Stand Alone Map View - Multi monitor KSP [1.4.x]

[Unit327]

 

 

A Kerbal Space Program mod that opens the map view in another window/monitor (or a separate computer).

It works by launching a separate instance of the game, and syncing the time

and ship information via networking (udp/tcp).

install via CKAN (samv-server in your main game, samv-client in a separate install)

source code

GNU GPL v3 license

To get it working, you'll need two separate installs of KSP; your normal one and a separate one for the map view. The "samv-server" mod goes in your normal game, the "samv-client" mod goes in the other. Start up an instance of both and you should be in business, providing you have the CPU and GPU and RAM to handle it. To save RAM, all parts can be deleted from the client apart from the mk1-3 pod.
Ye olde development thread.

Current Features

* Syncing of all vessels

* Syncing of maneuver nodes (bidrectionally)

* Syncing of time and time warp

Bugs

Check the buglist on github. Expect a bit of jankiness on the client side (the map view) but your main game will not have any problems.

Minimum requirements for running on a single computer

* 2 monitors

* 4 core processor

* 6GB RAM

Or a separate computer to run the map view on.

Change Log

Check the release notes on github

Running on a separate computer

To run the map view on a separate computer you will need to edit the connection settings found in "saves/samv_server.cfg" and saves/samv_client.cfg" (created on first run with the mod installed). I recommend leaving the port settings alone and just changing the "Client" or "Server" setting to the IP address or URL of the other machine.

[Vanamonde]

Some well-intentioned posts about EULA issues have been removed, not because they're bad, but because nobody here is an expert on this sort of thing, so let's please not derail the mod's thread with it.

[Geonovast]

Oh.  My.  God.

I was just wishing for this type of thing a few days ago when I was running an IVA only mission.  I will be playing with this tomorrow!

 

Is this OS agnostic?

 

Edited September 5, 2018 by Geonovast

[flack]

Is it Christmas already?!?

[AngrybobH]

On 9/2/2018 at 1:47 AM, Unit327 said:

To save RAM, all parts can be deleted from the client apart from the mk1-3 pod.

Does the client need mods(other than the client mod)? Or can all of those be removed too?

Edited September 5, 2018 by AngrybobH

[Unit327]

3 hours ago, Geonovast said:

Is this OS agnostic?

Yes, in fact it was developed and tested entirely on linux. I've never run it on windows or osx but there's no reason it shouldn't work on them.

2 hours ago, AngrybobH said:

Does the client need mods(other than the client mod)? Or can all of those be removed too?

The client needs all mods related to the planets/moons and their orbits, launchpads and stuff (e.g. Real Solar System, Copernicus etc). All other mods (parts, physics, graphical, gameplay) can be left out.

Edited September 5, 2018 by Unit327

[Geonovast]

6 hours ago, Unit327 said:

Yes, in fact it was developed and tested entirely on linux. I've never run it on windows or osx but there's no reason it shouldn't work on them.

Even better as I'm running Linux.  Thanks!

[Geonovast]

This is so cool.  How is this not getting more attention?

All the money I've put into this computer is suddenly justified.

Edited September 5, 2018 by Geonovast

[theJesuit]

Mmm.  Separate computer.  Hadn't thought of that.  Now this may get have to have a new copy to be on the *ahem* work pc...

Would this work if all the visual mods are NOT part of the second install!?  Part mods would definitely be required.

Peace.

[Unit327]

5 hours ago, theJesuit said:

Would this work if all the visual mods are NOT part of the second install!?  Part mods would definitely be required.

Part mods are not required on the client. It doesn't need to know what your ship is, just where it is (and where it is headed).

[Jesusthebird]

Man...this sure is interesting. Just tossing this out there...*wispers raspberry pi* but if a heavy mod install with lots of planets n such...i can see the pi getting bogged down very easily. Well keep an eye on this

[RoboRay]

Hmmm... I bet I could move a lot of MJ and KER information panes over to the map screen and declutter my main view, too!

On 9/5/2018 at 12:02 AM, flack said:

Is it Christmas already?!?

Yes!  I would say so!  I remember seeing this in development years ago and thought it had been abandoned.

