[1.0.4] ESLD Jump Beacons - [Dev 0.6a]

[FatherLawrence]

On 12/13/2015 at 1:35 PM, Stoney3K said:

I think that if you want to do interstellar jumps, you could scale them with the same dynamics but in Kerbol orbit only

That sounds great, actually. Much more difficult to use than normal beacons, but with the added benefit of interstellar travel.

On 12/13/2015 at 1:35 PM, Stoney3K said:

you can drop an array of drills/ISRUs anywhere on your favorite planet and timewarp until the tanks are full, haul the fuel off the surface, and repeat. This is anything but a challenge since time is not a limited commodity in stock KSP.

When playing with a full constellation of time-sensitive mods like KCT, State Funding, TAC-LS, etc, just time-warping till full is a little less feasible, haha.

[Thegamer211]

Will the mod be updated to 1.0.5?

Does it work with 1.0.5 as it is right now?

[Crampman]

It does not seems that this mod will ever be updated, and, unfortunately, it does not work with 1.0.5

(The beacons won't show any UI, making them useless)

[FreeThinker]

On 7-2-2016 at 2:05 PM, Crampman said:

It does not seems that this mod will ever be updated, and, unfortunately, it does not work with 1.0.5

(The beacons won't show any UI, making them useless)

Well not completely. we can still incorporate some of ideas and code into other Warp engines. I'm particular interested in it's method of detecting gravity wells. I might for instance limit the speed around gravitywell, forcing you out of warp if you attempt crash into a planet.

Edit: The idea of warp beaken is also intresting. It might be a very effective way to aligning angular momentum for warpschip traveling between planets in the same or seperate solar systems

Edited February 12, 2016 by FreeThinker

[Crampman]

Should anybody interested, I did make this works with 1.0.5 :

- First I had to get rid of the beacons models, since they seems to have broken meshes. I made clones of the techboxes, with the charasteristics of the beacons.

- Then, I could not make any jump, no active beacons could be found. So I took the source files, gracefully provided with the mod, and recompiled them. Tadaa

I could then revive the long-dead beacon network of my save !

[Judicator81]

3 hours ago, Crampman said:

Should anybody interested, I did make this works with 1.0.5 :

Awesome! Can you upload it somewhere?

[Crampman]

I still need to fix the parts in a non save-breaking way, but there is the fixed dll

[Booots]

On 2016-02-29 at 7:51 PM, Crampman said:

- First I had to get rid of the beacons models, since they seems to have broken meshes. I made clones of the techboxes, with the charasteristics of the beacons.

Does anyone know why the beacon models are broken in 1.0.5? I kind of liked the look of them. Is there any way of editing them with what is distributed in the mod?

[Luxord52]

40 minutes ago, Booots said:

Does anyone know why the beacon models are broken in 1.0.5? I kind of liked the look of them. Is there any way of editing them with what is distributed in the mod?

You'd have to pull out the models and drastically reduce ther face count, the issue was that the old models had basically too many faces, and so for whatever reason, 1.0.5 hated them. I might actually look into making a new set of models for this if someone chooses to maintain this. 

[Booots]

I'd be willing to maintain it if someone fixed the models. I've never done any modding for KSP beyond configs and stuff, but I have a pretty strong coding background so I could try to pick it up. I was considering it before because I wanted to add configurability to the jump costs and resource beyond what's hard-coded right now. Also to fix a bug I noticed a while back. I digress, Luxord, if you could do models, I'll do code. As long as there's no license issues with us taking over while TMarkos is away? Can we assume implied consent?

[Luxord52]

46 minutes ago, Booots said:

I'd be willing to maintain it if someone fixed the models. I've never done any modding for KSP beyond configs and stuff, but I have a pretty strong coding background so I could try to pick it up. I was considering it before because I wanted to add configurability to the jump costs and resource beyond what's hard-coded right now. Also to fix a bug I noticed a while back. I digress, Luxord, if you could do models, I'll do code. As long as there's no license issues with us taking over while TMarkos is away? Can we assume implied consent?

It is under GPL2, so as long as we give TMarkos credit, we should be good maintaining it. I'll try and get some time this weekend to go make at the very least preliminary models so that we can try and get people up and warping again.

