jheriko

Wow, now I feel young. Mine even had a divide /and/ a decimal point... and that funny percent button that just did divide by 100, as if that was worthy of its own button

I still haven't bothered with MechJeb at all... I downloaded it and tried it but it went when I realised how much it lowers the barriers to doing things I became afraid it might ruin my experience. So far i have landed on mun, eve, duna, ike, minmus and put things in orbit of everything except eeloo and moho... docking is fun to some degree but huge (for me this is 700+ parts) constructions end up destroying the framerate for that :/ On the other hand I have built a vm with a very simple assembly language in the hopes of programming a flight computer without any cheating using the 'game code senses' by adding parts for sensors, comms etc... should be fun and nearly impossible. The input will be more like the original DSKY from Apollo than the fancy MechJeb UI though. This is just for my amusement though - I cant imagine the sane non-programmers out there will want to subject themselves to this ever. XD

If you make small 4 wheel 10m/s rovers you can easily strap them to the side of landers using symmetry and docking ports or separators then blast them off when you land. as long as you have a module on it you can control it and even right it if it lands on its back... small rovers are very light. If you've gotten to the Mun already likely you have some spare delta-v enough for a couple of little rovers too... my favourite mun landing has to be unintentionally lithobreaking a lander carrying only 3 rovers and detaching them one by one as the ship turned into a fireball sliding across the surface - they all survived to some degree - one in operable - another with one damaged wheel and another with solar panels missing. The lander was almost utterly obliterated.

Its all magic and guesswork without being able to repro and debug whilst attached :/

Its a matter of perspective. It lets you do everything that is possible with HTTP GET and POST... which is most of the internet. making web requests should be distinct from rendering... you get the same data for a webpage that your browser would get for instance. i'm glad to see this works. I just wrote a pile of code with HTTPWebRequest and am now refactoring to use UnityEngine.WWW instead... About loading times, I've heard that everything needs loading up front? Is this really true? Surely we can create textures on the fly? In which case a multithreaded/timesliced background loading type solution is completely feasible. (I may have a past history of assembling these with such 'impossible' timescales as 'a week' or 'two days' ) My existing solutions are all native code that runs across every platform so they will probably be awkward to repurpose and wrap into C# for KSP use but there is no reason why similar can't be remade in C# very quickly. The key is just being able to load the textures etc. on the fly - all the threading/timeslicing stuff is less important afaik and rewriting it using nice handholdy C# should be a breeze. there is probably some lockless job queue thing already laying around. I know very little about Unity, just learning right now for the sake of modding KSP. Shame we don't have a good, clean, portable interface for the mods... just thinking of the needless overhead of 'do nothing' mods makes me light headed... 5000 super late binding C# calls are not healthy.

Hmm. I never checked the old one, I simply took the poster's advice that it didn't at face value. Typical. I guess I tested everything except whether the effort was even worthwhile.

I have had a bug like this when I got a landing leg stuck inside a solar panel. I debugged the problem by mistake by deploying the landing gear and noting that the problem went away, but returned if I raised the gear. On closer inspection one of my three landing legs was occasionally 'jittering'. The result I had was slow rotation which gradually accelerated - but when I say slow I mean, say 30s or so before the lander was tumbling like mad... I lowered the gear and decided to land anyway, which was lucky in hindsight. This sounds only vaguely like your problem though. The other thing I've seen which can cause similar things is having uneven distribution of fuel, or parts in general. If you get it badly wrong enough ASAS will compound things instead of making them better as well.. EDIT: not sure how but i seemed to miss the entire middle page of replies :I

