Snark

Pretty much this. I suspect they're ferociously busy, and/or don't have anything in particular to share. Bear in mind that the large majority of development time is spent on stuff that would be utterly un-interesting to anyone who's not a programmer working on the project. Stuff that players would actually be interested in and/or be able to see (e.g. game features) tends to come later in the cycle. Also, bear in mind that any time they want to release some info, it's not just a simple matter of "okay, take five minutes out of my day to write up a post and fire it off". It takes a lot of prep time and decision-making before choosing to release such a thing. It's non-trivial. Sure, but you can't "keep the community aware" of development if the development is a bunch of stuff that would be boring and/or incomprehensible to 99%+ of the prospective audience, which is what about 99% of the work in producing software is like. I don't think it's even slightly strange. I think they had the "big media push" because PAX is a big deal and they wanted to have something out for that, and they put a lot of effort into getting something presentable for public consumption. And then go dark because they're, well, busy, and also likely haven't come up with anything demo-able during that time. You'd know because you'd be too busy to post on the forums for the time being. Have you ever been part of a software development project? Here's what the typical monthly update would look like: "Spent weeks ironing out <list of obscure bugs, described in terms that make no sense to you>." "Well, we worked on the physics calculations, and managed to optimize <gibberish> so that the <jargon> is now <cryptic number> better than <other cryptic number>." "Refactored <thing you'll never see> so that <obscure internal development process> will be <better in some way that makes no sense to you unless you're a developer>." Seriously, there's nothing interesting or readable for most of this stuff. Ever watched a big skyscraper being built? For the first two-thirds of the construction period, it's just "dig a big hole in the ground". Important and labor-intensive, but not especially watchable. "Oh, today the hole got <small amount> deeper." Software's kinda like that, too. A few bits are very interesting to watch, but most of it isn't. Okay, so suppose they did post an update. There's an excellent chance that it would basically just be: "UPDATE: We're doing a whole bunch of programming. The end." There's an excellent chance that there simply isn't anything that would be at all interesting or meaningful to anyone who's not working there. ^ Also this. ^ Also this.

Yes, they've said that it'll have the same bodies with the same orbits and same properties, and even the same starting positions. The rationale is so as not to discombobulate existing players too much with a significantly different environment, given how much new stuff there will be to learn and get used to. The KSP2 versions are going to be considerably prettier than even the revamped KSP1 bodies, is my understanding. They're putting a lot of effort into making them more appealing and different, and not "land in one spot and you've seen it all". I've been playing with the revamped Mun in KSP 1.8. It's pretty and I like it a lot. But the stuff they showed us in the studio was another level entirely.

Many, many posts have been removed and/or redacted due to adults who ought to know better descending into personal attacks, flaming, open mockery, and off-topic flamebaiting. People, this is a place to discuss matters like civilized adults. C'mon, folks, you know better than this. There is absolutely nothing wrong with spirited disagreement. If someone says something you disagree with, by all means rebut or debate. But please address the post rather than the poster. Attacking the person themselves (e.g. calling them names, openly mocking them, impugning their motives, etc.) accomplishes only two things: It provokes flamewars that derail the thread, and everybody loses. It demonstrates that you lack convincing arguments of your own, so you go after the poster rather than reasonably addressing what they said. So don't do that. Just don't. Do not make personal criticisms or attacks. Address arguments, not people. Do not respond to personal criticisms or attacks. That just ignites pointless flame wars, and if you do this you're adding to the problem. Don't. If you believe you've been personally attacked, either just ignore it, or else report it so that the moderator team can have a look. Don't descend to the level of people who can't win arguments on their merits. We've tried to be nice about this, and give people the benefit of the doubt that they can comport themselves like civil adults. Please don't prove us wrong about this, folks. Further personal mudslinging here will be dealt with more sternly. Thank you for your understanding.

....aaand some further content removed for "backseat moderating". Folks, please don't tell each other what to do, it's not your place. If you see something that you believe is a legitimate concern, i.e. actual breakage of forum rules, please just report the post so the moderators can have a look. It's what we're for. Thanks.

I fired up wireshark to see what DNS entries it tries to resolve, which is where my above list came from. I haven't bothered to check what the actual contents are, because 1. it's almost certainly exactly what they say it is, and 2. trying to track anything more than DNS entries would be tedious for me to do, and 3. even if I did it, there's a good chance that the contents would be some binary thing anyway that would be meaningless without excruciatingly time-consuming spelunking to try to reverse engineer what they're doing. If someone wants to take that on, more power to 'em, but that's more time than I'm willing to invest, myself. As far as inferring whether their "opt out" really works or not, their design unfortunately makes that hard to verify first-hand (see notes in spoiler).

