Orbiter Video Thread

[Proximus]

I'm trying to get better at this movie making business, so here is my next attempt for your viewing pleasure (this one's even got a soundtrack :blink

Unfortunately the youtube conversion seems to lose a lot of quality. It looks better in the original.

Wow, I can only watch the vid from my phone at the moment but most of what I saw is photo realistic!

Increadable work Martin, thank you.

 

[jangofett287]

Can't wait to smash a few XR2's into the walls of the grand canyon before I get the hang of racing though it.

 

[martins]

That terrain collision at the end, amazing! Was that a UCGO rover or a native vessel?

A native vessel (I don't really know about UCGO and all those newfangled interfaces ). I borrowed Kev's mesh and textures, and wrote a quick module for it to fine-tune the touchdown-convex hull and the suspension parameters. Current vessels without modification don't work too well with the new impact model. Even so, the rover behaved a bit erratically. I used the best bit for the video. Immediately after the scene you see here, it did an almighty bounce and landed on its backside, decapitating the astronaut. Of course, the LRV probably wasn't designed to be driven at 80km/h.

 

[martins]

I have some questions about the terrain: How is it managed? KSP looses a great number of img/sec because the terrain model is not optimized, and the whole planet has a good level of detail.

I don't know of course how KSP implements it, but the quadtree model I am using is fairly straightforward to implement, and its performance isn't dependent on the total coverage and the maximum resolution. The LOD mechanism maintains an approximately constant number of tiles to be rendered (closer to the ground -> smaller field of view -> higher tile resolution). The loading of textures and heightmaps, and the construction of the tile meshes is done on a separate thread, so that the simulator performance isn't affected (although it can take a few seconds to build a scene to its desired resolution when panning the camera quickly).

How can we add some features to it? Via heightmaps, some sort of terrain mesh?

I haven't really thought of the best method for extending the maps. The textures and heightmaps for each tile are now stored in individual files, so it will be quite easy to replace them on an individual basis, or add higher resolution ones.

 

[Artlav]

Even so, the rover behaved a bit erratically. I used the best bit for the video. Immediately after the scene you see here, it did an almighty bounce and landed on its backside, decapitating the astronaut. Of course, the LRV probably wasn't designed to be driven at 80km/h.

Nice!
How does it behave under time compression?

Back in good old days i was driving a DG on the Moon with an add-on collision system, and it was quite bouncy even just at 10x:

I wonder how does it compare with an in-engine implementation?
In my case, the stopping block was that i couldn't backtrack the simulation or subdivide steps without overriding your whole physics engine.
So, it was either collisions or time accel, making the whole collision system quite useless.

 

[martins]

Nice!
How does it behave under time compression?

Well, I do subdivide the state updates between frames, but even then, more than a 100x time compression while a vessel is in ground contact will probably go badly. It's even worse if there is a large number of vessels crawling on the ground, because at some point the physics updates will become the bottleneck of the frame update, leading to longer and longer frame intervals, until the whole thing grinds to a halt. I need to think a bit more about what limiters to put in place.

Spreading the vessel updates onto separate threads would help, but this will require a major overhaul of the whole engine, since it's nowhere near threadsafe at the moment.

 

[thepenguin]

That's an awesome orbiter video, martins!

Does this mean that we could potentially land vessels on non-flat runways now (i.e. going up/down a hill for launching space planes)?

Also, is there any estimated time for when we could get our hands on a beta version?

 

[dumbo2007]

Well, for vessels in contact with the ground, I think that time acceleration should disable all physical forces. At the end of every time step at say 10x speed, the vessel's position can be computed.

If its position is ending up below the terrain after this calculation then put it directly above this spot on the terrain. Its very likely that the vessels position will always end up below the terrain at 10x speeds anyway if the terrain is highly uneven.

That still brings up some issues though :
1. What if the vessel was landing and expects friction force to slow it down, then after 10x acceleration, it may expect to stop after a few secs.
2. What if it was running into a hill, then the vessel should crash. Maybe this can be handled while calculating the vessel's final position after the time step. If the line between the 2 positions intersects a hill then its curtains !

 

[Yurik]

Who knows, how to fix texture shaking on model?

 

[Donamy]

What's you frame rate ?

 

[Yurik]

What's you frame rate ?

mostly 70

 

[Loru]

Who knows, how to fix texture shaking on model? ...

Import this mesh to 3d editor and check if there are no duplicate faces there.

 

[Yurik]

Import this mesh to 3d editor and check if there are no duplicate faces there.

Ok, i'll check

 

[fcn]

The shape of things to come

Oh, man! Such an opportunity missed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8zsE5zdlsQ

 

[rseferino]

 

[Pipcard]

[removed]

 

[ISProgram]

I thought it was funny a couple years back, don't know why. Maybe it's my aberrant sense of humor. Anyhow, enjoy.

EDIT: Whoops! Forgot to mention this, it is unfortunately 30 minutes long. Perhaps a little too long, but an excellent way of burning a half hour if you're terribly bored. :lol:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa3-vrCEbW0"]Why space missions fail - YouTube[/ame]

 

[PhantomCruiser]

A while ago, I was trying to look for any Orbiter-related posts on tumblr*, out of curiosity. Mostly, they were posts about that "Astro Orbiter" ride.

But I did find this. It's an Orbiter-inspired animation.
animation01-hd - YouTube

Interesting-looking spaceplane design, too.

*it's better to search using tumblr.com/tagged/[tag] (an orderly list of posts with that tag) instead of tumblr.com/search/[tag] (a jumbled-up mess of differently-sized posts)

Reminds me a lot of Moach's G-200. But that is one of the saddest pieces of music I've ever heard (Adagio for strings).

 

[rseferino]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjXFo_sQhi4&"]PTK NP - Orbiter Space Flight Simulator 2010 [/ame]

 

[Aeadar]

I knew I'd heard that music before!