Arsonide

Reputation, Science, and funds will be tweakable on a per contract basis, and you'll be able to tweak how many contracts can pop up for each type as well. This will actually allow users to help me balance things.

I had a great idea in modder chat come up. Since I am implementing configuration next, I will put these strings into the configuration file to allow customization. That would satisfy everyone.

Contract wipes actually aren't required, but a bunch of goofy things start happening if you don't, because things initialize to default values if they can't find save data. For instance, all orbits would be equatorial for a few days of in game time until new contracts generated. For the first few versions I put this in big bold letters every patch: Manually wipe or expect goofiness. However, I still got false bug reports for goofy things, and it was cutting into my development time, tracking down these non-issues. Thus, any time new save data is encountered, I force a contract wipe. Configuration is coming soon, and I can make this a setting that you can disable, but I do not recommend it. It probably will be necessary for about half of the patches, if I had to estimate. There have been a few where it was not necessary. In this particular patch, I had to move the orbit generation up to the contract from the parameter, and pass the data down through the save file, because people requested the ability to see the data in the contract text, thus modifying the save data, and forcing a reset. I weigh feedback a lot more than my own thoughts. It's guided several whole features. The whole satellite deployment contract was something I'd planned to do later, but it came now because of feedback. Sometimes feedback goes both ways. With "geostationary" I was getting feedback both ways. In these instances, I have to "average" the feedback, and I got much more feedback in favor of K-Syndrome in this instance. Personally I like geostationary, but keostationary is fun, and if I'm going to use that, I want consistency across the board. The people said keostationary, for the most part. On the forums and in the chat rooms, so that's what I went with. LAN checks are skipped and autopassed for inclinations under 1 degrees. I've got your back!

I have released 0.56a. It'll appear on Curse when it is approved, and it is on KerbalStuff now. This patch will reset your contract board, finish any active contracts you care about. Here are the changes: This patch does modify what gets saved in satellite deployment contract save data. As such, the contract board will get a courtesy reset when you patch. Please finish any contracts you are actively working on before patching. Removed references to "geo"stationary and "geo"synchronous orbits of anything other than Kerbin. They are now just stationary and synchronous orbits. In response to previous change, renamed geostationary and geosynchronous orbits around Kerbin to keostationary and keosynchronous. Introduced the terms keliostationary, keliosynchronous, and Kolniya for konsistency. Orbits no longer even consider generating at any inclination above 180 degrees. This fixes impossible to match orbits from appearing. Retrograde orbital objectives for Kerbin and the Sun are now much rarer at lower difficulties. For other bodies, they can still appear at random. Orbits are now generated when satellite deployment contracts are generated, rather than on every scene change. This is better for compatibility and performance, but more importantly, it allows me to show orbital parameters in the mission briefings for people that need to see numbers. Visual orbits got an art pass. Revolving icons are now much smaller, resulting in the appearance of a pulsing line. There are now icons for apoapsis and periapsis with accurate tooltips. If you are in orbit of a body with a satellite deployment contract orbit around it, ascending nodes and descending nodes will show on the mission orbit that show where you need to burn normal to match inclination. These also have appropriate tooltips. Tweaked how textures get loaded to save myself some RSI in the future. Tweaked some small backend stuff with existing waypoints - including ground and aerial. Tweaked the waypoint renderer. Tweaked some backend stuff with orbital parameters. All of this small tweaking will be important when I introduce configuration. Condensed all four orbit generators to one reusable one. Objective orbits now properly calculate specific angular momentum. Just nod your head and smile. Matching an orbit now requires you to also match argument of periapsis, fixing an issue where very rarely you could complete a contract using a vastly different orbit. I could go on and on about how it really doesn't matter for a game about green space men that live on a planet called Kerbin. It's fun, I like it, and it was in the wind before you posted. Enjoy it. If I get enough feedback against it, it'll change.

This was considered and is intentional. It's an agency request, so we're not sure why they asked for it to be there. Perhaps they plan on crashing it into an atmosphere in the future, or they are thinking of giving the Mun an atmosphere. Who knows. Maybe they want to prove that it doesn't work. I have renamed geosynchronous to keosynchronous, geostationary to keostationary, and I refer to any orbits that are not on Kerbin as stationary and synchronous now. For konsistency I also threw in keliostationary, keliosynchronous, and Kolniya.

This was a requested feature so that people could see contracts before accepting them. I've run into another issue with one of my icons. It's shaping up real nice, but I don't think the patch will be tonight as originally planned.

The inclination of that orbit is probably over 180, it's a known issue. Force the contract as complete for now by using your Alt-F12->Contracts->Active window. I've got the Apoapsis, Periapsis, Ascending Node, and Descending node showing on the orbits now, and I've changed how the rotating icons look, they are much smaller now so it looks more like the line is pulsing in one direction. I've already fixed inclinations going to weird numbers, so the matching problems should be fixed, and today I'm adding orbital parameters into the contract text itself, and tooltips on the new icons. If I had to give a rough ETA I'd say within the next day or two.

What mods are you running, and are you running 64 bit?

Click the waypoint in the main map that you wish to go to. It will appear on your navball. That's the spirit, view the mission ahead of time, and build a craft to the specifications of the mission. Every mission is a snowflake that requires special consideration.

Looks like a feature that draws using world coordinates as opposed to screen coordinates, which is what my waypoints use. I might rig something like this together in the future, no promises, but right now I have bigger fish to fry.

