Li0n

CLOSED See release thread : Hi Kerbonauts around the world Ever wonder what all the antennas you put on your craft, because they look so cool, actually do ? How far can you go with them ? How many science you'll be able to send back when you get there ? It's easy ! Just multiply the power of your strongest antenna with the result of the division of the sum of all your antenna's power by the power of the strongest antenna raised by their average weighted combinability exponent. This will give you the antenna power of your spacecraft, now calculate the root square of this number multiplied by the DSN power, it will give you your maximum range. So simple. OR You could use Antenna Helper to do all that, and more, for you. Looking for translators : If you like to help translate Antenna Helper please send me a message, either here or on GitHub. Translation remaining : English : Done Japanese : Done. Thanks to @EBOSHI, @COLOT and @anarog_1 Simplified Chinese : @CN_Warren Russian : @AlexALX Spanish : Done. Thanks to @fitiales German* : ... Italian* : ... French* : @Li0n Brazilian Portuguese* : ... *those language should be added to KSP 1.4. Ok, but what does it do ? It will show you the antenna capability of your active vessel in flight, in the editor and of all vessels in the tracking station. In flight ? Only in the Map View (for now). Click the Antenna Helper icon on the app launcher : And you should see something close to that : Those color circles represent the maximum range between your vessel and its relay/DSN, it also indicate how much signal strength you get. While your ship is in the green circle its signal strength will be clamped between 100 and 75%, in the yellow circle between 75 and 50%, in the orange circle between 50 and 25%, in the red circle between 25 and 0%. And if you're outside the red circle you don't have any connection. Apart from the color circles, you'll see a small window next to Antenna Helper icon on the app launcher : The four button will show you your range, and signal strength, from different sources (relay or DSN). ACTIVE (by default) show your range for the active connection, which can be from a relay or DSN. DSN show the maximum range between your vessel and the DSN RELAY show the maximum range between your vessel and all the in-flight relay DSN and RELAY combine the two above, showing you all the possible connection, with their range You mentioned the editor ? Yep. That's nice to see "on live" where you can go with your space probe but it's even better to know before launch how far you can travel. In the VAB (or SPH) click the Antenna Helper icon on the app launcher : It brings this window : Lots of infos here, let's go through them from top to bottom : Selected type : which antennas are taking into account to compute the vessel antenna power. Direct (by default) will use all antennas, Relay will use only the antenna with relay capability. Current target : the range of your ship's antenna is determined by the antenna power of its target, which can be the DSN or a relay. By default the selected target is the DSN. You can change the target by clicking on Pick A Target. (more about it below) Status : a quick explanation about which antenna on your craft will actually be used in flight. Power : the antenna power of your vessel. Max Range : the maximum distance between your vessel and the target after which you'll lose the connection. Depend on the power of your vessel and the power of the target. Max Distance At 100% : the distance between your vessel and the target after which your signal strength will start to decay. Color bar : it works with the Max Distance At 100% and the Max Range distance. The number aligned with the black bars separating the colors indicate the distance at which the signal decay. Example from the pic above : between 2 050 205 945m and 51 662 800 363m, your signal strength will vary from 100% to 75%. So the target is important ? Of course, one antenna on its own don't do anything. It must be connected to another antenna, can't compute maximum range or signal strength with only one antenna. Two type of target : the DSN (Deep Space Network) : it's the (very) big antenna on Kerbin. It has three levels with different power, you upgrade from one to another by upgrading the Tracking Station. relay(s) : those are vessels you build yourself, two condition need to be meet : having at least one antenna with relay capability and setting the vessel type to "Relay". You can simulate all those connection directly from the editor : Click the Pick A Target button : From here you can select a different DSN level, your current level is in bold and is selected by default. For simulating against in-flight relay hit the In-Flight Ships button : In this window you should see one button per flying vessel with its name and its antenna relay power, important distinction, when your connection is going through a relay only the relay antenna of this relay will be used. Sound obvious but... So if your