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[1.12.2] BARIS - Building A Rocket Isn't Simple


Angelo Kerman

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How many failures are normal early game? Because after 10 or so launches of one rocket and spending nearly an in-game year and 90% of my budget trying to reach orbit I'm still getting part failures on every single component every staging event. Which seems... excessive. I have not manipulated any of the BARIS settings all I did was begin a new career with BARIS enabled.

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I didn't expect the frequency of failures I'm getting either.  I have added this mid-save.  I have a lvl 2 SPH, lvl 3 VAB, and lvl 3 astronaut complex.  (My VAB and SPH have 7 levels each due to SETI and CustomBarnKit mods but Angel-125  says BARIS assumes 3 levels of each facility only.)  I'm getting +5 from each facility and my crafts come out with 35/100 for each part.  I've put BARIS on the easiest setting for quality checks and my engines still fail on almost every launch.  I put the number of flights to increase quality to only one and have gotten the engines only to 36/100 because I've only had one flight without them failing.  (Been using the same rocket.)  I'm using KCT instead of vehicle integration but I tried removing KCT and the vehicle integration results in the same quality and reliability.

Is this expected? Is this what everyone else is seeing?  My install may be off because I started mid-career and I'm running around 170 mods so I'm just wanting to compare what I'm seeing in my game.  I'm a bit concerned that this is happening on the easiest setting.  Doing test firings for one point at a time to raise engine quality is going to be incredibly tedious.  I'm fine if this is expected from the mod, I just want to make sure I don't have something messed up.  If it is expected I might ask that the easiest setting for the checks possibly be more forgiving...?  I like how this mod works and I've been wanting to add part failure to my game but I'd rather it be an occasional thing.

 

BTW, Angel-125, thanks for the clarification on the KCT integration.  Much clearer now.

Edited by CaribeanSoul
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4 hours ago, CaribeanSoul said:

  I've put BARIS on the easiest setting for quality checks and my engines still fail on almost every launch.  I put the number of flights to increase quality to only one and have gotten the engines only to 36/100 because I've only had one flight without them failing.  (Been using the same rocket.)

I'm in the exact same place. Turned the slider down to the easiest setting and 23 out of 24 of my launches have had total engine failure. Also I've noticed the loss of thrust doesn't actually change the thrust output of the engine.

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Yeah, I haven't tried it yet (looking forward to it!) but to be honest having constant failures early on actually sounds pretty cool. Especially given that (as @minepagan says) in the first few years of spaceflight, that's not far off from the way things actually were. I like the idea of having good reasons to do things like abort tests, static fires, etc.--especially of early-game rockets that are pretty much the same ones I've been building since I first started up KSP back in 0.90. And it is, after all, adjustable.

Also, thanks for 1.2.2 compatibility @Angel-125, not a huge deal for me but I'm still spending most of my time in 1.2.2 and I appreciate having that as an option.

 

Edited by Hotaru
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5 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Re: launch failures - why does SpaceX conduct static fire tests?

It's not just SpaceX.  In the history of rocketry, every rocket engine and motor as well as whole stages had dozens of static firings before being flown.

Or is BARIS being bit by the same thing as its namesake of many years ago.  If there's an upper limit to the reliability leaving a sufficiently large chance of failure, with a dozen or so checks against that number in a flight, then it becomes hard to have missions that don't hit a failure state.  It's why the successor, Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager, introduced saving throws against failures, based on the mission control staff and astronaut/cosmonaut skill, that prevented or lessened the failure.  It was the only way to make it possible to run a campaign without being crushed by failure.

Edited by Jacke
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Ok, so first of all I've read all the KSPedia pages three or four times now so I'm aware of what they say.  I very quickly switched to doing static test firings of the engines after the first couple of attempts at launching.  Those test firings have been successful less than 10% of the time, meaning that more than 90% of them don't result in any increase in quality for the engine I am testing.

