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[1.1.3] Orbital Decay v1.5.2 (17/07/2016) - Total Overhaul

Whitecat106

By Whitecat106
in KSP1 Mod Releases

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The-Doctor

The-Doctor

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Posted
On 6/17/2017 at 3:52 PM, ZAJC3W said:

I've dropped it from my mods list while ago as it was messing up some orbits, missing Duna by half of it's orbital period after carefully aiming to get encounter wasn't fun.

No game+save crashes for me though. But playing with 30+ ships and ~300 of debris was lagging.

Only recompiled as kessler syndrome badly needs it.

Doesyour 1.3 recompile work well without any game save destroying bugs?

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Whitecat106

Whitecat106

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Hello everyone,

I apologise for my lack of activity, this has been due to a number of factors of which I shall explain. 

- First of all, university; I simply do not have much time, especially due to my next reason. 

- Updating the mod for new versions of KSP; I am sick and tired of having to rebuild an element of the mod every time KSP updates, with no useful update log from the developers; which pretty much caused the death of my boat navigation mod with 1.0.3. Having begun modding with no experience of C# nor Unity, finding solutions to an undocumented change takes a long, and frequently, unnecessary amount of time for a trivial change to an already messily coded game. 

- Thirdly, my own interest in KSP has vanished, having played through my own historic missions to the early space shuttle age using every realistic detail, including this mod (in its last stable version), only to have the game slowly crawl through at a few fps,where a simple quick save takes almost a minute due to the ridiculously slow config file parsing built into the game even though the save file is smaller than the texture file for the orbital decay toolbar icon. With no sign of modernisation, (a touch of "we don't care now it's out of Alpha/Beta"), KSP for me has stopped being the game I started playing almost five years ago. This game is barely built for saving and loading, how can it possibly handle N-Body perturbation and still run any other mod?

 

Hence I decided no more, for the past many months I decided I would make my own unity game, built for 2017/18 and not for 2011 as KSP is.

Therefore I will be taking requests for someone to take over this mod, please send me a message and I can arrange this. 

This would also apply to my Historic Missions had I not discovered that the developers have already bulldozed over the work I put into the pack without a single comment, just a making history expansion with no mention of the community engagement in space history my mod produced - the reason the devs have made the expansion in the first place. I would have thought that over 50000 downloads of historic missions would have deserved a footnote in squads expansion - but as I along with many modders have known : the developers do not care about the modding community, the one thing that's stopped this incredibly limited stock game from being forgotten long ago. 

Thank you all for your support and help over the last three years, I hope you can appreciate my reasoning and understand my frustration.  

 

Kindest regards to all, 

Whitecat106 :) 

 

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Drew Kerman

Drew Kerman

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3 hours ago, Whitecat106 said:

Updating the mod for new versions of KSP; I am sick and tired of having to rebuild an element of the mod every time KSP updates, with no useful update log from the developers; which pretty much caused the death of my boat navigation mod with 1.0.3. Having begun modding with no experience of C# nor Unity, finding solutions to an undocumented change takes a long, and frequently, unnecessary amount of time for a trivial change to an already messily coded game. 

yea Fengist had the same problems with his maritime mod constantly getting broken each upgrade and trying to figure out how to fix it. So this is totally understandable. Shame tho, still. Best of luck on your Unity game

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linuxgurugamer

linuxgurugamer

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8 hours ago, Drew Kerman said:

yea Fengist had the same problems with his maritime mod constantly getting broken each upgrade and trying to figure out how to fix it. So this is totally understandable. Shame tho, still. Best of luck on your Unity game

It really depends on the mod.  During the upgrade to 1.3, most of my mods worked without any significant work.  One or two did require work.

Kind of expected, although the total lack of documentation (other than the KSP-API, which is mostly useless) does hinder modders a lot.

Fengist's problems were with the BoatNavigation mod, which was also done by @Whitecat106.  So it's understandable to get discouraged.

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eightiesboi

eightiesboi

Posted
Posted (edited)
On ‎7‎/‎9‎/‎2017 at 3:37 PM, Whitecat106 said:

Hello everyone,

I apologise for my lack of activity, this has been due to a number of factors of which I shall explain. 

<...>

Thank you all for your support and help over the last three years, I hope you can appreciate my reasoning and understand my frustration.  

 

Kindest regards to all, 

Whitecat106 :) 

 

You made some great mods, enhanced my gameplay, and did it for free. You have nothing to apologize for to me or any other KSP player. While I wish you were sticking around, I am grateful that you took the time to make mods in the first place, and then took time again to post on here and provide us with an update. Finally, although I have no coding ability, I especially appreciate that you specifically asked for anyone that was interested in picking up the mod to contact you, as that makes it all the more likely that another talented modder will continue these mods.

