Pharylon

[quote name='Peppie23']Hi, i've added RT XF to our next feature version v1.7.0. [URL]https://github.com/RemoteTechnologiesGroup/RemoteTech/pull/494[/URL] thanks @Pharylon[/QUOTE] Awesome! Thanks! [COLOR=silver][SIZE=1]- - - Updated - - -[/SIZE][/COLOR] [quote name='ArrTeeD2']I've rebuilt XF with RT 1.6.9. for 1.0.5. [B]EDIT: removed the link because I found out it causes a claw bug! Please be careful it won't break your savegames.[/B][/QUOTE] I just put out a beta release on Github ([url]https://github.com/Pharylon/RemoteTech-XF/releases/tag/1.6.9.0-beta1[/url]). However, it's not really tested since I haven't been playing much KSP lately. Could you tell me what the claw issue you saw was?

You're welcome! Pretty much this. To do it via CKAN, I either have to redistribute the whole package myself (instead of just the DLL) or make my code separate. The first isn't doable because the RT art may not be covered by the open source license1. I actually reached out to some of the artists recently to ask what the status was, and two of the four have gotten back in touch with me and said it was cool, the art would be covered. However, the other two aren't active on the forums (and I don't have their email) so I probably won't ever hear anything back. On the other hand, I could probably use the ORIGAME antennas since they're open source and rebalance ranges of some of the antennas to make up for the few I'd lose, but that would make my mod that much more work for me to keep up with. Although, I really do think the antennas need a bit of rebalancing. You get Duna/Eve contracts way before you get an antenna capable of reaching Duna/Eve. Anyway, the second option, where I make my own seperate DLL, is the more likely version. I'm going to play around with creating my own mod for realsies that interfaces with RT this week. It may not even be possible to do what I want, but we'll see. 1. From what I can tell, this is mostly just a case of no one ever explicitly asking the artists, since the current devs aren't the original ones. Additionally, most of the art was added after the license, and since the license is the GPL, this would necessarily make them covered by it. Basically, if I just decided to go rogue and start using the art, I think I'd be in the clear, and certainly no one could, like, sue me or something. That being said, I don't want to be an a-hole about it and annoy the RT devs, who after all have put together a pretty amazing mod.

Updated to RemoteTech 1.6.5

Well, everyone is aware there's an issue here. Let's not fetishize hardness over playability and realism. In real life - real life! - this is not a problem. A probe can recover from loss of contact. In fact, it could wake up from a completely unexpected power-down event, deploy it's antenna(s), and point them at Earth and look for signal. This is something that's literally harder in RemoteTech than for real life probes. I totally get why the RT devs didn't want my solution - but they know it's an issue, they're just addressing it in a different way.

As the RT-XF maintainer, I just wanted to mention there's no ethics/personality conflict going on. Personality-wise, we don't know each other. Ethically, RT-XF is a licence-compliant fork of RT, and I offered my code as a pull request back to the main RT project (with the XF-style behavior turned off by default in the configs), but they didn't want it. Basically, the RT devs feel that a cardinal rule of RT is "you can't do anything without a connection." The ability to control an antenna and re-establish connection violates that rule. So I think they're working on a more "hands free" mode, where the probe can go into an autotargeting mode. In other words, no drama or anything is going on. They just didn't want the RT-XF options.

Thanks! I'll try to get up an "official" version today. I hadn't noticed that RT had updated to 1.0 (I'm taking a break from KSP until the post-1.0 mod community stabilizes and I can feel confident about starting a new long-term campaign). EDIT: Updated. I offered the changes in XF as a pull request a while back. After some discussion, it was rejected by the developers over there, because they felt that it violated the "cardinal rule" of RemoteTech which was, "you can't do anything without connection." Which is fine, because it's their mod and all. I just think the cardinal rule is "Build a cool interplanetary communications network." So, they're aware this is an issue, they just want to solve it a different way. Specifically, I think they want to make probes be able to go into a "looking for a signal" mode. Kind of like real probes do (if something happens to Curiosity and it completely reboots with it's antennas off, it's going to turn them on and try and re-acquire a signal from NASA).

