Arsonide

I'm confused by the implication that High Definition Render Pipeline, a render pipeline that by Unity's own admission was not built with performance in mind, might help with performance. If anything it will enable a ton of fancy effects that will harm performance. If performance is a concern then that is something I typically associate with the Universal Render Pipeline.

This was actually the intended use of that contract. It all started back with the "Get Science in Orbit of X" contracts - players were spamming them, and repeatedly completing them using the same craft. That sort of felt like an exploit, so it was slated for patching up, as a lot of contracts have special logic to prevent exploitative behavior when applicable. The thing was that any time there was an attempt to "fix" this "problem", there was quite a lot of resistance to the idea. Players really enjoyed these repeatable contracts because back then there were no contextual objectives (like satellite adjustments or station expansions). They felt like these contracts encouraged them to build infrastructure and then allowed them to gain a repeatable source of income from that infrastructure. This behavior was never patched to my knowledge, but the payouts of those contracts were lowered slightly to reflect this. So that sort of renewable income was seen as sort of a gray area, but SENTINEL had one thing going for it - it was an optional official mod, rather than stock, so players had to opt-in to this mechanic. This gave us a bit of wiggle room, and we wanted the contract to feel different than other contracts, so we heavily accentuated this renewable income. That is to say, if you already have a SENTINEL satellite in orbit where the contract designates, all you have to do is accept the contract, wait, and rake in the cash. This made it different than anything else in the game. It heavily encourages building infrastructure, in a way similar to contextual station contracts, or the CommNet mechanic does. Obviously, the mechanic was popular enough to eventually be fully integrated into stock.

Leadership Initiative was added when milestones were added because there are indeed players that wish career mode was less guided, and more free-form, like sandbox mode with funds and science. These players wouldn't be satisfied with any changes to contracts, because contracts are not what they want from career mode. The reason it has such a large activation cost is because of the initial "record" milestones - altitude records, speed records, distance records, and depth records. There are a lot of those early in the game to kickstart your career on a positive note, and give new players some wiggle room. Having Leadership Initiative active as those are earned would be quite unbalanced, however, which is why the activation cost is a bit steeper. This ensures that players get it a little later in the game. I like that you noticed that it forces you to keep moving forward, instead of doing the same things repeatedly. This was intentional, to emphasize a playstyle that is very different than following contracts. It emphasizes more of a trailblazer or pioneer attitude, which is why it is called "Leadership Initiative". You want to be the first in your field to do these things that have never been done before. You want to keep moving. Another point I'd like to make is the boosted science gains. This might appear strange to someone initially, but the intent of that was not actually to give you more science. What do you do if you are using this playstyle and you are stuck? You've done everything you can do in the Kerbin system, but you can't make it to Duna yet? What if you've explored everything in the system, and there are no milestones left? The intent of the boosted science was not to give you science, but to give you a source of recurring funds when paired with another strategy. When initially doing science, this still supports the trailblazer attitude, as science comes from finite pools (doing it in the same places lowers and eventually uses up all the science there). However if you've done all the science there is to do, this will boost the amount of science your labs produce, and therefore potentially boost the funds they produce when paired with other strategies. Anyway, a lot of thought went into that strategy, hopefully I've explained some of it.

Good stuff. I like the new contract briefings. They read less gibberishy, and incidentally look easier to localize.

Then this is a bug, and should be reported. It should be offering them under certain conditions.

It's not a matter of importance, it's a matter of progression. What happens is the game sees that you are ready for advanced stuff on x, and therefore also qualify for a flyby at y. After your flyby, it creates a pool of advanced X subjects and basic Y subjects, and makes a choice from the pool that is created. The only time it checks distances is when it calculates the next flyby, otherwise it's just watching your progression. It could probably use a few extra options to allow people to tweak how they want it to behave. There are a lot of these in Contracts.cfg, but there could probably be more. Might be worth a suggestion thread.

I mean, nobody's ever asked me, so that would help. As would mentioning me properly so I get pinged, as I am active on the forums. It isn't really a mystery at all. Explore contracts have a very specific logic to them that is semi-random, but also quite ordered at the same time. They used to be entirely random, but that is not the case anymore. I'm not going to get into specific details, but here is the gist of things. They look at what you have done on the planets you have been to. They will keep offering you objectives on those planets up until a certain point of progression has been met on that planet before offering the next planet. However, if you "skip" a planet, and visit Duna, for example, then the game will assume that you are capable of reaching Duna, and start offering things there as well. Just because they start offering a new planet does not mean they stop offering things on an older planet. Advanced objectives for the old planet, such as rendezvous and docking, will appear alongside more basic objectives on new planets, such as flybys and orbits. They will always appear in a logical fashion. You won't see a return from flyby before you see a flyby, and you won't see a request to planet a flag before you've been asked to land. These contracts also keep track of what you are capable of, so for example, they aren't going to ask you to place a flag on the Mun if you've never sent any crew to the Mun. They aren't going to ask you to EVA if you don't have the facility upgrades to EVA, and they aren't going to ask you to dock without docking ports researched.

