[KSP 1.3.1] Bon Voyage 0.13.2.1 - Make your wheels rolling! 2017-10-15

[maja]

4 hours ago, mcm001 said:

Hi,

Not to be *that guy*, but are there any plans to update this to 1.3 sometime soon? It's an awesome mod, and I want to add it to my 1.3 save.

Still, you are that guy If you read one or two pages back, there is an unofficial recompile and bug fix for 1.3 done by me. As for when will be new official version, I don't know. RealGecko is probably very busy.

[Luna Cat]

I'm using the experimental version on KSP 1.3 with no issues. I wouldn't hesitate to go ahead install it.

[KerbMav]

This is amazing!!

[Atubara]

I might have missed something while skimming through this board, but I'm on 1.2.1 and the program seems to be working in the sense that it generates a route to the target, but when I click poehali nothing happens. I have even drove around a little to see if it could navigate to a nearby location less than 2km away but nothing.

 

Am I missing something or is it just my outdated version of KSP? Rover has four wheels and should be generating more than enough power. Yes, I have made sure the brakes aren't activated.

[KerbMav]

6 minutes ago, Atubara said:

I might have missed something while skimming through this board, but I'm on 1.2.1 and the program seems to be working in the sense that it generates a route to the target, but when I click poehali nothing happens. I have even drove around a little to see if it could navigate to a nearby location less than 2km away but nothing.

 

Am I missing something or is it just my outdated version of KSP? Rover has four wheels and should be generating more than enough power. Yes, I have made sure the brakes aren't activated.

It is a background process. The mod moves the rover across the surface while you are away / out of physics range.

[Loren Pechtel]

22 minutes ago, Atubara said:

I might have missed something while skimming through this board, but I'm on 1.2.1 and the program seems to be working in the sense that it generates a route to the target, but when I click poehali nothing happens. I have even drove around a little to see if it could navigate to a nearby location less than 2km away but nothing.

 

Am I missing something or is it just my outdated version of KSP? Rover has four wheels and should be generating more than enough power. Yes, I have made sure the brakes aren't activated.

Working as designed.  The mod is shy and won't let you see what it's doing.  The rover only moves when it's not loaded.

[Atubara]

Aww I wanted to see the lil guy go! 

Thanks for the help. Shame I can't enjoy the auto scroll landscaping. I turned to this mod because MechJeb won't work no matter how or where I orient the part. I looked deeply into the topic and found nothing.

[Loren Pechtel]

16 minutes ago, Atubara said:

Aww I wanted to see the lil guy go! 

Thanks for the help. Shame I can't enjoy the auto scroll landscaping. I turned to this mod because MechJeb won't work no matter how or where I orient the part. I looked deeply into the topic and found nothing.

Mechjeb will work--when I was having problems with this mod insisting my wheels weren't on the ground I used  MechJeb to drive my rover to every biome on Minmus.  It was quite capable of doing so other than having to do several reloads due to wiping out after going over a ridge line and a couple of wipeouts due to going down too steep terrain.

Your MechJeb control must be oriented towards the direction you wish to drive the rover--horizontal, not vertical.  (Beware of flying a rocket hauling such a rover!  You will get a spectacular disaster if it becomes the part that controls the rocket.  The worst I've seen was when I looked away after launching--and found a Kerbal amidst a few rocket parts on the runway.  I wish I knew how it happened.)

[Atubara]

1 minute ago, Loren Pechtel said:

Your MechJeb control must be oriented...horizontal

You see, after 300 million years (not exaggeration ) of trial and error I figured that out, but the rover will just drive in haphazard, enigmatic spirals. No troubleshooting I have found helped me. Even the almighty "control from here" option did not solve the problem after selecting a nearby target (less than 2 km) on the surface.

[Starwaster]

58 minutes ago, Atubara said:

You see, after 300 million years (not exaggeration ) of trial and error I figured that out, but the rover will just drive in haphazard, enigmatic spirals. No troubleshooting I have found helped me. Even the almighty "control from here" option did not solve the problem after selecting a nearby target (less than 2 km) on the surface.

Sounds like a PID issue in the rover controller. PID isn't a one size fits all and sometimes you have to tweak the settings.

[Atubara]

23 minutes ago, Starwaster said:

Sounds like a PID issue in the rover controller. PID isn't a one size fits all and sometimes you have to tweak the settings.

Huh. I'll check it out tonight. I haven't figured that was an issue.

