kOS: Scriptable Autopilot System

There's a lot of small changes over the last year that have added up to a big release. This release supports KSP 1.10 and KSP 1.11. It has no specific KSP 1.11 changes but it has been tested and it does work with KSP 1.11.

(NOTE ABOUT KSP 1.11 - If you want to put a kOS part into one of the new cargo inventory slots that came with KSP 1.11, you can do so but remember to FIRST attach it to the vessel in the VAB/SPH so you can adjust the disk space and boot file settings, then detach it from the vessel and drag it into the cargo slot - that way it has the settings you gave it. If you just drag it directly into the cargo slot from the parts bin then it only has the default values.)

The most important changes are probably in steering and control. Cooked steering shouldn't waste as much RCS as it used to, and if you are using raw control you now have the ability to set the player's trim settings for yaw, pitch, and roll so you can steer using those and not completely lock the player out of control. There is also a panic button for telling kOS to suppress all of its controls if the player needs to take over the controls regardless of what the script is doing.

As always, recompile KSM files with this release. Especially as there was an important KSM bugfix.

BREAKING CHANGES

• TimeSpan used to mean a fixed stamp in time (the name was not really accurate). Now there are two types, TimeStamp and TimeSpan, and the one that USED to be called TimeSpan is now called TimeStamp, with TimeSpan now being a new type that didn't exist before. This could affect scripts if you ever did a check for :istype("TimeSpan") (because of the rename) but shouldn't affect anything else.

• Even more than usual it's important to recompile any KSM files. A major bug in how KSM files were written was discovered that this release fixes. There's a chance your existing KSM files may already be wrong. If you have any bug reports about a KSM file not working right, please try testing again with this release by recreating the KSM file. There's a small chance you might have had the bug this release fixes. (Look for "KSM" in the bug section below.)

• If you are using the output of SteeringManager:WRITECSVFILES, be warned that output now has a new column in the second-to-last position, the MinOutput column. That means the MaxOutput column has shifted one position to the right. This should only affect people who are analyzing that data with external software.

• In order to support Kerbal Alarm Clock version 3.0.0.2 or higher it was necessary to break compatibiltiy with versions of Kerbal Alarm Clock that are older than that. The API wrapper changed enough that backward compatibility is too messy to maintain.

• The :LIST suffix of VOLUME said in the documentation that it returns a LIST when in reality it always returned a LEXICON. If you relied on this and wanted the lexicon not the list, you need to now use the new suffix :LEXICON because the old suffix :LIST has been changed to match the documentation and be a real actual LIST now.

• Temperature tolerance for the kOS parts was way too high, making them effective heat shields when they shouldn't be. If you had been taking advantage of this before that might not work anymore.

• CREATEORBIT() used to take mean anomaly at epoch as a value in radians, which didn't match how everything else in kOS works. It is now expecting it in degrees as described in BUG FIXES below.

• If you ever happend to have a string literal with a backslash followed by a quote mark (\") that has now become a special escaped quote char and is no longer literally a backslash and quote mark.

NEW FEATURES

• Maneuver Nodes can now be constructed with either ETA time or with UT time, and you can read their time either as UT (:TIME) or as ETA (:ETA). They also can take in the new Timestamp or TimeSpan types instead of just a Scalar number of seconds if you like. pull request

• There's a new button, "Reread Boot Folder", on the kOS toolbar window when you're in the VAB or the SPH. This button lets you tell kOS to re-read the boot directory when you've just added a new file to it, so you don't have to leave the VAB and come back for it to show up in the list of boot files. pull request

• The old TimeSpan type has been renamed to TimeStamp and a new TimeSpan type has been made in its place. This is to fit the design pattern where a "stamp" is a fixed point in time (a date and a time of day) and a "span" is a time offset. The main difference in Kerbal is whether you count years and days starting at 1 or at 0. pull request

• Suffixes :PARTSTAGGED, :PARTSNAMED, and :PARTSDUBBED can now be used with parts instead of with entire vessels. Doing so searches just the sub-branch of the ship starting from that part, instead of the whole ship. pull reqeust