The arrows are in screen space, not world space, this would look awkward if the camera rotated, so no, I cannot do that. GUI textures cannot rotate smoothly. What I plan on doing is making the orbit markers very translucent and ghostlike, and adding the four important markers over them at higher opacities.

Finally made a breakthrough:

About half of the satellite contracts are being given an inclination greater than 180, causing them to appear to be much harder to complete than they actually are. In actuality 7% is a pretty big amount of deviation, and these contracts are pretty easy for the most part. What is actually slowing down the release is my progress getting orbital icons for ascending and descending nodes onto the GUI. I want to get that in as well, and it is being very stubborn.

vvvvVVVVvvvv

I have some fixes in place, but they involve inclinations being generated weird. A polar orbit wouldn't be affected by this, as they generate with a set inclination. Give me a moment to check out your save. EDIT: Ah, I set the inclination before I do the crazy stuff that's messing everything up. Yes, this is fixed in the next version. My apologies.

Make sure the wheels you are using are powered wheels. I don't think your standard landing gears will work in this situation. Aerial missions suffer an interesting problem balance wise, in that they are too hard for players lower on the tech tree, and too easy for players higher in the tech tree. I have to balance them carefully, and I will continue to look at this. Right now the main problem, I think, is that their difficulty is based solely on the prestige level of the mission, whereas it should also take into account what level engines you have. Keep in mind also, that these don't just spawn on Kerbin. They spawn on any planet with an atmosphere, and not all planets with atmospheres allow air breathing engines. That is why there is no requirement to use jet engines. There was initially an issue in older versions with waypoints bunching up near the poles, but this is no longer an issue. If you are getting a lot of contracts at the poles, it is because agencies want you to visit the poles. (RNG) Similarly, regarding your Duna station, I don't necessarily think it's a good thing to limit agency requests to "realistic" constraints, because A: we do not know their needs, B: they are kerbals, and C: gameplay wise, if we constrain to realistic reusable situations, there will be less situations to choose from, and the game will get less replayable. The whole intention of Fine Print is to make KSP more replayable. You say there's a lot of delta V required to get to this orbit, to me that sounds like a challenge, and an interesting gameplay situation for you. Remember, these are stations you are building for the agency, not for yourself. I enjoy that the RNG occasionally throws oddball requests at you, because people have been playing KSP for years, and I like the idea that I might be able to confuse or challenge them with a request. This is a very intentional design decision on my part, to not constrain the output of missions too much. Indeed I am planning EVA contracts to easter eggs. New easter eggs that procedurally spawn in dynamic locations, as you can see in my signature. However, right now, I am trying to smooth out the satellite orbits. I know they are frustrating some people, and that frustrates me. Please quick save, and send me your save in a PM. I need as much information on this situation as possible.

Anything with powered wheels touching the ground is considered a rover juanml82. I do not constrain your creativity other than that stipulation. As far as missions spawning in difficult areas, that is a good thing in my opinion. I advise you to check the tracking station before accepting a rover mission to see where the agency is sending you. The Contract System determines what missions are chosen, and I have not modified that system in any way. What I have done is put limitations on my missions so that only a few can spawn at once. Beyond that I have little control over how the system chooses what it chooses. This is part of RNG. There have been times in my testing where I've had many stock missions and not any of mine. I've found a problem with the orbital matching algorithm, and I'm working on fixing that as well as adding more information to orbital waypoints.

No. Minmus can handle geostationary orbits. This actually allowed me to reproduce the issue, and I can see the problem. Thanks for this.

The tracking station shows all current contracts that are shown on the contract board, not only the ones you accept. When you completed the first deployment mission, another one probably generated to fill the void.

That's next patch sir. I actually spent all day trying to figure out why the ascending node isn't calculating properly for my GUI markers. Kind of hit a brick wall with that, but rest assured I am working on it.

Did you return to the flight scene after this and make sure that you were matched up? The two screenshots you've shown were close but might not be matched. It's hard to tell without being able to rotate, but I see some deviation of altitude. I had one other report of this yesterday, so I double checked all my math in the matching logic, turns out the person was just not matched yet, but deviations of 7% generally give you quite a bit of leeway, so I'm not sure. Maybe the inclination/LAN is flipped? Is anything popping up in the debug log by chance?

This happens to me quite a bit in testing. I see that you have multiple contracts to orbit around Kerbin active, but only one can fit in the tracking window at once. Scroll down the tracking window and make sure that the orbit you are matching is the one that you are looking at in the objectives. You might be completing one, it just isn't the one you're looking at.

Proof of concept is a decent idea, I like it. I agree with your feedback on Aerial Surveys. I haven't had any comments about it because I imagine most people flying planes have the later engine, but I have noticed that even with the turbojet, sometimes those waypoints spawn pretty high. My test jet has a turbojet. I'll look into lowering these for trivial contracts, thanks for your feedback. Also, we made Modding Mondays, so I'd like to thank everybody for their feedback once again. Development has gone quickly, the mod pretty much started half a month ago, but the feedback has been instrumental in helping me get things done right - all of the logs and suggestions and praise and even complaints have shaped the state of the mod. I've tried to react to any concerns quickly, and I will continue to do so.

Every time I post, I now leave bolded text in my signature. I set this up for people that don't have the time to read the entire thread. Please read my signature. Thank you.

This is a fantastic idea, and was something I was thinking about as well. I'm glad that more people are considering a more basic life support mod. Please develop this!