[Most 1.12.x] Near Future Technologies (August 26)

[Mikeloeven]

It's really not so much about laziness as it is about getting notified of updates in a timely manner through version tracking. The alternative to CKAN or Version Checker plugins is to watch hundreds of threads for updates which would probably blow up most people's inboxes

[Nertea]

21 minutes ago, Mikeloeven said:

I know it says CKAN is not supported but honestly it needs to be especially since its becoming the standard for mod management these version mismatches are kind of annoying. Not saying I am too lazy for manual installs but rather that the disconnect caused by manually updating can cause some issues

No, it's not. A typo in a version file could occur exactly the same way as a typo in a CKAN file. 

This also isn't a debate we're having, this is something that has already been decided. 

Edited March 10, 2017 by Nertea

[Streetwind]

36 minutes ago, Mikeloeven said:

It's really not so much about laziness as it is about getting notified of updates in a timely manner through version tracking.

Version tracking is included in Near Future packs - you should be notified at every startup if a new version is available. As demonstrated by NF Propulsion right now, even if unintentionally so Said notification even has a "Download" button!

Also, Near Future packs were on CKAN quite a lot in the past, usually put there by me or someone else who felt motivated. In fact, I'm not aware of the metadata files being intentionally removed, so they should still be there right now. They should automatically populate version information from SpaceDock, too. I'm not sure why they don't show up anymore. Perhaps they just need a bit of a touch-up to get back into working order? I honestly don't know. I stopped trying to maintain the metadata at some point because as amazing a tool as it is for the user, as unbelievably frustrating it was for mod owners or their assistants to try and keep the stuff under the hood maintained. I could launch into pages worth of words about it, but I'll spare you. Just rest assured that it was quite far from the ideal that you hold in your mind's eye. I usually invested at least 3 hours every major release cycle (plus grumpy mood for the rest of the day) so users could save 20 seconds over a manual download.

Mind, I hear CKAN has come along a bit since then. Undoubtedly there are smart and eager people there who genuinely want the best for the community and improve the tool as much as they can. Who knows, maybe they fixed some of my grievances? ...But I'm honestly not succeeding in motivating myself to try and get back in there. I'm done with it, personally. And since Nertea's stance is made quite unmistakably clear in the post right above mine, any CKAN maintenance will have to be unofficial and provided by someone else. Have you considered looking into it yourself? All you need is a Github account, and Bob's yer uncle, as they say.

Edited March 10, 2017 by Streetwind

[Nertea]

NF Propulsion 0.8.5

• Fixed incorrect link in AVC file

NF Electrical 0.8.6

• Fixed animation corruption on Whirlijig model
• Fixed obsolete normal map on Whirlijig model

[Raideur Ng]

Question concerning the Mk4-1 Pod, how is it meant to safely re-enter the atmosphere? I feel silly asking but with its overhanging edges, it's presenting an issue for use with a heatshield. Any thoughts?

[Space Kadet]

its not, its a space ship

[Streetwind]

It can probably reenter safely behind an inflatable heatshield, though.

(Almost anything can... )

[FirroSeranel]

3 hours ago, Space Kadet said:

i love how many people ask for CKAN but there's some many issues with a new mod and people b***hing about it i can see why people dont want to get involved. Never mind the gits that tell you to do it as if the developer is lazy and not person that wants to spend 10 minutes installing mods!  Rock on @Nertea your mods are awsome!

 

 

Well, with due respect, when you run in the neighborhood of 200 mods, like I do, it actually takes about three -hours- to install them, -with- CKAN. It takes a full day to do so manually, and then there's a -very- good chance something won't play nicely together, at which point you have to manually track it down. I've tried it both ways, and for a heavily-modded install, CKAN isn't just a convenience. It's a requirement. Being a dedicated KSP player is already 70% tweaking and bug-hunting and 30% play time -with- CKAN, so... "lazy"? I don't think so.

