fishlips13

Yep that worked a treat, assuming this isn't some elaborate ploy to get dirty stinky viruses into my system. Egads! Thanks.

I'm also having an issue downloading this. My firewall is popping up and telling me it's malware. False positive or some malicious infection of the file?

When I say "soon" I imagine something in the next half dozen updates. I don't doubt for a second that the practical application of career mode will come first (as it should) and that'll dominate the next few updates. I'm casting my gaze far away on the horizon where imagination more than science has dominion. If anything I'm hoping the new data for science will let us maaaybe fiddle with some things and add such a mapping system through a mod. We'll see. That's as far as my hopes go for the immediate future.

Neither, lol. I used to use it all the time. Every terrain update was a new adventure, finding interesting crags and peaks. Unfortunately, whenever I try to use it my machine just laughs at me and grinds to a halt, no matter how much a try to hack it to make it work. I was talking about the KSP Weekly (24th September). It's more of a personal habit to called it a "dev blog" because most developers call it that. The part I was referencing is in Harvs "what I've been upto" section. The way I understand it ISA MapSat uses iterative raycasting to calculate the distance from the ship to the surface through a specified area below the craft. The game was never designed to do anything so vicious and the mod does an excellent job hacking together the data to make a nice map. Unfortunately, as hacks tend to go it's complicated and CPU/RAM intensive, so it can easily blow up in your face with very small bugs if unmaintained (ring any bells?) and limits the use of time acceleration because that's just so much more strain on the already heavily loaded system. Why I'm so excited/hopeful about what Harv described for science is, if the game is storing data about locations on the surface coherently for specific 'tiles' it's not unfeasible to store a ton of terrain data in an easy to access format that doesn't involve all this interpolation about heights and distances ISA MapSat uses. The theoretical mapper in question could say "Hey wheres the closest tile between me and the orbited bodys CoM? Oh it's that one! Hey, gimme your terrain data." Pop. And suddenly a pre-parsed map of that tile is now displayed in the game, no additional processing required because it was compiled back at Squad HQ. And lets say your higher up taking a bigger picture of the planet. ISA would have to do a tonnnnn more calculations because there's more map to be made. This system would just ask neighboring tiles to the one queried to hand over their data too. Cheap, simple, replicable, robust, and time acceleration safe (within reason). But alas, I'm rambling. I'm just excited at the potentiality of it all!

Speculation maybe, but I have my reasons. In yesterdays dev blog, Harv was talking about science and experiments. One of the things he mentioned was "a system to allow experiments to output different results based on where you are on the planet". Now this on it's own doesn't mean much but if you extrapolate the way in which the game handles the data, one could envision the game checking the position of the craft relative to the planets' CoM and determining attributes valid for that location. Among those might be gravity, temperature, etc, but it's not out of the way to envision co-ordinates and terrain heights along with it, and if that's the case then that implementation couldn't be too far from doing the same, but in space! I know what your going to say. I'm tying vague possibilities together to form a very whimsical whole. And I would have to agree with you! In all likelihood the science stuff for landed craft will be tied to the planets texture and read based on the 'tile' of the surface your on (or closest to). But then, that still stores information about the planet in location coherently (the same cannot be said for the mish-mash way MapSat derives its data). So, whats stopping the next inevitable step towards storing terrain it in a way we can access it easily, maybe using a ray cast to the surface through he CoM, finding the closest 'tile' and reading it's beautiful terrain data, say from a mapping satellite? I've been hoping, along with many others I imagine, for a long time for KSP to add mapping and in my eyes this is a lot closer than we've been before. But I can dream can't I. Haha.

As a matter of fact, HarvesteR posted this Blog 2 days ago talking about finding where the cursor is on an orbit. That's the precursor to finding where an object is along its orbit. Us nerds call that the "True Anomaly" which defines the position along an orbit as an angle. So it's coming, and as soon as 0.18 if we're lucky!

