[1.12.x] IndicatorLights v1.8.3: Small, convenient, informative.

[Jacke]

1 minute ago, veryinky said:

Would it be possible to have indicator lights on docking ports? Like the docking collar lights from Necrobone's Modular Rocket Systems, but directly applied to the 0.625, 1.25 and 2.5m docking ports?

  Reveal hidden contents

If there's anything that I've wished had indicator lights it's docking ports to help with docking alignment when the target ends up on the dark side of a planet. I usually end up putting a bunch of batteries around them for the little green lights.

 

I've used parts from the Aviation Lights mod in a similar way, to put Navigation Lights on my spacecraft, but it's more for me to better orient the spacecraft, and when left lite on a docking target, see how it is oriented.  You actually don't want them on the docking ports.  You want them on the spacecraft at points like an aircraft in the Wikipedia article, so you can see how it's oriented.  You can do this with Indicator Lights too.  For docking in shadows, it can be helpful to use the stock Illuminators Mk1 & Mk2 aimed forward to light the target as needed.

But the best solution is the Docking Port Aligment Indicator mod.  With it, you'll get properly aligned and docked just right.

[Snark]

Hi all,

I've posted pre-release v0.5 of IndicatorLights. New/changed things in this update:

• Indicator lights on the small/medium/large docking ports.  They change color to show fuel crossfeed status.  I was worried about being too gaudy, so they're not always-on lights.  They're toggleable via action groups or right-click menu, just like the BL-01 standalone lamp.  Also like that part, they'll get added to the Light action group by default if you have DefaultActionGroups installed.
• To enable the docking port indicators, I've added a new PartModule that will work with any docking port.
• Updated to ModuleManager 2.6.24, for KSP 1.1.2 compatibility.
• Slightly adjusted the position of the indicator on the Z400 battery.
• Did a major refactoring of the internal controller architecture.  Should be unnoticeable to players, but could be a breaking change for any modders who have been using ModuleToggleLED.  The architecture changes are forward-looking, to enable some really cool, flexible setups a little farther down the road. More on this later.

 

 

Enjoy!

[Beetlecat]

Most excellent!

I never got a response in the TextureReplacer thread as to what could be blanking out your lights.There are other missing features there, still in 1.1+, so perhaps that'll be fixed with one of those issues.

[HebaruSan]

9 hours ago, Snark said:

Hi all,

I've posted pre-release v0.5 of IndicatorLights. New/changed things in this update:

• Indicator lights on the small/medium/large docking ports.  They change color to show fuel crossfeed status.  I was worried about being too gaudy, so they're not always-on lights.  They're toggleable via action groups or right-click menu, just like the BL-01 standalone lamp.  Also like that part, they'll get added to the Light action group by default if you have DefaultActionGroups installed.

Neat! Would you object in principle to an option to make the colors reflect docking alignment? So I could "control from here" on craft A's port, and then craft B's docking ports would show green if they're aligned with it, red if they're 180° off, and shades in between otherwise? You could usher in the age of navball-less docking!

[Snark]

1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:

Neat! Would you object in principle to an option to make the colors reflect docking alignment? So I could "control from here" on craft A's port, and then craft B's docking ports would show green if they're aligned with it, red if they're 180° off, and shades in between otherwise? You could usher in the age of navball-less docking!

It's an interesting idea, but I doubt that I'll go there.  A few reasons:

• It's not clear to me that it would actually be useful/usable, in practice.  When I'm docking, simply knowing "my alignment is bad" is almost useless to me.  I need to know in what direction it's bad so that I can correct appropriately.  Indicator lights on docking ports aren't really the best way to accomplish this, IMHO.  (Especially since they may be hard to see, with view obstructed by ships unless everything's at just the right camera angle, etc.)
• It would be a lot of complicated code to write.  (The need to ensure that it doesn't hammer memory or CPU in the process would make it even trickier.)
• It would be trying to solve a problem that's already solved, IMHO.  Docking-alignment mods are good at this.  (More to the point, IMHO they're the right answer for this problem. My personal favorite was the one that put an icon on the navball for alignment.  Perfect!  Problem solved.)

