Elite Observatory - Search your journal for potentially interesting objects, or notify you of new ones on the fly while exploring!

Vithigar

Vithigar
CMDR Ame No Kanashi Okami said:
Thanks so much for the quick response! I somehow completely missed that page of documentation. I think I should be able to figure it out from here! I find that sometimes planets 4LS or so away from the parent star have awesome views from the surface, but don't trigger the criteria. I may try setting it to 4*Radius and go from there.

EDIT: For some reason, I keep getting this error in a popup now, and every time I start monitoring, EO unchecks custom criteria. It appears to happen whether custom criteria are enabled or not. I haven't had a chance to test whether the custom criteria work or not yet because the ED servers just went down for maintenance.

[string "chunk"]:2: attempt to index a nil value (field 'scan')
Click to expand...
Oops, need to ensure that the first parent scan actually exists in order to check its values.

Code: 
::Close Orbit::
parents and parents[0].Scan and scan.SemiMajorAxis < parents[0].Scan.Radius * 3

No idea why you'd be getting the error with custom criteria disabled though.
 
Last edited:

CMDR Ame No Kanashi Okami

C
Vithigar said:
That is a very strange error.

Oops, need to ensure that the first parent scan actually exists in order to check its values.

Code: 
::Close Orbit::
parents and parents[0].Scan and scan.SemiMajorAxis < parents[0].Scan.Radius * 3

No idea why you'd be getting the error with custom criteria disabled though.
Click to expand...

Fixed! Everything is back to normal, looks like the custom criteria were being disabled whenever the error popped up.
 

Vithigar

Vithigar
CMDR Ame No Kanashi Okami said:
Fixed! Everything is back to normal, looks like the custom criteria were being disabled whenever the error popped up.
Click to expand...
Yes, that's correct. They self-disable on error to prevent spamming it as the long continues to be read.
I have plans to make that behavior a bit more intelligent in the future and hopefully more intuitive.
 

Vithigar

Vithigar
Small hotfix available for some minor framework issues that were causing errors in some (non-exploration related) situations. If you haven't been getting errors don't worry about it. If you have then see the latest release page for how to get the fix.
 

Vithigar

Vithigar
The last couple of updates have brought Observatory Core into what seems to be a pretty stable place, so I wanted to take this oppotunity to talk about what's next for development.

First up, I wanted to talk about the Herald plugin a little. The addition of cloud-based speech synthesis brings with it the very first telemetry reporting for the application (other than github's traffic monitoring) and the usage was more enthusiastic than I actually anticipated. Between all of Observatory's users you synthesised over 200,000 characters of unique text since Herald launched.
HeraldUsage.png

(For anyone concerned, I cannot see the specifics of any individual person's requests to Azure, just high level aggregate metrics like this.)
The actual amount spoken is likely quite a lot higher than that, as Herald creates a local cache of previously spoken lines. Dig into %appdata%\ObservatoryCore\ObservatoryHerald if you want to see it. I'm actually quite surprised that the amount being actually requested from Azure has remained so consistent for so long, as the text spoken by Herald is typically very cacheable; it will say "landable with atmosphere" a lot. I do have some internal changes planned for Herald that will improve caching by creating a hosted online cache which is shared between players, so... heads up if you're making Herald say naughty things that it might be stored somewhere other than your own computer at some point in the future. ;)
In the immediate future there are a couple of other enhancements planned for Herald which will come with the shared caching, such as control over volume and speech rate. So stay tuned for that.
Which brings me to my first big point. Beyond a certain modicum of usage Azure speech synthesis is not free. I'm still within the limits of a free account for now (though it was looking dicey for a while with the initial usage spike), but I also have plans to expand what Observatory can do with voice, so it is possible that some future functionality might end up gated behind patreon or something. Before anyone asks I don't currently have a patreon, it's just a future possibility. Also before anyone flies off the handle about locking things behind paywalls I'll lay this out now:
No functionality that is currently in any version of Observatory will ever be paywalled. Additionally, no functionality that runs entirely locally on your own machine will ever be paywalled. It is purely an option that I'm considering for future functionality that involves a heavier load on cloud-based services than Herald — and therefore costs me actual money to provide.

