Pontiac

I've not installed this, nor even looked a the source code, but I'm somewhat curious as to consumption. With Kethane, you can bleed a planet dry. Depending on the planet size, a single pixel on the PNG map could turn out to be a few KM on the planet surface. So if I land at a particular spot, start mining stuff up, do the resources count down, or stay static? If they count down, is this information stored in the persistence/quicksave file? Does the PNG map get copied somewhere and modifications are done to the PNG on a per-save basis? And who's made a PNG for Kerbin that puts massive amounts of fuel right around the flight center?

I don't have access to the craft file at this time, however, I'm having an interesting time with MJ, my tug, and RCS. MJ only seems to want to work with RCS on, otherwise it acts as a completely dead stick. Sometimes, I have to toggle RCS off, then on, to make MJ react. No movement on the pitch/yaw/roll pins until I do the toggle. This typically happens when I undock from my fuel station, and start to use the auto-land function. For example, if I turn on RCS after undocking, I back off manually from my fuel station, and then if I turn off RCS, tell MJ to turn retrograde with Smart ASS, I get a dead stick. The craft doesn't rotate, and the P/Y/R icons don't move. If I manually rotate, everything is hunky-dory, but MJ is just dead. If I toggle RCS on, MJ wakes up immediately starts to rotate the tug. Turn off RCS while its doing the maneuver, dead stick. When I use the auto-land feature, it lands as expected, (I don't remember if I have to toggle RCS on descent to wake MJ up) I hit the action group (Brakes toggle - Figure this would work since I don't have wheels on the tug) to kick off the mining gear, and then wait. RCS is usually manually turned off at this point not waste fuel as the SAS is able to keep the craft straight, or I've landed on a flat enough area to not worry about it. Once mining is completed, I auto-launch to a 25k orbit. MJ launches the craft, does the initial ascent, gets onto the right trajectory while burning, all the way up and starts turning at about 3k up, but on ascent if RCS is off, once it shuts down the engine to wait to get to AP, I get a dead stick again until I toggle RCS on, then it wakes up, reorients, then time-warps and gets into the orbit. Nothing is assigned to the RCS action group. There are a couple of other things as well. - I've got the ActionGroupManager installed, and have used it to assign the ABORT button to undock the tug from the station. There are no other assignments to ABORT. - With RCS turned OFF on the station, tug docked or not, MJ is still able to rotate the station to the orientation I want. The P/Y/R icons move as expected. - Both the station and the tug are robotic. The station has SEVERAL robotic control modules. No Kerbals installed. The tug has way over 3,000 electrical charge, with a single RTG to ensure an "always on" state. This particular tug has its days numbered. After about 20+ landings (Some fully manual just to keep practicing, other times fully automatic because I'm watching Danny or Manley or Goosexi) I've got a few modifications I need to do to the tug which means this one is going to get 'expired' or used as a landing point until I can get another Kerbal up to mark a new landing spot. Any thoughts to what might be going on? I haven't looked at the persistence or quicksave file to see if something else is going on.

@Galane> It doesn't show up. If you turn debug on, the window may appear once on a reload and the initial scene you go into, however, when you swap out to another scene, that particular UI gets messed up. DEBUG is off for now on my box. I know where the problem is, but I've no idea on how to even begin to fix it.

heh.. I just had a thought, but it'd require a new part, me thinks... Bling out some wheels with some lights on the inside? Strobes, colored, brightness, etc.

