nightingale

@pap1723 - Those look great! I'm concerned how well the grand tour one will scale. Can you provide an original without the text (or provide in a format with layer info) so that I can potentially move/remove the text for the smaller version of the icon? @Enceos - I love your work, and the minimalist style actually really appeals to me. If you're interested in filling some blanks I'd be very grateful. I'm currently sitting in an airport between flights, so I can't provide sketches at the moment (but I'd be happy to if that's all that's required). So out of what's left: Base Construction - Maybe something like the stock base icon (I don't even know what that is, looks like a truck of some kind to me). Or something like the MKS module should be fairly well known by players (I'd want to get @RoverDude's blessing if that's the way we go. Rescue & Recovery - A MK1 pod that looks somehow broken. Maybe debris coming off it? Or perhaps an icon version of the shocked/scared Kerbal face? ISRU - A drill, something similar to the stock one, perhaps Surveys - This one is a little trickier. On Kerbin survey is synonymous with planes, but that's not the case for other planets. Maybe a globe with a flag on it (sounds more like flag planting). A global with a couple of the science icons "orbiting" it (too complex?) Tourism - I think I'll use pap1723's flag planting as inspiration and do something with the stock tourist crew icons. Even if you're willing to do just one or two of the above it'd be a huge, huge help.

@Yemo - I'll have to give some thought to those suggestions. I'm concerned about how well the icons will scale to 1/4 size, but otherwise am considering going with the smaller icons without groups.

Check HasResource and HasResourceCapacity. If neither of those meet your needs you'll have to be more specific as to what you're looking for.

Pre-release build 1.15.1 is up. <Usual red warning lights about this being a contract author-only pre-release>. The main reason I did another pre-release was to get the changes for sortKey out, which is a new field to allow customizing the sort order of contracts within a group (or groups within a child group). See details on the wiki pages for Contract Type and Contract Group. Stock contracts are now mostly working, and there's a bunch of stuff around helping the player figure out which contracts to actually look at (details in the last page of the thread, feedback is welcome). A quick summary of what's missing/broken in the pre-release: Hitting cancel/decline may mess up mission control. At the very least it will collapse all expanded groups No logic around contract limits yet Lots of missing art for the stock agents Still need to give a bit more thought on auto-accept contracts.

Right now I'm using the stock sort in that view, but sorting it the way you've described sounds way better. Fairly easy change, so I'll do that. I haven't looked at contract limits yet - so I wasn't aware of the bug, but probably (hopefully) would've run into it.

Could be an install issue, where it doesn't actually think you have SCANsat? Can I get a log file to have a look at?

Oh I see what you were asking for now. It's a bit more work to do it that way, but still a possibility. I'm going to leave as-is for the next release, as there's stuff that wasn't in the original pre-release that mitigates a bit: There's an indicator saying how many offered contracts are within the group, so it's pretty easy to see the groups without offered contracts. The ones with "unread" contracts are in bold. So you can tell which groups have contracts that are new since the last time you looked in that group (opening the group keeps the new ones bolded, but marks them all as read). I think it's fairly intuitive, but let me know your feedback onceyou check it out.

By popular demand (@Yemo & @severedsolo), the Available tab is back with a flat listing of all available contracts (the grouped view is still the default under a tab called 'All'). Going to try to do another pre-release for tonight, the last change is one that @Whitecat106 had asked for that I'd totally forgotten about - sort order for contracts and child contract groups. Stay tuned for that.

If anyone has any art skills and would like to help out with the agent logos for stock contracts, please see the thread I raised:

Calling all artists! I'm working on a change in Contract Configurator that affects how contracts are offered in mission control (details here if you're interested). In short, the contracts are grouped by "type" (whether that is a stock contract type or contract pack). I use the contract agent logos for the group headings, so it ends up looking something like this: The problem is that the stock contracts don't have a good logo (with a few exceptions like World-Firsts). So I'm looking for one or more artists that are willing to help me out to make some logos for the stock contract types. The contracts are: Collect Science (currently using R&D as a decent placeholder) Exploration Grand Tour Part Test Flag Planting Rescue and Recovery Asteroid Recovery Base Construction ISRU Satellites Stations Surveys Tourism World-Firsts Achievements (this one has a good logo already) For each of these I need two images - 256x160 and 64x40 (typically it's the same image, but doesn't have to be as long as they have consistent elements). So, anyone willing to help out here?

