might try and enlist you for testing again.

Glad it's working now.

[The_Right_Arm]

Sounds good.  Whenever you have something to test, you know where to find me.  Thanks for your help!

[seanth]

Dearest Koogie,

One of the unreported bugs has been that there are rare instances where two different stars have the same name. Based on the name generation code I explained in a previous letter, it's bound to happen. I was working on fixing that problem today and have a working solution that also avoids the bug where a generated star name matches an existing template name (like 'Jool' or 'Sun' or 'Mun'). This method will also avoid the wasteful reading of files every time a star name needs to be generated

QB64 apparently doesn't have lists, so I've been using arrays. But I also can't do a sort of boolean query and say "is X in array Y" without looping over the array. What I have done is made a blank array that has as many elements as star names the app will need. Next, it uses the Prefix and Suffix files to make a random star name.

Now we loop over the names of template planets that are in TBG_Planet_Templates.csv. If the star name happens to match a planet template name, "o'" (as in "of" or "of the") is added to the end and another suffix is chosen. This method results in names like "Joolo'turus".

Next we do a similar loop where we see if the proposed star name has already been added to the array of star names. Instead of "o'", "a'" is used...just to provide some variety. This way we get extended star names like "Kerurya'in". There is the possibility that the extended star name has been used. When that happens, another "a'"+suffix is added. So we might see star names like "Rananta'unea'daa" or even "Joolo'turusa'lou".

You get the idea.

I'm too lazy to do the probability of star names repeating--and the probability will change if the player ad/removes prefix/suffix/template names--but I generated 900 stars and 146 of them had to have their names modified as I explained.

Until next time.

-seanth

[leoxc]

On 3/9/2017 at 1:06 PM, seanth said:

Skip to 6:01 and 9:36 to skip my blablabla and see the lack of terrain glitching and the galaxies. Watch the whole thing for a peak at some things that will be in 0.3

 

Really glad you followed the not moving  kerbol system logic from the fix i posted a while ago. it was the first thing i noticed in the config and glad you went went this route because it opens up the that black hole aspect! two thumbs up for following through!