0.90 Kerbal Weather Systems! Alpha 0.5.3 WIP! (Jan 2)

[Fox Loco]

Hello again! i've tested with RO and the clouds seem to work fine, in the China's launch site, wich is at 7500m the clouds were covering the mountains flowing to the ground, very beautyful, but i couldn't find the GUI to change the wind config tho. i use the toolbar mod.

What is API btw? hehehe

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Edited January 2, 2015 by Fox Loco

[silverfox8124]

@FoxLoco, You don't change the wind, the wind changes you! Also, I could be misusing the term API, but what I mean is: "A class or series of classes fit for the use and advantage of others when referencing your library(.dll)" So that way you can check the wind speed in your code, if you were to code something.

[theonegalen]

So are you integrating with the new version of EVE coming out soon? Some of the things coming out of the EVE Overhaul dev thread are amazing and it would be wonderful to see tornadoes, etc, rolling out along a KWS storm front.

[silverfox8124]

@theonegalen, Rbray and I haven't really gotten to discussing the new EVE that much, however I will have to take a look at what it's come out with so far and see if it'd be of any use. I'm not aiming to implement things that wouldn't benefit the end user. My mod will be quite something on performance generally, as I'm not making whimsical weather, but a potato-sized weather simulator. The storms will come in due time when I get everything all worked out with the cell code and having proper interactions between the cells.

[MasseFlieger]

Hi SilverFox,

I love your mod, have a couple of questions if you can help me:

1. wind speeds are often very strong, upwards of 30-70kph cross winds, causing for very challenging Jeb moments - typically I would expect to see in calm days light winds, is there any configuration that I can change min/max (other than the wind storms option)?

2. the wind speed reported in your UI is vastly different than that of the Anemometer. see here:

perhaps Im not using the mod correctly, is this an issue?

[silverfox8124]

The wind speeds at one point didn't match, the one on the anemometer is in km/h and the one in the UI is m/s it seems. I did not notice it was as such when I released it, my bad. And also, on your point about strong winds, yes, I literally had no idea what was making them so strong tbh. They were supposed to be from -5 - +5 m/s (~18km/h)at most, but instead they went on to be upwards of 70km/h, again, have no idea what's happening there.

On better news, I'm currently working on getting the atmospheric layering for the cells so that global cooling and warming may come into effect, day/night cycles to help with that, and adding in the coriolis effect to the winds. Today I got the cell Albedo changing moreorless properly. Tomorrow(Jan 9th) I will be layering the atmospheres properly so that they somewhat match that of the ISA(International Standard Atmosphere), and can be used for calculations, and eventually, calculation and simulation of wind!

A fun ride is ahead, enjoy the fun wind while it lasts!

~SilverFox8124

PS. I just realized you don't have the 3 or 4 cloud layers in that screenshot, are you sure you're using the latest version of KWS, or did you manually remove them?

Edited January 9, 2015 by silverfox8124

[sober667]

im close to RAM limit(HUGE amount of mods ) so im using it with DX11 and ATM is any way to make just a little less RAM-hitting?

[silverfox8124]

@sober667, I'm working on ways to try and reduce the RAM, but it's quite hard to do in this situation, as there needs to at least be weather existing on other planets, else, there would be no weather on a planet. The only option I'm seeing currently is to give you guys the option to disable weather for a planet? What do you guys think about that?

The thing is, weather just can't simply *not* happen at a specific time, I can't turn off specific cells, because then the neighbouring cells go off that "off" cell's data to get temps and pressures and such. Having a weather simulator with a little impact is tough, and damn near impossible to do right, but I'm trying my best to conjure up ideas for reducing impact, such as less CPU usage by not having all the planets being simulated at a given time, only the one you are orbiting.

I'm also adding in a Settings GUI on the main menu for adjusting things like the grid level, which determines how big or small the grid is, this would affect RAM footprint directly, but I'm standing by that the grid shouldn't have a level smaller than 5(the level it has now) simply because of how weather happens and how it needs certain areas to be certain ways for weather phenomena to happen. I'm also adding in a way of reducing CPU usage via making n amount of cells being updated per weather tick (which is also adjustable) instead of *every* cell being updated every weather tick.

