Discussion regarding unathorised forks of mods and their distribution

[Camacha]

The distros I know that can run from USB will save files on that USB with use if you indicated so when setting things up, so that should not be an issue. That will not work when running from CD, for obvious reasons.

[TheAlmightyOS]

I wonder if thumb drive bootable ksp playing linux distro is a viable alternative to all this win64 nonsense...

Almost...

The bootable linux distro is the easy part (Use Linux MINT for quick results) and if you have a higher spec machine with a higher spec thumb drive you can get away with running it live. HOWEVER, everyone's rig is different so I can not say that someone won't have some strange issues booting or getting a linux vid driver installed properly.

Personally, I have a separate SSD with MINT Linux in my gaming rig that I select at boot when I want to play games like KSP and it works very well. Just throwing it out there. Your results may vary.

[KerbMav]

It only has to load it once, and then the whole game is in RAM.

For it being completely in RAM it for sure takes its time to switch scenes or load crafts entering the physics bubble.

[steve_v]

HOWEVER, everyone's rig is different so I can not say that someone won't have some strange issues booting or getting a linux vid driver installed properly.

Nail meets head

A live distro with generic drivers is fairly easy, a live distro that autodetects and installs a proprietary GPU driver, not so much.

There are distros out there that do it, but i'm pretty sure I've not seen one that works with all concievable hardware. MS, on the other hand, works around this by simply not providing a live distro...

Personally, I prefer my install/live disk to load the bare minimum of hardware specific drivers - just enough to get a console up. Less complexity, less potential for a no-boot scenario.

This has the added benefit that if something doesn't go as planned later on, you have a fallback bootable disk to fix it with.

I have a separate SSD with MINT Linux in my gaming rig that I select at boot

While a live disk is a nifty idea, multiboot really is less hassle in the long run.

I have a similar setup, GNU/Linux 98% of the time, with a Windows install I can boot for occasional Windows only games - a list that is growng shorter by the day

Edited January 17, 2015 by steve_v

[Ossie]

I don't know much about whats going but seems like a person converted a mod not of their making ,following the license , then the author of the original mod got pissed because mod was converted for x64 use and did not breach original license , if the license conditions where not breached then their is no argument it is the original license writer who is at fault for not including all the conditions he wanted in the license , and as a matter of law only the government and agencies of the government can change laws and back date them, but their seems to be a lot finer pointing going on over trivial matters I would thought a recognition of the original author in conversion would have been enough works in most other mod communities

[ratchet freak]

I don't know much about whats going but seems like a person converted a mod not of their making ,following the license , then the author of the original mod got pissed because mod was converted for x64 use and did not breach original license , if the license conditions where not breached then their is no argument it is the original license writer who is at fault for not including all the conditions he wanted in the license , and as a matter of law only the government and agencies of the government can change laws and back date them, but their seems to be a lot finer pointing going on over trivial matters I would thought a recognition of the original author in conversion would have been enough works in most other mod communities

there i still the trademark issue of the name which is independent of the copyright of the code

[panzer1b]

I really never understood why so many modders are so against x64?

Yes its buggy, but why cant they bloody put in big bold letters on their mod page they do not support x64 anything, and using that version makes you on your own, and that noone will respond to bug reports or any complaints about using x64. I never understood the whole complaining abotu bug reports anyways? All mods ive ever released (this game or other games) i release as is, and while i do look at bug reports and take them into consideration for improvements, i feel in no way obligated to fix or change any mods ive made. Why cant the modders just make it super clear they have 0 support for this or that version, or whatnot, and will ignore issues arising from use of those versions.

Now personally i get really ticked off when some modder adds code that disables the mod on a specific version of the game, and all mods i currently run (that have any restrictions put in them in teh 1st place) have been custom recompiled for my own use to work regardless of what game im running. While i strongly disagree with the limiting bs that many modders have done to restrict what users can do, i do still respect them, and their hard work, and i dont release anything without at least asking before hand (most of it is a 1 minute edit, so isnt even worth the time to upload). Anyways, liek someone here said, i do reccomend a basic tutorial be made for the inexperienced modded as to how to at a bare minimum recompile someone's mod with some changes, such as removal of limiting code.

[NathanKell]

Protip: we did.

Didn't work. We still got blamed, and flooded with support requests we couldn't do anything for.

Not just requests we could ignore, but threads saying hey, mod X breaks KSP, don't use it! Modder, why you bad person who break KSP?

(And worse, offer "solutions" that only made the problem worse, but spread quickly.)

Please try to, y'know, look at the history of things.

[Senshi]

It's a bit confusing why people still ask about how to reenable Win64. It's been floating around in various areas of this forum how to do this, in more or less tutorials. Hell, there even is a one-click tool on github that was created just to remove the win64 check of mods.

I'm amazed the discussion hasn't moved anywhere over the last twenty pages. The stuff I read here is the same that was posted on page 1 and 2. The problem is that modders have a very limited method of handling support requests. Usually they are restricted to "one thread per mod", where everything gets piled in: Dev notes, bug reports, support requests, etc. . This was enough for a long time, but with the ever growing popularity even the most active modder simply can't keep up with it anymore. It also causes the problem of the same questions being asked over and over again, because nobody will read through the 8000 posts in the FAR thread alone. And a surprisingly large number of people don't bother to search for a solution at all and just slam the mod author at once with some nonsense bug.

I think the Win64 "shutdown"by modders is just one symptom of the underlying issue of the too large userbase without having access to tools to handle that userbase.

With 0.24 Win64 was still okay-ish, but it continuously degraded with 0.25 and especially 0.9. And now that Squad has given up on Win64 and will not offer such a version with 1.0, it's best to bite the bullet now and set up a Linux dualboot if you cannot keep your game in the 32bit memory limit. I did just that some time ago, and it really is much easier than I expected it to be.

If there's a demand, I could write a guide on how to set this up, tailored to people that usually are "Windows-only", though there already exist plenty of guides on how to do this in principle:

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2014/06/11/how-to-dual-boot-linux-mint-17-and-windows-8-on-a-pc-with-uefi-firmware/

And setting up Linux KSP is well described in the Linux compatibility thread here in the KSP forums.