Personally - never in game.

Asteroid Day is open source and can be modified, as per the modding guidelines, and has a permissive license. The source code comes right with the addon.

This stuff does (eventually) get to them, and they really appreciate it. Edit: But it gets there faster if you poke @sal_vager.

Not quite, but you're on the right track. Floating point math breaks down as you move further away from the origin due to loss of precision. Only so many decimal places can fit in a number, and as the numbers get larger, you get more places on the left, and less places on the right. In most games this causes unpredictable symptoms. My first encounter with it was modding Morrowind - cliff racers spawned very far out in the ocean would jitter like mad. That's a common symptom, but you see it sprout up in various ways. I think in Minecraft they call it the "Far Lands" or something. Anyway, there's a method known as "floating origin" that software engineers use in many games to deal with this issue. Essentially, after the player moves a certain distance from the origin, the player is snapped back to the origin, and everything in the world is moved with him so that from his perspective, he hasn't really moved. You could say that it's as if the origin "floated" to a new location. Sometimes you can feel when this snap happens due to various artifacts occurring. In KSP you might notice some particles suddenly appear or disappear, or sounds suddenly sound like they are in a different location. But overall, from the player's perspective he's moving seamlessly through an incredibly large world with little to no loss of floating point precision. Anyway, if it is not already evident, KSP uses this method (As is well documented from Felipe's talk at Unite in 2013) to keep precision high at all times, while maintaining the scale of a massive solar system. So this loading hint is a sort of double entendre.

You're getting a null reference exception. If you type /stacktrace into the console it (may) give you more detailed information that the creator of said mod might want.

KerbNet is a part of the stock game, a feature that I personally had a heavy hand in implementing. It allows you to map the surface of planets, visualizing the terrain, the biomes, and occasionally spotting where an anomaly is whether that anomaly is static or not. They aren't though, most of them are still static. However, if all of them were randomized...now that people have a stock way to find them, I don't think that would be such a terrible thing. It might even be a decent idea for a mod.

That sure would be nifty wouldn't it.

Says who? What fun would an easter egg hunt be if the easter bunny put the eggs in the same spots every year? It could certainly be said that unique, static landmarks make excellent easter eggs, because these static points of reference allow the community to relate to each other much better when someone posts a video of their super low orbit going through a Mun arch. It could also be said that procedural, dynamic points of interest make excellent easter eggs, because they allow people to discover new things on their own. I don't think either one precludes the other, but both are definitely easter eggs.

Not sure I understand here, randomizing some things ruins them, and randomizing other things does not?

Aerodynamics were tweaked a bit. Pointier things go faster, blunt things go slower, red things go faster.

You could read between the lines and probably come up with all sorts of things, but unfortunately I will still not be able to answer any questions regarding future decisions.

Unfortunately these two statements directly contradict each other. Polish does not come from the polish fairy. Every second we spend on Feature X is a second that Feature Y does not get.

This video was uploaded in 2011. The package itself was last updated in 2012, and therefore has not had to deal with all of the...intricacies...of Unity 5's wheel colliders. It would no longer function nowadays.

Correct, we overload the default and use the wheel's down, given that our gravity can go in any direction.

Suspension settings in any vehicle, and any wheel solution would need to be precisely tuned to each other, whether or not the wheel was simulated with a raycast or a round volume of some sort. If you are referring to the rover that EJ blew up, that was an issue with the camera, not the wheels. He crashed upside down and blew up his root part, which triggered an issue we've resolved since with the camera. The Unity wheel collider is a raycast pointing in the direction of gravity, rather than a point. For the majority of vehicles, players, and games that utilize this collider, this is fine. Most third party solutions for wheels are also raycasts pointing in the direction of gravity, with some extra features. If we were to change this paradigm, it would take a great deal of development time away from other things, to allow a very small subset of vessels to function.

While I do understand this viewpoint, as it was the original reason for "Immediate" being the default, this was very much in the minority in the feedback we received.

We recently made "Open when safe" the default option, after feedback over the weekend.

The specific durations are in settings.cfg if you want to make them faster (or slower)...and yes all KerbNet features also apply to the narrow band scanner as well.