goldenpsp

Thanks for all the work, and tagging so this thread is in my "stars".

Oh please. Maybe not flaming but you are doing an excellent job of continuing to stir the pot.

It might help to give more info. Your one liners are hard to do any diagnosis. For example if you are on 1.1.3, it broke EL and Taniwha hasn't released a fixed version yet.

@sharpspoonful You are late to the party and frankly what you posted shows only a partial understanding of the issues at hand.

@swjr-swis Yea I know you are out. Just a couple things. Modders aren't sellers. No mods are being held "hostage" they are still freely available to download. The community is fine. Even a healthy community has a fight every so often.

Yes, yes you are.

Then maybe CKAN should have an install support button right in the app. The bottom line is all CKAN issues should go to CKAN first. They can be the clearinghouse. This kind of stomping seems to be what causes install issues, especially with the larger modders who have whole suites of mods that pull from other dependencies as well as are dependencies of other mods. So I wouldn't call the drama unnecessary.

Today you are seeing the results of modders having their support via their threads get choked with CKAN this and CKAN that. If Modders never saw a CKAN question they wouldn't care about CKAN working or not. IMO CKAN should own their solution start to finish. CKAN issues should be brought up with the CKAN people. At the very least they would be like the tier 1 support. Then if necessary the CKAN people could reach out directly to modders when necessary. This outreach would be coming from someone knowing what's up, not a clueless end user, and as such would still be far less frustrating to a modder when that support comes up.

THIS ultimately is the problem with this CKAN mess. Solve this and things would likely be fine. You will never have a perfect system but right now the biggest issue with CKAN goes something like this. When a user has an issue with FAR, they post in the FAR thread. When a user has an issue with KIS, they post in the KIS thread. When a user has an issue with CKAN they post in the CKA...Mod's thread. (see what I did there?) If CKAN issues were left in the CKAN thread and didn't clog up modders threads, modders would probably be pretty happy no?

Published? No, but I stayed at a Best Western last night.

@mjl1966 Cute post. There is one key factor to keep in mind when trying to apply your "business model" to this issue. In large part modders don't create content for consumers. They create content for themselves that they then share. I will call out @RoverDude as I understand his standpoint the best and he has been openly vocal on the forums, Twitch livestreams etc. To paraphrase "I make mods for myself. I am then nice enough to share them with the community. The community gets some fun bits to play with. I (Roverdude) get playtesters and bug reports. And as long as this situation comes with a hassle factor low enough, all is good in the world". The reality is that Roverdude doesn't really care if 5 or 500 people use his mod. As long as the benefits he gets from sharing the mod outweigh the hassle of sharing, he is happy. To that end, the very easy method of manual mod installation works perfectly fine to install his mods, and really it is only the very occasional user who cannot figure out how to copy the mod to the gamedata folder. Beyond that, I don't think Roverdude really cares if it is a hassle to manually manage the other 295 mods you chose to install beyond his.

Probably better asked in the MKS-L thread. AFAIK there isn't really an actual "upgrade" path from MKS-L to MKS. That being said full MKS isn't "that" much more complex than MKS-L. All of the MKS-L parts are also in MKS so you can still build MKS-L style bases with MKS. Hopefully that wasn't too confusing.

I don't necessarily agree it would even have less content. But it would force CKAN to win over modders (something I've said is key in my other posts). If they put their efforts into this you would have at least as many if not more mods on CKAN. Imagine a world where the big modders such as @RoverDude and @ferram4 tout the benefits of CKAN ("those CKAN guys bend over backwards to make life easy for us modders so we can create even more content"), the way they tout the benefits of KSP-AVC?

So I don't feel like going through and picking out all the individual quotes to illustrate this, so I will try and explain the best I can without them. As I said before, and is generally the case with modders I know (and from the likes many modders seem to agree) is that modders don't make mods for the community. They make mods for themselves and graciously share them with the community. Re-read and let that sink in because it is important. The reason it is important is because at the end of the day, a modder's primary goal is NOT to get as many people to use their mod as possible. It is how to share it with the least amount of frustration possible. To that end In my opinion CKAN started completely backwards. From my perspective CKAN has always been something "for the users". This is backwards. From the beginning CKAN's goal should have been to reach out to MODDERS with the goal of making a system "as painless and seamless as possible for modders". This is not because users's are unimportant. But the Modders, the content CREATORS are most important. There will always be users wanting to use mods, but a far smaller subset has the skill, time, and drive to create mods. If CKAN had this attitude and actively reached out from the beginning to work WITH modders to come up with a system then you would have modder support and possibly a far more stable ecosystem to work within. Even as a user, I don't care about a user who needs CKAN to manage his 300+ modded install. But I do care about modders such as @ferram4 possibly not creating new mods that he has ideas for because of negative stuff like this. I'd hesitate to even say it is a minority. There is definitely an issue when you see CKAN in threads everywhere. Will you put your mod on CKAN, when will you update CKAN, your CKAN says it is incompatible. CKAN says it is compatible but it isn't working... I'd say maybe a minority vocal enough to complain, but in general there is too much talk about it. If it works properly CKAN should be effectively invisible.