And it doesn't even work. Not one person on the street has pointed at me and said, "hey it's the fishing mod guy!".

America can into space?

I'm going to keep an eye on this one, but not sure if I need to do anything yet. If you load it up on an existing save, the first contract generation pass may take a bit (even on a slow machine we're probably only talking in the 5-10 seconds range). So if you go immediately to Mission Control, you may see still still showing up. It could happen after coming back from a mission where it causes a bunch of new contracts to be valid too... so might need to do something (not sure what yet). This was a pretty good one actually. The uniquness check for vessels is a bit special, because it uses the vessel id to check. However, before a contract is serialized (eg. before the save happens), it hasn't converted it over to the ID. So what you end up with is it compares the id against the vessel itself, and doesn't get a match. If you save and re-load the game, remove all contracts but one, the checks actually start working (but they stop again if you cancel all the contracts. So yup, the new system badly exacerbated an existing bug. Fixed for 1.14.1 and 1.15.1 releases (still leaving the option open for a 1.14.1 release without the MC changes). Ah yes. The old contract is still in the "pre-loader" when it redraws the contracts, so it's got a link to a contract in a weird state. This will be fixed when I fix up the decline/cancel UI (right now it just lazily redraws all the contracts, which causes the player to lose the state of which groups are expanded). Scary, but agreed it's probably not me. Ah yes, I had been thinking that you would be forced to do different titles and different data nodes for these, but I can see how that would get messy pretty quick. I've changed it so that it now merges all the duplicate lines (and does a logical AND of all the conditions it merges). Should be unaffected. How active contracts are stored remains unchanged. Fixed, bug in the new stuff (good catch, by the way). If you want to test out any of my changes, just grab the .dll from the MissionControl branch.

Yup... a flat view is something under consideration (I'd change the new view an "All" tab, and leave the "Available" tab alone). The list would be potentially very big though.

Awesome, congrats on the release!

And now that that breaking change is pending, I just want to say congrats to @pap1723 on the release of a new Contract Pack: Historical Progression. Let this pack take you through the history of human space!

Yup, that's pretty much what this line is meant to cover: Need some summary-level info when contracts are collapsed so a player knows if it's worth expanding the group Most likely it will be just be a count of the Unavailable/Offered/Active contracts. In addition, I may do some sort of read/unread type of thing, where there's a star or other thing to notify if there are new contracts that have been offered since the last time the player expanded that group.

Awesome! I was under the impression that RealScience was somewhat in hibernation, but it seems a lot more active than I'd thought! I'm definitely interested in a collaboration, but would need to clear other KSP commitments out of the way first (ie. finish the MC overhaul discussed above, and complete the "secret" contract pack mentioned above, which is actually a different collaboration). I think we have some of the same reasons for wanting a science overhaul, so I could definitely see myself collaborating rather than trying to make something from scratch. The other thing I'd like to see is exploration/discovery being a key part - I know @JPLRepo has mentioned an API for ResearchBodies before - maybe RealScience/ResearchBodies integration could be in the cards in the future too? Especially Kerbal Golf? Thanks! I'll leave that to @severedsolo to address, but I suspect once 1.15.x is out with these changes you'll be pleased with the results for Bases & Stations.