building a relay make sure your selected type, in the main window, is set to RELAY. Speaking of building relays, you may want to simulate the antenna range of a relay before you launch it. To do so you need to add your ship/relay to the Antenna Helper Editor Ship List. Just open your vessel in the editor and click on Add Ship to the Target List in the main window. After which you can click on Editor Ships in the Pick A Target window : It works the same way as the in-flight relay list, the number between parenthesis is still the antenna relay power. But what all those numbers really mean ? They are, mostly, just distance. At a solar system scale. So big distance, like space-travel distance (we're playing a space program game, are we not ?). Anyway, to help figuring out what does numbers represent you'll find this window, by clicking on Signal Strength / Distance in the main window : In it you'll see what signal strength to expect for a distance equal to the minimum and maximum distance between the home body (Kerbin), its moon(s) and all the others planet on the solar system. Keep in mind that those distance are approximate, specially for celestial body with an highly inclined orbit. You can check the distance used by hovering your mouse on the celestial body name. In the same window you can check the signal strength to expect at any given distance, write it in the input box at the bottom of the window and click the Math ! button. Still don't get a clear representation of what those space-travel distance mean ? Save your ship in the Antenna Helper Editor Ship List, click the Add Ship to the Target List button in the main window. Quit the editor and open up the Tracking Station. Tracking Station ? Yummy ! Yes it's good. Fire Antenna Helper : From there if you select a vessel in the Tracking Station list you'll see its range circles just like in flight. You can check the range for the active connection, the DSN connection and for all relay in flight by selecting it in the GUI. To check the range of a vessel saved in the Editor click the Editor Ship List button. Now you can see the range and the signal strength of your future vessel for the different connection type. The number between parenthesis is the total antenna power of your vessel, as opposed to the Ship List in the Editor that show the relay power. About the mod This is still a work in progress, you can use it safely, it won't break any thing in your game but the value may be off. If you find a bug or have any suggestion please post it on this thread or create an issue on GitHub. Know issues : the circle of the map view jitter at high time-wrap. Almost fixed. the orientation of the map view circle, relative to the camera, is, most of the time, sub-optimal. Fixed when orbiting the DSN's planet transparency of the circle are not good, specially when they overlap. in-flight, antennas of the active ship are all considered extended. in-flight math are done only once on loading. It need to be re-done when the ship stage, dock, etc... DSN and range modifier may not be correctly set when loading a new game (after an "exit to main menu") range modifier are off when using RSS, see this thread should be fixed by v0.13, waiting confirmation circles in the Tracking Station disappear when zoomed far away Tracking Station window should be clamped to the button. Not sure actually Future plans : showing the range circle in the tracking station. Done + show range circle for ship not already launched. Done Window with NUMBERS in flight. in the editor, a window showing a list of antenna with their characteristics. in the editor, add all the in-flight relay to the list of target. Done in the editor, add relay antennas (part) to the list of target. Done re-work the GUI, possibly with the new GUI system instead of on OnGUI. map view window should be clamped to the toolbar button. Done Have a way to simulate an antenna at an arbitrary location, see this post show the occlusion of signal on the circle, see this post + move the dsn circle to the antenna position, see this post show the possible connection range along the relay orbit, see this post Credits The idea for an in-game calculator is from this thread by @Tyko. Thanks to @Poodmund for his google docs's calculator, and for the help he provide to this mod, and for writing the CommNet section of the KSP wiki. Thanks to @Skalou for his help with the math Antenna Helper icon/logo made by myself with assets from FlatIcon by Freepik. Download Antenna Helper from GitHub. You NEED Toolbar Controller too (v0.1.4.7 or higher) SpaceDock and CKAN will come once it reach a more mature state. Last version for KSP 1.2.2 / 1.3.0 Source are on Github. License is MIT. Please share your thought, suggestion, bug(s) report, 2 (or more) cents, etc... And enjoy building your craft with the exact number of antennas needed

Will do. Probably with settings for each light where you can choose your blinking preference. Sounds interesting, I'll see if I can do that.

