Arsonide

Thanks to the fine reports of Burkitt, and his actual craft file, I was able to locate and smash the cupola bug. It seems to be a stock bug that randomly changes the internal name of the cupola from "cupola" to "cupola ()". This will be remedied in the next version of Fine Print.

You can and are encouraged to dock many parts.

I sent out some PMs to people that mentioned the cupola bug, but I am posting to get the attention of anybody that's experienced it and has not said anything. I need more information on this bug, as I cannot recreate it. If you wouldn't mind explaining how the mission went, the shape of your vessel (multiple command pods, etc), if there was any docking involved, if you left the game and came back, if you went to the main menu and back, if you went to another vessel for a while...anything that describes the flow of the mission, that would help me. It would also help to know any mods you had installed, and if you have renamed, deleted, or modified any stock part configurations. If you could recreate it somehow, and provide a log, that'd be more helpful, but I do not think there are going to be any errors. If there are that would pinpoint the issue, but I doubt it...knowing the flow of the mission should be enough to track this down. Once I get enough reports I can track down the issue and fix it, but as of now I cannot recreate it. Satellite missions are done, but I want to nail the cupola bug before I release. Thanks for any assistance.

Yes, I don't delete them or take them out of your control. This was discussed in the design of the contract, but I thought it'd be terrible. People who are getting "lots" of certain missions, tell me - is there more than two on the board at any given time? When I lowered the radius of rover missions I did not lower the "trigger" range of each waypoint. This was intentional, because there was a bug report of waypoints being below ground, I did not want to lower the trigger range so that people could trigger the waypoints if this happened. At this point in time, you can unlock a whole cluster by dropping into the center, but that is not the intention, and it will be looked at. I have a refactoring period coming up after I release the satellite contracts, and I will organize code and fix things like this.

I display an orbit on the map, and ask you to match it. It sounds simple, but they have varying inclinations, eccentricities, and sometimes they can spawn really close to the edge of a planet's SOI meaning burns are extremely small. I had a burn earlier during testing of 0.3m/s that I had to make with RCS thrusters. They're just about ready, but I have a few more issues to correct.

I'm finishing up the satellite deployment contract today, and I'll be looking at the cupola issue. That should be enough for a release in the near future.

Could you PM me the Part.cfg file? RemoteTech should work.

Since the bug reports have subsided somewhat, I'm focusing on two new contract types that are very ambitious. One spawns points of interest (physically) on the surface of a planet for you to inspect on EVAs, and the other asks you to deploy a satellite into an orbit that is shown on the map. The EVA contract may take some time, since it requires art assets. I'm torn on this. On the one hand, it would make more sense to get paid when the landing is stable, and on the other, your story is decidedly kerbal.

You have quite a lot of exceptions in this log, I see some from Interstellar, some from MechJeb, some from something involving clouds, and more. I see two from what appear to be MCE and Station Science as well, and indeed, the ContractSystem chokes up the game eventually. Keep in mind that any one of these exceptions might be choking it up in this resonance cascade of null references, but it looks like Fine Print is doing okay here. I have had one other bug report involving the cupola objective, but I haven't tracked down the source of it. It seems to be the last of the state issues. I assume at some point you switched out of this vessel and back into it during the flight?

Appears to be affecting the stock contracts as well. Fine Print is self contained, and does not modify the contract system itself at all. (This also means that when the contract system decided to pick aerial survey missions exclusively, and nothing else, I was confused.) I ended up having to limit the amount of missions it could pick just to fix a quirk in the system itself. I'm not sure what could be causing this, but a log may help. Right now I have a modeler working on points of interest for the EVA contract, but I'm sure he could use some help, the more points of interest the better. If you are familiar with the process of constructing a mu file, contact me on IRC. irc.esper.net #kspmodders

That's the idea. It could have put them clustered in the same region on Jool.

The mission will not complete unless you land that sucker with powered wheels on the ground.

Any time Fine Print finds something it does not expect in your save file, like a word where a number should be, or a missing entry, it will refresh your board. It only does this refresh once per run of the game. Note: This is what it should be doing, if it's doing something else, I need to know.

This isn't a bug, it's a feature. You are probably loading saves from .52a, it's just refreshing your board for you. Once the game saves in .53a, it will not do this on load. This might also happen if something is modifying your save file entries for Fine Print that isn't Fine Print.

You need wheels for rover contracts, the claw for ARM contracts, and mid range aeronautics stuff for survey contracts. (The first stock tech node is the one with the first jet engine.) Base and Station contracts require a lot of varied technology, they actually generate around the technology you have, on a per objective basis. To first appear though, they require that you have power generation, a docking port, and an antenna unlocked.

Made some progress on the EVA anomaly mission tonight and got this neat panoramic: It's like one of those family pictures in front of the world's largest ball of twine. This mission is a bit tougher because I'm going to start spawning neat objects everywhere.

Remember, the idea is that you are building stations and bases for other companies. It's mostly a financial endeavor, with some good effects on reputation. I do feel like the research lab should boost science more, however.