I'm not too familiar with ckan, but I'll see what I can do.

Not quite. When an action is invoked, it checks if It was invoked on a part that implements IAntenna (a RemoteTech interface). That it is NOT a probe core (since they have built in short antennas) If the config file allows it to be invoked. Mostly, it works out to be the same. I could have put those string literals into the whitelist, but this way some other mod that adds something that antennas could do could theoretically work. Also, I think this way is a bit more elegant.

Updated to incorporate changes from the RemoteTech 1.6.3 release.

I had a request to compile a version using the RemoteTech 1.7.0 branch (the RemoteTech devs currently have it in a pre-release phase, but it fixes a few bugs), so I made it available on my Github page. The main release is still the 1.6.2 version, and I haven't tested the 1.7.0 version myself, but it should be fine. Let me know if you try it and you run into anything.

I've never played with Realism Overhaul, but I can't think of any reason it wouldn't work.

I agree, and in fact I wrote the code to make that an option, but the RemoteTech developers didn't like it. They felt it violated the core rule of the game (which is, "you can't do anything without a connection"). On the other hand, I feel this is more realistic and more fun, so hey. If you want it, I made my code available here.

Yes, literally that's it. If your probe has no connection because the antennas are turned off, you can activate them (and, if it's a dish, point it in the right direction). It's a teeny tiny change that has very big gameplay implications. There's, like, five lines of code different. Thanks for the compliments everyone! But I want to reiterate how little my change is, and how awesome RemoteTech is. RemoteTech is fabulously complex and a lot of people have put a lot of work into it. And they made it open source, which is freakin' awesome. They didn't have to do that, but they did, and that lets anyone else make their own little tweaks. So for a variety of reasons, they're the best, and I'm just a hack who made one little change.

I like that idea, and unless you want to learn KOS or use MechJeb, it's probably required, but I'm also internally debating that. After all, these are settings that people can already change. Yes, you still have to have electric charge. Yes. If your dead probe was dead just because the antenna was deactivated, yeah. You could have switched back to the old dead probe and turned them on.

Yes, it does. I edited the original for clarity, thanks for asking.

You didn't miss it, I forgot it. Added it to the post, thanks.

No, I'm not sure if the models in vanilla RemoteTech are open source, so I can't redistribute them. So you first have to download the regular RemoteTech and install XF over top of it. I updated the post above to make that clear. Thanks.

