[1.3.0] Kerbalism v1.2.9

[raptor_xxl]

35 minutes ago, ShotgunNinja said:

And there is a shielding material, called not surprisingly 'Shielding', that you can add to manned parts. I assume it to be lead in fact.

That's why @ThatPilot has maxed shields and cosmic radiation is killing his Kerbals

[ShotgunNinja]

@raptor_xxl That guy has maxed 'shielding' (not active shields, it is a different thing), and his problem wasn't cosmic radiation but the NERV. I believe how the shielding resource affect radiation is fine right now, as at max level you get just enough time to go to the furthest planet and back. What may be unbalanced is the NERV radiation amount, that I'll look.

 

EDIT:

Yeah I think the problem is that there is nothing really available to counter the NERV radiation. Ideally that would be dealt with putting distance between it and the crew, and/or putting a lot of matter between the two. But given that both options are unavailable in Kerbalism right now, and that reducing the NERV radiation doesn't sound right to me, I believe I'll just disable the NERV emitter in next version. At least until I implement something to counter it in an acceptably realistic way.

Edited October 25, 2016 by ShotgunNinja

[The-Doctor]

Really can't wait, this plus OPM and mother will really spice things up for me, giving me an awesome play-through to colonize everywhere 

[iguana_man]

@ShotgunNinja Would it be possible to make it so that the GUI you have on the tracking station screen(that gives options to show radiation), remembers whether it's been closed or not.  When I was playing 1.1.3 with Kerbalism I remember I would forever be closing it.  I play with radiation off because it was a huge FPS hit for me when the radiation was visible.  Great mod you have and I hope you don't mind my small suggestion.  Thanks

 

[KSPanier]

Do you plan on adding support for the Universal Storage mod?

[ThatPilot]

On 10/25/2016 at 0:41 PM, akharin said:

This is so nice and so complex mod - it just can't go without some bugs. So I'm desperately waiting for a new release cause the ' no-EC-burn-death-timewarp bug ' makes gameplay too much challenging as my kerbals goes interplanetary.

Anyway, thanks for a good work and so many fun features!
 

I just landed all of my Kerbin, Mun and Minmus space station crews before I've blasted off to Duna

On 10/24/2016 at 10:00 PM, podbaydoor said:

It would be nifty to have a 1/r² law governing radiation exposure from on-board generators like NERVs so you could put them at the end of a long truss segment to mitigate their effects. I've seen people self-impose this sort of thing when playing without this mod. I really appreciate mechanics that let you solve problems with better vessel design rather than slapping a part on (i.e. active shield).

This. A 100x this!

[akharin]

14 hours ago, ThatPilot said:

I just landed all of my Kerbin, Mun and Minmus space station crews before I've blasted off to Duna

I was too entusiastic and sent two expeditions - to Eve and Duna. Before I discovered this EC nuance. And now have to switch between ships every 4 days.

About space station. I have one with Gravity Rings and once noticed what kerbal settled in Ring have 'cramped' space status, while station have plenty of space - for up to 20 kerbals. I moved unhappy kerbal to another module ('lab') and he became happy about living space. Does it normal?

[raptor_xxl]

19 hours ago, KSPanier said:

Do you plan on adding support for the Universal Storage mod?

It should be the other way - Universal Storage could support Kerbalism by adding some elements that are available only when Kerbalism is installed

[KSPanier]

3 hours ago, raptor_xxl said:

It should be the other way - Universal Storage could support Kerbalism by adding some elements that are available only when Kerbalism is installed

Universal Storage already has a surplus of features for life-support mods, it's only a question of activating the correct ones, that's why I think Kerbalism should support Universal Storage.

[DJ Reonic]

To my knowledge, it already does support Universal Storage

[kraden]

Universal storage does work with Kerbalism. I have them both on my 1.1.3 career save.

[raptor_xxl]

@ShotgunNinja, maybe you would split shielding for 2 types of shielding - water against cosmic radiation and lead against nuclear reactors radiation? This would be more realistic and would allow more possibilities for water management, eg create shelters for Coronal mass ejections, where you would put your kerbals and pump water to it, and pump the water back to other modules when it's safe again.

[TheEpicSquared]

@raptor_xxl I like that idea

[Z3R0_0NL1N3]

I believe I have asked this before here, but is there a possibility for the malfunction system to be updated to reflect full-on failures the way DangIt used to, or is that not something you have in mind?

[lajoswinkler]

Hurry up with that update! Chop, chop, ShotgunNinja, come on!

Just kidding.