I wasn't pointing a finger any anyone in particular. I can't and don't bother to keep track of that kind of stuff, which is why I didn't bother quoting anyone. I've just seen several comments (Both in here, and in the original thread) all lined up about the memory limitations, making something "compiled", so on and so on. When requesting the amount of free space in the kOS environment is simple enough to do to get rid of all the excess white space. Loop through, do trimming, chip away at the comments, etc, etc. But that might not solve the underlying problem that there is the hard limit of 10k bytes which is what is stored in memory (Comments and all) because whatever is driving the interpretation may be what the limiting factor is, not the number of bytes the software has available. To which I wrote a lot of ASM applications via the monitor/assembler and broke away from the interpreter. I still have that brown ASM book laying around somewhere. I don't doubt better machines were used to develop code, test code, compile code to work with the op-codes on the 64 CPU had. Any machine I developed on had to be bigger and better than the machines I typically distributed to. But the point of the matter is not where the code is written, its what can be actively stored (Comments, spaces, and all) and run on the target platform. I knew about all that. You can replace the entire BASIC interpreter with one of your own making. Although I didn't write something to do that (I was less than 10 when I had the 64) I did have some Computes Gazettes around, and plugged away in MLX to write code that'd enhance my BASIC programming experience, such as auto-line numbering while coding, renumbering, etc. Eventually I did get into ASM and coded up some stuff that simulated what a TSR was on the PC Clones of the era. ... man those were the days.... Nostalgia setting in anyone? heh

I plan on installing this right now (Been humming and haw'n about using this or writing/borrowing/stealing someone elses script for kOS) but this won out for this purpose. The question I have though is it possible to add your config to change the +/- settings to a decimal number? My nuke engines are extremely close to the ground and I'm worried that if I hit anything harder than 0.5m/s that I'll crush 'em. heh [edit] I read the code. Seems as though line 192, 198, 207 and 213 are the lines of interest. I'm going to dig through how you're reading the configs and make an EDIT 2.

[begin rant @ turning kOS into a compiler] Based on my experience, back in the day, the Commodore Vic 20 and the 64, and I'm sure the 128 did this as well (Never had the pleasure to play with that one), when the BASIC program was running, it was looking at symbolic code to save space. That is why the literal "?" was PRINT. The question mark was the same BASIC language op-code as the PRINT statement. There were other commands as well, but, its been 20+ years since I've touched BASIC v2.0. (I think even the comparison functions, like, =, <>, <=, >= were a single symbol) [2] Then you have other languages, like Visual Basic, which uses full words, and not symbols to deal with your language construct. The interpreter would read through and figure out what the developer wanted on a word by word basis. Some versions of VB actually sent the code WITH the EXE. No encryption or attempt of hiding the code of any sort. The "Compiler" would just take the run time engine, put it in the EXE, copied all relevant code directly into the EXE, and off it went. Between C64 BASIC and VB run time constructs, I personally prefer the C64 method of using symbols to deal with a smaller memory footprint. Assemblers convert written word to the lowest level of symbols a PC understands. However, changing the existing code base so that it uses symbols to "count words" would require(!!!!) to take the existing command set, change them into numeric number and use that as an ID of sorts, then change the interpreter to deal not with words but with the command ID, THEN deal with the instructions as required. Not only is that going to be a PITA to maintain the command ID set, but it is also going to be a nightmare that compounds itself when new commands are added or removed, not to mention you have a HUGE overhead above and beyond with simply Now, as we developers (Both in the real world and for kOS both in-game and the development team for it) have our choices to deal with this kind of thing. You have notepad, notepad++, VIM, EMACs, ECHO "code" > prog.dat, etc. But more realistically than redirecting your code to a file at a command line, there is a kOS IDE laying around somewhere. It think its mentioned in the first post. Just from observing the IDEs page, as I've never used it, the feature list claims (verbatim) - it keeps two versions of your script. One is the raw code that you write, the other is comment stripped, line trimmed, excess space removed file that kOS actually uses. - code highlighting - cross platform compatible The other thing we need to be aware of is that people are running so many mods that every BYTE counts. A 10k hard limit does seems small, considering that the C64 had 38k available for programs[1]. 64k was on board, but the other 32k was for fonts, the screen at its different resolutions, software registers, etc, etc. But then you look at the Vic 20 (Older model) that only had 3k of memory available, worked at 40x23 text mode (It had graphics mode, but I think it was something like 160x200?). People are running MODs that cause KSP to crash and burn due to memory constraints. A few KB here and there, meh, OK, but when you have 10 drones flying around with 10 different kOS scripts actively running, you're now looking at 100k, and that COULD be the difference between a crash or not. Not to mention the general overhead of running said scripts. The other thing I just thought of is that the 10k limit MIGHT be a limitation of C# holding onto different entities. Perhaps not on the number of bytes used in a string, but perhaps the number of lines of code. There might be something that kOS just can't handle when things start to get "too big". So in MY humble opinion, please stop asking for this INTERPRETED language to become a compiler. It just isn't going to happen with the existing code base. There are other projects around here that do this kind of thing that are more low-level. [end rant] ** [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64#CPU_and_memory [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC#Technical_details