[Loren Pechtel]

3 hours ago, Atubara said:

You see, after 300 million years (not exaggeration ) of trial and error I figured that out, but the rover will just drive in haphazard, enigmatic spirals. No troubleshooting I have found helped me. Even the almighty "control from here" option did not solve the problem after selecting a nearby target (less than 2 km) on the surface.

I just realized--I never used the targeting, just the hold bearing and speed.

[maja]

12 hours ago, Atubara said:

I might have missed something while skimming through this board, but I'm on 1.2.1 and the program seems to be working in the sense that it generates a route to the target, but when I click poehali nothing happens. I have even drove around a little to see if it could navigate to a nearby location less than 2km away but nothing.

 

Am I missing something or is it just my outdated version of KSP? Rover has four wheels and should be generating more than enough power. Yes, I have made sure the brakes aren't activated.

As others said, it's backround process to handle more rovers at one time. Plan a route, click poehali and switch to another scene or vessel. And voila, rover is moving (or not :D).

I think, that you can safely use my 1.2.2 version of BV even in 1.2.1 ( https://github.com/jarosm/KSP-BonVoyage/releases ), which targets some issues with wheels and power. Warning, backup your saves, because there isn't an easy way back without editing of a save file, if you have rovers on the road.

[maja]

Unofficial release 0.12.0.32

Change list:

• Only for KSP 1.3
• Fix for a rover burried in the ground
• Wild Blue Industries reactors support

Download: Version 0.12.0.32 for KSP 1.3

All previous releases and full change log are here: https://github.com/jarosm/KSP-BonVoyage/releases

 

I started a new career in KSP 1.3. This means, that I'm stopping support of my version of BV for KSP 1.2.2 and from now on there will be only new versions for 1.3. If I find something that I need to fix (or you reported it ). There is the last unofficial prerelease version of BV for 1.2.2 which has fixed rover height over terrain. You can use it without worries.

[NermNermNerm]

Thanks Maja for putting this release out.  I've been using it for several days now and it's working great!

 

[maja]

3 hours ago, NermNermNerm said:

Thanks Maja for putting this release out.  I've been using it for several days now and it's working great!

 

Glad to hear this.

I have a rover on a way around Kerbin and in combination with the new ScanSat it's perfect anomalies hunter. ScanSat have option to add waypoints by clicking on its map and BV can navigate to a waypoint. Only limit is the maximum distance for path finder utilities. It's around 350 kilometers. I didn't looked into this part of the code yet, because it's not a big deal, to make few hops between a start and a destination.

[KerbMav]

I always ignored 95% of the "explore Kerbin", "investigate biome" kind of contracts, because roving for hours is boring and flying always risky for me. This mod changed this quite a bit.

[maja]

Definitelly. It changed quite a bit every exploration by a rover. Do you want to visit all anomalies on the Mun? No problem. Do you want to visit Muns poles? No prob... well, poles are a little bit rough area, but it's doable

[Aelfhe1m]

... and makes harvesting MKS resource lodes much more viable when I only have to do a little local driving at each end of the collection trip.

Spoiler

 

[Loren Pechtel]

6 hours ago, maja said:

Glad to hear this.

I have a rover on a way around Kerbin and in combination with the new ScanSat it's perfect anomalies hunter. ScanSat have option to add waypoints by clicking on its map and BV can navigate to a waypoint. Only limit is the maximum distance for path finder utilities. It's around 350 kilometers. I didn't looked into this part of the code yet, because it's not a big deal, to make few hops between a start and a destination.

I have looked at the code--there's no range limit.  What there is is a time limit--if it doesn't find a solution in 10 seconds it gives up.  The problem is that the pathing is an O(n²) algorithm (I'm not aware of anything better, short of pre-calculating a lot of data like the mapping engines do), and becomes very painful very fast.  While I think the code could be optimized a bit the approach being used has no chance of truly long distance hops, especially on Kerbin.  (It will fare better on bodies not torn up by water.)

I see two possible fixes:

1)  Allow entry of a path with waypoints--shift-click a string of points.  A human can provide the big picture guidance easily, let it figure out the details.

2)  A divide-and-conquer approach in the algorithm itself.  This could get stuck by certain types of terrain but in general I think would work:  Take the existing algorithm but use much bigger tiles.  This will allow it to find a path around the seas.  Keep the search data in case a point must be discarded.  Now run the current algorithm using the centers of the big tiles as waypoints.  If a leg can't be solved you mark the tile as impassible and go back to the big picture.