So, there are a few things I'd like to say about this... Firstly in a strictly purist sense I do not believe that there is anything particularly special to distinguish the laws of nature that apply to me over, say, this chair I am sitting on. Life is basically unmeasurable and unquantifiable if you are looking for anything beyond a certain accuracy, and so I believe is sentience as a property of life. Its a very useful label - the example that springs to mind is the pile of sand. As we add grains one by one we can never say when they become a pile - we can conclude (wrongly) that therefore the pile doesn't exist. It does infact exist, but it is a useful approximation to reality that we employ because stating precise numbers of sand is impossible - we have some ballpark idea that we call a pile. The same is so with life and its many properties. Some are defined 'precisely' in terms of chemistry or other criteria, but even those can be challenged in this way... right the way down to constituent parts and even the logic and background for our theories. I've seen very reasonable arguments that any complete theory of everything (with some assumptions about how good GR and QFT are...) has no precise concept of 'vacuum' or 'state', that measurements become meaningless at the tiny scale, things like space and time lose meaning and are emergent from something else - or even the concept of countability being unusable (and hence lots of axiomatic set theory, on which we base almost all of our mathematics and science). Then there is the question of what we think of as life in concrete examples... What about prions, which are tiny protein fragments which will replicate in vivo displaying a key property of what we consider life - to reproduce? Virions which are essentially giant molecules and do the same, maybe more by encoding for genes that affect their hosts... or viruses which are the same but happen to be encapsulated in protein that their RNA/DNA encodes the genes for assembling... and what about bacteria and so on? There are also stranger things like Spiegelman's monster... a strange result of forced evolution containing 'merely' a few hundred atoms, but able to replicate itself in the presence of RNA replicase? Where do we draw the line? What about software? By some measures computer viruses can be considered alive - and thanks to radiation, error tolerances and various other quirks of nature they are now evolving, live, in an artificial ecosystem. 'Artificial' is another one of those words though - where do we draw the line? How is my house or a factory any less natural than an ant hill or a beehive? How derived does a tool need to be before it stops being natural? On the flipside how can we justify not considering prions, virions, Spiegelman monsters or computer viruses to be life? Aside from this I don't think you really know how the brain works - lets be honest here. No offence, its just that whilst neural networks are certainly capable of learning and are powerful tools for this, they are not the only functionality in the brain - there are many functions which are poorly understood on the cellular level involving the ion channels and their self-regulation which have effects on the neuron firings. The glial cells are also less well understood than the neurons, but are known to be important and at least partly responsible for brain function. I think the best neuroscientists will even deny having a good or near complete understanding of the matter and medicine is one of the more 'dangerous' of sciences for constant changing its mind and not being able to easily carry out good quality of experiments to pin things down (not always such a bad thing...) There are plenty of people working on artificial neural networks and machine learning in general btw, and making things that can be considered intelligent has already happened, arguably going right back to the perceptron. In fact I believe the human neural summing function is known (or at least some generalisation or approximation of it) but being the result of chemical processes which come out of messier math than we have even invented yet it is a monsterous thing to calculate using classical computing resources. I wish I could quote a source for this because a figure here would really help pin down exactly how feasible it will ever be to build a 'true' replica of the neural network in the brain using classical computers. I do not subscribe to free will or any interpretations of quantum mechanics (including those which claim to have uncovered the magic of free will) - I prefer the "it just works and the abstractions I use in my daily life are as useful for describing this as 'pile' is when discussing sand" interpretation. As a random aside am I the only one who finds spooky action at a distance far more reasonable than infinitely small things that must occupy the same point in space and time to communicate... That being said I have a rather dull outlook on life it could be said - at the same time I can't really tell that I don't have free will and this illusion is rather convincing and works pretty well to an every-day approximation... I won't complain that the universe sees fit to allow us these comforting delusions of self-importance - it helps me feel smug when 'I' am successful. It also makes it a little easier somehow to not be worried about the meaning or consequences of approaching, asking or answering these 'deep and meaningful' questions. EDIT: nearly forgot - referring to the 'question asking' criteria. What about animals who learn to perform one behaviour when they expect you to perform another in response? This requires no great intelligence - and in fact what is there to say that asking questions isn't learned behaviour in humans because it provides us with reward? Most obviously we get attention when we receive an answer. You never asked a guy/girl where she worked or some other mundane question only because you wanted his/her attention for a few more minutes whilst you think of something worthwhile to say? For example...