The real kicker is that I myself would never, ever use this feature when playing.  As far as I'm concerned, the right solution is a docking alignment mod.  In general, it's always unlikely that I'll spend much time coding something that I wouldn't use myself. 

Of course, if someone else wanted to mod such a thing and use IndicatorLights to do so, great!  But I doubt I'll be working on it myself.
 

[Kerbart]

I haven't gotten the leds to work yet, but I keep trying.  Knowing how much you dislike clutter, could I still ask if a minor tweak could be taken into consideration:

Add a "blinkenlight" option, that comes with a 1-5 slider. The slider indicates when the light will blink (if it's 1, on every whole second, if it's 2, on every .2 second, if it's 4 on every .4 second, etc). Implementing this should be... I don't know. Maybe it's impossible. But if it's rather trivial, think of the possibilities! Not only can you add them as navigation strobes to planes, but planting 5 or more in series opens up all kind of fancy animation properties! Alien spaceships with pulsating lights! A ford mustang with working blinkers (or a BMW but using blinkers on a BMW is unrealistic)! Those kind of things!

[sebi.zzr]

9 hours ago, Beetlecat said:

Most excellent!

I never got a response in the TextureReplacer thread as to what could be blanking out your lights.There are other missing features there, still in 1.1+, so perhaps that'll be fixed with one of those issues.

I noticed exact same problem,everything works except:both fuel cells and led indicator light,they're just black.After some testing i found out this happened due to compressing textures with TR.
I solved my problem by disabling the commpreson at @default.cfg

isCompressionEnabled = never

I don't know how those texturse are made,but it's interesting just those three are getting black.

[Snark]

12 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I haven't gotten the leds to work yet, but I keep trying.  Knowing how much you dislike clutter, could I still ask if a minor tweak could be taken into consideration:

Add a "blinkenlight" option, that comes with a 1-5 slider. The slider indicates when the light will blink (if it's 1, on every whole second, if it's 2, on every .2 second, if it's 4 on every .4 second, etc). Implementing this should be... I don't know. Maybe it's impossible. But if it's rather trivial, think of the possibilities! Not only can you add them as navigation strobes to planes, but planting 5 or more in series opens up all kind of fancy animation properties! Alien spaceships with pulsating lights! A ford mustang with working blinkers (or a BMW but using blinkers on a BMW is unrealistic)! Those kind of things!

Oh, I'll definitely be adding animation options (blinking, pulsating, etc.)  I did a major refactor in 0.5 of how the controllers are wired together.  It doesn't actually show on the surface while you're playing, so you won't notice anything there.  But it makes the architecture much more flexible, in ways that will make it easier to wire in blinking.  (That was, in fact, one of the motivating factors behind the re-architecture.)

And, in particular, it will make the mod much more friendly to people who want to tinker with it via ModuleManager.  Let's say I release some new part or indicator mode, and you love it, but you really wish it had an option to make it blink, and I didn't do that.  Wouldn't it be nice if you could just write a snippet of ModuleManager code to make it do exactly what you want it to do?

I don't quite yet have the refactoring done to the point where you can do that (there's still some more work to go).  But it's headed in that direction.

So the short answer is:  yes, you will get to have pretty much what you want (though the UI won't necessarily look exactly as you've described). 

It might take another update or two before I get there, though.

 

7 minutes ago, sebi.zzr said:

I noticed exact same problem,everything works except:both fuel cells and led indicator light,they're just black.After some testing i found out this happened due to compressing textures with TR.
I solved my problem by disabling the commpreson at @default.cfg

isCompressionEnabled = never

I don't know how those texturse are made,but it's interesting just those three are getting black.