• Added a new Suffix to RCS parts, :DEADBAND that lets you finally override the game's enforced 5% deadband on RCS controls. It turns out the deadband isn't in the controls, but rather it's in the RCS Parts themselves and doesn't apply to other torque sources like reaction wheels. That's why you notice it when translating (where only RCS works) and not when rotating (where reaction wheels do something and take up the slack left by the RCS thrusters not responding). pull request

• Big overhaul to SteeringManager's internals: There's been some important refactoring in SteeringManager that should reduce the control vibrations and consequently the RCS fuel wastage especially in Realism Overhaul (which relies more on RCS than stock does). Also, there's some user-settable epsilon values - if you want to change the tuning you can adjust SteeringManger:ROTATIONEPSILONMIN and SteeringManager:ROTATIPONEPSILONMAX.

  • Dynamic Epsilon logic to reduce control jitter: pull request 2810 pull request 2813
  • The stock KSP's available torque calculations are random wrong values for RCS parts. kOS now replaces that with its own calculation instead: pull request 2820

• The random number generator now can be fed a seed. pull request

• PIDLoop is now a serializable structure so you can save your PID's settings and bring them back from a file. Also PIDloop's CSV output now has a Minoutput column. pull request

• Enlarged max allowed terminal font size to 48, to benefit people with tiny pixels (i.e. 4k monitors). pull request

• Uses the changes to Kerbal Alarm Clock's API that started with Kerbal Alarm Clock v3.0.0.2. (This does break compatibility with older versions of Kerbal Alarm Clock, though.) pull reqeust

• On-Screen warning when SAS is fighting kOS: The message appears when both SAS and lock stering have been active for a few seconds and goes away when one or the other is turned off. pull request 2780 pull request 2783

• Emergency Suppress Autopilot: You can now click an emergency toggle button on the kOS toolbar dialog window that will temporarily suppress all of kOS's locked steering so you have manual control. If you use this, the script will still keep running and think it's moving the controls, but the steering manager will ignore the script's commands until you turn the suppression toggle off. This can also be bound to an action group for the kOS PartModule if you want a fast hotkey for it. pull request

• Part suffixes that allow you to traverse the symmetrical sets of parts. (i.e. if you place 4 fins in radial symmetry, and have a reference to one of the fins, you can find the other 3 fins that it is symmetrical with.)in the same symmetry set) pull request

• The player's own TRIM controls are now settable by script. (Example use case: You want an autopilot to control an airplane by moving the trim but not the main controls so the player is still free to push the main control stick at any time). pull request

• ETA:NEXTNODE now an alias for NEXTNODE:ETA pull request

• Trajectories Addon updated to support Trajectories v2.4 changes. (Thanks PiezPiedPy) pull request

• Kuniverse:launchcraftwithcrewfrom() (Thanks JonnyOThan) pull request

• New suffixes for the special case where a Vessel is really an asteroid. (Thanks JonnyOThan) pull request

• Ability to read the stock game's Delta-V readouts for the vessel. (Thanks ThunderousEcho) pull request

• New subtype for Part - the RCS part type, with information about how its nozzles are aimed, what fuel it uses, the ISP, max thrust, etc. (Thanks RCrockford) pull request 2678 pull request 2809

• Can now use \" in string literals for embedded quote marks. Also can prepend the string with @ to turn this off and keep it literal. (thanks thexa4) pull request

• New Engine value suffix :CONSUMEDRESOURCES, and new Type ConsumedResource it returns. These give more information about fuels the engine uses. Mostly relevant when RealFuels mod is installed so every engine is a bit different. (Thanks RCrockford) pull request

• Can CreateOrbit() from position and velocity (before it only worked with Keplerian parameters). (Thanks ThunderousEcho) pull request

BUG FIXES

• Fixed: Kerbal Alarm Clock alarms had no ToString() so when you printed them you saw nothing. Now they show the alarm info. pull request

• Fixed: The suffix Widget:HASPARENT was documented but didn't actually exist. It exists now. pull request