I won't deny I've been roaming around the forums for a while now. I'm just kinda a quiet guy, I keep to myself. That being said KSP and the community are kinda dragging me in so I guess I should start interacting. :3

So here’s the story. I got tired of lining up my protractor on my screen every 20 seconds for orbit transfers so I put on my goggles and dove into the trash pit that is the internet to try and find some screen angle measuring software that wasn’t awful, actually worked and didn’t cost an arm and a leg. And I found this little gem. It’s a small application made by a small company and it’s freeware. It’s become one of my go-to tools, especially in 0.17. This'll only be useful until there's a better way (such as a mod or better yet, in-game support for such things) and I'm well aware that only the perfectionists will use it, but hey rocket science is all about perfection right? So there yah go. Hope it’s helpful folks! Enjoy. Oh and 1 more thing. This isn’t a addon/mod. It has no connection to KSP, besides being somewhat useful imo. I didn’t create it, nor do I take any credit. Any Copyrights etc. are held by Talon Designs LLP. Think that’s everything. Screen Scales Screen Scales is a screen measuring program made by Talon Designs. It provides the user with a simple interface that aids the measuring of distances and angles on your screen. Installing it is pretty simple. Go here and click on the “Install Now†button in the Flash pane to the top right. It requires Adobe AIR to run but that’ll be installed first if you don’t have it, though chances are you do cause it’s bundled with most Adobe products these days. If AIR is installed a window will pop-up asking you to save or open it. From there it’s just like installing any other program. The software is pretty self-explanatory but for those who might need a hand with it, here’s a quick rundown. Feel free to skip the rest of this post if you’re savvy with this kinda thing. ---------------------------------------------- Upon opening, 2 points are displayed on screen with a line between them. Further points can be added or removed by right clicking one of the points and clicking Add or Remove point. Points can be dragged around to display the distance between them and more points can be added to determine the angles between lines. To enable angle display right click and select Show Angles. From here it’s simple enough to place the points over the ships, planets, moons, or Sun and have the display read out the appropriate angle(s) between them. To close the program, right click and select Close or just close the tab on your taskbar. There’s no Start Menu folder so to open it you need a link on your desktop from the install or you have to dive into your Program Files and find the .exe file. By the same token, to uninstall it you need to do so from the Control Panel. ---------------------------------------------- Some other fun things if you’re interested or are having trouble: “Help, I can’t even see this thing!†You can change the colour of the interface in the context menu. Turns out the default colour is black. When I first opened the thing I actually couldn’t find the interface on my dark desktop background and to change any options you need to right click the points. Oops. So I had to change my background to a brighter one just to find the points and change the colour to something with better contrast. Doesn’t exactly help against a black map screen in-game either. I can’t find any .cfg files or anything to change it so if you can’t find it, change your background like I did or stab around your desktop till you find it. Ha-ha. “Tips?†I’d recommend focusing your map display on the body you’ll be orbiting during the transfer so you don’t spend as much time chasing your targets with the points when you’re time accelerating. If you’re chasing a Phase Angle for a transfer, place one point on the origin body, a second on the body you’re orbiting and a third with the Phase Angle on the destination body’s orbit path. Now time accelerate and spin the camera to keep the first point stationary on the origin body and wait till the second point lines up with the destination body. Easy transfer windows indeed. For goodness sake, make sure your camera is perpendicular to your focuses orbit when taking measurements (directly above or below for anything with 0 degrees inclination) or any angles you take will be off by a sizable amount. This is simple enough for 0 degree inclinations because you can just move the camera up or down until it stops, but could be more difficult for, say, a polar orbit when you need to just guess and hope. Use your best judgement. “Any neat tricks with the overlay?†Like most window based applications, you can set it to be Always on Top in the context menu. Useful if you're time accelerating to find an appropriate Phase or Ejection Angle because when you click back on KSP, Screen Scales loses focus and won't appear until you re-focus it. Juggling windows is no fun. In a similar vein, because this is a window based application, it CANNOT be overlaid on a full-screen application. I.e. You need to run KSP in windowed mode to make use of Screen Scales. “I need a vertical or horizontal line! STAT!†One of the options you can enable is Show Deltas which brings up the horizontal and vertical components between any 2 points. From there, you can actually click on any of the numbers on any line and enter your own values with the line changing to suit. Setting a lines’ horizontal component to ‘0’ will make it a vertical line, and vice versa. You can do the same by just lining up the points pixel perfect but I think this is snazzier! You can use the same system to change things in some creative ways, but I won’t go into that. “So it's, like, really accurate then?†The angles are accurate to within 1 pixel of error horizontally and vertically assuming they're dead on the center of your target and obviously to 2 decimal places numerically because that's all it displays. You might lose a few degrees because of that. There's some fun things too when you put lines on top of each other: you often can't read the text, and it says there's 90 degrees between the lines ... yeah. Lol. It's not infallible but it's flexible enough for what we need methinks. ---------------------------------------------- “Screen Scales†by Talon Designs LLP http://www.talon-designs.net/screen_scales.htm also available via Softpedia (just be careful what “Download†button you click on this site as most of them are adverts) http://www.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Enhancements/Other-Desktop-Enhancements/Screen-Scales.shtml