[Proteus]

On 2/29/2016 at 8:31 PM, Crampman said:

I still need to fix the parts in a non save-breaking way, but there is the fixed dll

so if i get the mod for 1.0.5 i just replace the new dll file and the mod will work in 1.0.5?or is there something else i need to do?

[Stone Blue]

Has anyone tried to contact @TMarkos , to see whats up?... He/she was last on the forums only a couple months ago... ???

[Booots]

I've got a dev build set up and working on my KSP 1.0.4 installation. Just waiting on the models to be fixed and I'll update to 1.0.5 and make sure it still works.

I've also added the ability to define new beacon types from part config files. This works by defining the different coefficients and exponents used in the jump cost calculation. Now we aren't limited to just the original 4 types. The IB1 (self-jumping beacon) is a little different from the other three, though, so for now it's the only one that can jump itself. There was some talk a page or so back about interstellar jumping being prohibitively expensive, so now anyone who wants to can define a new beacon that is optimized for super-far distances. I don't play with multiple star systems so I don't know the order of magnitude for the jump distance or I'd do it myself.

I am also trying to fix a bug that keeps altering my near beacon's orbit. HyperEdit seems to cause the same bug when I use it to move my vessel instead of jumping so it may have something to do with going on rails and changing orbit. They use the same mechanism as this for altering orbits so I submitted an issue to them (since they're way better than me at modding KSP) and I'll see what fix they use or if it's just me.

While I've got the code open, are there any requests for features or bugs to fix?

[iliketrains0pwned]

On 3/7/2016 at 6:07 PM, Booots said:

I've got a dev build set up and working on my KSP 1.0.4 installation. Just waiting on the models to be fixed and I'll update to 1.0.5 and make sure it still works.

I've also added the ability to define new beacon types from part config files. This works by defining the different coefficients and exponents used in the jump cost calculation. Now we aren't limited to just the original 4 types. The IB1 (self-jumping beacon) is a little different from the other three, though, so for now it's the only one that can jump itself. There was some talk a page or so back about interstellar jumping being prohibitively expensive, so now anyone who wants to can define a new beacon that is optimized for super-far distances. I don't play with multiple star systems so I don't know the order of magnitude for the jump distance or I'd do it myself.

I am also trying to fix a bug that keeps altering my near beacon's orbit. HyperEdit seems to cause the same bug when I use it to move my vessel instead of jumping so it may have something to do with going on rails and changing orbit. They use the same mechanism as this for altering orbits so I submitted an issue to them (since they're way better than me at modding KSP) and I'll see what fix they use or if it's just me.

While I've got the code open, are there any requests for features or bugs to fix?

I have an idea for simplifying interstellar jumps. With all the different planetary mods and galaxy mods out there, it would be ridiculously time consuming to calculate the distance between every star system. I suggest making a part called the "Interstellar compensator" which would scale the fuel requirement between stellar sphere's of influence to that of an interplanetary jump. In order to do so, however, you would need to attach the part to beacons located in the outskirts of both the target star system and the origin star system. Once the "beacon bridge" is set up and linked, you would use it kind of like a Mass Relay from Mass Effect.

Edited March 28, 2016 by iliketrains0pwned

[Booots]

On 2016-03-28 at 11:58 AM, iliketrains0pwned said:

I have an idea for simplifying interstellar jumps. With all the different planetary mods and galaxy mods out there, it would be ridiculously time consuming to calculate the distance between every star system. I suggest making a part called the "Interstellar compensator" which would scale the fuel requirement between stellar sphere's of influence to that of an interplanetary jump. In order to do so, however, you would need to attach the part to beacons located in the outskirts of both the target star system and the origin star system. Once the "beacon bridge" is set up and linked, you would use it kind of like a Mass Relay from Mass Effect.

That could be done, with one catch. I'd somehow have to figure out which celestial bodies are stars (or system parent bodies in the case of black holes) so that players can't just install one of these on every beacon and suddenly have super cheap jumps in-system (which is something I'd totally do as a player ). Do you use multiple star systems? Do you know how the mods demarcate which bodies are stars?

Edited March 30, 2016 by Booots
Use fancy kerbal smiley :p

[Booots]

Here's a link to the GitHub repository I opened with my fork of the ESLD beacons for those of you who are interested in downloading the updated DLL. I don't guarantee anything about it working, but it works for me so far on 1.0.5. The models are broken, however, so I still need someone to fix them. Their collision mesh is broken, I think, because I can't right click on them. Anyone interested in defining a new beacon type should look at the source file ESLDBeacon.cs for the equation used as well as a description of the parameters and coefficients used.

