Arsonide

I use this function to determine the semi major axis of a synchronous orbit: public static double synchronousSMA(CelestialBody body) { if ((object)body == null) return 0.0; return Math.Pow(body.gravParameter * Math.Pow(body.rotationPeriod / (2.0 * Math.PI), 2.0), (1.0 / 3.0)); } I then calculate where the apoapsis would be given that semi major axis, and compare that with the sphere of influence of the body. If it is greater, the orbit is rejected, and the generator defaults to a purely random orbit, the contract is notified of this, and the briefing text changes accordingly to describe a random orbit. public static bool canBodyBeSynchronous(CelestialBody body, double eccentricity) { if ((object)body == null) return false; double semiMajorAxis = synchronousSMA(body); double apoapsis = (1.0 + eccentricity) * semiMajorAxis; if (apoapsis > body.sphereOfInfluence) return false; else return true; } If you would like to check my math. Mathematically, these can only show up on bodies that support them.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, you mean docking with something in orbit that pushes you through a transfer, that existed before the contract was accepted? I think this situation would be okay. I just check the launch date of the vessel vs the contract acceptance date, and I believe that when you dock two vessels, if there are two launch dates, it uses the earlier one. So what would happen is that it would not count until you undocked from the transfer stage again, at which point the newer launch date would be considered. As long as any one part is older than the contract, that parameter will shut off, meaning even if the station is built to the exact specifications of the contract, it won't count.

It's hard to say, could you edit that to have the entire log? It has a scroll bar so it won't spam the thread. It looks like something with a GUI window is crashing you, and Fine Print doesn't have one in any released builds. There's one in development. I'm tempted to say it might be TAC, but like I said, I need to see the whole log.

This shouldn't be possible. A stationary orbit would be well within the SOI, and randomized orbits limit their apoapses to be under the SOI altitude. Do you have a screenshot? This was actually the first thing that I wanted to add to the mod, and ultimately the first idea I had to shoot down. Samples don't really keep track of where they have been, which makes things complicated. Say the player keeps a warehouse of samples right beside the launchpad. Hundreds of samples from every planet and every biome. Suddenly he's swimming in money from stacking sample contracts. 0.25 is adding logs to where Kerbals and Vessels have been, and I'm hoping that this will enable some new types of contracts. We will see.

Stationary orbits of Minmus are possible, I had to do plenty of them while testing. The sphere of influence is at around 2000 KM whereas the synchronous orbital altitude is around 300 KM. In fact I found the satellite contracts to be very educational, so I'm glad other people are learning as well. The second issue is unconnected to Fine Print, but rather how the game handles those sorts of contracts. The Explore missions tend to favor your progress, they don't go in a direct line, but rather check where you have been and what you have done there. If you had already been to Minmus, it would prefer to put you somewhere you hadn't been yet.

What kind of wheels were you using?

If you don't have the proper technology, my other contracts will not appear. If all you are getting is satellite contracts, that is likely because all you have is satellite technology. Also, unless you have configured your version differently, there will not be more than two of them, so you should have plenty of other contracts to choose from. This is incorrect. How high your nodes are matters quite a lot, because that determines your period. You are correct - with geostationary orbits, this period will come with an inclination of zero. Synchronous orbits have the same period but can appear with varying eccentricities and inclinations. Perhaps you are confusing the terms stationary and synchronous. The apoapsis and periapsis theoretically would be the same, but I calculate them from scratch, and due to floating point inaccuracies and such, they might be a few meters off from each other. If this bothers you, I apologize, but there isn't much I can do. Trust me when I say, the orbits you see are indeed stationary and synchronous. You won't be matching them to exact specifications anyway, so a few meters difference isn't going to matter too much. This mod does expand on the lack-luster stock contract offerings. Satellite contracts were a request from the community. All stock objectives that ask you to orbit a planet, and some of mine, do not care what shape your orbit is in. People wanted specific orbits to match, so I added them. I do that sometimes. The trivial ones have deviation windows large enough that the orbits just have to be vaguely similar, if you are having difficulties doing it. During testing I never once used any external tools to do this - just my eyeballs and maneuver nodes. This is a game about modifying orbits, essentially, so it's probably a good skill to learn. If you don't want to, I have configuration options to disable satellite contracts. If that's not enough, might I suggest another game? How old is the hub you are docking with? The contract specifies that you should launch a new station, and that includes all of the parts of it. If you connect an old part that was in orbit before you accepted the contract to a new one, that will not qualify.