If what I am seeing is how things are intended to work I would have to suggest that perhaps the SuperEasy setting could use some tweaking.

Let's assume for the moment that since my sample size isn't very big that it's not really a 92% failure rate.  Since the quality numbers max out at 100 I'll say for the sake of argument (since I don't know how it works behind the scenes) that a 35/100 quality part will launch or test without a failure 35% of the time.  To get that part up to any kind of reasonable reliability is going to take hundreds of test firings for every engine I want to use.  That's a lot of clicking around (especially if using KCT) ... not particularly engaging gameplay for me.  Some people might want to do that and that's fine ... but please keep in mind that I have my settings set on "SuperEasy" and my SPH/VAB are levels 2/3 so I wouldn't classify my current game as "early on" in career mode.

It's entirely possible that I'm just missing the point here.  For a parts failure mod I'm just looking for something that is going to require me to build a certain amount of either redundancy or safety systems (LES) into my rockets and have failures happen just often enough to make me want to design for emergencies and to add a little spice to the game here and there.  I'm not looking for something that's going to have me spending the vast majority of my time testing parts.  If that is the intent here then I'll simply disable these features and move on, no worries.  If not then I think some of the math needs some tweaking.

 

EDIT:  Thinking about it a bit I have the following suggestions.  First include an option to get quality improvements from failed launches/tests as well as successful ones.  In the real world a failure is just as likely (if not more so) to provide data leading to an increase in reliability.  Secondly I would include a slider (perhaps 1-50) of how many quality points a test flight will add to a part.  This way things can be set up so that I would need to run some tests on my parts before using them for a mission but that it would just be one step in designing (for instance) a booster rather than a long process.  I could then use the maximum quality slider to tweak just how often I want the game to be throwing me a curve ball.

Edited by CaribeanSoul
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BARIS 1.1.0 is now available:

- Created a bridging dll for those who want to optionally incorporate BARIS into their mods.
- Event cards won't spawn during high timewarp, but if the timer expires then you'll receive an event card once you exit timewarp.
- New debug option: In the editor, you can add flight experience to parts in the currently loaded vessel. Similarly, you can do the same for the active vessel in flight. This should help players integrate BARIS into existing saves.
- Vessels will make a Reliability check a few minutes after launch if you haven't already achieved orbit. This will cover SSTOs and add extra pucker factor.
- Added new "Event Card" hints for first-time players.
- Clarified KSPedia entry for KCT support.
- Moved stock launch clamp to Engineering 101 to help with early-game static fire tests.
- When staging events fail, parts might still gain flight experience. The odds of that happening is configurable from the BARIS settings screen.
- Fixed issue with Astronaut payroll not showing up when KCT is installed.
- Dropped support for KSP 1.2.2; you can thank the bridging dll for that...

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8 hours ago, Jacke said:

It's not just SpaceX.  In the history of rocketry, every rocket engine and motor as well as whole stages had dozens of static firings before being flown.

Nowadays, yes it is.  SpaceX is the only major launch provider that does full stage static fire tests any more.  (Nobody can figure out quite why.)  The same for individual engines, they pretty much go from factory to flight.

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I like the slider for parts gaining experience on failure.  The more configurable the better I say.

As for the part flight experience sutff:  I only have one vehicle in orbit since installing BARIS so I went to that one and added flight experience.  My part quality numbers went up rather quickly so that's good.  I went back to the space center and built a new copy of that vehicle and rolled it out to the pad but found that the quality numbers were back to 35.  So I added the flight experience again and recovered the vessel.  Built another one and still found it to be 35.  I can confirm that the no. of flights are going up in the save file:

PartFlightLogNode
        {
            name = ROUND-8 Toroidal Fuel Tank
            flights = 90
        }
        PartFlightLogNode
        {
            name = 48-7S "Spark" Liquid Fuel Engine
            flights = 30
        }

Does this have something to do with the fact that I am adding the experience in the flight scene rather than in the editor?  I don't have access to the BARIS gui in the editor because I have KCT installed.

