steve_v

FWIW (I assume you are signed in anonymously now), I don't see you on the list of active users. Nor does the profile hover give me any "currently viewing" or "last login" type data.

This is what happens when you spend decades allowing application vendors to provide their own executable installers, write whatever they want wherever they want, and store configuration data in whatever crazy directory structure they like... You form bad habits, and push "run it as administrator" to the top of every helldesk monkey's troubleshooting flowchart. Over here in the sane unix world, we've had a multi-user system with consistent separation between administrator-provided application files and user-modifiable configuration since day one, and a formal standard for such since 1994... A point in time when MS was still running on top of DOS and had no concept of access control or user privileges at all. So yeah, it's not Microsoft's fault any more, but it is Microsoft's fault that this situation developed in the first place. IMO, the "All these folders are yours, except Europa Program Files. Attempt no writing there." solution is still the wrong way to go about it, because then you get what we see here - namely bypassing access controls by simply putting the same nasty mix of executables and configuration in some other globally-writable place.

Guys, can we please do something about the confusing, flow-breaking, order-screwing-up default "sort by votes" behaviour of the tech support and gameplay question subs? Not only does it default to this idiotic behaviour on every single thread you view, it also doesn't save your preference in any way, forcing you to manually switch back to by-date on every view or page refresh.

That's actually something I've never tried, using pistons as landing gear, (excuse: I haven't played with the BG parts much at all) it's a pretty cool solution. It is more complex, but it also gives you the tools and information to deal with the complexity. Once you get a handle on how to read it, I find the SPH analysis tools actually makes it considerably easier to design a good aircraft than stocks "two blobs" trial and error approach. TBH I suspect much of the trade off not being worth it is just people getting intimidated by all the graphs and engineering terms.

Honestly the only reason I put up with all the jank in this game is that I've been playing it for so long that I know how to work around most of it. If I had picked the game up for the current going price and run into all this malarkey my patience would have expired rapidly. Catch 22 and all that. And circles. This is why I complain as much as I do, if I put myself in the shoes of a new player this kind of thing (not to mention the real bugs) would drive me (even more) nuts. It's one thing to learn about the rocket equation and orbital dynamics as a newbie, but it's quite another to have to figure out the hard way that interstages aren't fairings, hollow parts aren't hollow, stationary craft aren't really stationary, wheels are the devil incarnate, or that certain configurations of parts turn into whirling dervishes, perpetual motion machines, or just instantly explode for no reason whatsoever. Good luck with the landing BTW. Oh, and be sure you don't drive into the landing legs with the rover, physics doesn't like that at all.

LOL, nobody ever claimed that KSP's craft structure made any kind of real-world sense. It is what it is, and that's the lowest part-count solution. Since low part-count == not miserable framerates, that's the one I use, because the game not running like a stuck pig is IMO more important than an invisible attach node. it would of course be more straightforward to just use the engine plate for this, but then you run smack into the weirdness of the aero model, as you did. So upside-down fairings it is. vOv

It's got me squarely on the "no tux, no bux" side of said fence. Wine/DXVK/Proton/SteamPlay whatever API layer is flavour of the month simply doesn't cut it. If relatively small studios like Squad or Egosoft (custom in-house engine, vulkan renderer, runs better on GNU/Linux than Windows) can release a decent port, so can Take Two Interactive. They've got the budget to make it happen (and that budget will be miniscule since Unity already does all the heavy lifting), they just can't be arsed... So I can't be arsed buying their product. If the developers actually collaborate with the WINE team to make sure everything works, give them some publicity (or, ya know, a cut of GNU/Linux sales as a donation), and provide support for the configuration, then I'll consider "it works on proton" as a valid reason for not releasing a native port. Not once have I seen a wine logo on the splash of a game that bundles it, not once have I heard of a big game developer donating (money, time or code) to DXVK, and not once have I got anything better than "we probably won't ban you, but you're on your own" as a response to running games with proton... And sometimes they ban you anyway. Proton is not the answer, official native support for the platform is.

