Leaving SENTINELs on was a bad idea! What to do?

[bitzoid]

So, I have about a dozen sentinel probes that double as relays in the kerbol system. It's useful to have them for cheap money and reputation from contracts (no launch costs, very little work, often repeating orbits around kerbol). My save has been getting slower and slower, timewarp being a pain, to the point where today I could almost not even load the map view. After a lot of patience, I was presented with THIS:

In case it is unintelligible there are 747 (yes, that's hilarious on at least three levels) unknown objects, and I stongly suspect that this is why the game was getting slower and slower.

How do I get rid of all of these?

Edited January 14, 2019 by bitzoid

[Greenfire32]

oh...oh no...

I believe you can go into a config file somewhere and just literally delete them from existence (i think asteroids are handled in a similar manner as crafts), but someone smarter than me will have to tell you how to do that.

In the meantime, turn off/terminate ALL sentinels...like yesterday lol. You gotta stop spawning in new objects.

You could also try to stop tracking each object manually, but that would take...lots of time...

Edited January 14, 2019 by Greenfire32

[FleshJeb]

I would backup the save file, and start deleting the objects with a good text editor. Or, write a Python script to do it.

These are old, but they might work:

https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=kerbaledit

[steve_v]

36 minutes ago, bitzoid said:

I was presented with THIS

Ahh, asteroidageddon. Haven't seen that for ages.
They should disappear by themselves eventually, provided you deactivate/remove all the sentinels, on the other hand, save file editing would be my choice.
And bug-reporting, this isn't supposed to happen.

[bitzoid]

12 minutes ago, steve_v said:

And bug-reporting, this isn't supposed to happen.

I thought it was normal that more objects appear if you have a lot of sentinels (on many orbits around kerbol). If you are sure this is a bug, I'll open an issue in the bug-tracker.

I'm now going through all sentinels I can find, turning them off (swichting vessels takes betwee 5-10 minutes, though).

[steve_v]

1 minute ago, bitzoid said:

I thought it was normal that more objects appear if you have a lot of sentinels

More spawning is normal, allowing them to build up to the number you state and and cripple game performance is likely the result of omitting or misconfiguring a limit in the asteroid generation code.
Whether that is a bug or just an oversight it should be reported and fixed, as it is almost certainly unintended behaviour.

 

[pandaman]

11 minutes ago, steve_v said:

More spawning is normal, allowing them to build up to the number you state and and cripple game performance is likely the result of omitting or misconfiguring a limit in the asteroid generation code.
Whether that is a bug or just an oversight it should be reported and fixed, as it is almost certainly unintended behaviour.

 

But is it 'unintended behavior'?  The sentinels are there to detect those pesky asteroids, they are performing their duties admirably from what I see.  Deleting those sentinels is like shooting your guard dog for barking at strangers in the middle of the night 

Agreed though, that is a lot of asteroids, but if they are tracked the game will assume you don't want them deleting.   Perhaps there should be a pop up warning every so often to remind you to check and keep the numbers at sensible levels.  

[bitzoid]

All right, I opened a ticket while waiting for the game to load the next sentinel ...

[MaverickSawyer]

 

I'm honestly surprised you can even run the game with that many asteroids!

[bitzoid]

6 minutes ago, MaverickSawyer said:

 

I'm honestly surprised you can even run the game with that many asteroids!

Haha Yes, well I'm fairly patient and I grew accustomed to working on KRP when waiting.

Edited January 14, 2019 by bitzoid

[steve_v]

22 minutes ago, pandaman said:

Deleting those sentinels is like shooting your guard dog for barking at strangers in the middle of the night

I sure would shoot the dog if it had 747 barking episodes and prevented me from doing anything else.
Dogs that bark in the night need to be shot anyway, they're a public nuisance.

[bitzoid]

Please don't kill any dogs -- any of you.

[steve_v]

2 minutes ago, bitzoid said:

Please don't kill any dogs

So long as they are seen and not heard, no problem.

[bitzoid]

So, in case somebody else runs into the problem (and finds this thread). I deactivated all sentinels manually, then switched to the observatory and waited a couple hundred days. It was rather fun to watch.

[Cavscout74]

Glad you got it fixed. 

To help prevent that in the future while still getting the contract money coming in, you can cover Kerbin orbit asteroid contracts with just 3 Sentinels.  Almost all of the Kerbin orbit asteroid contracts can be covered, and you don't get too many asteroids building up since the Sentinels are pretty spaced out.  I put Sentinel "A" in a 10.0 Gm by 10.5 Gm orbit, then "B" in 10.5 x 11.0 Gm, then "C" in 11.0 x 11.5 Gm.  They don't have to be perfect.  About 95% of Kerbin orbit asteroid contracts will get covered - and that last 5% can usually get satisfied by making a tiny orbit change on whichever of the 3 is closest.

[Superfluous J]

I agree this is at BEST an unintended consequence of not fully thinking through the SENTINEL feature. AKA what most users (but not developers) would call a bug.

In real life, if you put up 1 satellite you  may find X asteroids. If you put up 10 satellites you will NOT find x*10 asteroids. There is a limit to how many asteroids you can find and diminishing returns for each satellite you put up.

I would suggest a limit of 2x the asteroids found by one SENTINEL, to ever be found. Each SENTINEL after the first should find 1/2 more asteroids than the previous one found.

[Scaprod]

Wow.

[Snark]

Glad you got it sorted out!

The fact that this can happen does seem like a design flaw, i.e. bug. Seems to me that what they ought to do is to handle asteroids the same way they do debris: have a max allowable number (as a setting that the player can tweak), and the game won't go more than that.

[Xurkitree]

Damn, I wanna know how many are going to collide

[StrandedonEarth]

39 minutes ago, Xurkitree said:

Damn, I wanna know how many are going to collide

Never, unless you make an active vessel out of one on a collision course. Objects on rails cannot collide (no active physics), they just phase through each other

[qzgy]

19 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Never, unless you make an active vessel out of one on a collision course. Objects on rails cannot collide (no active physics), they just phase through each other

this has been a useful feature in certain times.

[monstah]

2 hours ago, qzgy said:

this has been a useful feature in certain times.

The Kitty Pride Collision Avoidance Technique

[Ub3rshadow]

click the unknown object button to hide them. You can also delete them in your game's save config, but that'll probably take a while considering how many there are.