Adding +5 to flight experience seems to add it for each copy of that part on the vehicle.  For instance in the above vehicle I have one spark engine and 3 of the toroidal fuel tanks.  Not sure if you intended that or not.  I'm good with it either way.

One other minor thing is that turning debug mode on to enable adding the flight experience really clutters up the BARIS gui and the part right-click menus so in that way something in the settings menu would be less invasive.  In fact, due to this and KCT possibly adding complexity, I would be fine with just an option to turn the flight experience features off and just be able to use all the other excellent features of BARIS.  Parts could just default to whatever the maximum quality slider is set to.  I have so many parts mods installed that the thought of doing tests on all of them is a bit daunting anyway to be honest.

Also: The static fire tip card is showing every time I enter a flight scene.  The following line in my save file never gets updated:

showedStaticFireTooltip = False

 

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1 hour ago, CaribeanSoul said:

I like the slider for parts gaining experience on failure.  The more configurable the better I say.

As for the part flight experience sutff:  I only have one vehicle in orbit since installing BARIS so I went to that one and added flight experience.  My part quality numbers went up rather quickly so that's good.  I went back to the space center and built a new copy of that vehicle and rolled it out to the pad but found that the quality numbers were back to 35.  So I added the flight experience again and recovered the vessel.  Built another one and still found it to be 35.  I can confirm that the no. of flights are going up in the save file:


PartFlightLogNode
        {
            name = ROUND-8 Toroidal Fuel Tank
            flights = 90
        }
        PartFlightLogNode
        {
            name = 48-7S "Spark" Liquid Fuel Engine
            flights = 30
        }

Does this have something to do with the fact that I am adding the experience in the flight scene rather than in the editor?  I don't have access to the BARIS gui in the editor because I have KCT installed.

Adding +5 to flight experience seems to add it for each copy of that part on the vehicle.  For instance in the above vehicle I have one spark engine and 3 of the toroidal fuel tanks.  Not sure if you intended that or not.  I'm good with it either way.

One other minor thing is that turning debug mode on to enable adding the flight experience really clutters up the BARIS gui and the part right-click menus so in that way something in the settings menu would be less invasive.  In fact, due to this and KCT possibly adding complexity, I would be fine with just an option to turn the flight experience features off and just be able to use all the other excellent features of BARIS.  Parts could just default to whatever the maximum quality slider is set to.  I have so many parts mods installed that the thought of doing tests on all of them is a bit daunting anyway to be honest.

Also: The static fire tip card is showing every time I enter a flight scene.  The following line in my save file never gets updated:


showedStaticFireTooltip = False

 

Not sure where you're getting the 35 quality from, but if I take one of my reference designs and add flight experience to it, then start a new vessel integration, then I see the vessel reliability increase. It won't increase for a vessel currently undergoing vehicle integration; that's a feature that will be added in a future release.

Normally, when you gain flight experience through staging events, it will only affect future vessels. Flight experience is per part, not per vessel. The exception is the in-flight debug option, which will affect not just future vessels, but the active vessel as well.

I'm unconcerned about the debug button clutter- it's there for testing purposes. You already have a way to turn off flight experience features; simply disable the ability for flights to fail during staging events.

The event card issue is due to how and when KSP does its saves. I think I can manually tell KSP to save the game; should be addressed in the next update.

 

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2 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Not sure where you're getting the 35 quality from, but if I take one of my reference designs and add flight experience to it, then start a new vessel integration, then I see the vessel reliability increase. It won't increase for a vessel currently undergoing vehicle integration; that's a feature that will be added in a future release.

Normally, when you gain flight experience through staging events, it will only affect future vessels. Flight experience is per part, not per vessel. The exception is the in-flight debug option, which will affect not just future vessels, but the active vessel as well.

