Arsonide

Two was just an arbitrary number I chose, I was thinking more like four, but the feedback was very strong due to the aerial missions back in .5 being so prevalent. I finally fixed the ARM contracts in the development branch. I keep track of the actual explored status of the asteroid now, and not it's orbit, which means that I can detect fresh ones much more accurately. I also track ANY fresh ones you touch over the duration of the mission, so if you grab three or four, the contract can differentiate. I'm also updating it to request a specific size class of asteroid, for a little more player interactivity.

This is a known issue, and one of my top priorities for .53, I made a lot of progress on it last night but there are still a few kinks.

That's because you probably unlocked aerial missions, but there should still only be two aerial missions at a time, if that. I'm not sure which of your other mods is conflicting, and without a log if I told you I'd just be guessing.

They've never shown up in the tracking station, I just added that feature about thirty minutes ago to the dev branch, so it'll be in the next patch. If you are referring to the map screen, they should show up, if they don't, it's because you don't have a contract, or because you just patched. If you just patched, please follow the bolded instructions in the original post above the download link to reset your contract board.

The spontaneous side objectives are really what make a contract. While I like the waypoint contracts, they aren't as diverse as the base and station ones yet.

Minor note: I now display all available missions in the tracking station, so if you want you can check where they are before accepting them.

PQSCities. I'm just patching up the various glitches in the original contracts before I move on. Also my friend is figuring out how to export to the mu model format.

Solar orbit doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be near the sun, it just can't be orbiting something else. You can be in a solar orbit just outside of Kerbin's sphere of influence. Also, you don't need to take ten kerbals, you just need to be able to support ten kerbals (you need ten seats on the bus).

Like I said, I don't plan on auto regenerating, that's invasive. Clearing the board does not clear your existing progress at all, it just wipes the board and any active contracts clean and regenerates them, which after a patch means they will have updated values. You will see Fine Print in the debug log if it is having issues, I labeled it so you'd know which mod it was coming from. If you see that, by all means report it, if not, this is probably an issue with another mod.

That's a lot of mods, I couldn't begin to debug that without a log of you regenerating some missions. My mod would throw errors if it was having issues with your research tree that would be visible in the log. I gave it some thought, and I've decided that I am not going to auto regenerate missions after each patch. Doing this could mess up a contract that someone is already working on and is somewhat invasive. Rather, I am going to post instructions in bold text in the original post and in the readme on how to regenerate your mission board, so that people can do it on their own. This gives them the freedom to do it when they are ready, as not every patch will have sweeping changes to missions like this one did.

A custom tree, as in a custom research tree? If you are getting PartTest errors then whatever mod you are using to edit the tree is conflicting with stock.

Deleting the mod will not help, as the contracts are in your save game persistence file. Getting rid of active contracts will not help either, as the board is a persistent object. You need to clear the board, which will wipe your save of any generated contracts, and regenerate using the new version. Alt-F12->Contracts->Tools->Clear.

Me and my buddy discussed easter egg missions, and agree they would be neat, but that they need to be in procedural locations, so that experienced players don't have an edge. We are currently working on implementing models to place in the world randomly for a mission such as this. The player would get a waypoint within say 1 or 2 kilometers of an object, and be tasked with finding that object in EVA. The object would be large enough to see at a distance.

The current logic requires that it be in solar orbit on the initial grab, but I will be rewriting it tonight to something much more reliable that I discovered yesterday. I also think I'm going to write something that detects contracts being upgraded and automatically refreshes the mission board, so that new patches do not cause confusion. What happens is that I add extra values to persistence, and when loading, my loading class will not find these new things in contracts saved in an old version, and load default values in their place to prevent any serious errors from happening. If you open up the debug log, you should see this happening the moment you open up mission control. The default value of the range is PositiveInfinity, and in the last patch I added range to the aerial contracts, which would explain why people aren't seeing waypoints for upgraded contracts. However, these are only the ones that are on the board when you patch. When the board has time to generate using the new settings, the persistence is up to date, and everything looks good. In my own testing, I force refresh the board to prevent this from happening, and I think I will have the game do this by itself when it detects a certain amount of persistence upgrades. Also, I think changing the default value of range to something other than infinity would at least make the waypoints visible, albeit visible in predictable locations. I think I've narrowed the source of this down enough to fix it, combined with the state fixes I am implementing in station and asteroid contracts, and a weighted equatorial function for generating locations so that they aren't always at the poles, and I think we might have 0.53a soon. Soon as in, whenever I have time to work on it. *puts on work uniform*