Optimizations will come along the way, that's almost inevitable, but the next update will introduce more RAM usage(most likely) from now adding in more layers of cells for proper atmospheric calculations.

Again, optimizing this can be quite the challenge, and having only one brain come up with optimization ideas can be pretty blinding sometimes, so suggestions are welcomed and will be considered.

TL;DR: Weather Simulators are hard, More RAM usage to come, optimizations too, later, and suggestions pl0x

~SilverFox8124

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

im close to RAM limit(HUGE amount of mods ) so im using it with DX11 and ATM is any way to make just a little less RAM-hitting?

OpenGL can knock a few hundred more MB off of your RAM usage, possibly at the cost of some FPS. Also, take a look in your ATM cache -- if there are any folders larger than a few dozen MB, there are probably some normal maps that aren't being compressed (though compressing them will cause some loss of sharp detail). You can tell ATM to compress them by making a config like this:

ACTIVE_TEXTURE_MANAGER_CONFIG
{
    folder = *whatever*
    enabled  = true
}

[silverfox8124]

The thing is, my mod isn't heavily based on Textures, it's 99% data. Doubles, floats, ints bools, and other data types are being stored and calculated, so using any sort of texture reducer or memory management shouldn't have an effect on the majority of my mod's RAM.

[SmashBrown]

Well hopefully all these niggles will be non existent when we get unity 5.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

The thing is, my mod isn't heavily based on Textures, it's 99% data. Doubles, floats, ints bools, and other data types are being stored and calculated, so using any sort of texture reducer or memory management shouldn't have an effect on the majority of my mod's RAM.

Sure, but sober667 mentioned having lots of other mods -- my suggestions may help reduce the memory load of those, thus leaving more room for weather.

Also, a weather vane would be a great science tool. I'm not sure what critter the Kerbals might use -- perhaps a Kucco, or a Kraken, or a rocket (the rocket from the KSP logo might be cool). "The weathervane twists wildly in the storm."

[DaMichel]

silverfox, i think what you are doing is awesome but would you consider making a light version which fakes the whole weather simulation with closed formulas? I just think that basically doing a weather forecast simulation may be a bit too computationally demanding for the sake of just having a bit of wind to make flying more interesting

[silverfox8124]

@DaMichel, To make a whimsical weather system is not my goal with KWS, I *may* make one later on, after I'm done with KWS, but that's a big if, simply because magical weather doesn't interest me. And trust me, so far it won't be too demanding on your toaster

[silverfox8124]

Btw, if any of you thought 70km/h winds are crazy, I'm currently getting >8000km/h winds

[Darren9]

70km/h is enough to deal with for me I think Is there/could there be some way to "look out the window" and asses the wind/weather from the VAB/SPH before making the trek out to the runway and ending up sat there with a craft that can't possibly take off in the conditions you find?

[silverfox8124]

@Darren9, when weather tracking becomes a thing, I'll have a GUI that comes up on the Space Center view to let you know of the weather around the globe, the GUI in the VAB will be for measuring EC generated from wind turbines on craft, resource capacity, weather tracking abilities, and data bandwidth.

[DaMichel]

@DaMichel, To make a whimsical weather system is not my goal with KWS, I *may* make one later on, after I'm done with KWS, but that's a big if, simply because magical weather doesn't interest me. And trust me, so far it won't be too demanding on your toaster

Okay then.

On the other hand i realize that i would like to test vehicles in specific wind conditions. So something even simpler than what i requested would be nice to have. Basically like the very beginning of Kerbal Weather Sytems where you just set a constant wind speed and maybe some turbulence. When i have time and feel like doing so i will just make this for myself using the old KWS as basis.

[silverfox8124]

@DaMichel, Hmm.. Testing facilities would be nice.. Perhaps if there was a wind tunnel or weather testing facility of sorts? The idea of having a testing facility, where you put your vessel inside it, and then manually create the conditions is something that *could* be done... But for now, that is on the back burner. I shall add that to my Wishlist. However, please take into consideration the Copyright license KWS has/had and all I ask is for you to respect it.