I'm unconcerned about the debug button clutter- it's there for testing purposes. You already have a way to turn off flight experience features; simply disable the ability for flights to fail during staging events.

The event card issue is due to how and when KSP does its saves. I think I can manually tell KSP to save the game; should be addressed in the next update.

 

The 35 quality is what I was getting before adding the flight experience from the debug menu.  After adding flight experience (to where the parts show 95/100 quality) when I build a new vehicle with the same parts they all show 35 quality again.  The builds were started after the flight experience was added.  I can provide logs if you want but l'm running ~170 mods so I may be having all manner of interactions.

What I meant by flight-experience features is the need for parts to gain quality through flight experience (or other factors I guess.)  I want parts to have the potential to break, especially during staging events.  I was just hoping for a way to have that happen much less frequently without spending almost all of my time doing test fires and such.  (I'm not sure if that'll be true for parts other than engines because I've not been able to launch anything with BARIS enabled as my engines fail every time even on SuperEasy.)  My ideal scenario is this:  I'd be fine doing 2-3 test fires of an engine to get it to an acceptable quality level.  By acceptable I mean (for me) it needs to be no more than a 5% failure rate.  Ideally more like 2-3% but you're using 5% increments in the settings so we'll go with 5%.  For me that is enough to ensure that I build safety features into my crafts but any more than that and it's too frustrating for me to put expensive payloads or kerbals on that craft.  The only way I can currently see to do this is to run in debug mode and add flight experience (or quality I guess) to each craft from the debug buttons every time I build something.  (Which is why I brought up the menu clutter incurred from always running in debug mode.)

Is it possible I can do anything with MM patches to get to what I'm looking for?

So ... am I just way off from what you're trying to do here?  If so, that is perfectly fine and I'll turn it off and stop with the feedback.  I just got real excited when you released this but somewhat frustrated that I couldn't launch anything.  I'm running a career with a fairly tight budget and I take losing kerbals very seriously.  NASA won't human rate a vehicle unless a loss on ascent is expected no more than 1 in 500 launches.  This is KSP though so 1 in 20 isn't so bad. :wink:

The line in the save file for the event card issue did not change even after exiting my save (and therefore definitely having the game saved.)

 

Edited by CaribeanSoul
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8 hours ago, CaribeanSoul said:

 I only have one vehicle in orbit since installing BARIS so I went to that one and added flight experience.  My part quality numbers went up rather quickly so that's good.  I went back to the space center and built a new copy of that vehicle and rolled it out to the pad but found that the quality numbers were back to 35.

 

6 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Not sure where you're getting the 35 quality from

I think this is what @CaribeanSoul is referring to:

P7M4zDj.png

 

In my case the change in reliability is not quite as drastic.

 

Edit: I am also running a much milder 35 mods and getting this issue

Edited by Mattgearhead
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I'm using KCT so I don't have a vehicle integration window.  I expected higher than 35 since when I added flight experience from the debug buttons the parts went to 95 on the existing craft ... and then I got 35 on new craft built after that.  I can remove KCT and see what things look like in the VAB gui if that helps.

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This looks great.  My budget has been a little tight but that's nothing a little tweak to the difficulty sliders won't fix. :funds::cool::funds:

This will very likely resolve my issue.

My only question is: will I be able to get to this gui with KCT installed?

 

BTW: do you have a patreon?  I've looked for it before but never seen a link.  Your mods are an essential part of my Kerbal experience.

Edited by CaribeanSoul
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10 hours ago, CaribeanSoul said:

This looks great.  My budget has been a little tight but that's nothing a little tweak to the difficulty sliders won't fix. :funds::cool::funds:

This will very likely resolve my issue.

My only question is: will I be able to get to this gui with KCT installed?

 

BTW: do you have a patreon?  I've looked for it before but never seen a link.  Your mods are an essential part of my Kerbal experience.