Hm, interesting.  Thanks for looking into this.

One thing to bear in mind about IndicatorLights:  I think the design and the coding is pretty good, but the modeling is strictly kindergarten stuff.  Quite frankly, I suck at modeling, not just artistically but on the technical level as well.  I'm brand new to it, and before writing this mod, I had never touched Blender or Unity at all.

So the fact that weirdness happens might be TextureReplacer's fault... or it might be mine for doing my models in a way that's unintentionally off-kilter in some way.

I will definitely be coming back to revisit the modeling at some future date (i.e. eventually try to learn how not to suck so badly, and then put time and elbow grease into polishing it up).  It may be that when I do that, the TR issues will go away, but I honestly don't know.

 

[Beetlecat]

Here's a response on the TR topic:

Quote

Have you checked the resolution / sizes of these texture files?  Each dimension ( X * Y ) needs to be a power of 2.  (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.)  If not, manually resizing them COULD work, but would only fix it on your end until the mod were updated.  Maybe notify that mod author?

This was in the TR docs regarding the helmet reflections, but I think it could be contributing to the black textures. It also said that the textures needed to be squares. I may have time to fiddle with it tomorrow evening and see if this is a correct hunch.

Edit: I grabbed the file here at work just because I was too curious. The images for bezel, bulb, and white are 2x2, so I'm not sure if just doubling them to 4x4 would make a difference (since it already seems to meet the above criteria), but it's worth a try.

Edited May 2, 2016 by Beetlecat

[hab136]

Instead of trying to detect and dynamically show alignment, you could just provide some static visual representation of what is "up" vs "down", like MRS's docking helper does:

 

Using my leet MSPaint skills, I made a mockup:

 

See also the completely static Docking Target (which is actually two layers; watch the video)

 

 

[Jacke]

Putting on 2 or more sets of Indicator Lights might help with using them for orientation, as well as being crafty with where they are put.  I found that helps with Aviation Lights, even with them illumnating and the glow being visible even when they weren't in direct line of sight.

3 hours ago, hab136 said:

Instead of trying to detect and dynamically show alignment, you could just provide some static visual representation of what is "up" vs "down", like MRS's docking helper does:

Spoiler

 

Using my leet MSPaint skills, I made a mockup:

I did something like that with Aviation Lights marker lights.  I would put a red one on the left, a green one on the right, a white one on top, and a blue one on the bottom.  "Top" and "bottom" can seem odd for landers but I find it works.  (While landing, when the lander is bottom away from me slowing down from orbit, the blue light on "bottom" will be uppermost and white on "top" will be undermost, but red is left and green is right.)  Use them for orientation in docking and landing.

Here's a picture in the spoiler of them on an unmanned Mun 2-stage lander-return.  (The non-stock tank is the Better Than Starting Manned Octotank, a 2.5m part half the size of the X200-8 tank.)  Side towards the camera is the top with the white marker light.  You can just see the glow of the left-side red and the right-side green lights, with the bottom-side blue one out of sight on the far side, but you can just make out its glow on Mun's surface.

Spoiler

 

Quote

See also the completely static Docking Target (which is actually two layers; watch the video)

As he notes in the last post of that topic, @tg626 has release that mod as KOAS for KSP 1.1+.

 

Edited May 3, 2016 by Jacke

[Snark]

Hi all,

I've posted pre-release v0.6 of IndicatorLights. New/changed things in this update:

• The BL-01 indicator light now has a customizable "blink" option.  (@Kerbart should be happy!)
• The docking port indicators now blink when the docking field engages.

That may seem like a pretty small couple of changes... but it was a major code refactor (part 2 of the refactor that began with v0.5), which changes the internal hookups of the various part modules in a significant way.  From the player's perspective, there's not much change (just a couple of "minor" features listed above)... but it's a big deal for part authors (such as me, or anyone else who wants to use IndicatorLights to mod things).  The way the lights' behavior is hooked up is now much more flexible, and it's possible to get all kinds of neat behaviors by wiring up various controllers in chains.