Did you initially grab the asteroid within Kerbin's sphere of influence? I realized that might be occuring. I check if you're in orbit of the sun to find fresh asteroids, and that isn't technically accurate. Tonight I learned how to fix that. I can detect asteroids you have never touched without looking at your orbit. That should fix this issue. The asteroids have to be fresh, because if not, you could drop one in orbit of Kerbin and farm these missions indefinitely. Tonight I also set up each and every objective that looks at your ship for parts to automatically set itself inactive temporarily any time you switch vessels or start a new flight. That should fix the station contracts from losing state. I am also raising the rewards of certain missions due to feedback. I have not had time to work on any new contract types, unfortunately, because I've been polishing these up. I want these to be fully playable before I move on.

I've sent the debug version of the mod to three people, two of them can't reproduce the issue, and the third appeared to be the default initialization, or that, the contract was on the board when the patch happened, and thus is behaving wonky (as I stated it would) because I added some new stuff that wasn't saved in the persistence file, and rather than crash the program, my mod will initialize the values with placeholders. Could the people that are having issues seeing their aerial waypoints try to refresh their boards by hitting Alt-F12, going to the contracts tab, the tools tab, and clearing the list? (The middle button). Clearing the list generate new missions and save them with updated information, preventing this default initialization, and thus prevent wonky behavior. It should make your waypoints show up. If this works for you, I will sticky it up in the main thread as general post patch advice. Please let me know, whether it does or does not. As of right now I'm going to have to move on to other issues until I can get more concrete evidence that this is a bug and not outdated contracts upgrading to the new version.

Robotengineer I have a modified DLL with much more debug information in it, since you can produce the bug, would you be willing to use that to whip me up a log that I can look through?

I have reproduced the waypoint disappearing error, it involves an interaction between the contracts, but not any particular number of them. Taking them one at a time should be okay for now. I don't know the cause yet. Sorry this creeped in guys. I'll also keep working on the contract state issues. Still interested in knowing what mods you have installed Burkitt. I ask because the one that lets you mine asteroids changes asteroids into fuel containers or something internally. Also if anybody else can do ARM contracts successfully, I'd like to know that as well. I know what's causing the issues with station contracts randomly completing, and I'm going to nail that one in the next patch by resetting the objective anytime you switch vessels or scenes or anything. EDIT: The waypoints are being added to the system, they just aren't being drawn to the GUI. I'm narrowing in on it. DOUBLE EDIT: I'm a moron, I didn't reproduce the bug, the missions were just occasionally going to the Mun, causing me to think the waypoints weren't showing, cause I test on Kerbin. Only figured this out while debugging. Still have been unable to reproduce the error.

No, that isn't it. If you can reproduce it - logs.

Relevant question: are you towing the asteroid with a claw, or some other means (KAS winch, landing legs, etc.) Also a relevant question: Are you using any mods that might modify the asteroids (to make them mineable or something)? As I said earlier, I need to see your logs if you cannot see aerial waypoints. I'm looking at them right now in 0.52a, so I can't debug a problem I'm not experiencing. if you are experiencing this, I am very interested in your logs, please PM them to me. I would also be interested in knowing if anybody else can see these right now. Remember, the waypoints do not display right now in the tracking station, only the in game map. They also do not display for a planet unless you are focused on that planet, or a ship near that planet. Ensure that your mission is not on Laythe or something.

It is not possible for a mission to generate if there are two on the board. Are you accepting them two at a time? And is your tech tree modified in any way? And are you playing in 64 bit? Anybody who has missing waypoints or more than two aerial survey missions, can you PM me logs or console pastes of any errors or warnings you might have?

The locations should persist. You didn't happen to patch in between these two missions did you? The patch could have adjusted some things. Did you do anything between the two missions?

at Contracts.Templates.PartTest.Generate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 Looks like it's trying to generate a stock mission, the part test. Out of curiosity, are you using 0.51 or 0.52? There's a reference to LINQ in there that might be related to not having 0.52. (Probably not though.)

Hey RoverDude, I like what I'm seeing here. Are there any callbacks for things like, when you acquire a resource, or when you start drilling? I ask because if there are I can easily make some contracts to use Karbonite.

It's capable of generating near the equator, but it seems to prefer the poles. I believe this is because the latitude and longitude get denser up there, thus giving more opportunities for the random generator to pick that location. In the future I will probably weight the choice towards the equator some how.