Test Bench is available even with KCT disabled. I don't have a Patreon link but I accept Amazon gift cards if you're so inclined. PM me if you're interested- and thanks! :)

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BARIS 1.2.0 is now available:

- Fixed issues with event card tips repeatedly showing up.
- Tool tip cards won't show up if BARIS is disabled.
- Parts on new vessels will receive default flight experience points when launches can't fail.
- Parts created in the field will receive default flight experience if none existed before. This will help with incorporating BARIS into existing games.
- Improvements to flight experience will now affect vessels currently undergoing vehicle integration.
- Fixed issue with flight experience not being added to parts after vehicle integration was completed.
- New VAB/SPH button: Test Bench - If you assemble a collection of parts in the VAB/SPH, you can spend Science in Science Sandbox and Career games and/or Funds in Career games to simulate launch conditions and gain flight experience. That flight experience will improve your vessel Reliability ratings on future craft. You can adjust the per-part Funds cost in the Difficulties screen; Science cost is based on how many flights it takes to gain a flight experience bonus point.
- Vehicle integration rush jobs are now only available in Career games.

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Finally got around to trying this out, but I had some trouble getting past setting up the difficulty options because whenever the difficulty window is open while creating a new save, my framerate drops to 3 fps and the log gets spammed with these:

[EXC 17:38:58.870] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
    WildBlueIndustries.BARISSettings.get_PartsCanBreak ()
    WildBlueIndustries.BARISBreakableParts.Enabled (System.Reflection.MemberInfo member, .GameParameters parameters)
    DifficultyOptionsMenu+<CreateDifficultWindow>c__AnonStorey161.<>m__25A ()
    UnityEngine.Debug:LogException(Exception)
    <CreateDifficultWindow>c__AnonStorey161:<>m__25A()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIToggle:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIVerticalLayout:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIVerticalLayout:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIVerticalLayout:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    MultiOptionDialog:Update()
    PopupDialog:Update()
[ERR 17:38:58.875] Error calling custom Enabled method in type WildBlueIndustries.BARISBreakableParts:

[EXC 17:38:58.877] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
    WildBlueIndustries.BARISSettings.get_PartsCanBreak ()
    WildBlueIndustries.BARISBreakableParts.Enabled (System.Reflection.MemberInfo member, .GameParameters parameters)
    DifficultyOptionsMenu+<CreateDifficultWindow>c__AnonStorey161.<>m__25A ()
    UnityEngine.Debug:LogException(Exception)
    <CreateDifficultWindow>c__AnonStorey161:<>m__25A()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIToggle:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIVerticalLayout:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIVerticalLayout:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    DialogGUIVerticalLayout:Update()
    DialogGUIBase:Update()
    MultiOptionDialog:Update()
    PopupDialog:Update()
[ERR 17:38:58.881] Error calling custom Enabled method in type WildBlueIndustries.BARISSettingsLaunch:

The same two versions (BARISBreakableParts and BARISSettingsLaunch) repeated until I close the difficulty settings window. This was with standalone BARIS 1.2 in my modded 1.3 install; the same thing happened in an otherwise-stock install with standalone BARIS 1.2, standalone 1.1, and the version currently bundled with MOLE (after removing the standalone one, obviously). All in KSP 1.3 x64 on Windows 7.

This does not seem to happen with the in-game difficulty settings--only the ones that come up when you're setting up a new save.

I couldn't find any specific install instructions in the manual so I assume both the standalone and bundled versions are meant to be extracted to GameData as usual, resulting in GameData\WildBlueIndustries\000BARIS and GameData\WildBlueIndustries\000ABARISBridgeDoNotDelete.

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And now it's stopped doing it. No clue why, or why it was giving me trouble in the first place. Sorry to bother you!

 

PS. A little more information:

First, I installed BARIS, then I tried to start a new save. Got as far as setting up the difficulty options (vanilla and for other mods as well as BARIS ones), had above problem happen. Quit, tried various versions and mod combinations, found no solution. During all this, whenever I opened the BARIS difficulty options they were all available, as though BARIS was trying to default to enabled.