Just a heads-up to players, this is a breaking change for you.  It won't break your save-game (you can still play just fine).  However, the "breakage" will affect any ships that you launched (or saved in the vehicle editor) before installing v0.6.  What happens to affected ships is that their docking port indicators and BL-01 lights won't work properly.  For already-launched ships, there's nothing you can do to fix this problem.  For ships saved in the vehicle editor, you can fix it by deleting and re-adding all docking ports and BL-01 indicator lights.

Apologies for the breakage-- it's the cost of doing business when you're using a pre-release.  I would have preferred not to break anything, but making this change now will open up a lot of doors later.

You can see the new editor UI options for blinking the BL-01 here:

 

Enjoy!

 

[Kerbart]

Fantastic! Without having even downloaded the update, but based on the screenshot... Is there a way to phase the lights, so I can have animated lights on my ships?

 

i should post a screenshot -- putting the lights on the corners of hatches makes rescueing Kerbals—for sinister reasons something that predominantly seems to take place on the night side— so much easier as they can see where to go to!

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Kerbart said:

Is there a way to phase the lights, so I can have animated lights on my ships?

Not currently.  If you make several lights that have the same period, they will all blink in perfect unison with each other.  There's no current way to add a "phase" to the parts so that you could, for example, have several of them in a line with the lights marching along in sequence.

I've already thought of that feature, and it's on my to-do list, along with about a hundred other things.    I'll get to it at some point, not sure how soon.

[Kerbart]

7 hours ago, Snark said:

I've already thought of that feature, and it's on my to-do list, along with about a hundred other things.    I'll get to it at some point, not sure how soon.

Awesome! Little steps, Rome wasn't built in one day either (nor was KSP...)! Thank you so much for all the work you're doing!

[Snark]

Hi all,

I've posted pre-release v0.7 of IndicatorLights.  The new feature is crew occupancy indicators:

These are per-crew-slot indicators that light up when occupied, dark when vacant.  The color corresponds to the profession of the occupant:

• Pilot:  orange
• Engineer:  green
• Scientist:  blue
• Tourist:  white

This is not a comprehensive addition to all crewed modules-- at the moment, only the ones pictured above have been equipped with indicators.  I eventually intend to get around to them all, it's just that it's incredibly tedious getting the placement wired up just right, and I figured this was a good starter set to release and get some feedback on.    In the meantime, if you have your heart set on indicators for particular other parts and can't wait for me to add them, there are now all the tools in place to add them yourself via ModuleManager, if you are so inclined.  (It's how I modded the stock parts, after all.)

I was definitely concerned about annoying people with a "Christmas tree" effect on spacecraft, so the crew indicators are toggleable, and are off by default.  They won't light up until you turn them on.  You can do that either in the VAB or in flight via right-click menu item, and it's also available via action groups.

Enjoy!

[NecroBones]

 

Hey great, I like it! I think you're definitely doing the right thing by making those indicators tastefully small, and positioned by the hatch. Defaulting to "off" is probably a good choice.

[jlcarneiro]

2 hours ago, Snark said:

Hi all,

I've posted pre-release v0.7 of IndicatorLights.  The new feature is crew occupancy indicators:

These are per-crew-slot indicators that light up when occupied, dark when vacant.  The color corresponds to the profession of the occupant:

• Pilot:  orange
• Engineer:  green
• Scientist:  blue
• Tourist:  white

This is not a comprehensive addition to all crewed modules-- at the moment, only the ones pictured above have been equipped with indicators.  I eventually intend to get around to them all, it's just that it's incredibly tedious getting the placement wired up just right, and I figured this was a good starter set to release and get some feedback on.    In the meantime, if you have your heart set on indicators for particular other parts and can't wait for me to add them, there are now all the tools in place to add them yourself via ModuleManager, if you are so inclined.  (It's how I modded the stock parts, after all.)