It should be, I think I have tested it several version ago. Please report how it goes. @FellipeC and everyone that use Aviation Light : as I said before it don't work because it use custom PartModule for its lights. Not a big deal to make it work but I like to know what you expect for it. All the lights have several "lightning" option : On, Blink, Blink Twice, and another I forgot. Which option do you think will work best ? I can make it different for each light, for example the red one can blink when it's night and the white one just turn on. Tell me how you feel about it.

Maybe write the mod's name in bold with a more visible color ? And use a bullet list ?

Please also add the one that aren't updated (yet), it would be useful to have all those link in one place. Older mod can help to develop new one and this may motive some moders to maintain forgotten mod too.

It uses its own module on the light so probably not. I look into it and post an update if necessary. AGX is a very useful mod. I also have some option, in "GameData/CrewLight/PluginData/Settings.cfg", that may help you : "only_light_not_in_AG" : all light will respond to the sun, being in the Light action group or not "disable_action_group_for_light_part" : no light will be added to the Light action group The second one will only affect newly assembled vessel. I just realized I have a typo in the code that handle the settings, the "use_a_random_delay" setting, for staggered light, will fix it in the next release.

@Gaarst thanks for the new thread. I 've send a pm to @nismobg who did the old thread some days ago, he said somewhere that he have a backup of the thread, but he hasn't respond. Anyway good work. Here is my contribution : (both in the "Utility mods")

Version 1.2 is up ! On SpaceDock and Github @WuphonsReach thanks for the idea of the staggered light At a time wrap of 10 000x or more it won't work very good (not much I can do about that) but the light should go to their correct state when time slow down. Please report any issues or suggestions and enjoy

No more message saying the ship can't be loaded with "category = Engine" and the engine don't show in the part list anymore. Everything good. As said before I will miss the LFO engines but the new one look very good

On loading a save I got the message saying vessel X couldn't be loaded because Y part is missing. I haven't try to access the vessel thought, just hit alt-F4 asap before persistent.sfs got updated.

@Nertea I have issue with the "soft-deprecated" engine too. The "LV-T95-8" (orbitalEngine-25).

By nightingale from the before last devnote : So hopefully he will continue to update his mods. Anomaly Surveyor still work in 1.2.2 except for Jool contract If I remember correctly.

I have fired KSP after a month break, update all my mods (all with a .version at least) and on one ship I got a log spam when opening the USI-LS window : I have 3 crewed flight in progress and this happens only to one of them, a lander on Mun. The values look correct and the timers works so it just make the game a bit laggy when the window is opened. Is it something I can fix ? Editing persistent.sfs maybe (vessel name is "Munar 4 Crew Lander") ? Here is a zip with a log, persistent, screenshot of the vessel and of my gamedata folder.

No idea what is better performance wise. In my opinion, using one or the other depends on how often do you need to interact with the "throttlestate". Can you speak more about the mod you're planing ?

Not that I am aware of, but you can now create your own event : You can check the state of "vessel.ctrlState.mainThrottle" in every Update() or less frequently with a coroutine.

Hi @BeauZoe welcome to the forum Do you know about this mod ? With it you can load (or create) new contract. Check the second post for a list of available contract pack. There is a wiki if you want to create contracts yourself on github.

Never heard of a mod that does that but I love the idea. The "rocket check register" could also show when you gained science and rep.

