Several issues I am having building a simple mission

[Crusruss]

Hi. I am having the following issues building a basic mission.

1. I want to detect when an asteroid has left Kerbin's SOI. The only way I could see to do this was to create a dummy craft parked on Kerbin somewhere, and use the "distance" checking between that craft and 90m miles (which is just outside of Kerbin's SOI. I pushed the asteroid out that far and it wouldn't trigger. I tried a closer distance (still inside SOI but very far out) of 60m miles, and still didnt trigger. It is like this expansion wasn't tested?

2. As a programmer, I am finding this editor very confusing and not intuitive to use. For example, if I want to check that Kerbal A and Kerbal B have boarded my craft (for instance, from another craft in orbit during a rendezvous) there are a few issues I noticed. 

2.1 If you use the Kerbal "boarded" node, it only checks when they use EVA or something and click the "B" board button. It doesn't count if you dock and transfer the Kerbals - this is really stupid.

2.2 The node setup to test for BOTH Kerbals is something I can't figure out. It definitely isn't intuitive at all. The way I got it to work is really stupid. I check if Kerbal A has boarded then link that to a test for Kerbal B. In parallel I check for Kerbal B and then link that to a node to check for Kerbal A. This scales horribly if I want to check for 'n' Kerbals. There doesnt seem an easy way to do an AND operator. For instance, a node X is triggered if ALL input nodes leading to it fire. Every node transition looks like an "OR" operator. I am guessing there IS a way to do this but I can't figure it out. Why couldn't you just make a simple editor with and+or decision nodes so we can stack a bunch of checks together. I know there is "docking" of a node but that is even weirder and is more like an if-then-else not a logical "and" for a bunch of parallel checks.

3. Text in mission briefing doesnt support formatting. I have read here you can use HTML tags so I will give that a go.

4. There doesn't seem to be a way to check if a ship has a certain type of part attached. e.g. during flight i want to check that a ship has picked up an asteroid grabber and now contains that part. This is basic stuff missing from the editor. The only way to do this is to create a "ship" out of the part I want to check for, and then check they have "docked", which is a messy work around.

5. Why the heck can't I use cheats during mission testing? I dont want to have to fly from the start to get to a distant node in my test. Yes I know I can use check points but they are useless if you are making bug fixes and invalidating the check points. I should be able to hack gravity, go to any orbit I want, unlimited fuel etc. All the cheats are removed when playing missions which makes bug fixing so time consuming. If I want to test docking 2 vessels I should be able to hack orbit and then just test the docking is ok. Not fly the mission to that point and waste all that time.

 

Overall I am pretty unimpressed with this mission builder tool. I was really excited for it but it just seems so limited and intuitive. Not to mention that lots of stuff dosent work.

[PietrOZ]

Don't know how to help, but somehow it conforts me knowing that I'm not the only one having lots of problems...

[KerikBalm]

I haven't looked too much into it, mainly I just made the simplest missions I could to make use of the ability to spawn launchpads... but I'm a bit confused how it works too.

The only other games I really made missions for were those of the Arma series, and their editor had a lot of scripting commands. It was a bit daunting at first to go beyond the simple placement of units, waypoints and basic detection triggers, but it offers a lot of flexibility. I don't get the sense that its in this mission editor... although I'm a bit lacking on inspirate for KSP missions.

Can you set a staging limit? like requiring people to get to orbit in a single stage?