JDP Posted August 9, 2012 Author Share Posted August 9, 2012 If I may recommend, IRL there's about a 1-4 second delay of signal delay from the earth to the moon. I know that, because Kerbin is to the scale of 1:11, your delay is accurate. However, I think it is a little unbalanced. I think that, instead of using real life speed of radio waves, you should also bring down that speed to 1:11. That way, the delay will be more realistic. Keep up the amazing work! This is the only mod I use (Which is saying something because I don't like using mods).That's how it was in The_Duck's plugin. He had the speed of light set to 1:10. I chose to sacrifice that realism in favor of playability. I'm looking into adding a config file for the plugin itself in the next update. That way you have the choice of setting the speed of light to whatever you want.For now, i can't really make heads or tails out of how to actually implement a config file for a plugin. Mind you, before starting this, all my programming skills where based on some ancient rudimentary knowledge of Java and a semester of formal logic. For this project I had to learn, not only the API for KSP, but C# itself over the last month while writing this plugin. I'm still learning, but man is it fun to learn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BustedEarLobes Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 Well, I thank you for your quick response. I have high hopes for that being added soon! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maxpanic Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 Again, this mod is really cool and I thank you for your effort. Unsurprisingly, I have three and a half suggestions, all of which probably require more work than you're interested in putting in, all of which lie well outside my essentially non-existent capabilities.The first would be electricity usage. Tie-in with Electrical Energy Plugin? Signal processors should be using a few watts, omni antennae a few more, and high-gain antennae the most. Would give some incentive not to put 20 antennae on a small probe. Easy method might be to copy the code from an ion engine (power-using) part and tweak the details. Next suggestion would be to limit the number of antennae a processor can support. Four per processor part?Lastly, it'd be awesome if high-gain antennae would slew to the chosen target. This would require a new, animated dish model, such as the one in the ISA Mapsat kit, which slews to point at the ground. The half suggestion would be for any dish-utilizing connections to only work when the dishes are actually aimed in the general direction of the target if an auto-tracking, animated dish model isn't feasible. Having a dish pointed 180 degrees from the target and still functioning makes me twitch.I'm sure these are all ideas you've considered already or that others have suggested previously. They're merely refinements to what is otherwise a fun mod. Thanks again for all your work so far! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gresrun Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 (edited) Glad to see someone take and run with the satellite relay concept! I'm downloading it now.I encourage you to keep learning C# and to expose yourself to as many programming languages as possible. Keep up the good work!P.S. - Would you mind correcting my name in the credits? 'gresun' should be 'gresrun' Thanks! Edited August 10, 2012 by gresrun Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BustedEarLobes Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 Found a bug! Once I edited the speed of light to be 1/10 slower, RCS is not effected by the delay time. Not that important but it is there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDP Posted August 10, 2012 Author Share Posted August 10, 2012 ...I have three and a half suggestions......electricity usage. Tie-in with Electrical Energy Plugin? Signal processors should be using a few watts, omni antennae a few more, and high-gain antennae the most. Would give some incentive not to put 20 antennae on a small probe...That is indeed a planned feature. I would like for my plugin to work with an Electrical Energy Plugin. But for now i'm waiting for the awesome people working on these plugins to get it all settled and working right and uniformly, while I work on getting my plugin to working just right. I still don't consider the "core" functions of this plugin done, there needs to be added a bit more before i can say that....Next suggestion would be to limit the number of antennae a processor can support. Four per processor part?...Could be a good addition. But it will require a complete rewrite of the plugin and would possibly make it incompatible with your old savefiles. I'll keep your idea in mind for future updates, but don't expect it anytime soon (or possibly at all )...it'd be awesome if high-gain antennae would slew to the chosen target. This would require a new, animated dish model, such as the one in the ISA Mapsat kit, which slews to point at the ground...As I've heard from Alchemist, the next version of PowerTech will include exactly this function. I'm thinking about implementing it (though I would need a lot of help from part modelers out there). It would be mostly cosmetic though. As it's impossible to detect if far away vessels have their dishes pointed physically at you. In essense, anything that's further than 2 km away from your vessel doesn't really exist as far as the game is concerned.Regarding your half suggestion. I think it would add way too much complexity and headache if i made that strict a requirement on players. With everything moving merrily around in it's own orbit it would be a nightmare to set your satellite up in the right angle to always being able to point it's dishes in the right directions. And after just a few hours of everything moving merily around, you'd have to do it all over again. It is however possible for you to add that restriction on yourself, you'll just have to RP it a bit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDP Posted August 10, 2012 Author Share Posted August 10, 2012 ...P.S. - Would you mind correcting my name in the credits? 