Okay, I think the Mission Control changes are far enough along to do a contract authors only pre-release. If you are not currently creating contracts using Contract Configurator, then this pre-release is 100% unsupported. First up, let's gather the troops. Red rover, red rover, I call @tjsnh, @Kerbas_ad_astra, @Arachnidek, @CosmoBro, @severedsolo, @inigma, @linuxgurugamer, @Whitecat106, @Yemo, @Syntax, @maculator, @Volwen, @AlphaAsh, @Keniamin, @klefenz, @Whyren, @DMagic, @DBT85, @NathanKell & @pap1723 over. For anyone unsure why they've been tagged, start by having a read of the following post for a brief overview of the changes underway with Mission Control & Contract Generation: The changes are still underway, but the outstanding items are things that affect the players, and not the contract authors. What's missing is: Stock contracts don't show up in mission control Need some summary-level info when contracts are collapsed so a player knows if it's worth expanding the group Reputation limits on number of contracts offered has effectively been removed - need to add an alternate mechanism to make reputation meaningful Auto-Accept contracts may need some work - I'm not sure the best way to display those (maybe not at all, if the aren't active?) As such, I wanted to get this into your guy's hands ASAP (if you've read this far, you get to download the pre-release here). This way contract authors have ample time to make the updates that are recommended based on the changes. I've always striven to maintain backwards compatibility, and that is still the case. No existing contract packs should break with these changes, but there are definitely going to be things that won't look quite right unless some small changes are made in contract packs. My aim is to have the pre-release in the wild for 2 weeks before I release the official version. That means that I'll release 1.15.1 as an official release with these changes on July 22nd. Please don't release a contract pack that is only compatible with 1.15.x before that time (as I'm not going to support any players on the 1.15.0 pre-release). If any of you want to try to time contract pack updates with me, then I can set a more precise time (otherwise I'll just release it on the 22nd when I'm ready). Now, for the changes required. One way to get things working is to download the pre-release, set your minVersion=1.15.0 in your CONTRACT_GROUP, load it up and fix all the errors/warnings. Or for those who prefer reading (and understanding a bit more about what's changing ), read on: Recommended Updates Contract Agent The agent attribute has been added to the CONTRACT_GROUP, and it is highly recommended that you create a custom agent, as this is now used in the grouping lines. Also, if you click on an group/agent line, it will display the agent information that was previous hidden behind an unintuitive right click of the agent logo. So probably a good idea to fill out all the description fields on the agent config (I basically never did this in the past). Similarly, the CONTRACT_GROUP.displayName field is prominently displayed, so it should ideally have a player-friendly name. Requirement Text (title) This is the big one. In the new release, a player can click on a line in mission control that is tied to a CONTRACT_TYPE with no offered contracts. They will be able to see a list of all requirements and whether the are Met/Unmet. This way a player can look at a potential contract, decide they want to get the contract, and actively work towards it. Most requirements have a default title, but the Expression requirement doesn't (or rather, it has a bad one just to maintain backwards compatibility). You may also want to override the title when the default title is not what you want (to prevent spoilers, for example). Generic Title/Description Often contract types use expressions in the title/description. However, when displaying a contract type in Mission Control, often those expressions won't resolve to a valid value (eg. "Build a space station around @targetBody" won't work without @targetBody being set). For these cases, the genericTitle and genericDescription can be set (eg. "Build a space station around a celestial body"). New Features There's also a couple new features that may be useful for people to take advantage of. SelectUnique Part of the changes I did was around performance of the contract generation. Contracts that take several tries to generate should be avoided. Particularly the very common paradigm (that I myself have used many times) that looks something like this: DATA { type = Vessel uniquenessCheck = CONTRACT_ACTIVE theVessel = AllVessels().Where(<some criteria>).Random() } The problem with this expression, is that it will select a vessel that meets the criteria, then check if a contract has already been offered for the vessel. If it selects the "wrong" vessel (on that already has a contract), then the contract won't generate. Instead, the following should now be used: DATA { type = Vessel uniquenessCheck = CONTRACT_ACTIVE theVessel = AllVessels().Where(<some criteria>).SelectUnique() } This will apply the uniqueness check before making a selection, preventing the "wrong" vessel from being selected in this example. DATA_EXPAND This is similar to the DATA node, and is documented here. In short, it allows a contract_type to get expanded/duplicated, so it's shown multiple times in mission control (with one variable changed for each instance). An example of how to use this would be to have a single contract type that has Mun/Minmus variants, and have the two variants shown to the player in mission control (even when the contract can't yet be offered). I think that covers everything. I've tried to add some warnings through the code to check for stuff that is no longer recommended and push authors towards the new functionality. If there's anything that you think is missing, or if you run into any issues updating contracts for the new version, please let me know. And finally I just want to let everyone know that I'll be out of country on a business trip next week - so I probably won't be as responsive as usual.

Not really a bug, since the intention was to not offer the Mun probes if you've done a manned mission to the Mun. It checks for orbit over fly-by because I didn't want it to trigger off passing the Mun on the way to Minmus. So I'm surprised that it still stopped you - maybe you went orbital on the way back from Mun? Either way, if I make any change it'll be to make the requirements more clear (probably change it to Orbit or Land on).

Contract Configurator contracts will exist outside the stock system (I can get away with this because I'm also re-writing the UI). So stock contracts will still continue to generate as normal. I haven't written the code to put them back into the UI, which is why you don't see them. The plan will be to give them groups by type (so all Part Test contracts get grouped together, all Survey contracts will be grouped together, etc.). Right now the CC contracts will go into the stock list, but it's transparent to the user. I only do that to preserve backwards compatibility with CapCom (but @DMagic is willing to make changes to support this), and to leave the option open of turning "off" the new-style Mission Control (so far only positive reactions, but could be different when it gets into the hands of the masses). I may also decide to remove the CC contracts from that list to allow for more stock contracts to be generated.