Either that or turn the fairing upside down, depending on what you want to stay attached to what. The top fairing node (relative to the part, not the craft) is always the one that decouples. But yeah, KSP is super sensitive (and super janky) about the order in which you attach parts. It's an old craft file format thing.

Yup, a 50k by 50k jpeg bomb in your sig also breaks rendering. This is fun, what else can we break? I wonder what this does... [snip] Awww, someone put a limit on inline image dimensions. Boring.

That broke rendering in the most hilarious of ways for a minute there. Top notch job. Careful with this stuff though, you're starting to give me ideas...

Not really, the automatic engine shrouds are after all pretty limited in size, shape, and therefore utility. They're also not defined anywhere in the part config and practically impossible to disable, but that's another gripe altogether. The new engine plates do present a problem WRT replacing fairings, but if you don't want people using them that way, the answer is to make them limited to mounting engines or place them appropriately in the tech tree. What we have currently is an automatic and self-reinstating interstage-like part on every engine that doesn't actually do any interstagey things at all - it just looks like an interstage and seemingly exists mainly to confuse and/or irritate people. Why we even have automatic engine shrouds is beyond me anyway. The interstage fairing should be part of the decoupler rather than the engine, or it should be a separate part... I.e. the fairings we already have. So far as I can see the whole system is just another legacy thing from way back in alpha that has never been revisited. At which point you don't actually need the engine plate at all, just turn on interstage nodes on the fairing part and use those to mount the rover... And we've come full-circle, back to "why do these cosmetic-only things even exist".

Heatshields have both a mass offset factor and lift values, because the aerodynamics model is too stupid to account for natural stability the shape of the craft should provide (or notice overall craft shape at all for that matter). Installing a heatshield on a pod will artificially move both the CoM and CoP of the system to make it stable.

While true, this is both stupid and counterintuitive. Install a sensible aerodynamic model (i.e. FAR) and this problem just goes away, like all the other weird idiosyncrasies. If it looks like a fairing, it works like a fairing. The rule is that only parts with ModuleProceduralFairing or ModuleCargoBay have the "zone of aerodynamics nullification" enchantment on them, because apparently magic modules and hacky approximations > realistic and intuitive aerodynamic model. Don't they just... FWIW, I have been running FAR for years and I regularly hide stuff under engine shrouds. It works exactly as you would expect. Yeah, about those idiosyncrasies...

Perhaps. Frankly I find this current trend for enormous buttons, enormous fonts, enormous blank areas, completely unnecessary boxes/borders/padding, social-media links/likes/rep/ratings, and information-free icons, animations, and other random graphical elements properly perplexing. The purpose of a forum is primarily discussion, and secondarily a repository of information. As such, the more discussion and information one can get on a page and still be navigable the better. Bonus points for minimising bandwidth hogging graphics and CPU/memory hogging javascript, particularly if you intend people to use the site on mobile devices. Not everyone has this years super-phone and/or a high bandwidth downlink you know. Huge titles do nothing for signal/noise ratio or information density. All they achieve is making me scroll down further to get to the content. If they're remote fonts, they slow down page loading as well. What would be nice WRT the topic titles is eliminating some of that padding above them. Even with the huge font, there's still more screen devoted to blank space, buttons, ratings and follower counters than to content. --- And somewhere down here, pushed off the bottom of the image by all the silly bling, there be dragons content.

Yeah, I do prefer nbz's colour choice, but I gave up after about 20 minutes of constant 504s and infinite spinners on userstyles.org. I can't tweak what I can't obtain, which is why I went with yours, as it's served in a sensible manner as a flat file on github. Userstyles is a hellhole these days even on the rare occasions when it does work, stylish has gone proprietary and shoves an android app in your face at every turn, etc. etc. If you do happen to have a copy of nbz's theme, do you recon you could mirror it somewhere so I can have a play with it? Of course I can't see the licence on the thing I can't obtain either... That is sarcasm, right? It's huge already.