Edited September 6, 2018 by RoboRay

[Geonovast]

42 minutes ago, Jesusthebird said:

Man...this sure is interesting. Just tossing this out there...*wispers raspberry pi* but if a heavy mod install with lots of planets n such...i can see the pi getting bogged down very easily. Well keep an eye on this

I doubt a raspberry Pi could handle even vanilla KSP.  But you make me want to try.  I have a Pi3 sitting around doing nothing right now.

[Jesusthebird]

1 hour ago, Geonovast said:

I doubt a raspberry Pi could handle even vanilla KSP.  But you make me want to try.  I have a Pi3 sitting around doing nothing right now.

The cpu might be able to hang...might..but far as i know..the ram would be the major limitation. I say the rpi just for the idea on a development board...but a more beefy pi would be ideal. Such as an orangepi. Mine has 8gb onboard ram. With a 1.x-ghz quadcore. But as long as you arnt actually playing the game...figure mapview would be minimal cpu usage once everything is loaded up?

[Geonovast]

That might work.  I don't know anything about the orange pis, I just have Raspberries.  Most of them are running 3D printers, and I have one in a PiGrrl2, so I haven't done anything strenuous with them.

Definitely test it out on your Orange Pi.  Looks like you can remove all parts except one on the client side, so that would help with RAM quite a bit too.  I just think the 1GB on the Raspi is too little.

[theJesuit]

@Unit327 @Geonovast and @Jesusthebird if no part mods are required you wouldn't need Squad's parts folder either on the map screen view.  That would probably save massive amounts of ram. How pruned back could you make the second copy for it still to run?

[Geonovast]

9 minutes ago, theJesuit said:

How pruned back could you make the second copy for it still to run?

 

On 9/2/2018 at 1:47 AM, Unit327 said:

To save RAM, all parts can be deleted from the client apart from the mk1-3 pod.

 

My guess would be that much.  I doubt you could remove anything that wasn't a part.

Might also be a good idea to turn all the graphics down as low as they can go (on the client side), if you're not on a powerful computer.  I just tested in an otherwise stock + KER environment.  I still mainly play in 1.3.1, so I haven't tested this out in my main modded install.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Geonovast

[Jesusthebird]

Why keep the mk1-3pod? Simply because of MH expansion??

[Geonovast]

12 minutes ago, Jesusthebird said:

Why keep the mk1-3pod? Simply because of MH expansion??

The mk1-3 pod isn't MH.  It's just new to 1.4.x

I imagine it has something to do with having to keep something.  The game might freak out if there's literally no parts to load, so something has to be left.  I saw in older releases of this mod it was the cubical strut, and it's easier to tell people that they have to keep a specific item vs. "Keep something"

[Jesusthebird]

1 hour ago, Geonovast said:

The mk1-3 pod isn't MH.  It's just new to 1.4.x

I imagine it has something to do with having to keep something.  The game might freak out if there's literally no parts to load, so something has to be left.  I saw in older releases of this mod it was the cubical strut, and it's easier to tell people that they have to keep a specific item vs. "Keep something"

My bad. I thought the 1-3pod was part of MH..silly me. I dont make rockets much

makes sense tho.

i havnt tried this yet. But a quick thought i had. Can the window for the client be resizable? I think it would benifit the group of users that also like to use telemacius(cant spell...the browser telemetry mod) but may also be as simple as adding extra parameters to ksp.exe. just a thought i had

[Geonovast]

Just now, Jesusthebird said:

i havnt tried this yet. But a quick thought i had. Can the window for the client be resizable?

If you don't run in full screen, you should be able to size the window to whatever size you want.

Also I've never heard of the Telemachus mod... holy cow.  I need that too!

[Unit327]

9 hours ago, Jesusthebird said:

wispers raspberry pi

KSP doesn't run on ARM. To be honest though It takes far less resources to run on the same computer than you might think. Stock KSP doesn't tax a modern GPU very much, I can run max settings on 2 monitors with my 6  year old graphics card without even noticing a drop in framerate. With scatterer, EVE etc it is a different story though.