So when I say "ignore contract limits", I'm talking about the stock limit of 10 offered contracts, and the reputation-based limits (where at low rep I only see one or two 3-star contracts). There's definitely still randomization. The maxSimultaneous will become more important, as that's the real mechanism to limit how many contracts of a given type you'll see (as such the default value will be changing from unlimited to four). I also want to provide an alternative to this paradigm: DATA { type = Vessel uniquenessCheck = CONTRACT_ACTIVE theVessel = AllVessels().Where(<some criteria>).Random() } The way that works right now is it will make a random selection, then do the uniqueness check, possibly preventing the contract from generating if the uniqueness check fails. What I want to do is reverse the order (do the uniqueness check, then make a random selection) to prevent cases where the contract generation has to just keep trying to get a unique value. Syntactically, I'm thinking something like this: DATA { type = Vessel theVessel = AllVessels().Where(<some criteria>).SelectUnique(CONTRACT_ACTIVE) } I also want the above to be able to trigger generating multiple contract all at once (eg. generate a contact for each valid vessel, up to the maximum defined by maxSimultaneous/maxCompletions). I haven't yet figured out how exactly I will approach that. So to answer your question, in the case of B&S, you could potentially make it offer the initial contract for all available bodies, if that's how you want it to behave. Or you could keep it offering randomly up to a max. Keep in mind that the decline system is unchanged, but if a player declines a B&S station and you're only allowing a certain number of them, CC will immediately try to generate another contract to fill the gap.

I've seen @5thHorseman do it in his previous youtube series (the contractor one), but that was on Minmus (Mun will be much tougher). It's doable, but can be really tricky. My suggestion would be to get well above what you're docking to, get the horizontal velocity zero'd out and then do a pinpoint landing (easier said than done). Otherwise, trying to get your vertical and horizontal velocities to line up at the same time would be a massive headache. Also, Docking Port Alignment Indicator may help in lining things up right.

For those interested, I've posted a bit of a blog post about the contract generation & mission control overhaul that I'm currently working on over at the Nightingale Softworks Development Thread: For contract authors - I'll have some more info on this when I'm ready to do a pre-release (hopefully in the next few days), as these changes have the possibility of impacting existing contract packs. None of them will be broken, but there may be work for you to make it look the way you want (such as providing a contract agent where there isn't one today, or overriding the default requirement text).

Contract Configurator: Contract Generation & Mission Control Overhaul I've had this one on the back-burner for a little while, and it's finally getting close to being completed. Probably the most frequent support question I get is "why am I not getting offered <insert contract name here>?". This is painful, because half the time it's just that the RNG hasn't decided the player will get that contract, and the other half is that the contract requirements (pre-requisites) haven't been met (and the player has no idea what those pre-requisites are). So the solution is do a couple things: Show all contracts that are offered, as well as all contracts that could be offered (and what's stopping them from being offered) Ignore contract limits. If a contract can be offered, offer it. That's the basic idea. Of course, doing this has a bunch of impacts: The Mission Control UI needs a complete overhaul Contract generation needs a complete overhaul New limits need to be added to account for the fact that reputation no longer affects which contracts are offered Here's a preview of where the Mission Control UI is at: Each group is expandable/collapsible, and clicking on an unavailable contract will tell the player what the pre-requisites are for being offered that contract (information that previously was inaccessible to the player). There's still a little bit of polish needed, such as adding summary information to the group lines - this way a player has some idea of what's being offered without having to go hunting for stuff. Contract authors will have control over what's displayed here in the pre-requisites, so if they want them to be spoiler free or otherwise obfuscated, they have that flexibility. Overall, the changes do mean that contract authors may have to do some re-work to get things to display the way they want it, but the overhaul is completely backwards compatible - it won't break any existing contract packs. Lastly, there's another huge upside to all this work - there's been a massive performance improvement in the contract generation. This is mostly due to the fact that I'm no longer at the whim of the stock system that continuously tries to ask if a contract can be generated. The other reason is because of the way all contracts are generated up-front, I can get away with not generating contracts at all while in the flight scene (when performance really counts).