Then it occurred to me that the in-game difficulty settings might not have the same problem. Started a new game, didn't set the difficulty options but went straight from picking a game mode to the KSC screen, set the difficulty options from there, no problem. This time, when I first looked at the BARIS options, they were all gone except the disabled "parts can break"--as expected, BARIS defaulted to disabled.

Then I tried the new-save difficulty options again--and this time they behaved correctly: no FPS drop and default to disabled.

Edited by Hotaru
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45 minutes ago, Hotaru said:

First, I installed BARIS, then I tried to start a new save. Got as far as setting up the difficulty options (vanilla and for other mods as well as BARIS ones), had above problem happen. Quit, tried various versions and mod combinations, found no solution. During all this, whenever I opened the BARIS difficulty options they were all available, as though BARIS was trying to default to enabled.

Can you elaborate on this, preferably with screenshots? I've always enabled BARIS from the KSC Space Center screen.

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OK, here are the steps to reproduce both the problem and the workaround:

Spoiler

Starting from a clean 1.3 KSP folder. Install a new copy of BARIS 1.2 standalone and start KSP.

 

Set up a new sandbox game and open the difficulty options window:

HfsAhJm.jpg

Errors and NRE showing up in the corner, FPS down to 2-3.

 

Clicking on the BARIS tab reveals this:

ZhLwd8s.jpg

"Parts can break" is switched off, as expected, but for some reason all the options under "Breakable Parts" and "Launches, Construction & Events" are available.

 

Close the difficulty window without doing anything (click Cancel) and start the game:

i5suAia.jpg

 

After dismissing Gene and the BARIS RTFM screen, pause the game and open the difficulty options again. This is what the BARIS tab looks like now:

SMW7OAq.jpg

As expected: BARIS is off and there are no options available except the one to switch it on. Also there are no errors and no FPS drop.

 

After enabling "Parts can break" it looks like this:

9o3Wwnh.jpg

Again, as expected.

 

Now quit back to the main menu, set up another sandbox save, and open the difficulty options, and go to the BARIS tab again:

AnMbdIp.jpg

Now it seems to be working: no NREs, no FPS drop, BARIS disabled, no options besides "Parts can break."

 

 

With the above done, the problem doesn't seem to recur until I uninstall and reinstall BARIS.

 

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1 hour ago, Hotaru said:

OK, here are the steps to reproduce both the problem and the workaround:

  Hide contents

Starting from a clean 1.3 KSP folder. Install a new copy of BARIS 1.2 standalone and start KSP.

 

Set up a new sandbox game and open the difficulty options window:

HfsAhJm.jpg

Errors and NRE showing up in the corner, FPS down to 2-3.

 

Clicking on the BARIS tab reveals this:

ZhLwd8s.jpg

"Parts can break" is switched off, as expected, but for some reason all the options under "Breakable Parts" and "Launches, Construction & Events" are available.

 

Close the difficulty window without doing anything (click Cancel) and start the game:

i5suAia.jpg

 

After dismissing Gene and the BARIS RTFM screen, pause the game and open the difficulty options again. This is what the BARIS tab looks like now:

SMW7OAq.jpg

As expected: BARIS is off and there are no options available except the one to switch it on. Also there are no errors and no FPS drop.

 

After enabling "Parts can break" it looks like this:

9o3Wwnh.jpg

Again, as expected.

 

Now quit back to the main menu, set up another sandbox save, and open the difficulty options, and go to the BARIS tab again:

AnMbdIp.jpg

Now it seems to be working: no NREs, no FPS drop, BARIS disabled, no options besides "Parts can break."

 

 

With the above done, the problem doesn't seem to recur until I uninstall and reinstall BARIS.

 

Huh. Didn't even know you could do that. I blame SQUAD for that error, maybe I can create a workaround.

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