Also, on the note of turbulence, that is something I could probably add without *too* much hassle, but it's not of significant priority currently. This mod is still Alpha, and probably will be for a few months until things start coming along better.

As for progress update, I just changed the WeatherCell class into a struct, and am working on going through all those changes and such. I'm sorry to say, but it's going to be a decent chunk of time before the 6.0 comes out, but when it does come out, it will be gloriously mediocre.

[pingopete]

Hey creator, I was thinking of including this for RVE (RSS) and in particular for Venus, which has pretty intense wind speeds up to 355km/h however it wouldn't be this great at ground level, and trying to land/take off/EVA in those kinds of winds would be impossible. So I ask this; would it be possible to allow some logarithmic wind speed decrease with decreasing altitude, to better replicate high altitude winds?

Cheers again for the mod,

P

[Drew Kerman]

putting in a plea for Blizzy toolbar support. AppLauncher is just not a feasible sole target at the moment because it becomes too crowded, too quick. Soon my top-center UI widget will be overrun!

[silverfox8124]

@Gaiiden, I'd like to get the stock app launcher up and running first before moving to blizzy's toolbar. Also, if the button is lost, it's alright, just press ESC and it pops up automatically for some reason unknown...

@pingopete, the high(er) altitude high winds are caused by less friction being had against the earth's surface that lower atmospheric layers have, and I'm *hoping* to include friction as a factor, but that could perhaps be for 6.1, right now I'm focused on getting my cells to stack, layer and update properly with proper values, which is a task in itself... Also, I'm quite sure that the decrease in wind speed is logarithmic with altitude... It's a series of calculations and calls to surrounding points in space that gives you your answer of wind speed and direction.

Weather isn't easy, it'll take time to get good. Also, it doesn't make my job any easier that our knowledge on climates of other planets isn't as "full" as our knowledge of earth's climates and wind patterns. I also can't apply earth's values to Laythe because it's atmosphere is a metric f* ton of salt and it has very little land to it.

[DaMichel]

Did it. This is a polished up version of your first release. No fancy stuff.

https://github.com/DaMichel/KerbalWind/releases/download/R1/KerbalWindR1.zip

https://github.com/DaMichel/KerbalWind

I'm not sure where to put it. Do you want to put it in the OP until KerbalWeatherSystem is more stable? I'm planning to add a bit of random noise for turbulence. Apart from that i think it is already done.

Beside, you will see that i (re)wrote virtually everything by myself, using KerbalWeatherSystem.cs as starting point, i have to admit. I'm no lawyer, but i think it is fair if i claim it as my intellectual property, or whatever, and put it under GPL, okay?

Edited January 17, 2015 by DaMichel

[silverfox8124]

@DaMichel, Neat work you've done. It'd fit well with a turbulence/ wind tunnel facility. However, in your code, you reference the navball, and this is unnecessary. You just go:

Vessel vessel = FlightGlobals.ActiveVessel;

Vector3 Up = vessel.upAxis.normalized;

Both ferram4 and I use this code to get the up vector relative to surface, no need to use the navball. But I do commemorate your use of other methods.

I however, am not too entirely sure about license conflicts, as I operate under ARR(All Rights Reserved) and I don't know if that conflicts with GPL.

However, since you did copy-paste my source, then edit it as necessary, you MUST include my license in yours. That is, you must mention me in your license, and include source of where you got the code from, that is what I ask of you. Also, my thread isn't a place for your mod to be put, I suggest making your own thread for such, and in such, I also request that you link to this thread, or in the very least, to my github. I shall get back to you on any other matter regarding such that comes up.

If only we could make our own buildings, I would be in full agreeance to collaberate with what you have and build a wind tunnel facility. I wonder if this can be done already, however I do not know..

Next step I suggest would be making a text field for the wind speed input. I also recommend a Lerp function to go from wind direction to wind direction, see my Wind.cs class for more code example on how I do things.

Best of luck~

~SilverFox8124

[silverfox8124]

Also, the line: "The following code is based off the work of SilverFox8124, and used with permission under license of: All Right's Reserved, 2014(copyright symbol)"

would be acceptable to put in the license.

~SilverFox8124