Exactly like that Personally I'm not looking for a "night mode" theme (light is fine, just not actinic), so I'll probably tweak the colours a little. Aside, is there an alternative to userstyles.org that works with stylus and isn't unusably slow? I know you put your stuff on github like a sensible person, but others do not... poke poke@HebaruSan

I think you mean WYSI(Usually)WYG... Unless you're trying to quote or edit a post on mobile of course, in which case it's WYSI(Rarely)WYG, with screwball autoscrolling that pushes the thing you're editing off the page every time you manually move the cursor for added entertainment value.

If by "single line" you mean "two lines so as to match the height of the icons and avatars", sure. "Announcements" for example has the sub title with a description below it, on the sort-of left of the page. Then on the right you have a post count with the word "posts" below it, and the most recent thread title with the username below. Two lines because avatars and (identical) icons, a waste of both screen space and bandwidth... Though in this day and age of putting meaningless graphics on everything, probably forgivable. Now note the ellipsis on the right because the thread title doesn't fit on the page, if the sidepane wasn't there you would be able to see the whole thing without relying on the hover tooltip. Hell, if it simply had a reasonable size allocated to it rather than being right-justified with a gaping void in the middle of the page you'd get most of it too. Two lines, and at least another two lines of vertical padding between entries. Topic title truncated to make room for.... A bunch of white space. ---- November 2015, with the switch from VB to IPS. Lots of people hated it then too, for much the same reasons as in this thread. It took quite some time to get to a theme and layout that wasn't completely horrible, and apparently we're starting again from scratch on that for some unfathomable reason. ---- Good to see the post editor is as janky as ever too, I just had it lock up with an unremovable "paste as plain text instead" prompt (and nothing actually pasted) when trying to edit in that extra quote there. Can we please have a non-javascript input method and BBCode support back already? Also, please retrieve the edit and report buttons from that ridiculous hamburger menu and put them back where they belong. A menu for two entries when you have all that empty space available is insane.

phpBB has built-in support for per-user themes... Just sayin'. Oh yeah, that's right, we're stuck with a proprietary monstrosity so we can't have nice things like that unless we get all Chuck Norris on the browser side. Oh well, good job on the software selection I guess.

My speculation: Shiny marketing, reactive design (because someone can't be bothered with a separate mobile layout), and a "Just leave everything to us" corporate support policy. AKA, the usual reasons to just buy a one size fits all shrinkwrap solution. It sure sounds easy, and managers lap this stuff up. The downside is that it's one size fits all, you have to pay for themes or someone's time to hack around all the idiocy later, and if an update screws things up, you're well, screwed. If this forum was built on an open source PHP solution, you would be seeing a bunch of patches (and maybe even a complete theme) by yours truly in this thread. Since it's not, all I can do is complain. It might be wise to hold off on using or creating stylesheet overrides until they've finished buggering about with it, things are bound to break randomly until it settles down.

That's my recollection as well. I'm not advocating a return to vBulletin (though VB5 is still getting updates as of this month), I'm advocating one of the multitude of free, open-source, infinitely customisable PHP based solutions that do one thing and do it well - namely being a forum. Somehow they even manage this without reams of proprietary animating / collapsing / auto-resizing / hamburger-grilling / mobile pandering / spinner-presenting / memory wasting / non-BBCode understanding / quote mangling / social-media integrating / faceborg try-harding / captcha presenting javascript maddness. ---- To return to my above butchery, it occurs that the entire line containing nothing but the word "Forums" (yes captian obvious) and the "Start new topic" button can also be binned, freeing up considerable vertical space. That particular fat-finger button is completely redundant as we already have a "create" beside the notification indicator in the top panel. ---- And to back up further still: The advantage is that they can then be one line rather than 3+ (and padding), so one doesn't have to scroll down so far. Not such a big deal on the landing page perhaps, but saving of much scrollwheel wear on the forum at large.

