Orbital Survey [v0.9.4 for KSP2 v0.2.1]

[Kimera Industries]

Honestly, I think this should be stock. With the game at this early stage, it's a possibility!

Edited January 5 by Kimera Industries
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[tsaven]

Am I correct in understanding that you can't actually see the surface of planets until they've been scanned? That they just appear as flat grey until you've gotten a probe to them and scanned them?

If so, I LOVE THIS MOD EVEN MORE THAN IN KSP1!!

[cromery]

I have encountered an issue with the mod. After completing a survey, region is still stuck at 0%, retrieving data. It might be me that is missing something obvious as well.

I did miss the obvious mechanic that antennas either do visual or region surveys.

Edited January 6 by cromery
There was no issue. I missed an obvious mechanic of the mod.

[GoldenCat]

I used CKAN and installed the mod as well but patch manager is having dependency issues currently. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Edit: Does anyone know when Patch Manager will be updated on CKAN? I believe it's outdated 

Edited January 6 by GoldenCat

[Falki]

9 hours ago, tsaven said:

Am I correct in understanding that you can't actually see the surface of planets until they've been scanned? That they just appear as flat grey until you've gotten a probe to them and scanned them?

Not yet, but I'm thinking of adding in a later update that bodies are pixelated in Map view: 

 

4 hours ago, GoldenCat said:

I used CKAN and installed the mod as well but patch manager is having dependency issues currently. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Edit: Does anyone know when Patch Manager will be updated on CKAN? I believe it's outdated 

I don't see anything wrong with CKAN and Patch Manager. Just tried it and it installed normally. Be sure to have an up-to-date version of CKAN, there was a new version recently

[Kimera Industries]

19 hours ago, tsaven said:

Am I correct in understanding that you can't actually see the surface of planets until they've been scanned? That they just appear as flat grey until you've gotten a probe to them and scanned them?

If so, I LOVE THIS MOD EVEN MORE THAN IN KSP1!!

I think you toggle their appearance but what do I know, I don't even have KSP2. 

One of the problems with map view in KSP1 is that you know how everything looks at the very beginning of the game. One of the first things I ever did was go to the tracking station and look at every single planet and moon. And it meant there was nothing new when I visited those places. They looked exactly like they did in map view. I agree that they should appear as maybe indistinct blobs at first, in the case of some planets with vague dark and light patches like early telescope photos. And if you send a ship there, you can straight up see what it looks like, but you have to do some sort of imaging action to add an area to the map view. 

 

[DMagic]

Cool mod 

[TysonY2]

This mod breathed a lot of life into the game for me purely being able to mask/overlay planet features. It can be monotonous exploring the same worlds but this mod captures that feeling of "progress for discovery".  It should be pretty obvious I'm thrilled at the potential of pixelated planets. I've found areas that personally interested me that I wouldn't have looked twice at without the region overlay. As others have said, this should be stock in the game.  If only Tarsier's Space Technology found it's way to KSP2...

Not that I'm in anyway suggesting a change, but I'd be curious if different resolution mapping couple be changed based on the tier of equipment used and/or survey height. If you want more than a 512x512 pixelated sphere you have to use the next tech to bump it up to 1024x1024, or 100% resolution in that area with a kerbal or respectable equipment. There's just something about not knowing what you're getting into till you get there that keeps me coming backs to mods like this. Thank you for your continued time and effort.

[Angelo Kerman]

@Falki This looks like a great addition to KSP 2. I look forward to watching how it develops. Are you considering adding Discoverables to the display as well? I like the "?" feature of SCANSat displays that showed anomalies, and something like that in Orbital Survey would be great.

[Deadly_Laser]

Ok, here's an idea. Kerbals have eyes, right? They're not very good but better than nothing. So what if just having an occupied crew module on a craft allowed you to create a "blurry" version of the physical map (with a wider FOV as you're literally just looking out the window). Of course, it's not particularly useful right now, when every antenna can scan and you get antennas almost immediately, but in a future version where you need to progress up to a certain science node to obtain proper scanning tech and where you could start with the option of not seeing any celestial body properly until you've scanned it it would probably be useful at least for early missions around Kerbin and for preliminary overviews of other bodies. Anyway, not anything urgent, just food for thought.

[Kimera Industries]

43 minutes ago, Deadly_Laser said:

Ok, here's an idea. Kerbals have eyes, right? They're not very good but better than nothing. So what if just having an occupied crew module on a craft allowed you to create a "blurry" version of the physical map (with a wider FOV as you're literally just looking out the window). Of course, it's not particularly useful right now, when every antenna can scan and you get antennas almost immediately, but in a future version where you need to progress up to a certain science node to obtain proper scanning tech and where you could start with the option of not seeing any celestial body properly until you've scanned it it would probably be useful at least for early missions around Kerbin and for preliminary overviews of other bodies. Anyway, not anything urgent, just food for thought.

Even if it's not their 'eyes' kerbals in a pod would still be able to map out a surface, Apollo-style, through photographs from handheld cameras.