Ah okay, thanks. Fixed. It didn't contact that address while I was running KSP just now. Thanks, I've updated my post above. I saw the treasuredata entries sitting there in my host file-- obviously I must have added those back-in-the-day, I just didn't sufficiently comment them to keep track.

Well, here's what I'm using. This is from running Wireshark on a KSP 1.8 install, and filtering for all DNS requests. I just added a block for anything at all that KSP tried to talk to when I started it up: 127.0.0.1 cdp.cloud.unity3d.com 127.0.0.1 config.uca.cloud.unity3d.com 127.0.0.1 perf-events.cloud.unity3d.com 127.0.0.1 prd-lender.cdp.internal.unity3d.com 127.0.0.1 thind-gke-usc.prd.data.corp.unity3d.com 127.0.0.1 thind-prd-knob.data.ie.unity3d.com 127.0.0.1 remote-config-proxy-prd.uca.cloud.unity3d.com 127.0.0.1 data-optout-service.uca.cloud.unity3d.com AFAICT, this is the full list of everything that KSP tries to talk to, at least when I start the game up, open a game, return to main menu, and exit. Important caveats to bear in mind for the above: It's not a guaranteed complete list of sites (though I suspect it probably is). Why it's not guaranteed: Because there's nothing in principle preventing KSP from perhaps trying to access some other site at some other time. These are just the sites that it accessed while I was watching it. Why I'm not super concerned: Because I ran through a few cycles of startup / shutdown of KSP, and it hit these same sites every single time. So I'm guessing this is probably about it. There's no guarantee it couldn't change with another update sometime. Of course, it's easy to just run Wireshark again at that time, too. These are just the DNS calls. Why that's a potential concern: In principle they could be making direct calls to specific IP addresses and I wouldn't see it here, since I'm only tracking DNS requests (because trying to read the full Wireshark output for all network traffic on my computer, including all the other programs that are chattering all the time, would take more of my time than I'm willing to sink into this.) Why I'm not super worried about it: Because nobody uses direct IP addresses, that's a noob move. Almost certainly any configured attempts to talk to them will need DNS resolution at least to start with, so blocking all their DNS traffic ought to do the trick, seems to me. Incidentally, the last time this concern erupted over RedShell stuff a year or two ago, I added the following entries, based on stuff I was reading in the forums at the time: 127.0.0.1 redshell.io 127.0.0.1 api.redshell.io 127.0.0.1 treasuredata.com 127.0.0.1 api.treasuredata.com ...Based on my current Wireshark observations, I'm not seeing any attempts to contact redshell.io; all I see are various *.unity3d.com addresses. I've left the redshell.io entries in place anyway (because it's not hurting anything, I have no legitimate need to ever go to redshell.io, and why not). But they may not be actually accomplishing anything anymore. [EDIT] Updated list of sites, thanks @swjr-swis

.NET version is one concern. Another is that the new version of Unity factors a bunch of stuff into separate DLLs, which used to all be lumped together in one big mother-of-all-DLLs. So another thing that mods generally need to do is to update assembly references. My guess is that most mods are pretty simple and easy to update. For example, for all of my own mods, all I had to do was to update the .NET version and assembly references, and they all just worked-- no further code changes required. And most of my mods only had to make one specific change to assembly references (to add UnityEngine.CoreModule.dll); I just had one mod that touched some areas of Unity that required adding some other assembly references as well. So anyway, the point is that for most mods, the actual update process should be pretty simple. Hopefully, this means that mod authors will be able to come out with updates relatively Soon™. It'll be case-by-case, though. Some mods will require more detailed attention, and of course not all modders are equally busy. So hopefully most mods will update fairly quickly, but some mods will take longer until it happens-- and for such mods, we just need to be patient. Give the modders the time that they'll need, they'll get there in time. Not so. The only stated requirement is that they be anything 4.x. But if you substitute "4.x" for "4.7.2", then yes, point taken.

Looks pretty good, but can you please include, 1. a link to the release thread for that mod, and 2. a "NEEDS" directive so that this config won't be active until/unless the relevant mod is installed?

Pretty much all mods with code in them have broken with KSP 1.8. It's a thing. The usual approach in such cases is to be patient. Modders are busy with IRL things, and obviously a spare-time hobby like modding has to take a back seat to that. KSP 1.8 has only been out just a few days, so it's not at all surprising that not all the mods are updated yet. So just give it some time to allow the modder to come up with a fix. Watch the mod's release thread and follow along with the discussions there. We all understand how frustrating it is to have a beloved mod go belly-up for a while... but trying to rush these things tends to be counter-productive. So... basically, just be patient and wait for the modder to come up with a fix.

There's certainly not a config for it in this mod (yet). FYI, there's a list of supported mods in the OP of this thread, which I make a point of keeping up to date. So if you're ever wondering whether a particular mod is supported or not, you can just check that list. Anyway, that's the answer for this mod. I have no way of knowing whether someone may have created such config elsewhere, of course, but I'm guessing not. Absolutely! The more, the merrier. If you make a config for it, please provide it to me so I can incorporate it here. No, that shouldn't be necessary. It's just a 3rd party compatibility patch and therefore shouldn't discommode the mod author in any way. Yes, and kudos for your caution. However, that topic regards people forking and releasing the mod itself (which does affect the modder, which is the source of the kerfuffle). You're not doing that; you're just talking about producing a 3rd party thing that happens to work with it, which doesn't interfere with it in any way and is released separately. Therefore, not a concern in this case.

Actually, I'd say "fortunately", because experience has shown that if we had such a feature, people would abuse the heck out of it to push their threads to the top. It would create tons of noise, plus it would likely be confusing to people who would be asking "why is this thread that hasn't had a post in months at the top of the first page?" Also not a feature, but easily worked around by the thread owner. For example, whenever I update one of my mods, I rename the thread with the updated version, yes... but I also make a "Hi everyone, I've released version N, here's what changed" post in the thread. Everyone wins.

Some off-topic content has been removed. Please try to stay on topic, folks. Thanks.

They're already there, as stated in my post above.

Some content has been removed and/or redacted, due to personal remarks and an unhelpful digression into arguing-about-arguing. Let's please keep things civil, folks, and remember that we're all friends here. There's nothing wrong with spirited debate, but please address posts rather than posters, and don't make assumptions about the motivations or thought processes of anyone but yourself. Personal remarks are never called for. Thank you for your understanding.

You're wrong. No. That's exactly precisely what I'm trying not to do. That's what's happening, but I have no idea why or how to stop it from happening. Thus the trial-and-error part. Why yes, that's what I did for the 3.75m tanks. You'd think that I'd just do the same thing this time around, e.g. You'd think that if there were something different here from doing it for the 3.75m tanks, which makes it hard or vexing, I'd say something about that, huh? e.g. In short: Yes, I do in fact remember what I did last time. Yes, I have enough basic common sense to try doing the same thing as last time. No, the same thing as last time doesn't work, because the 5m models are more complex (and different from the smaller tanks) in a way that I haven't been able to figure out how to make work. Thus my plea for someone else to figure out how to make this work, since I don't have the time or inclination to spend many hours on it myself.

Will the new name be different enough that someone googling for support won't end up on the "real" Scatterer thread? As long as that's the case, and as long as you've scrupulously followed the terms of Scatterer's license (including giving credit / linking to the original), and as long as you adhere to the add-on posting rules for the forum, then I think you may be in the clear... though I gotta say that the idea still kinda makes me twitch, a little. I'm not sure what the implications are for compatibility with other mods (including visual f/x mods that provide their own configs), the possibility for injecting confusion there (e.g. suppose people start making configs that turn out to be compatible with your thing but not with the update that blackrack eventually releases, or vice versa). However... is there some reason you have to be in such an all-fired hurry? 1.8 came out literally just a few days ago, and this seems awfully quick to be turning another mod loose in the ecosystem just because the last one hasn't updated yet-- why not give modders a grace period of at least a few weeks to put something out themselves? To be clear: as long as you're not breaking forum rules or legal license provisions, then you're within your rights to post what you want here. But I'm still not convinced that it's a great idea or that it is guaranteed not to cause problems down the road.

Okay, I looked into this a bit. The practical upshot is that I've found that it's trivially easy to add an orange variant for the 5m nosecone, but not so simple to do the 5m tanks. Those models are a bit more complicated than the smaller tanks' models, and the half-hour or so of trial-and-error tinkering I've done has not shown me how to get it to work reliably. I've been able to get them so they have two variants, and make one of the variants be the same as their current appearance... but I can't get the new orange variant (upscaled from 2.5m tanks) to work right. I get a corrupted-looking thing that still has the 5m model but tries to wrap the 2.5m texture around it, with comical results. That's not to say that it's impossible, just that I don't know how to make it work. And given that I rarely use the orange variants myself, I don't have a lot of motivation to spend hours and hours figuring out by trial-and-error how to do this. So, I don't expect to be doing this any time soon, unless some helpful soul can figure it out first to take the guesswork out of it for me. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Figure out how to make an MM patch that adds an orange variant to the 5m tanks, which is an upscaled version of the corresponding 2.5m tank... but with the other (default) variant still having the appearance of the original 5m tank. If anyone can get this to work, let me know and give me your config that does it, and I'll look into integrating it into the mod. Okay, I see what happened here. These were parts that previously had no variants (and MissingHistory added them)... and then 1.8 came along and added variants in stock, so now they're arm-wrestling. The fix, I believe, is to simply remove the variants from MissingHistory, since they're no longer needed and have been superseded by stock. Therefore, what I propose to do is to release an updated MissingHistory version that removes the following three files: rescaled/Size3LargeTank.cfg rescaled/Size3MediumTank.cfg rescaled/Size3SmallTank.cfg ...Before I actually go and do the release, however, I'd like to make sure that this doesn't badly break anybody who has a previously-launched ship with these parts in it. (I define "break" as "can't load the game" or "can't load the ship in the VAB" or "can't switch to a ship that's already in flight". I do not consider it a "break" if it simply makes an already-launched ship look ugly because now it's showing the wrong variant or something.) So.... could someone who already has some already-launched ships using the 3.75m parts try deleting the above three .cfg files, launching the game, and letting me know what happens? Does it break, or can you still load the ships?

Nope. If you want to run with an older version of KSP, use an older version of the mod, which you can download from the SpaceDock page as @RealKerbal3x mentions.

That's an excellent choice, and thank you for being foresightful and considerate. Unfortunately, people tend not to look at the fine details. If the thing says the name of <famous mod>, even with decorations appended to it, then people will just google that and go where it leads them, very often. The fundamental issues is that most mod users never read the fine print. They just don't. And there's no way of getting them to do it reliably, either. And by "fine print" I mean basically anything other than "I download, I install, I run it".

I know you were just trying to be helpful, and I wouldn't dream of blaming you-- I hope others wouldn't, either. You were trying to help the community, and I applaud you for that. Bear in mind that if emotions seem to run a bit high, here, they're not really directed at you. What's going on here is that, through no fault of your own, you've innocently stumbled into a bit of a hot-button topic that's caused considerable contention and grief in the past. So when you make your post, you're kinda "inheriting" all the pent-up frustration that people have. On the one hand, that's understandable, but on the other, I'm sorry you're kinda bearing the brunt, here. It's not your fault that the innocent-looking can you were opening just happened to have a whole lotta worms in it. That's a kind thought, and props to you for suggesting it. In an ideal world, that's all it would take. Unfortunately, though, experience has shown that in actuality, no, that wouldn't be even slightly helpful. The problem is that once something is released into the wilds of the Internet, it tends to get copied around and passed from hand to hand, and any accompanying "admonishments about proper use" will get lost. A few dozen people might download directly from your page, here. Maybe one or two of them might actually read instructions you provide, though 99%+ almost certainly won't, because nobody ever does. The typical user (myself included) who wants to download a mod, just goes and looks at a page and all they see is "blah blah blah download link blah blah blah". All the "blahs" just get ignored. But those people who download your stuff may post it elsewhere, and then it gets copied around all over the place. It could end up with thousands of people using it, most of whom may not realize that it's not the official author's version. And when they want help, they won't even know that your thread exists, much less where to find it. No, the way they'll try to get help will be what they always do, which is to just type the mod name into Google, which will helpfully direct them to the mod author's thread. And then hilarity will ensue, because neither the mod author nor the well-meaning mod user will realize that they're not actually using an "official" version, which in turn could mean that a lot of time gets wasted until that salient fact eventually emerges. And that difficulty would persist for a long time, even if you took down your thread-- because once the copies are out there, they're out there. So, that's the thing that mod authors really worry about. If "unauthorized" copies exist in the wild, then well-meaning but clueless users will go to the mod author for support, and there's no good way of stopping that from happening.

Oh hey, thanks for the heads up! I'll have a look. I assume that what happened was that they did something with the 3.75m tanks, and hopefully it'll be a simple fix to make. No promises about exactly when, but hopefully it'll be easy and I can have a fix out sometime Soon™. Hm, interesting idea! I'll have a look and see how practical it seems.

Some additional posts that are talking about "mod licensing / forking / modder-user interactions" in general, rather than about this specific thread, have once again been moved over to the Mod licensing and "etiquette" thread. Philosophical discussions about the nature of modder / user interactions, forking, etc. go in the other thread. Discussions about what R-T-B is specifically doing with the specific mods here, are fine here in this thread. Please try to keep things reasonably on-topic, folks? Thank you.

It's usually pretty obvious at a glance, just by looking at a mod's thread. If the author hasn't posted anything in a year and the mod's been broken a long time and you see plaintive posts in the thread from forlorn users wishing for an update, then that's a clue that it may be abandoned. On the other hand, if you see a lively and recent discussion there, then it's likely a going concern. And of course if there's any doubt, you could always just ask.

Moderator's note: This discussion was split off from another topic, located here: