Here I am again, with a major update for this project.
I literally rebooted it almost from scratch, and I'm very happy with the result by now.
Messages are sent and received around the sim, everything seems to be working smoothly.
Together with messages, as anticipated in another thread there's the possibility to send and receive pictures!
Coding of the dialog is almost finished, I'll add a tab with the settings so they can be changed by the user directly in the sim. I don't know if I'll add an MFD as well, since the dialog is working quite all right by now.
to give the idea of how it works:
when a vessel is sending a message, this is splitted in bits and sent bit by bit by the sender vessel.
The bits fly around the sim up to the vessels, each of them becomes a receiver. A receiver actually receives the bits only if he can "see" (no obstruction by bodies) the point from which the bit was sent (the module checks both the obstructions relevant to senders and to receivers).
Each vessel will have an High Gain and a Low Gain Antenna. Bandwith and distances for those are customizable by cfg file.
Full Ground Network is simulated, including TDRS sats, Tracking stations (both for LEO and nearby) and DSN for BEO. DSN is an animated vessel which receives from the Ground Network system the input for tracking the various vessels around the sim and actually orient itself to them (see picture below).
That's for general of course, but I'll give details in the docs, once done with the coding (it will probably still take a while).
still to do then:
- settings tab (not difficult, just boring)
- class interface for developers (so everybody who's building his addon can leverage on the new space network)
- a bit of "movement" when vessels are sending/receiving bytes
- automatic vessel control through default messages (users will be able also to implement their own through the SDK, but a set of default commands will be provided)
- documentation
here's some pics:
vessel tab
ground tab:
map tab:
pictures received:
DSN tracking object:
that's it for now,
cheers everyone