Edited October 29, 2016 by lajoswinkler

[ShotgunNinja]

Re Universal Storage:
it use the same resources so the containers work out of the box. In current version I also slightly tweak the amounts to balance them (but probably not going to do it in next one). The other components it provide weren't really used by Kerbalism up to current version, but some may be in next one (eg: recycler, etc).

Re reliability:
that system was recently extended and made more flexible and at some point I'll take advantage of that and add more types of failures, provided however that they can be implemented to also happen in background. Every mechanic is slowly moving toward more realism, and for the malfunctions 'total failures' can be the next logical step (maybe optional). But keep in mind this update focus more on the life support aspect, so reliability-related things are not happening now.

Re 'when you deliver?':
I'm looking at the changelog and it has 250+ entries, and I'm not done yet. Also I rarely have more than 1h per-day to dedicate to this. But hey I'm dedicating 1h of my life every day to this mod, for free! I don't even want to count how many mexican-months of pay that would sum up to . Funny video BTW.

Re 'two types of shielding':
thanks for the suggestion, but I'm sticking with shielding as it is for now.

 

Now onto what I did recently. With the explosion of features that could be enabled/disabled, things were getting out of control. I noticed long ago that most of them were really determined by the specifics of the profile the player is using. So I investigated how to generate them from the profile modifiers automatically, but that was never possible because I needed to be able to check NEEDS[xxx] in MM patches. Well, finally I found a way around this. Now some code is injected in the KSP loading process, just after the game database has been created and just before MM does its thing. This code in turn generate MM patches of the form '@Kerbalism:FOR[xxx] {}' on-the-fly. So MM patches will be able to use NEEDS[FeatureAbc] and also NEEDS[ProfileXyz].

A general cleanup of all the MM patches followed, including all the contrib ones. The EC tweaks were removed everywhere, according to the new policy of 'stopping messing with other mods balance'. Then with all the feature-set finalized I added a whole lot of checks in-code based on what's enabled and what's not, mostly UI tweaks. This was harder than it looks.

Here's the features that can be enabled/disabled:

• Radiation
• Shielding
• LivingSpace
• Comfort
• Poisoning
• Pressure
• Habitat
• Supplies
• Reliability
• Signal
• SpaceWeather
• Automation
• [undisclosed]

For instance, if the profile you are using doesn't use the 'comfort' modifier, then all the patches that add Comfort-related stuff are disabled. Because they are using NEEDS[FeatureComfort]. Similarly for all other features.

Also, when you make a profile there is probably the necessity to add some MM patches to it. However you want these patches only applied when the user select that profile. Now this can be accomplished by using NEEDS[ProfileXXX] in those patches and it all work.

Next week: what should be done with the signal system.

[theJesuit]

2 hours ago, ShotgunNinja said:

Here's the features that can be enabled/disabled:

• [undisclosed]

I, for one,appreciate your time and awesomeness at this mod.  Thank you for your [typical and probably more] hour per day.

Undisclosed could be my favourite part of the mod! So many possibilities! jks all the mod is good.

Peace.

[Bonus Eventus]

On 10/25/2016 at 10:17 AM, ShotgunNinja said:

@raptor_xxl That guy has maxed 'shielding' (not active shields, it is a different thing), and his problem wasn't cosmic radiation but the NERV. I believe how the shielding resource affect radiation is fine right now, as at max level you get just enough time to go to the furthest planet and back. What may be unbalanced is the NERV radiation amount, that I'll look.

 

EDIT:

Yeah I think the problem is that there is nothing really available to counter the NERV radiation. Ideally that would be dealt with putting distance between it and the crew, and/or putting a lot of matter between the two. But given that both options are unavailable in Kerbalism right now, and that reducing the NERV radiation doesn't sound right to me, I believe I'll just disable the NERV emitter in next version. At least until I implement something to counter it in an acceptably realistic way.

I had an idea when I was messing with dynamic colliders and bounds. https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Bounds.html

 

All you need to determine if a part should be irradiated or not is a tapered cylinder, that has a mesh collider.

 

When a mesh collider is assigned to a mesh component in Unity, after it's added the mesh component can be removed. This leaves just the mesh collider behind but with the shape of the mesh.

 

 

A custom part module could then access this mesh collider's bounds parameters, and exploit the bounds.encapsulate method. https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Bounds.Encapsulate.html 
Or have it's empty game object's parent scale on the y axis to the distance between the command pod and the shield's part.transform position vector 3.

Parts within the protected zone can be found by checking with bounds.contains

if(encapsulatorObject.bounds.contains(targetObject.bounds.min) && encapsulatorObject.bounds.contains(targetObject.bounds.max))
{
	//do stuff
}

I imagine these calculations only needing to be done once when the flight scene begins. 