With that out of the way, I'd like to talk a bit about what people can expect to see in the near-to-medium term future. My number one elephant-in-the-room issue that's been looming at the back of my mind for quite a while is how the UI in Observatory Core is managed, so the next big piece of work I want to undertake is a complete overhaul of how plugin UIs are handled. Under the hood the settings panel in the "Core" tab is a complete disaster that desperately needs a major refactor, and to say that the current grid that plugins use to present data to the user is "janky" is a gross understatement. I believe the settings panel is salvageable without changing how settings work on the plugin side, but the grid in its current form has got to go and will be seeing a complete rewrite. This will break every existing plugin and require how they handle their UI to be rewritten, but I believe it's for the better.
This will bring with it some missing functionality that people have been asking for in Core for a long time. Sortable columns, exportable data, copying from the grid... you know, basic things that exist almost everywhere except here. :D It should also give plugins greater control over how the grid is handled, which I know is something @MattG has been wanting for quite some time now.

Finally one last piece that was promised long ago and has not yet come to light, Observatory Prospector, the mining plugin, will also debut with the UI overhaul to showcase some of the fancy new features that will be added, so look forward to that!
 
Last edited:

yianniv

yianniv
Hi, it's a great program and I'm glad i have it while exploring. Unfortunately, it crashes if I have the speech output enabled (right after it shows the yellow text box), whether I use Zira or David. My region is greek, but I use English as Display language and I have also got EDDI using Zira with no problem. I think the initial re-release didn't have this problem, because I remember hearing David (observatory) after Zira (EDDI) at discoveries.

I disabled the speech output and no crashes occur, but speech is very useful.
 

Codger

Codger
Thanks for the info, and for all your work on this. I don't use the voice stuff, and don't care about it, but the rest is a very nice addition to my exploration routine. And I really like a couple of the plug-ins, too. Nice job.
 

Vithigar

Vithigar
yianniv said:
Hi, it's a great program and I'm glad i have it while exploring. Unfortunately, it crashes if I have the speech output enabled (right after it shows the yellow text box), whether I use Zira or David. My region is greek, but I use English as Display language and I have also got EDDI using Zira with no problem. I think the initial re-release didn't have this problem, because I remember hearing David (observatory) after Zira (EDDI) at discoveries.

I disabled the speech output and no crashes occur, but speech is very useful.
Click to expand...
That's strange. There might be a crash error logged to event viewer. I really need to put some better error logging in place so people don't have to dive in there to find errors.

Do you have the same issue with the Herald plugin? It uses a completely different code path for speech audio, and has better quality voices.
 

yianniv

yianniv
Vithigar said:
That's strange. There might be a crash error logged to event viewer. I really need to put some better error logging in place so people don't have to dive in there to find errors.

Do you have the same issue with the Herald plugin? It uses a completely different code path for speech audio, and has better quality voices.
Click to expand...
You're right, there is a .NET Runtime error:
Code: 
Application: ObservatoryCore.exe
CoreCLR Version: 5.0.1221.52207
.NET Version: 5.0.12
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at Observatory.NativeNotification.NativeVoice.AddVoiceToSsml(String ssml, String voiceName) in C:\Users\Xjph\Source\Repos\ObservatoryCore\ObservatoryCore\NativeNotification\NativeVoice.cs:line 89
   at Observatory.NativeNotification.NativeVoice.ProcessQueue() in C:\Users\Xjph\Source\Repos\ObservatoryCore\ObservatoryCore\NativeNotification\NativeVoice.cs:line 55
   at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.InnerInvoke()
   at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.<>c.<.cctor>b__277_0(Object obj)
   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunFromThreadPoolDispatchLoop(Thread threadPoolThread, ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state)
--- End of stack trace from previous location ---
   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunFromThreadPoolDispatchLoop(Thread threadPoolThread, ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state)
   at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.ExecuteWithThreadLocal(Task& currentTaskSlot, Thread threadPoolThread)
--- End of stack trace from previous location ---
   at Observatory.NativeNotification.NativeVoice.ProcessQueueAsync() in C:\Users\Xjph\Source\Repos\ObservatoryCore\ObservatoryCore\NativeNotification\NativeVoice.cs:line 35
   at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.<>c.<ThrowAsync>b__140_1(Object state)
   at System.Threading.QueueUserWorkItemCallbackDefaultContext.Execute()
   at System.Threading.ThreadPoolWorkQueue.Dispatch()