I did play with those : desiredContentAspect : it's a ratio (width/height) for the kspedia window, changing it do the trick but I couldn't figure out the math to make it behave how I wanted. Actually I may have the math right now, see below AspectMode : no idea how it is supposed to be used, I try every settings, multiple time. It either does nothing or the kspedia window collapse, leaving only the top bar. Don't remember which settings does what though. borders : they are the size of each of the border window, not sure what I can do with them SetLayout() : I've tried several time to call those, after changing kspedia.RectTransform.sizeDelta, or the AspectMode (and probably others I forgot about) but it has never done anything That's what I was thinking but I couldn't find any RectTransform with the "real" size of the kspedia window. The parent of KSPedia(Clone), DialogCanvas, has its sizeDelta equal to my screen's resolution. KSPedia(Clone)'s RectTransform.sizeDelta is equal to 880*528, no matter what the resolution of the screen is (and therefor the size of the "visible" kspedia). In order to find the "real/visible" size of the kspedia window I came up with this formula : float visibleHeight = Screen.height - KSPediaAspectController.borderTop - KSPediaAspectController.screenBorder; float visibleWidth = visibleHeight * KSPediaAspectController.desiredContentAspect + KSPediaAspectController.borderLeft + KSPediaAspectController.borderRight; For info here is how I checked the size of the different RectTransform : foreach (RectTransform rt in KSPAssets.KSPedia.KSPedia.Instance.GetComponentsInChildren<RectTransform> ()) { Debug.Log ("SizeDelta of " + rt.name + " is : " + rt.sizeDelta.ToString ()); } None of which was the size of the "visible" kspedia window. So, what I could do differently is reversing the formula above in order to input the height/width I want and calculate the resulting desiredContentAspect. That may work. Sorry if I missed something in my explanation, I really tried a lot of things and don't remember all of them (my source file has something like 1000 lines of "try and missed code").

Too bad the list as a parameter don't work. Another approach : display each resource as a toggle parameter, in your script you will need to check that only one toggle is set to true at a time but that should be doable. The downside is you will end up with a big list of On/Off switch in the difficulty window, particularly with a modded game. Don't think it is very "user-friendly"...

@DMagic I've tried 5 times to answer your comment, each time I've re-read it and thought about something I haven't try so thanks for the hints As you suggest I used "Debug Stuff" to figure out what was the kspedia's hierarchy and what layout component was there, here it is : Tweaking those don't get me anywhere though. So I've tried to add a ContentSizeFitter to KSPedia(Clone) in order to make it resize to whatever I wanted, that kinda work but the bluish background won't resize horizontally and don't re-center (the left border of the kspedia stays at the same x position). I couldn't find out how to make it resize so I add a GameObject with a RectMask2D component to mask this ugly remains of the background. Last I struggle a little to find the correct math to move the resized KSPedia under the mask, for whatever reason the "real" size of the KSPedia isn't available, I think it is in KSPAsset.KSPedia.KSPediaAspectController.rt.sizeDelta but it's a private member. Thanks to an on-screen ruler I've figured out what was the math to get the width of the kspedia from the height of the screen. Next step will be to add buttons to move and resize it dynamically.

Can you use a list as a parameter ? If so you can get the list of all the resources loaded in the game and populate the parameters 's list with it. In my opinion let the user enter the name of the resource will be prone to error.

Not sure I understand, can you load the scout's texture in TextureReplacer ? If not how can you make it the default suit ?

Strange as I assume it's, basically, the same as the others. Maybe you should report it to TextureReplacer 's dev ?

The MM patch is here. It assume the path to the icons are like : "GameData/TextureReplacer/Suits/#skill#/icon.dds". The icon from PortraitStats looks upside down (when viewed in explorer with Win10), I imagine you need to turn yours too. It will be better if you could download PortraitStats and look how its icon are set. Last, you don't have a suit for scout so I used the pilot icon from PortraitStats for them, if you do one I'll update the patch. Edit : you use a red cross as symbol for the medic class, do you feel like a war criminal ?

I think you can have Firespitter as an optional dependency, thanks to ModuleManager. You bundle your mod the way you did it, aka multiple part. In the MM patch, if Firespitter is present, you add the switch texture module to the stock parachute then delete your parts.