[1.0.x] KeRD - Kerbal Remote Display that runs in your browser - July 7th

[Lokaltog]

Firstly, awesome! This has floated my boat above the water line, however im a (sometimes) thick person......

Could some kind hearted, knowledgeable member explain how (if its possible) this can be installed and working for my flight to Duna tonight on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 tablet?

I apologise for my stupidity

First of all, there's nothing to install, you just visit the website http://kerd.space and you're good to go! You can test it on your computer first if you want.

I don't have an android tablet for testing, but here's how you use it on the iPad (it should work pretty similarly on android tablets):

1. Visit kerd.space (in safari on the iPad, with chrome on android)

2. I recommend you add a shortcut to the dashboard, on the iPad this will remove the browser borders when you open it

3. Tap the bottom of the screen, you should see a narrow bar appear

4. Tap again, this will open the menu

5. Click the cog icon to open the settings menu, in the settings menu change the IP to the machine that you're playing KSP on, then save your settings

6. Optionally repeat step 3-4 and click the edit icon to enable the layout editing mode - this will allow you to remove parts of the UI so the interface will fit the screen

Please keep in mind that this is alpha software at this point, it's not as user friendly as I'd like, I'm going to spend much more time polishing this interface. I just wanted to get it to a usable state as soon as possible. Let me know if you have any questions and I'd be happy to help you set this up for your tablet

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holy wow that was fast. Glad I took the time to document stuff You can add current orbital velocity to your 3D readout using my JS plotting code as well

Yeah, your code really helped out to get this done quickly. Thanks a lot for your work, I definitely wouldn't be able to do this as quickly without it! I commented out the velocity related code as it's already being provided by telemachus, it's available in the orbital info module.

[Drew Kerman]

I commented out the velocity related code as it's already being provided by telemachus, it's available in the orbital info module.

Ah right, forgot this was in addition to telemachus

[maceemiller]

First of all, there's nothing to install, you just visit the website http://kerd.space and you're good to go! You can test it on your computer first if you want.

I don't have an android tablet for testing, but here's how you use it on the iPad (it should work pretty similarly on android tablets):

1. Visit kerd.space (in safari on the iPad, with chrome on android)

2. I recommend you add a shortcut to the dashboard, on the iPad this will remove the browser borders when you open it

3. Tap the bottom of the screen, you should see a narrow bar appear

4. Tap again, this will open the menu

5. Click the cog icon to open the settings menu, in the settings menu change the IP to the machine that you're playing KSP on, then save your settings

6. Optionally repeat step 3-4 and click the edit icon to enable the layout editing mode - this will allow you to remove parts of the UI so the interface will fit the screen

Please keep in mind that this is alpha software at this point, it's not as user friendly as I'd like, I'm going to spend much more time polishing this interface. I just wanted to get it to a usable state as soon as possible. Let me know if you have any questions and I'd be happy to help you set this up for your tablet

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Yeah, your code really helped out to get this done quickly. Thanks a lot for your work, I definitely wouldn't be able to do this as quickly without it! I commented out the velocity related code as it's already being provided by telemachus, it's available in the orbital info module.

You sir are amazing! Thankyou for your prompt reply, and I will be trying this in the next 30 minutes

[Anewcombe]

Hello there. The mod looks great, but I've been unable to get it to work. Telemachus is working fine, but when I go to kerd.space (in Firefox, on a PC) I don't get any information loading in. Any idea what might be causing this? I've double-checked the IP that Kerd is using and it's correct...

[maceemiller]

Tried this on my Samsung tablet. Using Chrome I cannot open the setting pressing the cog icon. Using Firefox I can open the settings but dont have anywhere on screen to add my IP.

[Raptor831]

One more suggestion: user-defined resources to track.

So, in Real Fuels, there are many resources added to the game. It would be nice for a user to be able to define, say LqdMethane as a resource in KeRD. You could say have a module of one, two, or three resource bars where the label and the resource name need to be entered in. Then the app uses those pieces to listen for data from Telemachus.

I forked your project and took a look myself, but I haven't quite figured out how to either add/remove resources from the watch list on the fly. Of course you could just have a list defined from say Community Resource Project's master list, but it just seems to be too much work to maintain that, when there will be 10-12 resources on a normal craft. Is that possible?

[stibbons]

I think kerd will be providing the navball and orbital map for my KSP controller. This looks really nice, fantastic work Lokaltog!

[Armor9]

Not sure what the problem is, but when I use this, my game lags (2-3 FPS) like crazy. When I do not use it, everything works fine. Any suggestions?

[drtedastro]

Wow, glad I found this.

Looks GREAT...

Downloaded and testing now.

Thanks, cheers.

[Lokaltog]

Hello there. The mod looks great, but I've been unable to get it to work. Telemachus is working fine, but when I go to kerd.space (in Firefox, on a PC) I don't get any information loading in. Any idea what might be causing this? I've double-checked the IP that Kerd is using and it's correct...