[iliketrains0pwned]

23 minutes ago, Booots said:

That could be done, with one catch. I'd somehow have to figure out which celestial bodies are stars (or system parent bodies in the case of black holes) so that players can't just install one of these on every beacon and suddenly have super cheap jumps in-system (which is something I'd totally do as a player ). Do you use multiple star systems? Do you know how the mods demarcate which bodies are stars?

While it was a good mod when it first came out, multiple star systems hasn't been updated since 0.9. But a much more recent mod, called Galactic Neighborhood, has really pushed forward from where MSS left off. It's a great platform for hosting a lot of planet packs by adding them as separate star systems in the game, so any mods that are compatible with it would be compatible with the bug fix:

Aside from that, Sigma88 has made quite a few mods that modify the Kerbol system. If anyone knows how to, it's him. I personally don't know what separates a star from a planet, but I think it involves a few settings in the Kopernicus config file.

[Luxord52]

47 minutes ago, iliketrains0pwned said:

While it was a good mod when it first came out, multiple star systems hasn't been updated since 0.9. But a much more recent mod, called Galactic Neighborhood, has really pushed forward from where MSS left off. It's a great platform for hosting a lot of planet packs by adding them as separate star systems in the game, so any mods that are compatible with it would be compatible with the bug fix:

Aside from that, Sigma88 has made quite a few mods that modify the Kerbol system. If anyone knows how to, it's him. I personally don't know what separates a star from a planet, but I think it involves a few settings in the Kopernicus config file.

I've looked at Galaxy and Kop's cfgs, and they (and presumably the planetary system in general) calls bodies, and then gives them a referend body for their orbit. It's not something that explicitly calls a sun a sun, but it should let us make a patch for compatibility, using the new system's sun's reference body.

The call Kopernicus makes goes something like so:

Body

{

        name = BodyName

        Orbit

        {

                   referenceBody = ReferenceBodyName

        }

}

 

Should be easy enough to use. I hope.

[Luxord52]

We have a couple of options for the models, I can go with basically replicating the old ones, or trying to go a completely new direction. I'd prefer to go with the old models, because I'm pretty sure the problem lies in the collision mesh (haven't had a chance to look at the old models/collisions yet). Opinions? If we go a new route, someone is going to need to texture these guys.

[Booots]

On 2016-04-10 at 1:59 PM, Luxord52 said:

We have a couple of options for the models, I can go with basically replicating the old ones, or trying to go a completely new direction. I'd prefer to go with the old models, because I'm pretty sure the problem lies in the collision mesh (haven't had a chance to look at the old models/collisions yet). Opinions? If we go a new route, someone is going to need to texture these guys.

I'm no texturer and I'm kind of a fan of the old design so I'd be happy with just fixing the collision mesh.

[DarkGod]

Oh somebody is resurrecting this mod? That's super cool!

 

As for interstellar travel I would love to see that yeah. I've never modded for KSP but I've read some kopernicus docs, this file may be of interrest: https://github.com/Kopernicus/KopernicusExamples/blob/master/KopernicusExamples/Creating%20New%20Bodies/Star/Nemesis.cfg

It's the definition for an example star, I don't know KSP API but I imagine there is a way to check some of those fields, and it's likely that no bodies but stars have a "SolarPowerCurve" set.

[rasta013]

I'd love to help with coding or modelling...except I'm neither. 

What I am good at though is testing and as you start rolling out changes for 1.1 I'll be more than happy to dive in and help test this as much as I can. Started playing with this back in 1.0.4 and really enjoyed goofing with it but never ran a long term save.  Looking forward to seeing what new minds start adding to this excellent idea...

[Booots]

Oh cool! Apparently 1.1 actual is out! Once a few of my 'must-have' mods get updated I'll download it and try compiling this for 1.1.

[Luxord52]

1 minute ago, Booots said:

Oh cool! Apparently 1.1 actual is out! Once a few of my 'must-have' mods get updated I'll download it and try compiling this for 1.1.

Well, that's the sign for me to take a kick in the ass and get those models out. I'll do my best for this next weekend, but it is the end of the college semester, so I may not quite have enough time.