Release notes

Kosmos 0.17

Stars and the quantum drive

• New sky: a smooth Milky Way with faint nebulae replaces the blocky background, and the brightest spots are dimmer.
• Stars are drawn as glowing, swirling suns with limb darkening, a corona, glare and rays, including our own Sun. Stars no longer flicker or z-fight against the scene.
• New hand-authored star systems: Sirius, Proxima Centauri, TRAPPIST-1, Betelgeuse and Rigel, plus Lalande 21185 and Procyon in the catalogue. Every other star has procedurally generated planets.
• Ships with a hyperjump engine (the Argo) have a quantum jump drive (range_ly, 50 light years by default). Open View > Quantum navigation, choose a star in range and engage. The galaxy map's Enter key jumps too.
• You arrive in orbit of the best world in the target system: an Earth-like planet if there is one, otherwise a Mars- or Venus-like rocky planet, any rocky planet, a moon of a gas giant, or the giant itself. --orbit-body auto does the same from the command line.
• Jumps happen inside the running program. The window stays open while a short hyperspace effect plays and the new system loads, instead of closing and reopening.

Ships

• The Skylark no longer has an afterburner plume.

Diagnostics

• When a surface texture cannot be loaded, the message now includes the loader's reason.
• New --test-jump N option jumps to star N a second into the run (for testing).

Kosmos 0.16

Ships

• New addon cvel-saturn-v: the CVEL Saturn V imported from the Orbiter add-on, with its meshes and the masses, thrust and Isp from its source. It has four stages (S-IC, S-II, S-IVB and the command and service module) and a three-man cabin. New scenario Apollo 11: CVEL Saturn V, T-5 minutes puts it on Pad 39A at Kennedy five minutes before the 1969 launch.
• More CVEL addons, all under a new CVEL scenario submenu: cvel-atlas (Atlas III and Centaur, on the Kennedy pad), cvel-centaur (Centaur G, Kennedy), cvel-delta-iv (Delta IV Heavy, Kennedy), cvel-vulcan (Avro Vulcan on the Twickenham runway) and cvel-transtage (circular 1500 km orbit).
• cvel-deltaglider (Chippenham runway), cvel-shuttle-a (Helsinki pad) and cvel-dragonfly (1500 km orbit) use the meshes and textures from the open-source Orbiter repository (MIT) with their Orbiter masses and thrust.
• Ships can set "horizontal": true to rest level on their gear rather than nose-up, as the Shuttle-A does.
• Engine plumes can be tuned with plume_width, plume_glow and plume_density, and a ship can set camera_target so the external camera looks at a chosen point (for example near the capsule on a tall rocket). User orbit cameras honour it too.
• Engines can have a different Isp at sea level and in a vacuum. Give an engine isp (vacuum) and isp_sl and its thrust and Isp change with air pressure as in Orbiter, while propellant flow stays constant.

Planets

• Hi-res Earth tiles now blend in softly: a patch of finer tiles fades in as it loads, and where it meets coarser ground its edge feathers instead of showing a hard line.

• Engines can be put in a hover group with its own throttle (/controls/hover, Keypad + − 0 .), used by the Shuttle-A, which also gets its Orbiter 2D panel.

• Tools > Start/Stop recording video saves the screen and the game's sound to an H.264/AAC .mp4 through ffmpeg; --record SECS records a scripted clip.
• Exhaust no longer passes through the ground: within 150 m of the surface the plume particles are turned and sprayed outward along it.

Deltaglider (CVEL)

• Engines, masses and touchdown points now follow the CVEL source: two 120 kN scramjet mains (Isp 4077 s), a 270 kN hydrogen hover engine, 12 t dry mass and 11.4 t propellant. A scramjet with an explicit "air_breathing": false keeps the scramjet plume but performs like a rocket.
• The 2D panel is the CVEL one, with working AOA and slip dials and the horizon. The retro engines are not ported.
• New ship properties rate-pitch, rate-yaw and rate-roll (deg/s).
• The panel also has slope, propellant and engine-level bars. The overhead rate gauges are not wired.
• Aerodynamics are retuned: the Deltaglider and Vulcan have delta-wing lift and induced drag (cl_alpha 2.6, stall at 30 degrees), and the brick-shaped Shuttle-A has almost no lift but a lot of drag. Lift and drag scale with air density, so none of it acts in vacuum.
• Hover: with the hover engines firing, the aircraft-class ships hold themselves level with RCS (pitch and roll levelled, yaw damped), so an off-centre hover thrust no longer flips the ship. RCS thrust is raised.
• Keypad + − 0 . 1-9 now work as keys (simlib had no keypad scancodes), so the hover throttle can be driven from the keypad.

Camera and flight fixes

• Dragging in the chase view now orbits the ship, keeping it centred, instead of turning the view in place (which lost the ship after staging).
• The chase camera can no longer drop below the terrain, and a crashed ship is lifted clear of the ground rather than sinking into it.

