KSC Runway / crash mitigation resource management

[Van Disaster]

Hi, two entirely unrelated suggestions:

* Can we scale the KSC runway up say, 50%? it's not particularily wide as runways go anyway and I've been finding quite a lot of big spaceplanes which will happily get themselves to orbit are running out of runway before they've reached takeoff speed. If it has to be bent at the ends because of Kerbin curvature, so be it.

* This idea needs a little more development, but can the game not monitor it's own memory use and start unloading parts which aren't being used in the current savegame, if it's starting to get near the upper limit? I realise that will just move problems to the VAB/SPH, but in theory it should prevent a lot of in-flight crashes unless the savegame is using all the mods in existence... note that this looks like it's doable within the API so even a mod might be able to, it's just better done by the game.

[Bilfr3d]

I like the idea of having the parts taken out, but not automatically. I think there should be a button in the VAB/SPH where it loads up a little window of all the parts, and you can select which parts you want loaded at the moment, and the other parts you don't.

[Van Disaster]

The way I was imagining it was that it'd start unloading unused parts - and this would be an absolutely ideal place for a background thread - which weren't referenced in the savegame in flight - you'd never notice that while you're in any flight related scene. Then when you go back to the VAB it'd reload the missing parts either as you switch tab, or as you enter the VAB. That would cause a pause in the game the first time you re-enter the VAB from a long flight ( and if you're very overloaded might well crash the game anyway ), but repeated reverts to the VAB after short flights shouldn't see any delays. Memory leaks aside...

Alternatively you could generate thumbnails of everything & only load the part when you try and use it in the VAB; that's straying close to one of the areas on the not-up-for-discussion list though. My suggestion was just to help mitigate some of the current crashes by dumping assets which aren't being used anywhere. It looks like you can unload parts via the API, I'm just not sure how you'd load them again - and mods doing part management like that is duplicating something the game does, which is a bit of a horrible workaround.

Edited August 27, 2013 by Van Disaster

[Van Disaster]

Ok, forget the second idea - I heared a better one which boils down to "load a low res texture until the high res one is needed". Not sure if it's going to be written up but that's the essence.