• Fixed: Primitives like Scalars, Strings, and Booleans previously were not serializable with WRITEJSON() on their own as bare variables. They could only be written when inside containers like LIST() or LEXICON(). Now they can be written directly. pull request

• Fixed: KSM files would corrupt one of the kRISC instruction operands (leading to any number of random results when running the program) if the size of the operand pack happened to be just barely over 2^8, 2^16, or 2^24 bytes. (When calculating how many bytes addresses need to be to access the enire operand pack, its count of the size of the pack was off by 3. This could make the last operand in the pack get garbled when it loaded into memory from some random other part of the file instead of where it was supposed to come from.) (Thanks to newcomb-luke for discovering the problem and the cause) pull request

• Fixed how positions of packed vessels were off by one physics frame from the positions of everything else. This is apparently how things are reported b the KSP API and this had to be adjusted for. (Thanks marianoapp) pull request

• Fix Vecdraw labels no longer showing up in flight view pull request 2799 pull request 2804

• Remove strange blank setting on the difficulty options screen. pull request

• OPENPATH() now returns false on file not found rather than bombing out with an exception. pull request

• RangeValue now allows use of bigger ranges and for ranges that increment by fractional amounts. (Before, it couldn't do floating point and couldn't do anything bigger than 2^31.) pull request

• Fix raw control :NEUTRALIZE never having quite done what it said it did right. pull request

• EVA Kerbals no longer have duplicate KOSNameTags when you have the Breaking Ground DLC installed. (The problem came from how KSP mashes two kerbal templates together into one kerbal to put the DLC science features into an EVA Kerbal.) pull request

• VOLUME:LIST now actually returns a list like it says in the documentation. Use VOLUME:LEXICON to get the lexicon you used to get from VOLUME:LIST. pull request

• UNSET now fails silently on non-existant variables as the documentation claims it should, instead of crashing with a nullref error. pull request

• Fixed a mistake that made it possible to process lines of input out of order if they flood into the terminal very fast. It was noticed in JonnyOThan's TwichPlaysKSP, which pastes entire scripts of input into the interpreter in one big chunk. pull request

• ADDONS:KAC:ALARM[n]:NOTES now returns the right thing. (It used to just return the same thing as :NAME. (Thanks JonnyOThan) pull request

• The ConnectionManager dialog box at the start of a career was repositioned to where it is unlikely to appear secretly hidden behind other mod's dialog boxes. (Other mods putting their) dialogs in front of kOS's and not blocking clickthroughs made some users accidentally pick a ConnectionManager and dismiss the dialog before they ever saw it.) pull request

• UI sound effects from kOS (error beep, SKID sounds) no longer have an origin point in 3-D space inside the part. They are now "ambient". This is to get sound mods to stop dampening the volume the same way they'd dampen sounds from engine parts, etc. pull request

• Parts no longer have excessive temperature tolerance. (Thanks robopitek) pull request

• CREATEORBIT() now takes mean anomaly at epoch as degrees. It was in radians before which didn't match how other things worked. (Thanks vzynev) pull request

• Better fuel stability (ullage in RealFuels) calculation. (thanks RCrockford) pull request

• Documentation fixes. Too numerous to mention each. You can click each of the links below to see them all: pull request 2675 pull request 2680 pull request 2707 pull request 2712 pull request 2724 pull request 2751 pull request 2772 pull request 2775 pull request 2776 pull request 2777 pull request 2784 pull request 2788 pull request 2791 pull request 2800 pull request 2819 pull request 2833

• kOS can now handle KSP's technique of having multiple KSPfields of the same name that resolve the name clash by only having one visible at a time. KSP started doing this on a few fields about a year ago and caused bugs like "authority limiter" not working. (https://github.com/KSP-KOS/KOS/issues/2666) pull request

• kOS no longer allows ModuleManager configs to give it negative mass. (Antimatter summons the Kraken.) pull reqeust

• ETA:APOAPSIS no longer returns Infinity on hyperbolic orbits (While infinity is a correct answer, kOS scripts would crash when they get infinity on the stack. So now it says zero instead). pull request