Boooo-teeee-fuuuhhhllll.... UNFORTUNATELY I don't run 300 buttons worth of mods, so I'm not going to get a lot of use out of this, but, still, looks great. How are you going to treat folders?

"Permanant" is relevant, but, there is Kethane Mining you can build a base to refuel your ships for extra-planetary exploration. The reason it isn't permanent, without editing your persistence file, you'll run out of Kethane as it is a limited resource. Kethane: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/23979

New project... Record a launch, orbit, re-entry, and landing, get the Premier out, downscale colors, downscale size, encode, re-size encoded to viewable size on our 1080p displays, distribute to YouTube, become a YouTube sensation......

You're going to find three camps. Right now, I'm watching a series on YT for a guy who, up until recently, was using just stock stuff. Then he got into mods based on suggestions, and basically stated "[verbatim]I don't want to abandon the stock series, but [/verbatim][literal]I've just been so obsessed with the Mods series[/literal]". For me, I use mods to mostly help me get stuff done and add an avenue to do something productive. Parts wise, so far I've got Kethane as "something to do" and a few additional tools to help me maintain my ships and stations. For managment of my fuel reserves, I use TAC Fuel balancer and most recently installed Goodspeed Auto-Fuel Balancer. This helps me stir the fuel around. YMMV, but, its ultimately up to you. Do what makes you happy.

Went up... but didn't come down....

I keep tabs on my periapsis and make sure that I stage my final lifter stage when its under 70k, then ignore it. It'll eventually go down. In the final part of my lifter stage, I have MJ and a control part that allows me to force a burn if there is enough fuel if necessary. I set MJ to go into a retrograde burn, light up the candle and switch back to my main ship. One additional thought is to put a small tank of fuel onto my final stage of my lifter and don't allow fuel to power the engines. That way when I go back to clean up, I re-enable the fuel flow, burn retro, and deorbit.

... when you <strike>aerolithohydrobrakeencounter the Kraken in your car.</strike> fail to load your car because of too many mods...

mmmm.. pizza.....

@MASMC> Simply because it cuts off another reason for support calls. People could accidentally download an older version, find it doesn't work, then complain about XYZ not working when the most recent patch does work.

For the icon, both on iPad and Android devices, the "Settings" icon is typically a picture of a gear. Maybe draw one up and use that instead of the DOWN arrow? I'd make a request to even highlight the button AS a button, as it could blend into the background. As for the discoverablity ideal, the two thoughts I had on this is allowing the developers to automatically make their own folders, or, allowing the user to hide and show icons. I've not looked at (Or remember looking at -- maybe I have?) the code or the API, so you'll have to translate. The first thought I'd have is for your code to determine if "by default" the mod developer using your toolbar wants to throw a command into a folder directly. So in the case of MJ, using the icons for Settings, Launch and Landing icons, the developer could use something like "MJ2:Settings", "MJ2:Launch", and "MJ2:Landing". Depending on how your code creates the buttons, you may not be able to create a component named "MJ2:Landing" but prior to actually making the button, you actively change the developer naming scheme from MJ2:Landing to MJ2_Landing but then programatically go through the routine of creating the MJ2 folder then moving the MJ2_Landing button to the MJ2 folder, with appropriate config saves. As for icons, the author could also include the default icon by providing the PNG or whatever named as mj2_folder.png or define via the API what the folder icon is supposed to be. With this approach, a mod author could throw in multiple root folders if the functions of the mod conceivably cover more than one root function. The second thought I had was just throw everything at the user at the main menu that the mod wants to have, but allow for the user to easily hide the buttons. One method would be to use the middle mouse button to hide the icons, or, ALT+Right-Click for them Mac lovers who may not have a middle button. (HOW DO YOU FUNCTION WITHOUT A MIDDLE BUTTON!?!?!) Either that, have something in the settings drop down that will allow the user to selectively hide and unhide buttons that are controlled by the toolbar.