Since it is being rehashed here I will post this again As we have this fun CKAN discussion I think it is important to remember our places in this ecosystem. I have yet to find a modder who created a mod "for the community". Everyone I've known made a mod "for themselves" and then was nice enough to "share it with the community". Re-read if necessary because this is an important but subtle difference. Along those lines most modder likely don't actually care how many people use their mods. Sure there may be a bit of a rush when you see how popular something you created is. At the end of the day however is it not the primary motivation. With all of that said it becomes clear why modder a have the attitude about CKAN that they do. The ONLY reason for a modder to embrace CKAN is if it makes their life easier. Currently it does not.

Roverdude's github. (Easy Google or from his signature). And find it under repositories. It probably isn't the "latest" release at this point but is the one that references bad Tac-LS configs

You need the latest kolonization core. The update that fixes it was not bundled into MKS-L

AAR= all rights reserved

As we have this fun CKAN discussion I think it is important to remember our places in this ecosystem. I have yet to find a modder who created a mod "for the community". Everyone I've known made a mod "for themselves" and then was nice enough to "share it with the community". Re-read if necessary because this is an important but subtle difference. Along those lines most modder likely don't actually care how many people use their mods. Sure there may be a bit of a rush when you see how popular something you created is. At the end of the day however is it not the primary motivation. With all of that said it becomes clear why modder a have the attitude about CKAN that they do. The ONLY reason for a modder to embrace CKAN is if it makes their life easier. Currently it does not.

I'm sure there is a technical term for when someone takes one argument and then attempts to extend it to everything, but I cannot think of it now. Without writing volumes I'll just put these few things here to try and illustrate. First there is a vast difference between most applications and their associated installers VS KSP mods. Many of these things are very regimented with stable rules on how and where things get installed and therefore installers can work pretty smoothly. If you have ever dealt with iOS app development you would know just how strict Apple is in this regard to ensure their installer works near flawlessly. Contrast that with KSP mods, which have pretty much no structure or guidelines other than "it goes in the gamedata folder" There are no guidelines on how mods should work together, or handle dependencies with other mods. You could say it is the Wild West of programming. In short, if installers for windows programs, smartphones, etc worked as flawlessly as CKAN, then yes people should have a better understanding of what's going on under the hood. Also, on that note, when "understanding" mod installation for KSP consists mostly of "the mod goes under gamedata" you neither have to be terribly technical nor elite to take a few moments to understand that. And yea I have pondered that. As I said above both smartphone platforms worked hard to make their installers work as flawlessly as possible. The better argument for what you are trying to illustrate is that if my grandma came to me and said she wanted to root her phone, I'd say you really should know what you are doing first. I think you missed the whole point of what I was getting at. The issue is that modders get hit with CKAN issues when they didn't even know their mod was on CKAN. So it breeds ill will with modders as they now seem expected to troubleshoot CKAN, when they may not have even known their mod was on CKAN, or even how CKAN works.

You have a fire suit right? It's super late so I should be sleeping but I will try to do my best to distill the issue down as best I can. First, CKAN isn't perfect (what is?). When it works it works great. When it fails, it can fail horribly. While I don't think any tool is a substitute for understanding the process, that is often what happens. People will use CKAN and as a result never learn how to actually install a mod manually. So when it fails they have no idea how to troubleshoot. They take to the forums for support, which leads to the next point. Having a mod on CKAN may not actually be a result of the mod author. Since its inception, many mods on CKAN were a result of someone other than the mod author creating the CKAN metadata. So suddenly a mod author may find their thread filled with CKAN support requests when they in fact didn't even know their mod was on CKAN. So suddenly you have a mod author frustrated with something he had no control, or even knowledge of. This, in my opinion, has been the biggest cause of CKAN backlash.

Just a shot in the dark but is there any conflict between firespitter and interstellar fuel switch?

No it's stock. All Kerbals have lights in their helmet.

I'm sure if Taniwha feels like re-texturing them he will.

Awesomeness incoming? I think it's like Weld parts or something