The bottleneck for KSP is almost always the CPU, and that doesn't really matter in this case for a couple of reasons:

1. The map view is always on rails, no physics gets calculated
2. KSP isn't super effective at multithreading, so a second process doesn't really starve the first one

 

4 hours ago, Jesusthebird said:

Why keep the mk1-3pod? Simply because of MH expansion??

The "dummy" ship on the client side has to have something, so I picked the mk1-3 pod because it has the highest crash tolerance. There have been bugs in the past with the map view ship exploding when near the ground.

I didn't realise it wasn't in 1.3.x, so I might change that. For the adventurous, you can probably have a look at the code and replace the dummy.protovessel file yourselves.

8 hours ago, RoboRay said:

I bet I could move a lot of MJ and KER information panes over to the map screen and declutter my main view, too!

Some of the readouts will be wrong but it will work. Anything relying purely on orbit and trajectory is good to go. Anything else will give bad data, including:

• navball heading
• mass
• resources (LFO, electricity etc)
• deltav
• burn time
• crew roster
• etc

[Jesusthebird]

1 hour ago, Unit327 said:

KSP doesn't run on ARM.

bummer..that would be an interesting project for someone i bet if it could. Ohh well. Even the client being relatively low on resource requirements. its more of the "I did because I can, not because I should". lol

Edited September 7, 2018 by Jesusthebird

[Stone Blue]

13 hours ago, RoboRay said:

Hmmm... I bet I could move a lot of MJ and KER information panes over to the map screen and declutter my main view, too!

I had moderate success using this old mod for that:
 

Unfortunately, the second screen could NOT be used for mapview, or ANY other scene... just for moving UI windows onto.

As to modifying screensize, you can manually edit the resolution in the KSP settings cfg. I play on a 1600x900 ;aptop, and had IIRC, a 1280x1024 2nd monitor. Since the one dimension was so close, I ust left the Y at 900, and made the X 2880.
Also, it ended up distorting the view in any scene on the main monitor. It wasnt too bad, except that it made the mapview unusable, as certain screen elements wouldnt line up with other screen elements... namely, planets and their orbit lines.

Also, I'm not sure which was the last version of KSP I had used it on... IIRC, either 1.1.3 or 1.2.2...posibly 1.3.1

So it may at the very least need a recompile for 1.4.x

Also, Unity 2017 introduced some half-baked multi monitor support. I guess half-baked is closer to baked, than none at all... Maybe if KSP makes it to a Unity 2018 upgrade, and maybe Unity will have successfully pulled off working multimonitor support.

I know a certain well-known, famous, mod dev attempted a crack at coding a mod to see if the new support in U2017 could be taken advantage of by KSP... Unfortunately, even he was not successful

And as far as telemachus goes, I wouldnt bother with taking up a 2nd monitor with it, when it works on basically any device that has a screen and a web browser. I'll use my small smart phone for one of the action group or control button screens (touchscreen), a 7" tablet AND an 11" tablet to display the map screen, and the graph screen.... I suppose, I could even use my 42" SmartTV if I wanted either the graph or map screens bigglier...
 

Edited September 7, 2018 by Stone Blue

[MaianTrey]

Thanks a ton for this mod! I'm making videos for my ISS construction and it's been a little annoying having to go Map View so much since it kinda takes away from the video if you're staring at the map the whole time. Problem solved with the mod! I'm running on Windows 10 and it's working wonderfully.

2 things (for me):
I couldn't figure out how to remove all parts except the Mk1-3 Pod and still have it load, so I'm leaving all parts there for now. No big deal.

And for anyone wondering how to get both instances at the same time without running in windowed mode:
You need to make two changes for both your main instance (samv-serv) and your secondary instance (samv-client).

1. If running through steam, set KSP's launch options to -popupwindow. If running outside of steam, you have to create a shortcut of the .exe (I suggest the KSP_x64.exe). Then right-click that, go to Properties, and in the field that says 'Target', add a space outside of the quotations, and add -popupwindow.
2. In the settings menu, uncheck 'Fullscreen' in the graphics settings. If changing it in the settings.cfg, change the line FULLSCREEN = True to FULLSCREEN = False, and save.

Edited September 8, 2018 by MaianTrey