Wait, what planet is that you are looking at? Is that the Mun? There shouldn't be surveys there. It's hard to tell cause it's the dark side.

0.53a has been released on KerbalStuff. Here's the changes: The mod already verified entries of the save game and initialized them to default values if they were missing or invalid, which would happen any time the save game was manually modified by a player or a program, or after a patch that added new things. This would prevent crashing, but not weird little glitches, which would occur until the game naturally generated new missions, or until you refreshed the board manually. Now, whenever the mod detects one of these, it will automatically refresh the board for you. This means that any active contracts will be cleared sometimes after a patch, but it also means that you will not be experiencing these glitches. Please complete any active contracts that you care about before patching. Added new logic to control when contracts are handed out on the board. Asteroid Retrieval, Station Building, and Base Building can now only have two contracts out at any given time, and you will not receive duplicate missions to build or retrieve the same things in the same locations, to prevent contract stacking. Aerial and Rover missions can have four active and two on the board. New contract types are coming soon. State tracking has been vastly improved across the board. You should no longer have missions randomly completing on their own. This makes station and asteroid missions much more stable. Asteroid contracts were overhauled. The tracking on "new" asteroids is now much more solid, you will be asked to retrieve a specific classification of asteroid, and you will receive feedback messages every time you claw an asteroid to let you know what the agency thinks about your choice of asteroid. The classification request also applies to the rare station side objective, so you may be asked to build your station into a Class E for that Death Star look. The tracking station now shows waypoints for all current contracts, including ones you have not accepted. This gives you an opportunity to check out where a contract is going to take you before accepting it. Waypoints were not evenly distributed over the surface of a planet, due to the geometry of a sphere, there is much less distance per latitude near the poles than there is at the equator, causing the generator to put more waypoints on the poles than intended. This has been fixed, and waypoints now spawn uniformly over the planets. Removed default values of infinity from any variables, as it was rarely causing terrible things. Fixed a typo that resulted in aerial missions only spawning above land on planets with water. Tightened up higher difficulty aerial waypoint ranges slightly. Rewards remain the same. "Navigation activated" and "navigation deactivated" messages were reversed, causing some confusion as to what was happening with navigation waypoints. This has been alleviated, and our previous navigations engineer was tied to a Class D asteroid and thrown at the sun. Rover waypoint ranges can now be reduced (or increased) by the gravity of the target planet. The ranges from last patch apply to Kerbin, and can go as low as half of what they are now depending on how low the gravity gets. Asteroid Retrieval rewards were increased by a significant amount. Station and Base rewards were increased slightly, and made more malleable by their side objectives, meaning having to integrate a research lab will boost science gains, integrating a cupola will boost reputation gains, etc. I want to thank everyone that has been giving me feedback and reports. It's really helping build this into a decent mod. I will continue to listen and implement as many of your thoughts as I can, so keep on submitting them to my thread. Perhaps we can drop the "a" off the version soon!

Absolutely. The first load might have a few errors, but then it will save, leaving out the extra contracts.

I implemented this in the development branch. Base, station, and ARM contracts will no longer generate if a similar one exists on the board or has been accepted by the player. Thank you for the suggestion. I also did eventually decide to have the board automatically refresh itself if it detects any differences in the savegame, which would happen after a patch or if the save was manually modified by the player or an external program. This only happens once per run of the game if save modifications are detected. There are thousands of downloads of the mod, and I figure thousands of people aren't going to read the steps to refresh the board themselves. It should prevent a lot of false error reports.

Hmm, that's new. The height algorithm I use is the same one used by ScanSat and MechJeb. The height values kind of go crazy near the poles due to how the planet rendering is set up, that's why you find weird "easter eggs" at the poles frequently. Could be related, but I haven't experienced it personally. Thanks for the report, I'll look at it, but it'll have to be in the next patch. This patch should help a little bit though because I'm going to weight the latitude of points towards the equator to offset the current "preference" to picking the poles. The reason it picks poles more often than not is because the longitude are closer together up there, giving the generator more opportunities.

This is a problem with the base game, not Fine Print, and it has been bothering me as well. There is no real way to solve it without getting up in the player's business and restricting their freedom/options, which I don't want to do. I have been considering adding a reputation loss any time you refuse a mission to somewhat alleviate this problem, as you have to refuse quite a bit to stack missions in the same location.

They will come back on their own over time. In my testing, the game likes to keep at least one or two of these up on the board most of the time. My mod does not affect how the system chooses what missions to put on the board, it just adds more to the pool of choices. In fact, I now limit how many of mine can be up there so that stock missions should show up more often.

All I can tell you is that the contract system loaded successfully, Fine Print threw no errors, and that you have a lot of null reference errors coming from other mods. Kerbtown and Interstellar were throwing some, but there were more. Null reference errors can have a cascade of random consequences, so I would check and make sure that those mods are up to date and configured properly. If they are, I would report this in those threads.