"A more forgiving RemoteTech Experience." RemoteTech XF is a variant of RemoteTech, made either for people that want a slightly more forgiving experience or for those that want to drop RemoteTech into an existing game and be able to use their existing satellites/probes. It makes one minor change that has major implications: antennas are always controllable by the player, even without a connection to Mission Control. This allows the player to simulate what real-life probes do when something unexpected happens: they try to re-establish a connection with home! It's handy for... Retracting antennas during aerobraking and extending them when you're done! Recovering from mistakes (whoops, Comsat1 just blew up!). Adding RemoteTech to an existing game (since when you load them up for the first time, all the probes have their antennas turned off). Besides making it more forgiving, activating and pointing antennas without a connection is also (arguably) more realistic. In real life, probes have low-gain omni-directional antennas that allow space agencies to easily send simple commands across the solar system (like, "point your main dish over here") and probes generally have the intelligence to attempt to re-establish connection if they lose it. In some ways, standard RemoteTech is less forgiving of simple mistakes than real life interplanetary networks! That was my reason for creating XF. It also fixes the issue RemoteTech has when being added into games that are already in progress. Specifically, since antennas on pre-existing probes are deactivated, these probes end up dead in space, even if you set up a interplanetary network later! Again, the simple act of allowing the user to activate antennas without connection to KSC fixes this! You'll need to set up your network, but once it's up, your existing probes can connect to it! Installation 1. Download the Vanilla RemoteTech and install it. 2. Download RemoteTech XF from Github or Kerbalstuff and install over top of it. FAQ Q: You should submit this to the RemoteTech people! A: I did. They rejected the pull request, which is to say they don't want this as an option (even one disabled by default). Hey, it's their mod and they can do what they want. But fortunately, their project is open source, and that means anyone can tweak it, so THANK YOU RemoteTech, for having an open source project! Q: I want to use RemoteTech XF to bootstrap an existing campaign, but then switch to a regular RemoteTech game. A: No problem! You can always just install the regular RemoteTech back over top XF. Or you can just add this to the RemoteTech_Settings.cfg file to revert to normal RemoteTech mode: ​ ControlAntennaWithoutConnection = False Q: Thank you so much, this is awesome! A: You're welcome, but it's really the main RemoteTech devs that deserve all the thanks. RemoteTech is fabulously complex and a lot of people have put a lot of work into it. And they made it open source, which is freakin' awesome. They didn't have to do that, but they did, and that lets anyone else make their own little tweaks. So for a variety of reasons, they're the best, and I'm just a hack who made one little change. Q: What else should I do to make RemoteTech more fun? A: I can't suggest enough that you enable Root mode for antenna ranges. You can check out the details in the player's guide. But basically it lets omnidirectional antennas get a lot more range when they're communicating with more powerful antennas (like real life!). I also run with the power consumption halved on my game. Especially in the early game, when you just have the static solar panels, the dishes consume way too much juice. Oh, and unless you want to use MechJeb or KOS, you probably want to turn off speed of light. There's a lot of impossible stuff in Kerbal Space Program already, so I don't think it's a stretch to say that in their universe, light moves infinitely fast. Q: What does XF stand for? A: I'm not sure. Right now, I'm leaning toward Extra Forgiving. License Just like the regular RemoteTech, RemoteTech XF is licensed under the GNU General Pulic License v2

Can I make a suggestion? What if we could show/hide your toolbar... with the stock toolbar. That way those of us with a lot of mods installed could use your toolbar to hold our "extra" mods that we don't need to access very often.

Pretty please! Also, this is one of the first mods I always recommend. Love it!

This please!

I made this list for myself, then realized it might be useful to other people too, so I added a few more big mods that I don't use. I think I've got all the "big" ones, but feel free to note anything in the comments and I'll keep this list updated. Tweakscale - Yes Infernal Robotics - Yes Kerbal Attachment System - No - Forum reports seem to indicate that upgraded games explode, but new Career Modes seem to be fine RemoteTech - No Kerbal Alarm Clock - No - Forum reports indicate that it works TAC Life Support - No - .90 Beta available - has known issues TAC Fuel Balancer - No - .90 Beta available - no known issues Karbonite - Yes MKS (Modular Kolinization System - Yes Ferram Aerospace (FAR/NEAR) - Yes ScanSat - No Kethane - No Interstellar - No MechJeb - Yes KW Rocketry - No - Forum reports indicate that it works Station Science - Yes Distant Object Enhancement - No - Forum reports indicate that it works Environmental Visual Enhancements - No - Hasn’t been updated since .24 - Forum reports mixed Deadly Reentry - Yes Astronomer's Visual Pack - No B9 Aerospace - No Module Manager - Yes Active Texture Management - Yes Planetshine - No - Forum reports indicate that it works Docking Port Alignment - Yes

Cool. I just came by today to see if there had been any progress on Interstellar Lite. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing your mod!

Holy crap. You are awesome. Infernal Robotics is awesome. Also, I just donated to you.

Just want to mention I LOVE you and couldn't imagine playing KSP without Precise Node now. Also, I have a suggestion: you know when KSP bugs out and won't let you place a node on your current (blue) trajectory, only the purple (future) one? A nice option might be the ability to just have Precise NOde place a node X minutes in the future. And, again, thanks for the awesome mod!