3)  Split the pathing off into a separate thread.  The selector returns immediately, if it gets stuck it sends you a message.  It would still need a timeout, but you would be free to do something else while it worked.

[maja]

6 minutes ago, Loren Pechtel said:

I have looked at the code--there's no range limit.  What there is is a time limit--if it doesn't find a solution in 10 seconds it gives up.  The problem is that the pathing is an O(n²) algorithm (I'm not aware of anything better, short of pre-calculating a lot of data like the mapping engines do), and becomes very painful very fast.  While I think the code could be optimized a bit the approach being used has no chance of truly long distance hops, especially on Kerbin.  (It will fare better on bodies not torn up by water.)

I see two possible fixes:

1)  Allow entry of a path with waypoints--shift-click a string of points.  A human can provide the big picture guidance easily, let it figure out the details.

2)  A divide-and-conquer approach in the algorithm itself.  This could get stuck by certain types of terrain but in general I think would work:  Take the existing algorithm but use much bigger tiles.  This will allow it to find a path around the seas.  Keep the search data in case a point must be discarded.  Now run the current algorithm using the centers of the big tiles as waypoints.  If a leg can't be solved you mark the tile as impassible and go back to the big picture.

3)  Split the pathing off into a separate thread.  The selector returns immediately, if it gets stuck it sends you a message.  It would still need a timeout, but you would be free to do something else while it worked.

Thanks for info. I'll look into into some day to learn more. I'm not using algorithms in my daily work, therefore I need to catch up and do some research

Option three will raise other issues and I don't want invest to much time in it, if I don't know, what will be with this mod in the future.

[Loren Pechtel]

18 minutes ago, maja said:

Thanks for info. I'll look into into some day to learn more. I'm not using algorithms in my daily work, therefore I need to catch up and do some research

Option three will raise other issues and I don't want invest to much time in it, if I don't know, what will be with this mod in the future.

If you can modify the code you use algorithms, the only question is how complex an algorithm.

I do agree that the third option is a lot of work.  I haven't dug into it enough to even guess at how hard #2 is and I don't know what it takes to write for the KSP UI so I won't even guess #1.  I'm pretty sure there are some easy pickings for improving the speed of the pathfinding but the gains there are only linear, it won't add a lot of range.

Edited August 16, 2017 by Loren Pechtel

[maja]

@Loren Pechtel Ok, we can argue over how complex algorithms I'm using in my work. The point is, that I don't know much about time complexity of different algorithms and their types. It's probably better to move this conversation into private messages to not spam here to much

Edited August 16, 2017 by maja

[NermNermNerm]

I agree with Maja that it's not all that painful a limitation.  If I had to pick something that I really dislike, it'd be having to switch over to the Tracking Station to advance time.  It's not technically that much of a hardship, but it breaks up the immersion, yaknow.  It's just a bad gameplay.  I get it that showing the rover moving rapidly over the terrain just isn't going to happen, but if it could somehow be broken up into a series of scenes (with or without the actual rover), that'd be fine.

Still, if you tell me that's really hard to do, I'm ready to believe it.

[maja]

4 hours ago, NermNermNerm said:

I agree with Maja that it's not all that painful a limitation.  If I had to pick something that I really dislike, it'd be having to switch over to the Tracking Station to advance time.  It's not technically that much of a hardship, but it breaks up the immersion, yaknow.  It's just a bad gameplay.  I get it that showing the rover moving rapidly over the terrain just isn't going to happen, but if it could somehow be broken up into a series of scenes (with or without the actual rover), that'd be fine.

Still, if you tell me that's really hard to do, I'm ready to believe it.

There are other mods, like MechJeb, which can navigate rovers to waypoints in flight scene. The goal of the BonVoyage is to be able to do some other flights and let it handle more rovers at once.

The rovers aren't moving that rapidly. There is a speed limit imposed by maximum speed of wheels, manned vs unmanned rover, day or night and available electrical power. If I'm driving rovers, I can reach higher top speed then BV. Until I hit some ledge and go flying.

 

For example: I have one rover circling Kerbin and during that time I sent two ships to the Mun, one to deploy commsat network and second to land on the Mun and then randezvous with the first one (to fulfill various contracts). Kerbal Alarm Clock and other helper tools be blessed.

Edited August 17, 2017 by maja