No, it isn't necessary. I don't use KAS for anything. It isn't because KAS isn't USEFUL, but I just don't need it. I prefer making everything dock with each other, ground or space. To move fuel around I use both TAC Fuel Balancer and Goodspeed Auto Fuel mod. I make sure that my converters have one regular fuel tank attached directly to it, then set the attached fuel tank to auto-pump out at level 8. I use TAC Fuel Balancer to highlight the parts required for pumping out, as well as to manually transfer fuel from one location to another. Both TAC and Goodspeed are partless. There is a single configuration change that needs to be done with a particular config for Goodspeed to get Kethane to auto-pump around, but other than that, its automatic, persistent, and works great on my Kethane tug and fuel station. My fuel station does all the refining, the tug goes up and down with an 8000L tank of Kethane. The tug automatically offloads all Kethane, and pulls in the Oxi, Mono and Liquid fuel automatically thanks to Goodspeed. Edit: To be a bit more clear, here is an image of my current fueling station as a whole, and a closeup of the refinery. The way Goodspeed works is that it pumps from a higher level, to a lower level. I have 3 orange tanks and two medium sized tanks on my station. The two medium tanks are attached to the two refineries. I'll call those two fuel tanks the refinery tanks. So what I did was setup the refinery tanks to auto-pump and set them for level 8. This pushes all fuel generated by the refineries out to lower level tanks, so they always remain empty. One orange tank is set to auto-pump and set for level 3 (The one at the rear), and the two remaining orange tanks are set for level 2 and to auto-pump. The tug has two fuel tanks as well, and they're set to level 0. When the tug isn't docked, the two level 2 orange tanks are topped off with whatever the refineries produce, then it starts to fill the single level 3 orange tank. When ANYTHING docks that I've not mangled the pump levels on, the tanks are instantly filled up. With the Kethane, I have 12 of the 1.5m tanks (Or whatever size they are), split into two groups for the two refineries. To keep the mass towards the center of the station, I have the inner fuel Kethane fuel tanks set to level 1, and the outer tanks set for level 2. The tug has an 8000L tank and it is set to level 8. All the Kethane tanks are set to auto pump. So, even though the KAS solution works, its still manual labor. With Goodspeed and TAC, there's even less to do after the initial setup. That is assuming you get everything docked together.

So long your drills go into the cell, you'll mine. Hex sizes dependent on the body and the position on the body.

They look great. :]

hmm.. I've not installed kOS anywhere as of yet. I want to, its just a matter of relearning YAL... Yet Another Language. :] Is anyone aware of a specific site that we can use to post scripts/programs for KOS? If not, gimme a couple days and I'll have one built. I'll work on it tomorrow while the kids are in school, and I'm at home wishing I could do more Kethane runs.

ummm.. Looks more like a parking lot. {grin}

I have mine set as Debug = True Just in case, there are several "settings.cfg" file I've found. Modify the one in the Kethane directory.

I just had a thought. Would it be possible to put a threshold on how fast a part moves from stopped to max speed working on the theory of "It'll take [X] number of tenths of a second to get to full speed and back to zero". I like the variable speed option I saw somewhere, but I just don't want to hit the button then have parts jerk all around due to sudden acceleration.

I wrote an application (External to KSP and other games) that monitors any and all changes to a directory and its subdirectories and backs up any changed files that happen. Its a Windows only application, compiled under D2010. It works in the background, is automatic, changes are stored in a database and very easy to revert as needed. Its saved plenty of rocket designs, its saved plenty of frustration, In order for me to post it here, I have to provide the source code, and I'm not quite ready to do that as of yet.