[Falki]

8 hours ago, Angelo Kerman said:

@Falki This looks like a great addition to KSP 2. I look forward to watching how it develops. Are you considering adding Discoverables to the display as well? I like the "?" feature of SCANSat displays that showed anomalies, and something like that in Orbital Survey would be great.

Glad you like it. Yes, I've got DIscoverables further along the road map: https://github.com/Falki-git/OrbitalSurvey/blob/dev/src/OrbitalSurvey/Notes/TODO.cs. A bit more elaborate than SCANsat does.

[Infinite Aerospace]

On 1/5/2024 at 10:25 PM, Kimera Industries said:

Honestly, I think this should be stock. With the game at this early stage, it's a possibility!

There's a lot of this stuff should be stock to be honest, this, life support, alarm clock. I honestly don't get why it isn't, given how prevalent mods are for the first game.

[PTNLemay]

On 12/26/2023 at 6:14 PM, Falki said:

Yes, biomes changed, or rather it's that a new concept was introduced.

Copy-pasting from another server:

 

So... wait, biomes are not analogous with science areas?  In most cases they must be pretty similar though, no?

[Falki]

9 minutes ago, PTNLemay said:

So... wait, biomes are not analogous with science areas?  In most cases they must be pretty similar though, no?

They are similar, but do not align 100%. "Biomes" are used to generate the terrain, but you don't see this info as a player anywhere outside of mods. "Regions" are used for science. In any case, Orbital Survey (the mod) switched to displaying Regions instead of Biomes so you can effectively forget about Biomes

[DMagic]

On 1/5/2024 at 3:30 AM, Falki said:

That's on my TODO list. BTW this is my TODO list if anyone's interested: 

SCANsat has a relatively rudimentary slope map implementation (compares altitude from 2 neighboring pixels on a map to determine slope). It is very simple to generate if you already have altitude data, but not very useful on a full planet map, a neighboring pixel may be several kilometers away.

But if used with some type of zoom map it becomes very useful. 

It also has a mouse-over tooltip with map information, I believe that uses a much more accurate (but prohibitively expensive for a full map) method for slope information.

[FilldasBill]

Is the mod fully compatible with the “For Science” career mode?

If I have used the mod for a while and uninstall it later, can I simply continue playing with my save game without the mod or is the save game then unusable?

[Falki]

4 hours ago, DMagic said:

SCANsat has a relatively rudimentary slope map implementation (compares altitude from 2 neighboring pixels on a map to determine slope). 

I was planning on doing exactly that, comparing pixels and calulating the difference. That's good insight that it might not be useful on a full map. Thanks for the tips!

[m4ti140]

On 12/27/2023 at 12:14 AM, Falki said:

Yes, biomes changed, or rather it's that a new concept was introduced.

Copy-pasting from another server:

 

Regarding this, if I may suggest something:

• Discoverable mapping should require the other two maps to be completed first, at least in the areas discoverables are originally in
• The optimal altitude for them should be 0 m AGL (requiring aerial  survey in case of atmospheric planets) and the penalty should be precision: the map should simply show a circle, with the discoverable at random position within this circle. The lower the scanning altitude was, the smaller the circle should be.
• The site should not be identified (just ??? for name on map) until it is scanned from within a fairly small distance, say 1000m agl, or landed at and taken science from (which would pinpoint the exact position on map)

This would form a gameplay loop where orbital surveys would be used to determine general area for search and then the players would transition to more local and more precise methods until they find the exact location of the anomaly.

 

Edited January 11 by m4ti140
Reply prompt glitched out and posted same text 3 times

[Falki]

On 1/10/2024 at 8:59 AM, FilldasBill said:

Is the mod fully compatible with the “For Science” career mode?

If I have used the mod for a while and uninstall it later, can I simply continue playing with my save game without the mod or is the save game then unusable?

It's not only compatible with For Science! but it also adds to it by creating experiments that are triggered when you map 25%, 50%, 75 and 100% of the body's surface. And you get science from them.

Yes, you can uninstall the mod later and continue with your save normally.

[Falki]

v0.6.0 "There and Back Again"

• Added vessel markers, vessel names and geographic coordinates to the mapping UI
• Vessel markers are colored:
  • gray: inactive/disabled
  • red: invalid state
  • yellow: suboptimal altitude
  • green: ideal altitude
  • white: complete
• Added UI toggles for vessel names, geo coords and overlay
• Overhauled visual styles of the controls to be more in line with the stock UI
• Added UI sounds for toggle and dropdown controls

 

Edited January 12 by Falki

[Falki]

•  Fixed a bug where unloaded vessels on game load weren't performing active scanning (map wasn't immediately updated) - reported by @bmcmahonwrx

(forgot to add this to the changelog)

Edited January 13 by Falki

[fengyuan0529]

Good to see another update! Please integrate my updated localization file:

orbital_survey_localization.csv

[Falki]

2 hours ago, fengyuan0529 said:

Good to see another update! Please integrate my updated localization file:

orbital_survey_localization.csv

Thanks, will be updated in the next release!

[Jarin]

Any idea why I can't get region info to load?

Nevermind, I see now that I tried the RA-2 and RA-15, but those are both visual map only.

Still having a weird problem where scan progress resets when I switch away from the satellite.

 

Edited January 14 by Jarin