'gresun' should be 'gresrun' Thanks!...Done. Sorry about the misprint Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDP Posted August 10, 2012 Author Share Posted August 10, 2012 Found a bug! Once I edited the speed of light to be 1/10 slower, RCS is not effected by the delay time. Not that important but it is there.I just tried to recreate the bug and there was still a delay on RCS. If you meant the RCS toggle, then yes. Unfortunately AFAIK there's no way of delaying that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BustedEarLobes Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 Ok. Is this a bug? After this I'll leave you alone. For some reason, 250Km antennas cannot pick up data from a satellite.Recreation goes as followsSat I = Unmanned keo-sync satellite above KSC with a 500km antenna, and one dish pointed at SAT-IISAT-II = Unmanned and has a line of sight, 250km antenna, and one satelliteSAT-II Does not get a connection with KSC with the antenna (Even though SAT-I has a dish pointed at it) but does if you point the satellite dish at Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDP Posted August 10, 2012 Author Share Posted August 10, 2012 Ok. Is this a bug? After this I'll leave you alone. For some reason, 250Km antennas cannot pick up data from a satellite.Recreation goes as followsSat I = Unmanned keo-sync satellite above KSC with a 500km antenna, and one dish pointed at SAT-IISAT-II = Unmanned and has a line of sight, 250km antenna, and one satelliteSAT-II Does not get a connection with KSC with the antenna (Even though SAT-I has a dish pointed at it) but does if you point the satellite dish atNo need to apologize, bug reports are good But it does seem that you didn't quite finish your description, kind of led my thoughts to that famous scene in The Holy Grail: "Castle Arrrgh?...." .My preliminary thought is that your SAT-I is out of range, since it seemes as if you've edited the config file of the standard antenna to be 500km. If you're in kerbosyncronous orbit (way above 2000 km), then you are definitely out of range.Some of the first mistakes i've seen new players make with this plugin is trying to point a satellite dish at an antenna, which doesn't work. But i can't really tell if that's what you're trying to doAlso remember that you will need to point the dish of SAT-I at SAT-II and point the dish of SAT-II at SAT-I.Hope this helps........"NI!" (ok, now i have to rewatch that movie someday) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BustedEarLobes Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 (edited) But it does seem that you didn't quite finish your description, kind of led my thoughts to that famous scene in The Holy Grail: "Castle Arrrgh?...." .Haha. Guess I got distracted.First off, I meant to say 5000 km antenna on sat oneSecond off, the third line was supposed to end with if you point a satellite dish at it (SAT-I).Finally, I found out I was trying to point the dish (SAT-I) at the 250km antenna (SAT-I)So, although that's the case, I don't understand. If you send signals out of the dish of SAT-I in the direction of SAT-II, shouldn't the 250km omnidirectional antenna pick it up because the signal is in range? If that should be the case, then I think it's because you can't define what signals your antenna should look for. Edited August 10, 2012 by BustedEarLobes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
royying Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 It does recognize both Powersat and Dynasat. But since neither of them save any information of antennatypes available to them, it doesn't recognize any antennae on them and hence they are not useble as relay nodes. for now, You could fix this by strapping an antenna or two on them. If that's possible that is.To be honest i was kinda setting my hopes on you when it came to energy. My preliminary idea is for RemoteTech equipment to have a very low use of energy. Probably a bit more if its a very long-range class of antenna. The plan was to make sure players could use it alongside zoxygene, which would have to have a much higher energy drain. Then we would have created two different types of missions: low-energy unmanned missions and high-energy manned ones.the antenna will break after time warp:( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aegrim Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 Is it possible to change the parts from RCS tank size to something smaller please? They take up a large portion of some of my craft. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rkman Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 No need to apologize, bug reports are good Some of the first mistakes i've seen new players make with this plugin is trying to point a satellite dish at an antenna, which doesn't work. I think i understand why you made it so that that does not work, but it would be more realistic if it would work because in reality antenna gain amplifies both transmission and reception. Otoh the range of a link between a dish and and omnidirectional antenna is less than the range of a link between two dish antennas. What might work is if the ranges of two antennas used for a link are summed in order to determine effective range. But for that to be meaningful in the game the range of the dish should be reduced significantly, such that the total range of two dishes pointed at one another is just enough for a link between Kerbin and Minmus. That would mean a link between such a dish and an omni would be enough to reach the Mun (i'm not saying that's desirable).However it would still be a hacky approximation of how radio comms really works and it might have (other) undesirable effects on gameplay that i currently do not foresee.Ideally antenna gain and transmission power should be implemented separately and used to calculate whether or not a link can be established between two transceivers - in principal that's not very complicated. Receiver sensitivity can be the same for all transceivers just to not make things unnecessarily complicated. And eventually for interplanetary comms we'd need several different dish antennas with different ranges.This is not a complaint, merely some observations and suggestions for future improvements. For now i'm quite happy with the mod as it is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alchemist Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 I think i understand why you made it so that that does not work, but it would be more realistic if it would work because in reality antenna gain amplifies both transmission and reception. Otoh the range of a link between a dish and and omnidirectional antenna is less than the range of a link between two dish antennas. What might work is if the ranges of two antennas used for a link are summed in order to determine effective range. But for that to be meaningful in the game the range of the dish should be reduced significantly, such that the total range of two dishes pointed at one another is just enough for a link between Kerbin and Minmus. That would mean a link between such a dish and an omni would be enough to reach the Mun (i'm not saying that's desirable).Maybe ranges should be