Of course. Indeed. The actual content (i.e. posts) never expands beyond that width regardless of window size, and the rest is filled with white grey empty padding. The grey is an improvement, but the information-desert remains. I assume the newsletter signup nag goes away if you have subscribed (or at least it had better), but the sidebar it occupies is present in several places on the forum. What's actually in it varies, but it consumes the same large vertical slice regardless. Personally I nuke the entire sidebar element from orbit with uBlock, and the content (i.e. list of posts) expands to fill the now vacant space. It's still not full width, but it's an improvement. What I don't understand is why we can't have a forum that is just a forum, without all this extraneous not-forum crap scattered all over it. This is a dedicated discussion board, not a Farcebook clone. That big-ass Kerbal 2 banner in Alamo's image can go to hell for a start (also nuked with uBlock here). So can the "devblogs" sidebar (that belongs in a subforum or dedicated thread like everything else), and the "featured livestreamers" which can also have a subforum or thread. What you're left with is a list of forum sections with an overview of the activity in each, some navigation functions and a search facility - i.e all the things a forum is actually about. That list of subforums can then be full-width, as can post titles and/or previews... Which they are by default in all traditional non-hipster board software (phpBB, FluxBB etc. etc.). What exactly was wrong with using one of those ordinary (and BBCode compatible) FOSS forum packages anyway? The old (pre-IPS) forum did indeed waste a bit of space, but it was nowhere near as bad as the current iteration. On the other hand, it also didn't burn my eyes or bog down my browser with ridiculous quantities of unnecessary javascript, and it lacked most of the pointless animations / infinite scroll / dynamic loading / reactive design / social media integration / huge UI / hamburger menu infested "modern" insanity that makes this thing a chore to use on a traditional desktop. Ed, here's what the frontpage looks like for me, with uBlock applied to the most useless elements (banner, sidebar, link to modhost nobody uses, etc, etc.): See how much cleaner that is with just a few clicks? See how only forum related things remain? Now, if we can just remove the strip of desolation on either side, nuke some more of the padding around and above the content, make that "start new topic" button a sensible size, and find a theme that isn't miraculously both glaring and invisibly low-contrast at the same time, we'll be looking at a halfway usable thing.

* It's far too bright, everywhere. While this might look reasonable on a phone in full sunlight, it's tantamount to snow-blindness on a large, high-quality monitor. * Wasted space everywhere. They even went as far as to put useful and frequently used controls into one of those ridiculous hamburger menus to free up more space to turn into a featureless white void. * Anything that isn't garishly bright or blindingly white is so low-contrast one needs to squint to see it (i.e. the "jump to" button on the end of the quote header). The height of said header is also a gratuitous waste of space. * None of the annoyances with the previous incarnation have been fixed, the space-wasting sidebars remain (plus another 1/5 of the screen width lost to a little "newsletter" box on the activity feed), the pointless social-media buttons remain, the editor is still a nightmare, and BBCode support is still MIA. The activity feed appears to be an exercise in wasting as much screen real-estate as possible, and the rest of the forum isn't much better. We have a mobile layout already, we don't need the desktop render to have enormous fat-finger friendly elements and portrait-orientation centric layout as well. Hell, from the width of the actual content this thing looks like it was designed for a 4:3 monitor from 1995.

Indeed it is. Someone has actually managed to find a theme worse than the one they inflicted on us when first switching to IPS. While that is an accomplishment in it's own right, it's not one I'm going to stick around for, and certainly not for as long as it took to get it fixed the first time. On that note I'm off to use a website that doesn't make my eyes bleed. Wake me up when you've finished breaking stuff, whoever decided to pull the trigger on this ill-conceived "upgrade". So what? Since when does "It's the default" excuse inflicting horrible design on your users? It's horrific to the point it actually makes my vision blur if I look at it too long. Fix it. If you can't fix it, find some better forum software that supports non-horrific themes. Default, noun: A preselected option adopted by a computer program or other mechanism when no alternative is specified by the user or programmer. So specify an alternative already.

Google considers not allowing them to track your every move "suspicious activity". Denying cookies, using incognito mode all the time, using TOR at all, apparently those are not what good compliant internet sheep do and such behaviour must be punished. Solving CAPTCHAs while not logged into google (or using tab isolation)? Guess what, that's naughty too. They'll get progressively harder each time until you land at "suspicious activity"... Of course if one is using Chrome this doesn't really apply, because sites Google operates are exempt from cookie policy anyway.