 

With that information, there's a lot of ways you could adjust the radiation that parts receive.

 

 

[Nansuchao]

38 minutes ago, Bonus Eventus said:

snip

@ShotgunNinja, I think IRL the NERVA would not emit so much radiation to poison the crew. The NERVA itself has solid shielding around the reactor (RL), and between the engine and the crew there would be one or more fuel tank, more than enough to protect the crew from every issue.

 

The idea of the kind of shielding @Bonus Eventus is proposing however, is great! For engines or reactors like the ones in Near Future or Interstellar Extended, something like that would be necessary to save the astronauts from sure death.

[ShotgunNinja]

@Bonus Eventus The concept is not bad. Actually a mesh is not even required: assuming it is a cone, it could just be specified as an angle in the module config. Then in-code I can check if the sampling point is inside the cone by just doing a dot product and comparing it with the cosine of the angle. This will work without adding a 'transform' to specify the direction in the part (as we can assume all engines obey the same conventions in term of orientation, eg: the nozzle is at -Y and the shielded cone is at +Y), with arbitrary parts that have not been created specifically for this mod (like the stock NERV for example) and in background for unloaded vessels (where there are no parts or meshes).

But then there are other problems yet, here is a quick list of what's come in mind:

• how the user visualize it (including in the editor), maybe extending the field rendering to show it
• radiation is calculated per-vessel right now, so the current system need to be extended to evaluate it per-habitat then maybe do some volume-weighted average
• if an emitter in a vessel has to influence other nearby vessels, then an acceleration structure for neighbors queries is necessary (likely a multi-resolution sparse grid)
• more? probably

That being said, all of these problems can be solved or hacked around. Eventually, many many months from now.

 

[Bonus Eventus]

 

@ShotgunNinja thanks for the response. Glad you like the idea. After reading your post, your method does seem more elegant : )

 

25 minutes ago, ShotgunNinja said:

• how the user visualize it (including in the editor), maybe extending the field rendering to show it

Have you considered using unity gizmos? 

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Gizmos.html

 

26 minutes ago, ShotgunNinja said:

• radiation is calculated per-vessel right now, so the current system need to be extended to evaluate it per-habitat then maybe do some volume-weighted average

Well another option is to keep the calculation the same, and just add a shielding bonus per habs that fall within the protected zone

 

27 minutes ago, ShotgunNinja said:

• if an emitter in a vessel has to influence other nearby vessels, then an acceleration structure for neighbors queries is necessary (likely a multi-resolution sparse grid)

not sure, I guess I would need to know whether shields can block radiation from other vessels and what shield types you're thinking about. Lateral shields for example, which clad the sides of vessels?

 

1 hour ago, ShotgunNinja said:

That being said, all of these problems can be solved or hacked around. Eventually, many many months from now.

Absolutely! Keep up the great work

[Zipmafia]

I'm waiting to play [1.2] until this mod is ready. KSP is unplayable without this mod in my opinion, keep up the awesome work!

[podbaydoor]

On 10/29/2016 at 5:27 AM, ShotgunNinja said:

Next week: what should be done with the signal system.

My vote is for stripping out Kerbalism's signal system (including the tiny antenna) and using stock. Just in general I feel like "defer to stock when possible" is a good strategy for mods that aren't trying to be like RO.

The stock signal system (in hard mode i.e. no control w/o signal) is pretty similar to how Kerbalism handles it. AFAIK the only interactions between the signals system and the rest of Kerbalism are the signal loss notification and the "call home" QoL modifier, so as long as the stock signal connection can be checked in background you're good-to-go, right?

2 hours ago, Zipmafia said:

I'm waiting to play [1.2] until this mod is ready. KSP is unplayable without this mod in my opinion, keep up the awesome work!

I wouldn't say "unplayable". Boring, definitely.

[DJ Reonic]

KSP is quite boring without Kerbalism and Orbital Decay. It is certainly playable, but not nearly as fun.

[stoani96]

hey guys!

I know this mod is not yet updated to work with 1.2, but I still wanted to install it or better say, I DID install it (I tricked CKAN by altering the version in the readme.txt), but there are NO signs of the mod in the game.... does the module manager block incompatible mods?

I just wanted to fool around with the mechanics and the parts (as far as they work with this ksp version...)

Does anyone know, why there is no sign of the mod in the game?

And can the (great and honorable) author give us a vague release date for a compatible version? I want to play KSP again!

 

thx for your time!