How to tell if an engine is active

[wizzlebippi]

How do I tell if an engine is active? I would like for my engine to stop producing heat and electricity when the engine is shutdown.

[zekes]

right-click, if it is producing thrust it's producing heat and electricity....

[wizzlebippi]

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I need to figure it out in a module.

[Diazo]

It's a field in the ModuleEngines module. I think it is the ModuleEngines.isOperational field specifically.

D.

[wizzlebippi]

I can't find any documentation for ModuleEngines.isOperational. Do you know where that might be or of an example where it's used?

[Diazo]

I'm not sure what you are asking, it's just a property of ModuleEngines in my Visual Studio object browser.

In terms of documentation, it's what I use to tell if an engine is firing for my Vertical Velocity mod and it's worked so far. I determined that by testing how it worked myself, there's no reliable documentation beyond what the names indicate, although the KSP API documentation project tries (it's on github), but it does have out of date information on it.

D.

[wizzlebippi]

I don't have isOperational as a property of ModuleEngines. What are you using as resources?

[sarbian]

How are you looking ? isOperational is a public property of ModuleEngines.

[landeTLS]

public bool engineIgnited for if its active.

maxThrust / finalThrust for "percentage" of output.

EngineIgnited might be outdated. May need to test it. Maybe isOperational is now used like others have said.

hope this helps.

Edited June 23, 2015 by landeTLS

[Diazo]

If I remember right, engineIgnited is true if the engine is trying to fire, isOperational is true when the engine is actually firing.

So if the engine is trying to fire, but flamed out due to lack of fuel, engineIgnited is true while isOperational is false.

I did that test months ago though so double check if you are going to use that property.

D.

[sarbian]

isOperational accounts for flameout and EngineIgnited

[wizzlebippi]

I don't doubt that ModuleEngines.isOperational is what I'm looking for, but I can't figure out how to operate it. How do I pull the status of isOperational from ModuleEngines? Is there a global resource I need as a reference, or a special way I need to define a variable?

[Diazo]

I think this is now getting into more general programming questions, but the absolute basic explaination is:

First, I'm assuming you have your programming IDE setup, including the reference to Assembly-CSharp.

Then, FlightGlobals.ActiveVessel is a static you can use to get the current vessel, the Vessel.parts list is all parts on the vessel, then the Part.modules list is all partModules on that part, a part that is an engine will have a ModuleEngine in that Part.modules list.

Then you can pull the ModuleEngines.isOperational value from there.

Is that more what you were looking for?

D.

[Crzyrndm]

// if you inherit from moduleEngines skip this step
List<ModuleEngines> e = part.Modules.GetModules<ModuleEngines>(); // a collection of all engines in this part
if (e.Any())
{
//if partmodule inherits from module engines (FX), you only need this bit (leaving out e[0])
    if (e[0].IsOperational) // if first engine in the part is running
        produceHeatAndEC();
}

Edited June 24, 2015 by Crzyrndm

[wizzlebippi]

There has to be something more fundamental that I'm missing. Here's my error using Crzyrndm's code:

Error 2 'System.Collections.Generic.List<ModuleEngines>' does not contain a definition for 'isOperational' and no extension method 'isOperational' accepting a first argument of type 'System.Collections.Generic.List<ModuleEngines>' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) C:\Users\Ben\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\Projects\Reactor\Reactor\Class1.cs 41 15 Reactor

Here are my references:

Assembly-CSharp

System

System.Core

System.Data

System.Data.DataSetExtensions

System.Xml

System.Xml.Linq

UnityEngine

Here are my using statements:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using UnityEngine;

using KSP;

Does anyone know what I am missing?

[Crzyrndm]

That sounds like you tried to get .isOperational on the list as a whole (type List<ModuleEngines>) rather than an element of the list (type ModuleEngines). You didn't skip the indexing did you? (e[0] to grab the first element from the list)

[wizzlebippi]

I did skip the index, and that fixed that error, but now I have an object reference error with Part.Modules that I can't seem to fix.

Error 1 An object reference is required for the non-static field, method, or property 'Part.Modules.get'