There is already a way to disable my contracts, but not stock (yet).

This is odd, most of the missions have extremely long deadlines, like 34 years or something. It's actually something I was looking at shortening in the future. Have you modified your configuration file?

It seems to crash when trying to load a stock Part Test contract, and that's probably because several of your parts from Universal Storage didn't load properly. The part test contract uses parts. If you search for "Null Ref" you will see that up above. There are a few of these. Your addon version checker is also throwing a few null references, but they seem kind of harmless. None of it seems to be related to Fine Print.

Crew rotation is already in this, above was a brief summary. It'll choose that for a random vessel if it can't find one that needs help.

There is actually a community member working on a rescue mission replacement on my Github repository right now. It looks fantastic but I don't want to say too much until I'm able to help him hammer out all the details and integrate it with the master branch. It actually looks through your own vessels that are in the field that have no electricity or fuel, and tasks you with bringing the crew of those vessels home.

So I've given it some thought, and I think I know where I want to go with the general direction of development for the next few patches. As of now, I've added many complex contracts, and as you know, the more contracts you add to the pool, the less of a chance you have to see any particular one of them. This puts me in a dilemma, because people have so many good ideas, but I do not want to imbalance the game with a lot of contracts that are complicated and take a ton of effort. There should be an equal amount of complicated and simple contracts. As of now, the contracts are generated using the Progress Tracker, which is what the game uses to keep track of what the player has done. However, it is using the Progress Tracker quite loosely. It only checks to see if the player has been to a planet or not. This means that if you do a simple flyby of Jool, even if you just graze the sphere of influence, your progress updates and contracts start appearing for Jool. What I'd like to do is leash the contracts to a much tighter usage of the Progress Tracker. There are progress tracks on everything...whether the player has flown by, orbited, landed, done an EVA, docked, all sorts of stuff, for each planetary body...and I can use those to gain a more accurate picture of what the player is capable of and give him missions that are much more tailored to his skills. For instance, only giving him rover contracts for planets he's at least established an orbit around before, or only building bases on planets he has landed on. However. This will also lower the general amount of complex contracts, leaving a void. This is where my next idea comes into play. I am calling them "breadcrumb" contracts. They will be similar to the World First contracts, with some differences. They will check for the next unvisited location and situation, and ask you to do something extremely simple. Like fly by Jool, or land at a specific waypoint on Pol. Very simple objectives, but utilizing my systems for waypoints and such to make them more interactive. These contracts would fulfill two purposes: they would balance the complicated contracts, and they would push out the player's progress tracker. How a bread crumb contract will differ from a World First contract, is that once a bread crumb gets to Eeloo, it will not stop appearing. It will push in a progression from Kerbin outward, but once it hits the edge of the system, it will fold back in, and unlock again for every planet, to create some contract variety, and continue balancing the harder missions. I believe this is the best step for Fine Print to make next. It would give the contracts system some much needed balance and progression. Please let me know what you guys think. EDIT: This does not mean work on more complex contracts is ceasing. I just need a method of balancing them out, and I think breadcrumbs are a good way.

That is already how it works. Contracts at higher difficulties do start appearing as synchronous, stationary, and semi-synchronous (tundra/Molniya). Lower difficulties are more likely to spawn polar or equatorial. The completely random orbits are fill ins, they have a small chance to appear anywhere, but for the most part, they replace synchronous for example if the body does not support synchronous orbits. You can identify totally random orbits by the phrasing of the contract. They will ask for "a specific" orbit, rather than actually using a term to describe it, like polar or Molniya.