If you could open the developer tools (F12) and paste the messages you see in the console, that would be great! It should work if you enter the correct IP and use a recent Telemachus version, but keep in mind you need to have an active vessel for it to display any data.

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Tried this on my Samsung tablet. Using Chrome I cannot open the setting pressing the cog icon. Using Firefox I can open the settings but dont have anywhere on screen to add my IP.

I'll look into this later today, I'm going to refactor the whole settings screen and make sure it works better on tablets. I'll let you know once it's done!

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One more suggestion: user-defined resources to track.

So, in Real Fuels, there are many resources added to the game. It would be nice for a user to be able to define, say LqdMethane as a resource in KeRD. You could say have a module of one, two, or three resource bars where the label and the resource name need to be entered in. Then the app uses those pieces to listen for data from Telemachus.

I forked your project and took a look myself, but I haven't quite figured out how to either add/remove resources from the watch list on the fly. Of course you could just have a list defined from say Community Resource Project's master list, but it just seems to be too much work to maintain that, when there will be 10-12 resources on a normal craft. Is that possible?

This is coming with the next update. I'm going to work on the settings system next, and allow all modules to define their own settings, and for the resource view custom resources will be supported for sure. I'd like to support resources from the more popular mods out of the box, but I agree having every resource ever made built-in seems like a lot of effort to maintain.

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Not sure what the problem is, but when I use this, my game lags (2-3 FPS) like crazy. When I do not use it, everything works fine. Any suggestions?

Unfortunately WebGL isn't exactly a mature technology, and it suffers from high CPU usage because of poor optimization in all current browsers. This shouldn't be an issue on a multi-core CPU (KSP can only use one core anyways, and KeRD runs on a different core), and I don't experience any performance degradation from running it on my setup. I have to emphasize that this is a bit of an experimental project, but you could try these troubleshooting steps and see if it helps:

• Make sure you're running an up-to-date version of Chrome or Firefox
  
• Make sure you're running the latest graphics card drivers
  
• Reduce the framerate to 15 in the settings window
  
• Remove the map view and navball (these use WebGL) and see if that helps
  

Please let me know if this works to improve the issues you're having!

[imjustmatthew]

Assuming this works similar to how the pages that Telemachus comes with, this should be doable already; if the host forwards the appropriate port and gives the others the IP, the others should be able to input the host's IP and port in the settings.

The downside of this, of course, is that you'd have to give everyone your IP and that it would result in additional traffic, neither of which are desirable. You'd have to do something similar to Proxymachus to keep the traffic down and protect your IP.

If you want to do this I suspect you want a proxy/cache in front of your install since I doubt there's been a serious effort spent to harden this web server. You could run nginx or lighttpd on your desktop or on a Linode to proxy the requests for you. That would eliminate a lot of the load from the desktop that's trying to game at the same time and shield you from some attacks. Hosting it on a Linode would also help reduce the load on your WAN connection.

[Rich]

If you want to do this I suspect you want a proxy/cache in front of your install since I doubt there's been a serious effort spent to harden this web server.

I can confirm that a non-professional effort has been made to harden the web server.

You could run nginx or lighttpd on your desktop or on a Linode to proxy the requests for you. That would eliminate a lot of the load from the desktop that's trying to game at the same time and shield you from some attacks. Hosting it on a Linode would also help reduce the load on your WAN connection.

I can additionally confirm the need for this if you want the game to remain performant, as Telemachus will only scale to 2-3 simultaneous connections

[steveahol]

This looks great! But i'm a little lost in trying to customize the layout. I've never seen this system that you're using. I cant seem to manipulate it and add the panels that i want where i want... they just end up side by side in a big line! I'm clearly missing something obvious!?

Also on a related note it might be nice to have a way to revert back to the default layout. while pushing buttons to figure out what they do in the editor i deleted all the panels... now its permanently like that because of my above mentioned incompetence with making it do what i want!?

[Lokaltog]

This looks great! But i'm a little lost in trying to customize the layout. I've never seen this system that you're using. I cant seem to manipulate it and add the panels that i want where i want... they just end up side by side in a big line! I'm clearly missing something obvious!?

Also on a related note it might be nice to have a way to revert back to the default layout. while pushing buttons to figure out what they do in the editor i deleted all the panels... now its permanently like that because of my above mentioned incompetence with making it do what i want!?

Yeah, like I mentioned earlier I'm going to make this a bit more user friendly in the future! It's not particularily intuitive right now, but it's quite difficult making it both super flexible and user friendly. What you'll have to do to stack modules vertically is to click the row/column button (three dots) to swap the orientation for that module group.

I've just uploaded a new version with a layout reset button in the settings window.

[sk84eva234]

Wow this mod is so amazing and useful!

Thanks for your hard work Lokaltog

One feature request, could you add orbital period into the dispaly? Telemachus appears to have an output

Also your response time has been phenomenal!

[Lokaltog]

Wow this mod is so amazing and useful!