By request of a forum user over in the request forums here is a plugin which adds duplicates of the ASAS parts with the option to enable or disable them individually. (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/34031-Toggle-Passive-ASAS) http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/togglable-asas/ This should allows you to toggle each ASAS unit you include in your rocket, spaceplane, rover... or airship as it might happen to be. There was such a mod before, but it has code rotted away... apologies for recreating previous work, but it was relatively quick and easy. If the previous plugin author wants to reclaim this he may do so and I will not object. I have tested it before and after save as well as before and after returning to space centre - both from orbit and at the launch pad to ensure that the state saves correctly. This feels like flimsy testing, so bug reports etc. are appreciated. The biggest problem I see is that the enable/disable button asks you for the command to change the state without showing you the state itself, which may be counter-intuitive but is a problem with the previous mod and many user interfaces of this kind. The only reasons I have not added a separate status line are simplicity and to keep in line with the original request... but I am not adverse to doing this.

That's all well and good, but how (if at all) did you modify the shader? Or are you replacing an existing texture? I'm curious... Re being healthy - everything is C# - we have already thrown healthy out the window when we made that decision. I'd like to add some better shaders - the silly half-angle specular makes my eyes bleed everytime it pokes through something, and every other shader looks stock and boring... i'm betting there is room for optimisation and visual improvement at the same time. Also, IMO, a good API documents itself. e.g. by not having one class called Part and one called PartModule and an obvious legacy of indecisive early work still being present because its an alpha release... when its finished we might not need any documentation. Most code I've ever had to work with is completely undocumented - the best you get is maybe the guy who wrote it did so in the last 3 months and is still employed.

People have had problems taking 'vanilla' saves from 0.19 to 0.20. I doubt the modding mechanism itself became any less stable and I also believe that many 0.19 mods do not work 'as-is' with 0.20. The memory issue is an interesting one though - I've noticed it seems to mostly be better behaved under 0.20, but I can't say its always better... The advice I would give is not to get attached to savegames for a project that is still in development. The devs might want to completely replace the save system with something better (for example, with something which is memory and disk space efficient). They can always be backwards compatible in some way, but it takes effort and it would be nice if they didn't have to waste their time on that imo. I'd rather a finished game...

inspect parts.cfg (the contents) you should see what is meant by a 'MODULE {}' section then.

This is now updated to contain basically every country - including many contentious, tiny and historical ones...

I will add some more when I next get a chance. Sorry for missing you guys out until now - I did add some requested in the comments on Kerbal Space Port. There is a comment from one user suggesting that he has 800 or so national and regional flags all ready to go, and in that case it feels sensible that he should create an addon and I abandon this - or else I include his files and give him primary credit for the addon somehow. Thanks for the feedback. It is appreciated.

Actually this is an awful hack and won't fix the problem in its entirity. Skybox rendering is usually fine in any kind of 3D/stereographic setting because the camera used for the skybox is fixed permanently in the centre (or alternatively, the skybox is centered on the camera). If this is done correctly then scaling the box has zero visual impact. What are you actually using for 3D? A 'correct' stereographic render should use two slightly different camera positions pointing slightly inwards to simulate the separation and focus of eyes. An optimal one will probably not render the skybox, UI or other 'fixed relative to the camera' elements twice either... if it is some depth buffer reconstruction thing then the better solution would be to not write out to the depth buffer with the skybox and to clear it - doing a single depth clear is often faster than doing none on modern hardware, including mobile devices, since each pixel starts from a known state enabling various optimisation strategies that are ruled out with 'buffer feedback'. I'm curious about replacing the skybox - the current one, whilst a relatively beautiful approximation of the milky way, is rather dull considering we are in an alien space with artistic freedom. Think Homeworld.

This is now fixed.

ok. i will change it for a plain ol' zip file - shouldn't take long. my usual attitude towards macs and linux is that nobody has them to a very good approximation so i assumed a convenient installer would be better than expecting users to know things. - (i run a mac mini with linux/win/os x triple boot and have developed a game for the mac even - i'm not anti, its just the sad truth that these platforms may as well not exist) its not really a custom .exe I used NSIS to quickly create the installer. if its something you ever want to do easily I highly recommend it, its better than every commercial solution I've ever used, free and very well documented online. http://nsis.sourceforge.net thanks for the feedback

Since I'm sure many people will want their national flags, or similar I have put together a small collection of appropriately resized and cleaned up .pngs in an installer on Kerbal Space Port to save the small amount of effort involved learning how to add a flag and creating or finding a suitable source image. Enjoy!