multiplied? so that if one antenna gets twice more powerfull then the connection range is doubled?BTW, how the "point at planet" system works. Won't it accidentally connect Kerbin-faciing satellite in Munar orbit with a Mun-facing satellite in higher than the Mun orbit around Kerbin that is on the other side of the Mun? Or is there an angle limitation? (+- several degrees from the direction to the celestial body) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDP Posted August 10, 2012 Author Share Posted August 10, 2012 ...What might work is if the ranges of two antennas used for a link are summed in order to determine effective range. But for that to be meaningful in the game the range of the dish should be reduced significantly, such that the total range of two dishes pointed at one another is just enough for a link between Kerbin and Minmus. That would mean a link between such a dish and an omni would be enough to reach the Mun (i'm not saying that's desirable)...Sound like you have some really good knowledge there.As it is now, in checking if a connection antenna A and B is possible, i check if either the range of A or B is less than the distance between them. Only if both their ranges lie within the distance between them do i allow a connection to be made.I do the same for dish antennae, just with the addition of checking if they are pointed at each other (or each others planets if they are orbiting different bodies).I gather that this way of doing the check is simpler for players to understand and work with in-game. So actually the satellite dishes included do just reach Minmus. They have a range of 50000 km, and with minmus AFAIK having a semi-major axis of 47.000 km, a dish placed on kerbin is able to reach a dish in high orbit around minmus, but not much further.Regarding the dish-antenna pairing. If I implemented that as the mean of the two ranges, giving a range of 27.500 for the dish - antenna pairing and 25.125 km for the dish - RC-antenna pairing, the short-range RC antenna would end up being able to have a connection directly to kerbin. Which wouldn't work.I've even played around with exponential functions with no luck.I might simply implement it so that pointing a dish at an omnidirectional antenna would double the range of the omnidirectional antenna though. That would be simple and easy for players to get an intuitive grasp of in-game.If you stumble on a formula for appriximating the effective range between an omnidirectional- and directional antenna. Please feel free to pm me. It might be very good information to work on . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDP Posted August 10, 2012 Author Share Posted August 10, 2012 (edited) Maybe ranges should be multiplied? so that if one antenna gets twice more powerfull then the connection range is doubled?BTW, how the "point at planet" system works. Won't it accidentally connect Kerbin-faciing satellite in Munar orbit with a Mun-facing satellite in higher than the Mun orbit around Kerbin that is on the other side of the Mun? Or is there an angle limitation? (+- several degrees from the direction to the celestial body)ahh, you preempted my idea of a simple x2 bonus .Satellites in very high orbit around kerbin can still have dishes directed towards Mun. The "point at planet" system is in place mainly to make it more simple to link relay networks that are far appart. When you point a dish at the Mun, you're essentially pointing it at everything with Mun as it's mainBody. Without it, you'd have to have each of your kerbin sat's pointed at each of you'r munar sat's and vice versa. Neccesitating a whole bunch of satellite dishes on each comsat.I kept the lineOfSight method from The_Duck's plugin. So if any planetary body gets in the way of the signal path, it will be caught.Mind you, my plugin is very simple in the visual department. the satellite dishes included don't do anything as fancy as actually moving . Edited August 10, 2012 by JDP Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gabmaia Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 (edited) Awexome mod man, Im loving it!!!!! One sugestion tough: in the screen where you configure the antenas in other crafts you could put a button to switch to flying that craft, like in the Lazor mod!(http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/9923-Romfarer_LazorSystem/page3_ )Also, you could make a dish with even longer range, but have to be fisicaly pointed to the target to work!!! The lazor mod above also has a very nice tracking sistem that you could use to.. Ahem... "Inspire" yourself Edited August 10, 2012 by gabmaia Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BustedEarLobes Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 Mind you, my plugin is very simple in the visual department. the satellite dishes included don't do anything as fancy as actually moving .It is possible though I think. If you are able to find the direction of a target, then you can rotate the top of the satellite using the smooth look at script in the default assets section. Though, I never made a plugin before so I have no idea if it works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gabmaia Posted August 10, 2012 Share Posted August 10, 2012 as I said just above, to my stupid eye, the Lazor mod has a pretty awesome tracking system.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsalis Posted August 11, 2012 Share Posted August 11, 2012 Having a lot of fun with this mod. However I can't seem to get the Carts mod integration working. Is the DLL up to date? The one in this mod is smaller than the latest proper carts mod.Any help on this would be appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
togfox Posted August 11, 2012 Share Posted August 11, 2012 YOu need to put a remote control cylinder on the cart + an antenna. Works fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDP Posted August 11, 2012 Author Share Posted August 11, 2012 YOu need to put a remote control cylinder on the cart + an antenna. Works fine.An RC antenna will doo nicely too. It has a small RemoteControl module at it's base. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsalis Posted August 11, 2012 Share Posted August 11, 2012 Ok, I figured this out.... as-per readme this modified carts.dll is using the RCS translate keys, not the I/K/J/L keys that the original carts.dll use Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rkman Posted August 11, 2012 Share Posted August 11, 2012 (edited) JDP, i PM'd you. Not sure if that went ok since it's not in my outbox. Edited August 11, 2012 by rkman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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