My windows user name is not Xjph, I think it reports the programmer's user name.
 

KOLUMBUS

KOLUMBUS
Greetings,

i use Elite Observatory with Version v0.1.327.2251

my Problem is, that i want to have a Plugin vor Ice Rings. (Ring one, two or three)
but I'm not a programmer and I don't understand the explanation of the commands.
Also the syntax is not clear to me.

Can someone help me to develop such a plugin or has already written one?

Thanks in advance.
 

Vithigar

Vithigar
KOLUMBUS said:
Greetings,

i use Elite Observatory with Version v0.1.327.2251

my Problem is, that i want to have a Plugin vor Ice Rings. (Ring one, two or three)
but I'm not a programmer and I don't understand the explanation of the commands.
Also the syntax is not clear to me.

Can someone help me to develop such a plugin or has already written one?

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
You might need to be a little more specific about what you mean by "plugin for ice rings", but if you just want a criteria that notifies when a body has icy rings you can use:
Code: 
::Criteria::
if scan.Rings then
  for ring in rings(scan.Rings) do
    if ring.ringclass == 'eRingClass_Icy' then
      return true, 'Body With Icy Ring', ''
    end
  end
end
::End::
If you want something more specific than that I'm certainly willing to help.
 

KOLUMBUS

KOLUMBUS
Vithigar said:
You might need to be a little more specific about what you mean by "plugin for ice rings", but if you just want a criteria that notifies when a body has icy rings you can use:
Code: 
::Criteria::
if scan.Rings then
  for ring in rings(scan.Rings) do
    if ring.ringclass == 'eRingClass_Icy' then
      return true, 'Body With Icy Ring', ''
    end
  end
end
::End::
If you want something more specific than that I'm certainly willing to help.
Click to expand...
Oh yes, this is exactly what i need.

Thank You
Kolumbus
 

varonica

varonica
Ok so I have finally had some decent results from my oxygen atmosphere custom criteria, it's found some interesting results, here is how it displays in the panel;

jxKrGXt.png


It pops up nicely in the popup info box as well, and it found me this nice 83% oxygen atmosphere body, it wasn't particularly special in the views as you can see here;

Xb1iZHP.jpg


But here's where it gets interesting, it's one of the few (if only) body I have noticed with 3 components listed as part of the atmosphere! Oxygen, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide. I am sure most planets do have more than two, but most of them must be below 0.01% and thus don't display in the system map;

rAUmLqf.jpg


So yes, extremely happy with my custom criteria!

Oh yes, planets and moons with Oxygen as a major component (greater than 0.01%) of the atmosphere are very rare indeed!
 

varonica

varonica
Well now don't I feel silly, guess what I found in the very next system, yes you guessed it, an oxygen atmosphere planet, again with 3 components to the atmosphere, but the views here were indeed remarkable;

b9rWrmM.jpg


It was remarkably blue;

WPBUR9u.jpg


Flying along about 3klms up it was almost like flying over a cloud layer, the ground was obscured in what looked like a thick mist;

SsDTSnn.jpg


At ground level distant objects were tinted blue by the atmosphere, it remarkable, I would suggest as a part of your exploration routine to always check out oxygen atmosphere planets.

vECZU3S.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom