NermNermNerm

Yes, for example, MKS is like that. I approached @Roverdude about using some of his parts, as his licensing model is "ask first". He said "no", and for very good reasons -- only mod authors really will understand that a part that looks like it's from MKS is having a problem that is coming from the effects of my mod or MKS, and he just doesn't want to deal with the support hassle. I can definitely appreciate his point of view, so I'm trying to stick to part-packs. I would definitely like to learn how to slightly re-texture parts (e.g. add decals and such) that make it clear that they're being powered by my mod.

Sorry about that, as I said above, I boogered up the deployment. No, the mod includes no parts of its own at all, and uses storage containers from B9. I feel like, in a perfect world, there would be mods that supply parts, and mods that supply functionality. Why should we be unable to use a beautiful part just because we don't like the gameplay mechanics that come with it? I'm not perfectly happy with the B9 containers either - they look good on orbital stuff, but things like USI Freight Transport Technologies look better on bases. The UI is toggled by the Cupcake button in the toolbar.

My bad - I somehow failed to drag the zip file over to the GitHub release when I created it ><. That's why I have this task on my TODO list - automate the deployment. At this point I just need to write some code to interact with the GitHub API to make it happen. Seems simple enough from the examples, but I have a dread of being hassled by authentication issues.

CKAN will help with installing & keeping your mods up-to-date.

I just posted a new version which includes the feature for requiring you to build rovers to collect resources at Tier2+. I've been testing it in my own play-through this week and it looks good. There's one other change you're likely to notice: I've equipped all the command modules in the game with a small stash for Tier4 supplies. I needed to do that because the mechanics of the game make it so that Kerbals that are unfed don't work. I only made the change now simply because in the early days I didn't understand ModuleManager at all. I can't claim to be pro at it now, but good enough to do that anyway. The only bugs I'm aware of now all have to do with the colonization dialog. It has an annoying habit of reverting to the middle of the screen. After some doing, I figured out that it happens when the dialog resizes (say, because the amount of text to display grew). You can't use an uncrewed ship to transfer resources. I think #1 is really more an indicator that the colonization dialog is getting too busy and needs to be converted to some kind of tabbed dialog. #2 is simple enough to fix, but also seems a harbinger of other problems. The goal of the resource-transfer dialog is to just do the right thing, all the time. Those two items are high on the list, but another item is adding the ability to manufacture Extra-Planetary Launchpad's Rocket Parts. I've been pondering how to do it, and here's what I'm thinking. There'll be a new tiered resource, "SimpleParts" and another resource, "ComplexParts" which only can come from Kerbin. There'll be a tiered manufactory that converts "Stuff" (from the drills) into "SimpleParts". There'll be another component that will combine the "Simple" and "Complex" parts into plain "RocketParts". My desire is that these parts are going to be very labor-intensive. I'll probably draft the KSP "mechanic" Kerbal Trait to be a specialist for these parts. One thing I definitely don't like about EPL is that just a few Kerbals can build massive ships in a brief while. I definitely want to make it so that a big ship is a multi-kerbal-year thing. As I mentioned in my last update-post a couple weeks ago, I'm just not sure I like the idea of completely granular research - that is, for each body, there's farming, mining, shinies. In pondering it, I've decided scrapping it or combining it too much isn't my favorite idea either. I'm still kicking ideas around - some that have stuck with me as not-bad are: Making scanning just start at tier 2. Making it so that if you've unlocked Tier3 on some research anywhere, then future bases anywhere will start at Tier1 and if you've unlocked Tier4 anywhere, they'd start at Tier2. Creating a way to accelerate research through contracts or something like it. But I'm not rushing into that. Fixing the dialog and getting RocketPart production going are definitely more important.

I made building self-sufficiency into the centerpiece of the mod, and pretty much all decisions are built around that consideration. That's true of all of the "colonization" mods, I'd say. The life support model is dirt simple (I think), and has only the vaguest hint at realism. But if you really don't want to do self-sufficiency and the incumbent life-support, and you're keen to have your bases be able to do something, then you should perhaps have a look at Extraplanetary Launchpads. It's got a production chain built into it and gives you a really solid incentive to have productive bases (not having to do 57-year timewarps!) I'm a big fan of that mod, and making my mod interact with that one nicely is very high on my priority list.

What sort of gameplay experience are you thinking of?

No. The mod just wouldn't be much fun without it. If you're looking for fun with production chains without life support, there are a lot of mods that will serve your needs there. MKS/USI Kolonization is probably the most detailed one of these.

I'm new to this mod; really like it so far. When I first started using it, I got a target marker where my landing point was projected to be. I don't know what I did, but it's gone now. I don't see a setting for it and would love to know how to get it back. Also, I don't see a UI-scaling setting anywhere. It's a bit of a pain for those blessed with 4k.

I'm trying to create an experience where the player needs to go to a particular spot on a body in order to gather a certain resource. Two ways to do that present themselves: Create waypoints, then create a special gathering module that will only work if it's near one of my waypoints. Can anybody point me at good examples of how to create waypoints? Do what MKS does and create an actual asteroid-like craft. #1 was my first thought - but I'd love to find a recent example of code doing a waypoint - both how to create them and how to sense that the ship is near one. I stumbled on #2 while looking for a way to do #1. It actually seems like it might be a lot of fun, but I'm worried that the resources will turn up on hillsides and start rolling away from the player as soon as they get near.

I haven't had a whole lot of time to devote to the mod in the past few weeks, but I just pushed an update that includes bugfixes for the issues I've found so far in my own playthrough. The highlights are some performance problems with bigger bases, particularly noticeable in the editor. I also worked out some kinks with the crew requirement module. At present, my career playthrough is progressing along. I've just finally managed to unlock T3 hydroponics and T3 production &c. on Minmus, T1 on Gilly and Mun, and most of the way through T2 on Duna. I'm happy with the fact that my base on Minmus is blocked for lack of T4 Kerbals or specialists. I've looked at adding specialists, and I think I'll do that next. It looks like a trivial problem to solve with ModuleManager, but maybe hard to do right. I'll have to study it a bit before putting it into a release. The next thing to do is to start in on requiring rovers to fetch stuff to support T2+ production. This feels like several weeks of work at my current pace. In my playthrough so far, I'm starting to feel like the research areas are too granular. In terms of my own personal play, I stay at the body until all the various kinds of body-specific research are done, then I send the next-generation base. That being the case, why not just lump them all into one research category? That'd be the practical thing. In terms of fun, I don't know. I kinda like checking in on my base from time to time and see some kind of progress being made. It all makes me think there should be a different model for research -- maybe it could be lumped together, and maybe there could be milestones on the way to the next tier. Perhaps there could be mini-missions that could be performed at the body to help advance things along? Please post your feedback on using the mod. Unlike a lot of other mods, this mod has nothing to do with practicality, it's about fun, and that's a hard thing to pin down.

Progressive Colonization System v3.1.2 @ 2022/4/17 This mod provides a simple life support system and a production model that doesn't require mad slide-rule skills to understand. But core to the whole idea is the "tiered" model for production. When you first go to space, you can get by on stored snacks. When you want to stay out there a while, you'll want to look into producing food in space, and that's going to take a while. New "Tiers" of production are unlocked by actually producing and consuming stuff produced in space. This mod is designed to encourage you to build a variety of ships. To research agroponics, you'll need orbital space stations. To research off-world agriculture, you'll need to land a farm and no, all that stuff you learned about agroponics isn't going to do you a bit of good on the surface. To get an idea of how "Tiers" work, just look at the life support consumable, "Snacks". If you fill a container with snacks on Kerban, it's "Kerban Snacks". A kerban will eat one "Kerban Snacks" every day. Let's say you have a "Tier 0" Agroponics module on this ship. Given a little fertilizer, it can produce "Tier 0" "Agroponics Snacks". Tier 0 snacks are far from haute cuisine, but nevertheless Jeb is willing to take one for the team. But he's got limits; Jeb will be willing to consume only up to 20% of his daily snack quota on Tier-0 quality snacks. "Tier 1 Agroponic Snacks" are tastier, and Jeb would be willing to take that as 40% of his diet. But to be able to get out of the tier 0 kit, Jeb's going to have to choke down quite a few of those tier 1 snacks and Bill's going to have to spend some time trying to make them better. Tier-1 is unlocked by kerbals consuming Tier-0 snacks and lab research on ships equipped with Tier-0 kit. Once Tier-1 is unlocked, nothing changes on board Jeb's vessel - it still has the "Tier 0" equipment. A new vessel has to be designed that includes the new tier of agroponics modules. How Do You Start? Well first you have to download and install the mod (CKAN or the links below). Also, this mod is incompatible with any other life support mod. You can use it with USI mods (as long as you disable USI Life Support), but this mod is really meant to be an alternative to that mod. This mod doesn't come with a rich supply of parts, so it depends on a couple of mods with great varieties of parts for building orbital stations and planetary bases, Stockalike Station Parts Expansion Redux and Kerbal Planetary Base Systems. Get those too. Early gameplay is not impacted much by the life support modifications - your kerbals won't get mad about not having any snacks for 7 days, so you can get your basic science unlocked in career mode by the usual routine of trips to Mun. Minmus is a bit of a problem since the round-trip times there are longer. Once you're ready for that voyage to Minmus, find a container and select "Snacks-Tier4" as the content. Then mash the Cupcake button on your toolbar - that will bring up the life support calculator and you can see if you're going to have enough food on board for the trip. After you launch, the cupcake button will still be there for you to keep track of how the supplies are holding out. How about a Space Station! Get the Hydroponic Lab part unlocked in your science tree and head to the VAB. For this vessel, put in the Hydroponic lab, and add storage for Fertilizer (again, go with Tier4) and Snacks(again, Tier4). And of course, check that cupcake button to see where you stand. Strap some boosters onto that crate and git it up to LKO! As we said above, the more of those snacks you pack down, the faster the research progresses, so make sure Jeb has plenty of friends. Once you get it up there, you can see from the Cupcake button how long you've got until you will need to resupply the base and how long it'll take until you break into the next tier. How about a Mun Base! Right, this is trickier because you'll not only want the farm part (look in the Life Support category) but also a resource gatherer and a fertilizer factory. These parts look identical to the stock parts (because the author failed art class) but have different innards. Be sure to look hard at the parts in the VAB - there are more details there about how the parts work, but at a minimum, you'll need Farms, drills, a fertilizer factory and, if you feel it, a factory to make Shinies, which will help defray the cost of the whole trip if you can haul them back to Kerban. Again, the Cupcake button will help you understand what the requirements are. Note that you can't build body-specific things (like farms & factories) until you've actually returned a ship from there. Also, researching farming on the Mun doesn't do anything for Minmus - that's a completely separate problem. Get Your Wheels Rolling! In the early, hardscrabble days of Tier0 and Tier1, you can get by with just one base, plopped anywhere... Well, what we're doing here is presuming that Jeb's uncanny piloting skills will land your base somewhere with minimal nearby supplies to support your early efforts at self-sufficiency. And early they are, at those early tiers, you're still dependent upon trucked-in supplies. But at Tier2, things start to get more interesting: you'll have to go out and mine resources from elsewhere on the planet. You'll need that orbital scanning part that's so far been whizzing around uselessly in space to spot some, and it'll do a whole lot better at spotting them if there are scanner satellites in polar orbits. That will point you to where the resources are, and you'll want another craft, like a rover, to fly out to where the resources are, pick some up, and bring them back to the base. Once you've proven you can do that a couple times, you can just leave the rover at the base and the kerbals will automatically take care of that job going forward as long as there's a pilot there to drive it. (And yes, you need to make sure your rover has at least 2 seats on it.) Extraplanetary Launchpads! Extraplanetary Launchpads is a great mod, I love it. But I've never been quite happy with the idea that a couple engineers can land not-terribly-complicated vehicle on Gilly and, in a couple months, fly off in a Romulan Battlecruiser. This mod revamps the production chain for EPL to change that equation. Now, it takes a mess of engineers to build anything big, and it'll take them quite a while, and it'll take some support staff (farmers, miners, etc.) to get it done. Further, making rocket parts off-world isn't a thing you can learn how to do just by collecting a few surface samples and mystery goo containers. You gotta do it to be good at it. So the production mechanism for rocket parts works a lot like they do for the other stuff in this chain. Your first rocket parts factory can only produce the simplest components, the rest needs to be trucked in from Kerban. As your kerbals gain experience building off-world, they'll be able to make more sophisticated components locally. The more rocket parts you build, the less reliant your kerbals will be on the homeworld. Contracts! Support for ContractConfigurator has recently been added. Occasionally, you will be offered contracts to bring lost kerbals to your bases on worlds with Tier-3 Farming unlocked. Links Complete Walk-Through: GitHub Wiki Download: GitHub Source: GitHub Dependencies: https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/NetKAN/blob/master/NetKAN/ProgressiveColonizationSystem.netkan

Can somebody point me to documentations about the wheres and hows of the layout of folders within the GameData folder? I've got these questions: Having just discovered the wonders of ModuleManager, I've found I can inject my stuff into other mods. This is great stuff. But I see lots of examples of mods that actually place files in the other mods' GameData subfolder. What's up with that? (In my case, I don't need to, I don't think. I'm tweaking .cfg files, that's all). In other cases, I see a complete sub-image of the other mod, up to & including DLL's. Really? Shouldn't I just declare a dependency to CKAN and let ModuleManager figure it out? Is packaging ModuleManager.DLL still a thing? Finally, does anybody have automated tools for releasing to GitHub, SpaceDock, CKAN? Seems like they ought to exist...

I'm a new modder too, so I think I can give you the answer: No. KSP can be extended in so many wildly different ways that any one small mod would very probably not be relevant for anything you'd ever want to do. KSP has poop for documentation, and the API's are all over the place. You live and die by examples. As an illustration of this point, I found people using 3 different API's for getting all the parts of a ship in the VAB. The most obvious thing (if you just look at the API docs) actually returns not only the parts that are in the ship, but those that are just dragged off to the side. You just gotta know. And the means of getting parts in the editor are completely different than what you do in the Flight scene, and what you do in the flight scene varies depending on whether you're talking about loaded or unloaded ships. There's no end of stuff like that. There are things that make some sense after you've been at it for a while, but you never know where the next land mine will be. What you need to do is get good at finding other mods that do similar things to what you want to do and reverse engineering them. Get good at searching for API's on github. And then come back here when you get totally stumped. I never would have guessed that 'KerbalInstructor' was any kind of way to get a talking kerbal in my dialogs, but once Nightingale pointed the way, I was set to go. I bet there's another way (something similar to how the Kerbals in the lower right of the screen are drawn), but if there's no example of that, I've got absolutely no shot at discovering it myself. I would say that the tutorials I found in the sticky posts here are the forums have been helpful in getting a basic grounding. I've not yet found one that was uselessly out of date, either. If you haven't done it already, you should follow the post on how to set up the Unity debugger. That's an immense help in mod development.

Does anybody have examples of how to create a non-modal dialog that stays more or less where you put it? (That is, if you swap from one vessel to another, it should stay put.) I've hacked something up, here: https://github.com/SteveBenz/ColonizationByNerm/blob/30b389db8fa8bac559f2bdb3bebddcf088ed54cf/src/LifeSupportStatusMonitor.cs#L146 Which sorta does it. If you know a thing or two about this stuff, I'd love it if you'd pop over to that code and leave comments to all the "I've got no idea what this does" and "shenanigans" comments... If anybody can point me to non-stub documentation for PopupDialog.SpawnPopupDialog's arguments, that'd be great too.

Took me a while, but I managed to figure out how to use the KerbalInstructor technique in the new dialog framework: https://github.com/SteveBenz/ColonizationByNerm/blob/master/src/PopupMessageWithKerbal.cs That's a class that will display a quick modal dialog with a message in it.

I'm not sure where to go to report this, but as I'm developing a mod I noticed something that's almost certainly a smallish bug in KSP itself. PartModule.OnInitialize() gets called every time you create a part in the editor... Except for the first part in the vessel. (So if you have a modded part that relies on OnInitialize, that part won't work right if it's the first part on a vessel.)

I spent much of the holidays grinching it up at my computer building the mod. There were several "you should start here" kind of posts, but the trouble with that is that the "tier" thing is absolutely central to the idea, and there's nothing remotely like it out there. But I have implemented the hydroponic/farming scheme and the tiered-consumption code - the code is here https://github.com/SteveBenz/ColonizationByNerm/blob/master/src/TieredProduction.cs - it's somewhat ferocious, but also decently unit tested. The mod is playable at this point! I'm also pretty confident that I won't need to make any save-file-breaking changes to the thing to implement the remainder. I , which means that you can with the mod as it is, build orbital bases and progress through the tiers. At this point, I'd make a release, but I'm waiting on an "OK" from @RoverDude to use the art from several of his modules. The project is here: https://github.com/SteveBenz/ColonizationByNerm I haven't created a compiled release yet, but a highly motivated person could try it out. I'll try to keep 'master' clean until I can get a release out. I specifically have it coded at this point to not rely on anything external - installing it is just copying the stuff into GameData, and uninstalling it is removing it. Integration with other mods will be towards the end-game. (The ReadMe.md has my development plan and the completed/not-completed stuff). The big-ticket remaining items are: Having to rove to collect resources (I'm edging towards the idea of making this a Tier-3+ requirement - just in the playing, your grip on the land is pretty tenuous at Tier1 and you don't need the extra challenge) The Shinies chain (which seems pretty simple, compared to #1) A calculator in the editor If you play it now, you'll notice these tedious but non-blocking things: The status panel is fantastically fugly (but the data on it is pretty good). (I learned how to make a dialog and then learned that there's a better way) All the parts are lumped under the "Science" category and the models are dead copies of MKS or Stock things (but I hope you'll find the descriptions accurate, informative and amusing). This is just until I can get my own art or at least skins and can find out how to make a custom category or something. I made it so that you have to have a ship return from a body to be able to build a surface base there. That's true even in Sandbox - so if you wanted to test it out that way, you should just cheat yourself up a landing there. It is incredibly painful to set the target body for each part and way, way too easy to launch a ship without one part set correctly. (If you make that mistake, you can save-file-edit a fix for yourself quite easily, but it's super-frustrating, I know) Some changes have come from the time spent developing and time spent playing around with it: I've decided to hold off indefinitely on the "Goodies" thing. I've come to agree with the idea that one life-support chain is enough. I liked the "You can't do Tier3 & Tier4 near Kerbin" idea so much that I decided to apply it to Shinies too - you can only get "Tier2" shinies at Mun & Minmus - "Tier3" is the limit at Duna, Ike and Gilly, Tier4 is the limit at any of the Julian moons. (So you gotta go to Eloo, Mojo or Dres for Tier5 shinies and the mighty style points you will earn from that) One thing that I don't like is the feeling "Why should I build a surface base on Mun?" And really there isn't one right now other than there's nothing much else to do while waiting for your first landers to return. One idea I had was to make it so that if you're unlocked Tier2 anywhere that it makes it so that researching T2 elsewhere is easier.

I know that ScreenMessages.PostScreenMessage is a thing - but I'd like something fancier, like the tutorial messages - where it's a full-on dialog with a picture of Wernher Von Kerman in the corner. Anybody know how to do that?

I'm starting to get the hang of these PartModules - is there a stock part module that handles the notion that it takes a power-load to do its thing, and that the thing can be toggled on and off? I could go with a Resource Converter, with just "Electric Charge" as an input and no outputs. That seems like a good way to go, but it seems like this is probably a common need and there's something else out there like it.

This probably isn't "the" way, but it's "a" way: you could look for a shift backwards in system time - Planetarium.GetUniversalTime() -- I suspect that might also pick up on loading quicksaves, however... But maybe that's a good thing for your scenario.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here - [KSPAddOn]class foo does indeed control the lifetime of 'foo' - but what I'm asking for is how, if I'm in 'bar', can I get the correct instance of 'foo'.

I'm new to KSP modding, and am trying to figure out what is the best way for one component to talk to another. Mainly I've been following the example from @RoverDude's mods, which look to be the most polished of the code I've seen (and as a result, easiest to follow). But even within his mods there's variance. Maybe there's a rhythm to it? Maybe it's just some is older/comes from different sources? Anyway, one method is this: public class LifeSupportScenario : ScenarioModule { public LifeSupportScenario() { Instance = this; } public static LifeSupportScenario Instance { get; private set; } And the other is public class LifeSupportManager : MonoBehaviour { // Static singleton instance private static LifeSupportManager instance; // Static singleton property public static LifeSupportManager Instance { get { return instance ?? (instance = new GameObject("LifeSupportManager").AddComponent<LifeSupportManager>()); } } (And if anybody cares, that implementation could be made a little nicer with .net's 'Lazy' class). Unity does a lot of reflecto-magic with classes, and I, at one point, thought that the static instance object got some of this love. I'm not finding any clear evidence of it in the Unity docs, but that could be because my search-fu on Unity stuff is not all it could be.

Just did - doesn't work. WTH. These are grownups making Unity right? Stick with your version.

Solved - I struck a land-mine. I had copied an example from something that had KSPAddOn.KSPAddOn.once = true.