Difficulty isn't just altitude, it's eccentricity as well. I was considering decoupling those.

I mean the prestige level, yes. No you cannot disable difficulty levels. There are many things you can configure about the orbital parameters. Take a look at the configuration file. For now, if you only want things at lower altitudes, I suggest disabling orbits other than Synchronous, Stationary, and Molniya. Everything else has a chance to be anywhere in the sphere of influence. Those have locked semi major axes, which cause them to be at generally lower altitudes. Tundra orbits are also locked to a semi major axis, but they go to higher altitudes on the apoapsis. I do realize that this is not the ideal solution for you, I will look at having configurable altitudes for the random orbits as well in future patches.

DMagic can you attempt to find me on IRC sometime later? The "patch reset" function you used, I don't think it is functional...I've been tinkering with some replacements, but they are behaving oddly, and I think it has to do with some internal workings in the Contract System, but I'm not sure, seems like something worth investigating.

It really depends on the type of orbit. The randomized ones can go out to the edge of the SOI, but only on harder difficulties. It is weighted to lower altitudes, but it seems like a good thing to make configurable. As always, RNG can give you anything.

I knew that they were handed out at a ratio, but I wouldn't say I'd figured it out...I didn't put two and two together that changing the prestige level would throw off that ratio. The fact that I don't change prestige levels is more because I haven't had to. So yeah, luck.

I do not modify the prestige levels of missions as they generate, I cater the generation to the prestige level, because yes, it hands out prestige levels at a certain ratio. So I don't believe this would affect me. However, if this is something that other contract mods are doing, the saturation of non-stock mods might be confusing users. Thank you for the warning though. The fact that I haven't changed prestige levels manually is more of a factor of luck than anything. Now I know not to do it in the future.

Hah, nice. Snack growing missions. I hadn't even considered that...

Heh, that's stock behavior. It actually cleared them the first time you hit the button, but the contract window will show "ghost" contracts, that are not actually there, until you switch scenes. Switching scenes clears the ghosts. The ghosts aren't actually in your list of active contracts, they just show on the UI. This caused me a lot of grief a few patches ago, I could not figure out what was going on for the longest.

Sounds good. I'm implementing this and trying to track down some issues with that reset. Contract System is a tricky beast. I think I will check out how mission controller blocks stock contracts and have options for that too. I haven't heard too many opinions on the ISRU contracts, has anybody tried those, and did it go smoothly? After I implemented them they quickly became one of my favorite contracts to do.

Anybody have any requests for what should go on here? I would like to only have settings here that affect immediately visible in game stuff, like waypoint visibility. For all the detailed stuff, that's what the "Reload Configuration" button is for.

Your patch reset did not trigger properly. I assume these were on your board the moment you patched. These are default orbits. This is part of the wonkiness I describe that can happen when a patch reset doesn't properly trigger. If you clear your board manually by going to Alt-F12->Contracts->Tools->Clear Current Contracts, or by fast forwarding by about a week of game time, these contracts will disappear, functional ones will appear, and it won't happen again. I'm sorry LowAltitudeMultiplier isn't clear enough for you. Here are the default values I am using for the moment, though I've already patched this to use CelestialBody.scienceValues.flyingAltitudeThreshold in my build as a center point. (This is the point at which the game divides "Flying High" and "Flying Low".) I primarily did this to be compatible with RSS and other custom celestial body mods. I know what comments are... Like I said, the stock ConfigNodes do not support them when dumping to a file programmatically. When parsing one written by a human, they will ignore comments. Also, not every mod uses stock ConfigNodes for their configuration solution, so I'm 100% sure that if you go look for comments in other mods' configuration files, you will find them. Programmatically generated ConfigNodes? It will not, the facility missions require a new facility for that contract. Docking to an old facility won't work. I'm currently setting up an in game window to handle some in game stuff, I'm including options to toggle waypoint visibility, and reload the configuration file without restarting.