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[1.3.1] Aviation Lights v3.14 [use MOARdV's version instead!]


BigNose

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THIS THREAD IS DEPRECATED!

This mod has been taken over by @MOARdV and is maintained in his thread here:

CREDITS

First things first: Big thanks for RPGprayer's "Position/Navigation Lights" AddOn, from which the Aviation Lights originated.

Additional credits go to @Deadweasel, @Why485, @GROOV3ST3R, @JDP, @J.Random and especially @MOARdV for their great help/maintenance with/of this addon.

Because I personally have my focus elsewhere and sadly do not play KSP much at this time, community member @MOARdV kindly took over maintenance of Aviation Lights temporarily and fixed it to work with the most recent KSP version.

 

INFORMATION

I've implemented two types of standard aviation lights:

Navigationlights (often called Positionlights) are a safety feature on every plane bigger than an ultra-light. They indicate the orientation of the plane for other air traffic, so they know in which direction you're going. For that, the international standard of a red light on the left wingtip, a green one on the right and a white on the tail was set.

Example for the correct use in KSP:

6cz23stq.png

But, of course, this is KSP. You can just put them on where it looks cool. :D

Warninglights (More commonly reffered to as "Strobe&Beacon") are flashing lights to enhance detection range in bad weather and to warn other air traffic and ground personnel. Beacons are mostly mounted on tip of the vertical tail on smaller planes, or in the middle of the fuselage (top and/or bottom). They're red, bright and flashing to indicate that parts of the airplane (engines) or the airplanes itself are moving or about to be moved.

Strobes are very bright, white, fast blinking lights which are mounted on the wingtips (next to the red/green navlights) and sometimes on the tail (next to the white navlight) on larger planes. They're in fact so bright, that they remain off until the pilot lines up on the runway, so the ground personnel won't get blinded if they stand right next to it.

Due to popular request, I now also included the amber warning light by Deadweasel, which I just adapted to the new file system and values.

Screenshot with all lights in the pack (click to enlarge):

tv5fpv6d.png

But, as I said before: Who cares if you just want to built a disco on your deep-space-vessel? :D

Spoiler

AAAaaand it's done (Well, at least on the ground):

https://youtu.be/WL4YQoK6Nyk

 

AAAaaand then he topped it:

 

Another great example on Kerbin:

 

INSTRUCTIONS

The Aviation Lights Addon is very easy to use. Just download the .zip (link below), and extract it to your main KSP Folder. Every file should go to the appropriate place!

All lights can be found in the 'Utility' section ingame. Just put them on, set Action Groups, and you're good to go.

There are 5 Modes: OFF (standard), FLASH, DOUBLE FLASH and INT (Interval times are measured on those of real airplanes, but can be altered in the .cfgs) and ON.

The Navigationlights come in four different colours: white, blue, red, green. To further differentiate them they also have light grey casings.

The three types of Warninglights include an amber and a red beacon as well as a white strobe, which have dark grey casings and are very bright.

 

DOWNLOAD

https://github.com/MOARdV/AviationLights/releases

 

CHANGELOG

Spoiler

(SINCE v3.9 see GitHub changelog)

https://github.com/MOARdV/AviationLights/releases

 

16NOV15 - v3.8 (Entry cost and physics)

Added: Lights now have double their normal prize as entry cost in the tech tree

Changed: Lights are now skipped by the physics engine (performance gain when using them in large numbers)

 

17DEC14 - v3.7 (Drag error fix)

Fixed: No more minimum/maximum_drag errors in the log

(no other known bugs at this time)

 

- new forum 502 wiped it out until here -

 

 

LICENSE

This AddOn builds on content originally made by @RPGprayer. Used with permission.

Creative Commons Lizenzvertrag

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

 

Edited by BigNose
Thread deprecated, pointer to MOARdV's thread
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this plugin's been causing KSP 0.16 to crash hard

also using:

- carts.dll (1.33)

- Engineer.dll

- MuMechLib.dll (1.9.0.0)

- RemoteTech.dll

Sorry, but I can't reproduce this with the same PlugIns (except MuMechLib.dll, I used 1.9.1). The AviationLights PlugIn also shouldn't be able to cause such errors if you ask me, it does not interfere with any of these PlugIns...