Thanks for your hard work Lokaltog

One feature request, could you add orbital period into the dispaly? Telemachus appears to have an output

Also your response time has been phenomenal!

Glad you like it! I'm going to add all the Telemachus data points as options to the orbital display once I've created the new settings interface - orbital period will be among the fields that you can add to the display.

[Dr. Death]

I dont usually post but i just want to leave this as a warning:

The app consumes WAY too much CPU out of my computer

[Lokaltog]

The app consumes WAY too much CPU out of my computer

Unfortunately WebGL isn't exactly a mature technology, and it suffers from high CPU usage because of poor optimization in all current browsers. [...]

You can disable the WebGL based modules (3D orbital map and navball) to resolve this issue. This will reduce the CPU usage to a fraction of what it is with these modules enabled. This shouldn't be an issue with modern multi-core CPUs as KSP and KeRD should run on different cores, but if you experience performance issues or for some reason only want to use one CPU core at a time you can remove the WebGL based modules. The rest of the interface uses no more CPU than having e.g. facebook open on a secondary monitor.

[linuxgurugamer]

hi,

I just tried this out, and (yes, I know its a work in progress), have the following comment:

The Atmosphere gauge seems to be off. At 20 K, it shows no atmosphere, yet there is plenty there, even up to 30-40 K

Other than that, it looks nice. I assume that it is using the IP address to determine which data to present to the web browser? This could be a problem if there are multiple people playing the game behind a NAT'd firewall. I'd suggest maybe using a uuid or some sort of id to distinguish between different data streams.

LGG

[Wolf Baginski]

hi,

The Atmosphere gauge seems to be off. At 20 K, it shows no atmosphere, yet there is plenty there, even up to 30-40 K

LGG

The atmosphere is documented, and 6000m on Kerbin is about the same as 25000ft in standard Terran conditions, so 20km is about 83000ft The real atosphere goes up and down a bit. Check the Wiki, there's a formula.

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbin#Atmosphere

For test flights from the KSC we're on Kerbin's equator, which puts the tropopause at around 16km

The Kerbal engineers seem able to make air-breathing jet engines that give useful thrust at that altitude, Well, so can humans. It's in the same territory as the "service" ceiling of the SR-71. That's the usual working limit for any aircraft, still able to climb.

[zakkpaz]

any chance of changing the orbit displays to be a little more simplistic? as they are now the detail makes them look to complicated for a display. maybe switch to a line drawing like the old Gemini ones

[GhostPartical]

Problems with the KERD site. This is what mine looks like. Map has a black stripe on the side. I cannot arrange anything, and i don't have the ability to add any additional information to the page.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/134611630@N03/19585715956/in/datetaken/

[sk84eva234]

I found that toggling the view to full screen and back fixed the image, also what browser are you using?

Only chrome worked for me on Windows 7. Firefox showed some windows but none of them actually loaded. I suspect it was due to the age of the Windows 7 Computer.

Chrome and Firefox worked on Mac 10.9

[Lokaltog]

any chance of changing the orbit displays to be a little more simplistic? as they are now the detail makes them look to complicated for a display. maybe switch to a line drawing like the old Gemini ones

A ground track display like you linked to is implemented, and you can swap out the default orbital display with the ground track with the layout editor. Check the screenshot in the OP for an example.

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Problems with the KERD site. This is what mine looks like. Map has a black stripe on the side. I cannot arrange anything, and i don't have the ability to add any additional information to the page.

To edit the layout, move the mouse to the bottom of the screen and click the tab that appears, then click the edit button. This will allow you to change the layout. The orbital display having the wrong size is an issue that occurs sometimes because of timing issues with page load times and resize events, I'm working on a fix for this. In the meantime you can just resize your window or hit F11 to go fullscreen (after the page has loaded completely) and it should resolve itself.

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hi,

I just tried this out, and (yes, I know its a work in progress), have the following comment:

The Atmosphere gauge seems to be off. At 20 K, it shows no atmosphere, yet there is plenty there, even up to 30-40 K

Other than that, it looks nice. I assume that it is using the IP address to determine which data to present to the web browser? This could be a problem if there are multiple people playing the game behind a NAT'd firewall. I'd suggest maybe using a uuid or some sort of id to distinguish between different data streams.

LGG

Yep, I noticed the atmosphere density issue earlier when testing the displays. I'll look into correctly displaying the atmospheric density later.

Regarding the IP address, I'm not sure how this could become an issue. Telemachus binds to localhost:8085 by default, and KeRD connects to localhost:8085 by default (localhost is always pointing to your own PC), so you won't receive data from other people on your LAN unless you specify their IP in the settings window.

[icedown]

Kerd.space is not working for me either. No errors show up on debug log. Firefox and IE on windows 7.

Output log

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/79622787/output_log_KERD.txt

It will probably be a few before it finally gets finished uploading.

Also have you considered integration with RemoteTech?

Edited July 13, 2015 by icedown