Thank you, @Whitecat106. I appreciate all you've added to the KSP community and I'm sorry to see you go.

Scott aka eightiesboi

Edited by eightiesboi
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ZAJC3W

ZAJC3W

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I do understand your reasons Whitecat106, thank you for your awesome work.

KSP needs this mod so badly, it's the reason I've installed Visualstudio!!! Sadly I have no idea of the orbital decay physics beyond residual atmosphere drag.

All I could do is keep recompiling current version and maybe smash some bugs, besides You've seen my code, I'm probably most messy "programmer" ever.

The-Doctor

I have played 1.3 120 ingame days with this mod(alongside ~40  others) and only crash was memory violation caused by steam overlay. Only bug I've noticed is, in some cases huge, difference in decay rate between active/unloaded vessel. It's caused by(forced by KSP api) difference in vessel area calculation. It's impossible(AFAIK) to get exposed parts area for unloaded vessels, i.e. all parts in service bay will be counted as affected by decaying factors -> something to fix by new maintainer.

Edited by ZAJC3W
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Marcelo Silveira

Marcelo Silveira

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On 7/12/2017 at 6:06 PM, ZAJC3W said:

All I could do is keep recompiling current version and maybe smash some bugs

That's very good. This mod already simulates orbital decay quite well for a game like KSP.
In order to accurately simulate orbital decay it would be necessary a complete overhaul of KSP's gravity handling.

 

On 7/12/2017 at 6:06 PM, ZAJC3W said:

Only bug I've noticed is, in some cases huge, difference in decay rate between active/unloaded vessel. It's caused by(forced by KSP api) difference in vessel area calculation.

This is fine. The reentry time due to orbital decay is a bit unpredictable. IRL we can only calculate the impact point (and reentry time) just a few days or weeks in advance due to upper atmosphere variations.

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Maeyanie

Maeyanie

Posted
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On 2017-07-12 at 5:06 PM, ZAJC3W said:

It's impossible(AFAIK) to get exposed parts area for unloaded vessels, i.e. all parts in service bay will be counted as affected by decaying factors -> something to fix by new maintainer.

It should be possible to get the exposed part area when the vessel is loaded, and cache it somewhere for when it's not loaded.

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Starwaster

Starwaster

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22 hours ago, Marcelo Silveira said:

This is fine. The reentry time due to orbital decay is a bit unpredictable. IRL we can only calculate the impact point (and reentry time) just a few days or weeks in advance due to upper atmosphere variations.

There's a difference between what you're describing and an outright bug consistently causes more drag to the vessel than would otherwise happen

3 hours ago, Maeyanie said:

It should be possible to get the exposed part area when the vessel is loaded, and cache it somewhere for when it's not loaded.

The best place to cache that would probably be when the vessel goes on rails. There's a GameEvent for that.

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incrediblekarma

incrediblekarma

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On 7/9/2017 at 4:37 PM, Whitecat106 said:

Hello everyone,

I apologise for my lack of activity, this has been due to a number of factors of which I shall explain.../

\...Kindest regards to all, 

Whitecat106 :) 

 

This was a great idea for a mod and turned out to be a great mod. I really appreciate the work you put into it. It's nearly my bedtime, so I'm not feeling especially wordy, but I wanted to at least say something. Great job, might have been the most interesting mod I have had that didn't add parts. Thanks for all your hard work.

 

On 7/9/2017 at 4:37 PM, Whitecat106 said:

\... I decided I would make my own unity game, built for 2017/18 and not for 2011 as KSP is.

And if you do, please come back and let us know. I'd have interest.

Thanks again!

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Syczek

Syczek

Posted
Posted
On 12.07.2017 at 11:06 PM, ZAJC3W said:

I do understand your reasons Whitecat106, thank you for your awesome work.

KSP needs this mod so badly, it's the reason I've installed Visualstudio!!! Sadly I have no idea of the orbital decay physics beyond residual atmosphere drag.

All I could do is keep recompiling current version and maybe smash some bugs, besides You've seen my code, I'm probably most messy "programmer" ever.

The-Doctor

I have played 1.3 120 ingame days with this mod(alongside ~40  others) and only crash was memory violation caused by steam overlay. Only bug I've noticed is, in some cases huge, difference in decay rate between active/unloaded vessel. It's caused by(forced by KSP api) difference in vessel area calculation. It's impossible(AFAIK) to get exposed parts area for unloaded vessels, i.e. all parts in service bay will be counted as affected by decaying factors -> something to fix by new maintainer.

Care to share with urs compiled version??

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ZAJC3W

ZAJC3W

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Posted (edited)

@Syczek, care to look one page back?

On 2017-6-17 at 7:17 PM, ZAJC3W said:

I've compiled latest code from github and it's not loading at all, it's in between major updates code.

Last known working source for 1.2.2 is running, but GIU isn't showing up properly, If anyone knows what has changed 1.2->1.3 GUI wise I would much appreciate help.

 

I'm an idiot, .dll without Icons won't show correct GUI

Orbital Decay 1.53 compiled for 1.3

Same version as for 1.2.2, unzip inside GameData folder

Module Manager required, not included.

for non google users link here

On 2017-7-19 at 4:17 PM, Starwaster said:

The best place to cache that would probably be when the vessel goes on rails. There's a GameEvent for that.

Can you be more specific? I know there's API reference but why experiment if you know exactly what event to use.

Edited by ZAJC3W
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Starwaster

Starwaster

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1 hour ago, ZAJC3W said:

Can you be more specific? I know there's API reference but why experiment if you know exactly what event to use.

First hook into the game events, say in OnStart or Start (if the code isn't in a PartModule then you will need to do this in Start) 

        public override void OnStart(PartModule.StartState state)
        {
            GameEvents.onVesselGoOnRails.Add(OnVesselGoOnRails);
            GameEvents.onVesselGoOffRails.Add(OnVesselGoOffRails);
        }

        public void OnVesselGoOnRails(Vessel v)
        {
          // do stuff here
        }

        public void OnVesselGoOffRails(Vessel v)
        {
          // if you need to do anything when going off rails then do it here
        }

 

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ZAJC3W

ZAJC3W

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This game is bloody annoying. Sorted area calculations and I'm storing it using PartModule data, but now found that Vessel.GetTotalMass() is returning semi random numbers for unloaded vessels screwing everything.

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ZAJC3W

ZAJC3W

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@AlekM As far as I can see Nbody calculation code and GUI menus are only place holders for a code that will sadly never be finished. Feel free to test, and report back.

New update: 

Fixed null ref exception when switched to a vessel/debris without controllable module (probe core or crewed compartment)
Fixed decay rate variation between loaded and unloaded vessel
When upgrading have to fly each vessel to take advantage of this fix, vessels within physics range are affected.
Relay Vessel type added to GUI

Tested upgrading on heavily modded save, but PLEASE BACK UP YOUR SAVES!!!!

 

Edited by ZAJC3W
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AlekM

AlekM

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9 hours ago, ZAJC3W said:

 

@AlekM As far as I can see Nbody calculation code and GUI menus are only place holders for a code that will sadly never be finished. Feel free to test, and report back.

1

Actually I guess that is fine, since Principa would control the gravitational drifts, and Orbital Decay will apply aerodynamic drag and radiation pressure. If it was the other way around, we'd have gravitational drifts applied twice, which wouldn't be accurate, right?

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Drasive

Drasive

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Posted

I would be willing to maintaing releases for KSP 1.2.2.
What is the general state of the mod? Is it functional or are there any major bugs? Unfinished features are fine for me, as long as they don't interfere with normal operation.

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ZAJC3W

ZAJC3W

Posted
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It's fully functional, bugs I can see are:

 - ship left on trajectory entering atmosphere(below ~60k on kerbin) will be deleted when switched to another Vessel, have to babysit every moon return/aero braking flight. Fixing will require major rewrite of decay handling.

- sometimes list of vessels is lost when switching vessels, it seems to affect GUI only, all background processing is still working.

- nuisance more than bug, no click trough protection and window position not persistent.

I still have 1.2.2 on HDD I will compile it for 1.2.2

done:

https://github.com/zajc3w/OrbitalDecay/releases

Edited by ZAJC3W
Recompiled
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SpaceFarm

SpaceFarm

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Posted (edited)

Hello,

I've just add orbital decay in my ksp 1.3 (without any other mod) but I have some bugs :

- The orbital decay time countdown don't write the good time before decay (sometimes it works great, sometimes not)

- It doesn't work with a vessel with an higher altitude than 300 km (no decay and >1000 years is said)

- I have a mascon issue when I click on toggle decay rate. It can be a problem with the mascon system ?

Thank you if you can find a solution, I will try to search in the code and testing with other settings (PS: I have switched off orbital drift compensation) and thank you also for this very great mod !

Edited by SpaceFarm
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