But... You never know, right? :P Have you tried deactivating one PlugIn at a time and testing if it still crashes? Maybe looking into the crashlog?

Edited by BigNose
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One day i'm going to line the landing strip with the blue nav lights with a couple red and white lights near either end for orientation.

And it's going to be amazing.

No idea how i'm going to accomplish this though.

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But... You never know, right? :P Have you tried deactivating one PlugIn at a time and testing if it still crashes? Maybe looking into the crashlog?

yes I have and by all testing, Aviation lights was the culprit, even with a fresh new Persistence file :\ made me major sadpanda

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One day i'm going to line the landing strip with the blue nav lights with a couple red and white lights near either end for orientation.

And it's going to be amazing.

No idea how i'm going to accomplish this though.

That would just be a matter of editing your persistence file with 'ships' consisting of a single part (so they're 'landed' instead of crash debris), the light. Just a matter of working out orientation and coordinates.

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That would just be a matter of editing your persistence file with 'ships' consisting of a single part (so they're 'landed' instead of crash debris), the light. Just a matter of working out orientation and coordinates.

1 light at every 10 meters would mean 200 lights on each side.

I doubt if KSP could handle 400 to 500 ships in the persistence file.

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yes I have and by all testing, Aviation lights was the culprit, even with a fresh new Persistence file :\ made me major sadpanda

You mean even if you disable everything else and just want to use AviationLights, it still crashes? You seem to be the only one, so it has to be either a local problem or you are doing something wrong...

Could you be more specific about the crash? When does it happen, when you switch the lights on or when you load the world? Does it also crash when you have no lights on your vessel but the PlugIn installed? What does the crashlog say? I need more information to be able to help you, sorry. :(

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One day i'm going to line the landing strip with the blue nav lights with a couple red and white lights near either end for orientation.

And it's going to be amazing.

No idea how i'm going to accomplish this though.

Even if I think this would be a ****load of work, I'd love to the pics of that! :D

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Does someone have any complains or suggestions? Feel free to post them! :)

I have an observation. At first I thought it was a bug with the navlights, and I thought the navlights were somehow blinking in time with the strobe/beacons even though I thought I set them to "steady" mode.

Pressing the activation keys (O and P) is supposed to initiate the "blinking" mode first, correct?

I think the game must remember the mode it was in the last time you used it (such as on a different ship), because when going to a new ship and activating the lights, sometimes it first goes into "steady" mode, or requires two keypresses to activate at all (it goes to "blinking" mode...which makes me think the first keypress set it to "off"). This behavior persists even when exiting the game and restarting.

It's merely a minor annoyance. But I wonder if the mode setting can be reset upon changing focus to another ship and/or exiting the game entirely?

If not, can the lights be set to stay active upon changing focus? I was recently trying to "dock" two ships in orbit, and had lights set around the docking node of the 'mother' ship. I activated them, then switched to the 'daughter' ship, and was disappointed to find the docking lights deactivated.

Otherwise this is a very cool addition and I use the lights on all my new designs, and I've retrofitted them on my old designs as well.

Actually, I have one more item. Would it be feasible to create landing lights? Essentially it'd be a light with similar characteristics to the white strobe except it would have it's own key binding (L, perhaps?) and would only have a "steady" (and "off", obviously) mode. I'm not sure if the beam characteristics could be changed, but if so it would throw a relatively narrow cone of light forward rather than light in all directions (similar to how the Kerbals' EVA headlights function). Such an addition would really complete the illumination necessities of spaceplanes!

Edited by maxpanic
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Bignose, the lights are GOOD !, so don't expect complaints or suggestions from a lot of people. The lights do what they're meant to do.

If you really want idea's of things you could make (with lights), here are a few:

- flashing signs (with texts like "Danger" or graphical symbols like f.i. the nuclear symbol)

- multiple lights or arrowheads which flash in sequence (like roadsigns)

- (a personal favourite) a large thin flat surface which displays concentric circles moving to the center. Like the landingpad on the moon in the movie 2001. To be placed on launch/landingpads on Mun or Minmus (such as the Cargopad in one mods).

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