Also, do consider how busy the CKAN maintainers are, tracking down issues for hundreds and hundreds of different mods. It's like a chain of command. The mod creator working with the CKAN people to make sure their mods install and maintain smoothly, is efficient. Five hundred users with basically no clue what they're even talking about, whining vaguely about a problem they don't understand, is... not.

The inconvenient truth is, there are a few mods and support packages that make KSP a game worth playing. CKAN is definitely one. So instead of acting derisive and snarling that "CKAN is CKAN's problem," like its existence is some kind of inconvenience for modders, or its users are idiots, or lazy, for using it at all, maybe we should appreciate both the modders -and- the people who maintain the software package that probably 95% of any mod's users download and install it with (and discover its existence with for that matter).

I'm not suggesting Nertea -must- support CKAN. Of course he doesn't have to; he doesn't have to do any of this, and I respect him greatly for doing it at all.

I'm more saying that suggesting that it wouldn't be a bad idea isn't crazy-talk. There are modders who do interface with the CKAN people to make sure things go smoothly, and it doesn't seem to be much of a bother.

And I'm saying that there is a bit of a hostile response on these forums in general about certain things, and I think we could all be a bit more civil at times.

[eberkain]

3 minutes ago, FirroSeranel said:

 for a heavily-modded install, CKAN isn't just a convenience. It's a requirement.

I completely disagree in every way possible.  If CKAN worked 100% of the time and was reliable for installing all mods, then sure, you could make that statement like it was a fact.  

[DStaal]

I think aggressively stating that a mod maker needs to do something that they've very clearly said they don't want to do is fairly hostile to start with.

(And I run ~200 mods, without CKAN - because it's not very well supported on my platform, to the point that until I upgraded my computer it wouldn't run at all.)

[FirroSeranel]

2 hours ago, Raideur Ng said:

Question concerning the Mk4-1 Pod, how is it meant to safely re-enter the atmosphere? I feel silly asking but with its overhanging edges, it's presenting an issue for use with a heatshield. Any thoughts?

 

I do get -some- heating of the pod behind a 3.75 meter heat shield, but it's never been enough to destroy the pod, even on a Minmus reentry at 3.5 km/s. Actually I rather assumed it was just conductive heating from the heat shield's rather enormous contact area with the pod's underside, but maybe you're right about the slight overhang.

You can solve that though by putting something else between the two, without an overhang, so the shock front spreads wide of the overhang. I'm not sure where it's from, but there's a "Dragon Heat-Resistant Fuel Tank" that's perfect for that. It's styled nicely, too. Other options might be a reaction control wheel, or a battery.

Edit: Oh, another thought is, if you have TweakScale installed, nudge the size of the heatshield up slightly (if that one is tweakable, I'm not 100% sure).

Edited March 10, 2017 by FirroSeranel

[FirroSeranel]

12 minutes ago, eberkain said:

I completely disagree in every way possible.  If CKAN worked 100% of the time and was reliable for installing all mods, then sure, you could make that statement like it was a fact.  

 

CKAN is... a bit touchy, I'll grant you. It doesn't like to install very many mods at once, so you can't just pick 150 mods, and hit "Install" and expect them to all work glitch-free. But if you do a few at a time, in intelligent combinations (avoid mods that do the same thing together, unless they're part of a constellation or dependency chain like USI or Near Future), I've almost never had trouble with it.

Occasionally it has trouble downloading a file, but if you wait half an hour, it usually works.

Usually if it fails to install something, there's a reason, and it tells you what it is, and it's pretty easy to fix. Usually it's related to another mod using a file (it won't ever interfere with another mod's files, even if it installed them itself).

I think CKAN is by far the best mod management program out there. It blows Nexus completely out of the water. Just about the only platform that competes with it for reliability and ease of use is the Steam Workshop, but that has to be supported natively by the developers, not tacked on by an enthusiastic fanbase. And even that has its issues.

11 minutes ago, DStaal said:

I think aggressively stating that a mod maker needs to do something that they've very clearly said they don't want to do is fairly hostile to start with.

(And I run ~200 mods, without CKAN - because it's not very well supported on my platform, to the point that until I upgraded my computer it wouldn't run at all.)