I was definitely concerned about annoying people with a "Christmas tree" effect on spacecraft, so the crew indicators are toggleable, and are off by default.  They won't light up until you turn them on.  You can do that either in the VAB or in flight via right-click menu item, and it's also available via action groups.

Enjoy!

First of all, thank you very much! Your mod not only has great quality its features are increasing!

Second, this crew indicators are nice but I have a little suggestion: Final Frontier's ribbons seem to assign blue do engineers and green to scientists. I memorized it saying it was the opposite of Star Trek Starfleet convention. At that time, I didn't bother Nereid, first because KSP is a different universe and second because he was the first and somebody HAD to establish a pattern... But now, I'd like to ask: would you mind inverting your pattern or do have some strong point so I can convince Nereid to invert his pattern?

Third (and last), not exactly a question to @Snark, I can be answered by anyone: what values should I use to RGB sliders to get that tone of orange used by alert beacons (maneuvers, parking, etc.)?

[Snark]

21 minutes ago, jlcarneiro said:

First of all, thank you very much! Your mod not only has great quality its features are increasing@Snark!

Thanks!  Glad you're enjoying. 

21 minutes ago, jlcarneiro said:

Second, this crew indicators are nice but I have a little suggestion: Final Frontier's ribbons seem to assign blue do engineers and green to scientists. I memorized it saying it was the opposite of Star Trek Starfleet convention. At that time, I didn't bother Nereid, first because KSP is a different universe and second because he was the first and somebody HAD to establish a pattern... But now, I'd like to ask: would you mind inverting your pattern or do have some strong point so I can convince Nereid to invert his pattern?

Alas, my pattern cannot be inverted because Star Trek already established canon, and also blue is the correct color for scientists and therefore changing it would be wrong. 

(The above is a joke, in case it's not obvious.)

Actually, you can have it both ways!  I'm going to leave the defaults as they are, since I think of science as being blue and it's my mod so I get to decide... but you don't have to live with my choices.  I made a point of making all the colors in IndicatorLights configurable.

The first time you run the mod, it will create a file PluginData/IndicatorLights/config.xml inside the IndicatorLights directory.  Crack that open and it'll be pretty obvious which values are for the "engineer color" and "scientist color".  Just swap 'em.  The new values will take effect the next time you start KSP.

21 minutes ago, jlcarneiro said:

Third (and last), not exactly a question to @Snark, I can be answered by anyone: what values should I use to RGB sliders to get that tone of orange used by alert beacons (maneuvers, parking, etc.)?

That I do not know, but it's a pretty easy problem to experiment with.  Set the blue slider to zero, set the red slider to 100%, and then just slide the green slider around until you're happy with the color.

[jlcarneiro]

Well, thanks, thanks and thanks!

[NecroBones]

37 minutes ago, Snark said:

 

Alas, my pattern cannot be inverted because Star Trek already established canon, and also blue is the correct color for scientists and therefore changing it would be wrong. 

QFT. 

 

 

[Snark]

Hi gang,

Well, I goofed.  v0.7 has a truly asinine bug in it that broke lots of indicator lights so they won't light up.  The effects are really blatant, can't believe I didn't catch that before releasing it; total noob move.  Derp.

Anyway, don't use v0.7.  I've just now released v0.7.1 to fix the problem.  By way of apology, I've also added a crew indicator to the cupola.

(Fortunately, the bug only affects runtime behavior, not saved games, so if you've already installed and played with v0.7, you haven't broken anything-- just update to v0.7.1 and you're good to go.)

Apologies for the noise.

[Beetlecat]

frequent updates and interaction with mod users =/= noise

[Superfluous J]

Extremely cool mod! Definitely going on the list of must-installs.

[MK3424]

How about using the colours of portraitstats to indicate which kerbals are inside the craft?