Windows and graphics backends

• Vulkan now prefers a discrete GPU over an integrated one on a machine with both (SIMLIB_VULKAN_DEVICE_TYPE=discrete|integrated|any overrides it). The OpenGL renderer and the Vulkan device are printed at startup.
• Resizing or maximising the window under Direct3D 12 could freeze the game; the swap chain resize was fixed to refresh its back buffer index and to recover if the resize fails. This is untested on Windows.
• Known issues, reported on Windows with an NVIDIA GPU and not reproduced on Linux: Vulkan can show heavy graphical corruption (blocky black patches on the ground and sky), and OpenGL runs very slowly (about 5 fps) though it renders correctly. Resizing works under Vulkan. If you see either, try --d3d12, check that Kosmos is using your NVIDIA GPU (Windows Settings > Graphics > High performance), and report the OpenGL renderer: / Vulkan device: lines printed at startup.

Kosmos 0.15

Interface

• MFD and panel instruments now suit the ship: aircraft no longer offer the orbital displays, and spacecraft no longer show the airspeed, vertical speed, turn and heading gauges. The Skylark's Navigation panel now carries an HSI instead of the Orbit display.
• The COM/NAV and other nav displays show short ICAO-style idents (e.g. EGCP VOR, EGCP ILS 1R) instead of long names that overran the screen.

Scenery

• Runways, roads, launch pads and landing pads now have a tiling asphalt texture instead of flat colour; painted markings still show through, slightly weathered.

Planets

• New, sharper maps for Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, and Pluto's moon Charon is now in the Solar System with its own map. Pluto and Charon have relief shading.

For addon authors

• MFD modes in an addon manifest can set "domain" (space or atmosphere), and a ship's cockpit.mfd_filter (auto, atmosphere, space, none) controls which are offered. Use none for a spaceplane.
• Bases take an optional "icao" code (made up from the id if absent), and navaids an optional "ident".

OrbitComp

• New OrbitComp orbital-computer MFD (inspired by Orbiter's TransX): orbit plot with target and closest approach, manoeuvre nodes (T+, Pe, Ap, AN, DN) with post-burn orbit and burn time, and Hohmann/ejection planning that can be loaded into a node.
• New --set PATH=VALUE option.

Cameras

• New Camera editor (View menu, or the button in the F2 window): build your own cameras, saved between sessions.
• Orbit cameras circle a ship or a planet or moon and always look at it; right-drag swings round, [ ] zoom, and an optional spin turns it by itself.
• Mounted cameras sit at an offset on a ship or body and face a set direction, or look at another ship or body.
• An orbiting External camera is provided, and C now cycles on through your cameras after the chase view and cockpits. They are also listed in F2.
• New --user-camera N and --camera-editor options.

Loading and fixes

• New loading screen with a dim Martian-haze backdrop that says what is being loaded.
• Fixed the libpng "iCCP" warning printed at startup.
• After staging, a ship now rotates about the centre of mass of the stages that remain, rather than a point left behind in space, so turning an upper stage no longer swings it through the stage that just left.
• Earth's night-side city lights were mirrored east-west, so they appeared over the sea instead of the cities; they now line up with the land.
• The on-screen text is now off when Kosmos starts (press I to show it, or use --show-info), and the "Renderer =" label is gone.
• The download is now about 535 MB. The high-resolution textures (the sharper planet maps, the Earth surface tiles, and the specular and normal maps) are a separate optional download, kosmos-hires.tar.gz (1.2 GB). Unpack it inside the Kosmos folder with tar -xf kosmos-hires.tar.gz.
• Fixed stars and the sky going black when the nearest body is far away (close to a distant star, for example). The near plane could end up beyond the sky, or even beyond the far plane.
• Fixed the Earth cloud layer being sliced off along a straight line across the view in low orbit (below about 300 km).
• The website now works properly on phones: a collapsible contents list, wrapping menu and single-column layouts.

Kosmos 0.14

Interface

• The window can be resized freely and the view follows it.
• Full screen: start with --fullscreen, choose View → Full screen, or press Alt+Enter.

For addon authors

• A scenario file can set "fullscreen": true.

Kosmos 0.13

Fixes

• Earth was turned 180° when seen from space: Wagga Wagga appeared over Africa and the continents were mirrored. Orbit and high-altitude views now match the terrain below.
• The default start time is now your real local time (the Earth's day/night follows it). A scene's JSON can still set its own date, and --date overrides it.
• Right-drag and mouse movement now turn the camera instead of moving the planet.
• The start date is no longer printed on screen; it is in the info text.

Ships and effects

• Hydrogen engines in vacuum now give a short, tight plume with shock diamonds, like the ramjet, instead of a billowy one. Sea-level plumes are unchanged.
• The Ares now uses hydrogen engines (Isp 440), so its Mars performance differs from before.
• Nuclear engines (the Argo) have no plume: a soft neon blue-white glowing panel shows at the nozzle.

Interface

• The menu bar is pinned open by default, with more padding on the left of the text. Untick View → Keep menu bar visible to hide it.
• New View → 2D Panels submenu lists the instrument panels a ship defines and shows the chosen one in the 2D cockpit.
• The Skylark has two panels: Flight instruments (the six-pack plus engine and surface MFDs) and Navigation.

For addon authors

• cockpit.layout.name and a cockpit.panels list define extra 2D panels; see the modding guide.
• New command-line options: --panel N, --shot-stages N.

Known issues

• Some users have reported clipping at the cloud layer; this has not been reproduced yet.