 

 

Perhaps... but I didn't read aggression into his statement at all. Keep in mind, not everyone is a very good writer, or even has English as their first language. I find that I do best if I give people the benefit of the doubt, in terms of reading aggression into things or not. That kind of assumption that any comment is an aggressive attack, is exactly the kind of hostility I'm talking about. *shrugs*

Anyway, to be clear, I'm -not- saying Nertea must or should do anything he doesn't want to do. He has his stance, and that's fine. I've actually had no trouble whatsoever with Near Future and CKAN, ever. It's always been installable and updateable without trouble, so @Streetwind, if that was your doing, then thank you, and well done.

I'm just confused about the attitude I've seen as quite prevalent in the modding community that CKAN is something evil, an inconvenience that's (perhaps even deliberately) trying to make their lives more difficult. It isn't. They're people just like everyone else, busy just like any other modder, volunteering their time and effort, just like any other modder, and enthusiastic about the game, just like any other modder. So the attitude I detect, the hostility toward it just seems... misguided, to me, that's all.

Edited March 10, 2017 by FirroSeranel

[narvster]

7 minutes ago, eberkain said:

I completely disagree in every way possible.  If CKAN worked 100% of the time and was reliable for installing all mods, then sure, you could make that statement like it was a fact.  

I completely agree, CKAN has too many issues to manage a large 90+ mod install, I've found it often loses track of mods, updates are slow for critical mods.  CKAN I feel needs a major overhaul to fully support taking over already installed mods and ways to manually sync in and out mods from the tool.  I found due to the numerous bugs I was spending a large portion of my time fighting with CKAN to stop corrupting my gamedata library.

 

I now prefer to use AVC in game, click the download buttons, quit the game load, download/install, fire up KSP again and away we go!  It only takes a couple of mins and works a treat even at busy times with KSP updates.  It also means I can "break" conflicting mods into my library to trial them out.  For example: I have Interstellar extended and Kerbal R&D installed and working well by manually removing tweakscale (and Persistent Rotation as that causes issues when using BetterTimeWarp), this is something that is not possible in CKAN.

 

Oh and I found installing more than 5 mods at a time causes CKAN to freakout and give up.  Maybe CKAN will sort it all out and I wish them well, but it's certainly not essential and I've found actually hinders my enjoyment of the game.

[DStaal]

1 minute ago, FirroSeranel said:

I'm just confused about the attitude I've seen as quite prevalent in the modding community that CKAN is something evil, an inconvenience that's (perhaps even deliberately) trying to make their lives more difficult. It isn't. They're people just like everyone else, busy just like any other modder, volunteering their time and effort, just like any other modder, and enthusiastic about the game, just like any other modder. So the attitude I detect, the hostility toward it just seems... misguided, to me, that's all.

I think part of it is residual - for a long time CKAN would list mods whether the author wanted them to or not, and you'd get a lot of users that would say 'of course I've installed it correctly: I used CKAN', when using CKAN is *not* a guarantee of a correct install.  And then those users would argue with the mod makers saying that they need to fix something, when the entire problem was out of their hands and may well have been something the mod maker was against in the first place.

Now, CKAN has fixed up their policies some, but it still isn't completely smooth - and users have to know that, and be willing to see if their problem is on their end before reporting problems.  Which often isn't the case.

[FirroSeranel]

1 minute ago, narvster said:

I completely agree, CKAN has too many issues to manage a large 90+ mod install, I've found it often loses track of mods, updates are slow for critical mods.  CKAN I feel needs a major overhaul to fully support taking over already installed mods and ways to manually sync in and out mods from the tool.  I found due to the numerous bugs I was spending a large portion of my time fighting with CKAN to stop corrupting my gamedata library.

 

I now prefer to use AVC in game, click the download buttons, quit the game load, download/install, fire up KSP again and away we go!  It only takes a couple of mins and works a treat even at busy times with KSP updates.  It also means I can "break" conflicting mods into my library to trial them out.  For example: I have Interstellar extended and Kerbal R&D installed and working well by manually removing tweakscale (and Persistent Rotation as that causes issues when using BetterTimeWarp), this is something that is not possible in CKAN.

 

Oh and I found installing more than 5 mods at a time causes CKAN to freakout and give up.  Maybe CKAN will sort it all out and I wish them well, but it's certainly not essential and I've found actually hinders my enjoyment of the game.

 

You make some good points. I do manually install a couple of mods here and there that CKAN doesn't think are compatible (because untweaked, it's usually correct; they aren't). Or that CKAN is really slow to update, on a particularly critical update. Usually though, it gets updates within a day or so, and for most updates, that's fine. One play session with an old version of a mod or two doesn't kill me.

If I'm really honest, the -main- function of CKAN that I can't live without, is simply the menu of compatible mods. It gives me a nice, neat list of mods that I can be sure will actually work with the current version of KSP, in one place, with links to their forum pages to check them out.

Without it, how do you find mods to install, or remember them all when an installation finally gets borked enough to need a clean reinstall? Is there an aggregation thread on the forums that's kept up to date that I don't know about? I'm not being hostile... I really don't know, and would like to.

CKAN does have -just- enough issues that if there were a replacement for that "menu" functionality, I probably would go manual. I do manual installation on almost all games. Nexus Mod Manager is so abysmal I basically don't bother with it at all... CKAN is good enough that I don't have to, and I'm willing to live with its (fairly minor, to me) inconveniences, to get its advantages.

3 minutes ago, DStaal said:

I think part of it is residual - for a long time CKAN would list mods whether the author wanted them to or not, and you'd get a lot of users that would say 'of course I've installed it correctly: I used CKAN', when using CKAN is *not* a guarantee of a correct install.  And then those users would argue with the mod makers saying that they need to fix something, when the entire problem was out of their hands and may well have been something the mod maker was against in the first place.

Now, CKAN has fixed up their policies some, but it still isn't completely smooth - and users have to know that, and be willing to see if their problem is on their end before reporting problems.  Which often isn't the case.

 

That's fair. I'm not really sure why a modder wouldn't want CKAN to be able to install their mod, though I do know and respect that some don't. I haven't done a ton of modding (no mods under my own name), but I have helped on a few here and there, and to me, the idea that people are using what I've done, is the only actual reward. CKAN enables more people to use it, so it seems like a positive.

I do see how that kind of reporting could be irritating... but also keep in mind that a typical player doesn't just see one modder's outlook.

When you have someone like Allista or RoverDude, who are perfectly happy to work with CKAN people to make sure their mods can be installed smoothly and easily, and -thank- people for letting them know when their mods are having CKAN trouble... it is often disconcerting to then have someone like Ferram bite your head off for exactly the same thing... or actually half the time he doesn't have to. His regular commenters do it for him, en masse, fairly viciously.

I agree though, that users need to at least -try- to solve their own problems. And while it isn't realistic to expect people to read 100 pages of back-posts on 150 different mods' forum pages, if the mod author states in the OP that they don't support CKAN, we should try to respect that.

[Space Kadet]

28 minutes ago, FirroSeranel said:

Well, with due respect, when you run in the neighborhood of 200 mods, like I do, it actually takes about three -hours- to install them, -with- CKAN. It takes a full day to do so manually, and then there's a -very- good chance something won't play nicely together, at which point you have to manually track it down. I've tried it both ways, and for a heavily-modded install, CKAN isn't just a convenience. It's a requirement. Being a dedicated KSP player is already 70% tweaking and bug-hunting and 30% play time -with- CKAN, so... "lazy"? I don't think so.

Also, do consider how busy the CKAN maintainers are, tracking down issues for hundreds and hundreds of different mods. It's like a chain of command. The mod creator working with the CKAN people to make sure their mods install and maintain smoothly, is efficient. Five hundred users with basically no clue what they're even talking about, whining vaguely about a problem they don't understand, is... not.

The inconvenient truth is, there are a few mods and support packages that make KSP a game worth playing. CKAN is definitely one. So instead of acting derisive and snarling that "CKAN is CKAN's problem," like its existence is some kind of inconvenience for modders, or its users are idiots, or lazy, for using it at all, maybe we should appreciate both the modders -and- the people who maintain the software package that probably 95% of any mod's users download and install it with (and discover its existence with for that matter).

I'm not suggesting Nertea -must- support CKAN. Of course he doesn't have to; he doesn't have to do any of this, and I respect him greatly for doing it at all.

I'm more saying that suggesting that it wouldn't be a bad idea isn't crazy-talk. There are modders who do interface with the CKAN people to make sure things go smoothly, and it doesn't seem to be much of a bother.

And I'm saying that there is a bit of a hostile response on these forums in general about certain things, and I think we could all be a bit more civil at times.

With my currently installed mods 183, and yes it you mess up the install you get issues, and sometimes you get issues when everything goes correctly (never mind the 7 minutes to startup ksp even when your running it off a ssd),  but calling people lazy who badger moddev's to support ckan, when you know that dude is the one who will bother the mod when their ckan mod goes wrong. yeah i am right to call them that! thats lazy! And they are so self centred they want someone doing FREE work to do even more just to make their life easier.

Couple this with the fact ive seen this happen so many times over the last year it angers me, and im not a mod dev, just immagine instead of your 3 hour for install you have spent 4 months working on something, and giving it away for free, and then helping people with it further for free, only for someone to tell you you should be doing more. That my friend is hostile! Never mind the fact there's more that one dev stop developing their mod because of this barrage of lazy.  

[narvster]

3 minutes ago, FirroSeranel said:

Without it, how do you find mods to install, or remember them all when an installation finally gets borked enough to need a clean reinstall? Is there an aggregation thread on the forums that's kept up to date that I don't know about? I'm not being hostile... I really don't know, and would like to.

I find mods the usual way, via the forums, spacedock, curse, youtube etc. most, if not all mod makers make use of AVC by providing a .version file which tells you if a mod is incompatible or it has an update available.

Regarding borking an installation, its much less likely if you're installing them manually, I actually had a lot of problems with borked installations due to CKAN funnily enough.  Now I do them myself I know what's been updated and when and I just maintain my own little store, like CKANs, of mod downloads so if things go wrong I can easily roll back (which you can't do easily with CKAN).  I often find issues where a mod maker has omitted a file in a patch so I can go back to previous versions and bring in files they might have accidentally missed.  This has happened with Interstellar a few times I noticed in the past.

Also, make use of a back up program to ensure you back up the save and gamedata folders on a regular basis automatically.

CKAN is a great idea, but it's not in-depth and fully featured enough to handle the complex and fluid nature of 100's of mods written by 100's of developers all with their own style, quality assurance, inclinations and standards.  CKAN is brilliant for a small numbers of mods but not for huge installs.  I did think about helping out with dev on CKAN as I've got .NET skills but I didn't want to step on anyone's toes.

The minimum new features CKAN needs, I think are:

• Take ownership of a manually installed mod - without having to delete etc as some mods get marked as AD then you're screwed if you remove them (corrrupt CKAN library)
• Install incompatible mods - warn but let the user take the hit/risk
• Be able to say I'm manually managing a mod but let it notify you if there's an update and d/l for you to install yourself
• Sync the repository to take ownership of an existing gamedata directory
• Roll back to previous mod version
• Better error handling, whilst it's great it rolls back handled errors, when there are unhandled exceptions, that's when you get corrupt game directories
  • I think it should change the approach to installing to be download, unzip to temp dir, then copy across renaming old files, when successfully complete delete the renamed old files.
  • That way at no point are you at risk of being in an unrecoverable state as you could also add in a roll back feature if an error occurs using the old renamed files

 

[FirroSeranel]

2 minutes ago, Space Kadet said:

Never mind the fact there's more that one dev stop developing their mod because of this barrage of lazy.  

1

I'm actually astonished so many mod developers have actually stuck with it for this long. True, many mods have changed hands over the years, but a surprising number of original developers are still maintaining and improving their mods. I wish I had that level of dedication... Seriously, my hat is off to any mod maker.

I've made a few "mods" of my own, for my own private use, that I -could- publish, but don't, because I am, frankly, terrified of the level of time and effort and dedication it would take to do so... especially when I get tired of KSP and want to do something else for a few months.

I'm not sure I'd jump to a conclusion that they stopped developing their mod because of a "barrage of lazy". Unless they specifically ranted, "Blargh, that's the last straw! I ragequit!" (tongue-in-cheek here), I usually just assume they moved on, like anyone would do sooner or later.

[DStaal]

17 minutes ago, FirroSeranel said:

When you have someone like Allista or RoverDude, who are perfectly happy to work with CKAN people to make sure their mods can be installed smoothly and easily, and -thank- people for letting them know when their mods are having CKAN trouble... it is often disconcerting to then have someone like Ferram bite your head off for exactly the same thing... or actually half the time he doesn't have to. His regular commenters do it for him, en masse, fairly viciously.

Heh.  RoverDude is *not* a good example here.  He's willing to work with CKAN now - after there were some policy change that meant that mod authors have more control over things.  Before that he was one of the stronger anti-CKAN people around.

And Streetwind has given a perfectly good reason not to support CKAN - because it's a lot of work for him.  There are some that find that work useful, and some that don't.  I'm working on a mod at the moment, and I'm not planning on directly supporting CKAN because CKAN hasn't been useful to me, so I don't use it.  Therefore I don't have a good way of testing it, and don't feel I can offer any useful support.  I'll be open to others uploading it onto CKAN - and I'll point people having trouble with CKAN installs to them.

[narvster]

4 minutes ago, Space Kadet said:

Couple this with the fact ive seen this happen so many times over the last year it angers me, and im not a mod dev, just immagine instead of your 3 hour for install you have spent 4 months working on something, and giving it away for free, and then helping people with it further for free, only for someone to tell you you should be doing more. That my friend is hostile! Never mind the fact there's more that one dev stop developing their mod because of this barrage of lazy.  

I treat all mods with the up most respect, as you say they are putting in hours/day/weeks of their life for free to do something completely altruistic.  I will happily take whatever they provide and let them know if there's a problem, maybe even provide suggestions for cool additions to their mods.  But at no point should anyone ever demand something of a mod developer, not unless that demand is backed up with cold hard cash and an existing signed agreement in advance!

[Nertea]

@FirroSeranel: The real main reason that I have never liked CKAN is that the system defines a distribution standard which is different to the typical bundle of a packaged mod. That is, the mod should exist as a single GameData level folder and specify its dependencies separately. That has advantages (dependencies can be updated independently), but has one key disadvantage: I have to maintain not only several download locations, but two distribution models, one with dependencies packaged and one without. That's a fairly large amount of work to maintain the~10 mods that I work on. It's basically double the workload whenever a release happens.

In addition, because of this dependency structure, this forces me to maintain metadata for the subpackages that I have that are technically dependencies, but should never exist in the wild outside of my mods. For example I know that there is a NearFutureProps distribution floating around on CKAN, when this really shouldn't ever exist. Same with DeployableEngines and CryoTanks.

In my opinion, CKAN is not yet reliable enough to move uniquely to that distribution model, and only really provides advantages for me, the author, if I switch fully to that mode. So I won't. 

[FirroSeranel]

9 minutes ago, narvster said:

I find mods the usual way, via the forums, spacedock, curse, youtube etc. most, if not all mod makers make use of AVC by providing a .version file which tells you if a mod is incompatible or it has an update available.

Regarding borking an installation, its much less likely if you're installing them manually, I actually had a lot of problems with borked installations due to CKAN funnily enough.  Now I do them myself I know what's been updated and when and I just maintain my own little store, like CKANs, of mod downloads so if things go wrong I can easily roll back (which you can't do easily with CKAN).  I often find issues where a mod maker has omitted a file in a patch so I can go back to previous versions and bring in files they might have accidentally missed.  This has happened with Interstellar a few times I noticed in the past.

Also, make use of a back up program to ensure you back up the save and gamedata folders on a regular basis automatically.

CKAN is a great idea, but it's not in-depth and fully featured enough to handle the complex and fluid nature of 100's of mods written by 100's of developers all with their own style, quality assurance, inclinations and standards.  CKAN is brilliant for a small numbers of mods but not for huge installs.  I did think about helping out with dev on CKAN as I've got .NET skills but I didn't want to step on anyone's toes.

The minimum new features CKAN needs, I think are:

• Take ownership of a manually installed mod - without having to delete etc as some mods get marked as AD then you're screwed if you remove them (corrrupt CKAN library)
• Install incompatible mods - warn but let the user take the hit/risk
• Be able to say I'm manually managing a mod but let it notify you if there's an update and d/l for you to install yourself
• Sync the repository to take ownership of an existing gamedata directory
• Roll back to previous mod version
• Better error handling, whilst it's great it rolls back handled errors, when there are unhandled exceptions, that's when you get corrupt game directories
  • I think it should change the approach to installing to be download, unzip to temp dir, then copy across renaming old files, when successfully complete delete the renamed old files.
  • That way at no point are you at risk of being in an unrecoverable state as you could also add in a roll back feature if an error occurs using the old renamed files

 

 

 

That would be absolutely brilliant! I agree those are some wonderful ideas for improvements. Do you think they haven't thought of them? Or are they particularly tricky to code? Taking ownership of existing mods does seem like it'd be fairly tricky. Rolling back to previous versions would be easy enough, if somewhat open-ended in terms of storage requirements, with unknown user PC specs, I'd think.

But yes... I'll admit I've done... more than a few reinstalls because CKAN got corrupted.

Dammit... you're all half way to convincing me to go manual... *grumble grumble*

Edited March 10, 2017 by FirroSeranel

[narvster]

1 minute ago, FirroSeranel said:

That would be absolutely brilliant! I agree those are some wonderful ideas for improvements. Do you think they haven't thought of them? Or are they particularly tricky to code? Taking ownership of existing mods does seem like it'd be fairly tricky. Rolling back to previous versions would be easy enough, if somewhat open-ended in terms of storage requirements, with unknown user PC specs, I'd think.

But yes... I'll admit I've done... more than a few reinstalls because CKAN got corrupted.

I'm sure they have thought of them, that list was off the top of my head with a couple of mins thought, but there are probably good reasons they're not in there.

 

Also, just noting what @Nertea just said, some mods have very different install structures, or have things like sample .craft files or particular weird requirements and CKAN just can't handle those exceptions.  CKAN is REALLY hard to do right as there are very few if any real standards between mod makers and a lot of mod makers may have no formal coding backgrounds so in some ways CKAN is trying to fill a square hole with a constantly changing shape.

[FirroSeranel]

Just now, narvster said:

I'm sure they have thought of them, that list was off the top of my head with a couple of mins thought, but there are probably good reasons they're not in there.

 

Also, just noting what @Nertea just said, some mods have very different install structures, or have things like sample .craft files or particular weird requirements and CKAN just can't handle those exceptions.  CKAN is REALLY hard to do right as there are very few if any real standards between mod makers and a lot of mod makers may have no formal coding backgrounds so in some ways CKAN is trying to fill a square hole with a constantly changing shape.

 

*snorts* That's funny. But yeah, I really am impressed that it works as well as it does, and always have been. Like I said, the only mod management tool that even holds a candle to it, is Steam Workshop, and that requires native support in the game.

It does handle .craft files just fine though. I've installed many mods with it that include sample craft.

[narvster]

Just now, FirroSeranel said:

It does handle .craft files just fine though. I've installed many mods with it that include sample craft.

It lets you install 1 or 2 craft at a time into your save dir?

I know it downloads them ,it just doesn't manage them.