BryceSchroeder

By way of explanation, I started this project at a time when I was not busy at all. My initial work attracted a very talented developer, who did all the PQSmod stuff. I have no idea how it works, and as I'm pretty busy now again, I don't have the copious free time to figure it out. I started Kopernicus because I really wanted it to run a particular outer planets mission in RSS/RO. But now I don't really have time to play KSP much either, so I don't daily feel "I wish I could do that mission that I can't do because RSS doesn't have enough planets." To top it off, I've always felt some degree of mixed feelings writing code that improves a proprietary program for free in a programming language that, while ok, is certainly not my favorite, for a game engine that is really badly designed for this sort of game (Unity.) If KSP were open source, I'd probably have finished this off out of duty, but it isn't. I said I would watch for pull requests on the Kopernicus github, but no one seems to actually be making them. The only thing I've gotten on github are questions about how the PQSmods work, which I don't know the answers to. I am really sorry, but I just haven't been able to find the time to work on KSP stuff much lately. To reiterate my earlier statement, though, if you want to fix Kopernicus, fork it on github; I will be watching for pull requests.

I'll accept appropriately tested and functional pull requests to the repository, so yes, contributions are welcome. I get an email notification for pull requests so I should be able to check them fairly promptly. Thanks!

Yeah, that's exactly what happened to me. In addition, I am also moving to a new place, and it appears to have had a lot of kerbal construction. (I just attempted to change the bulbs in a fixture and had the fixture fall off the ceiling because it was installed improperly. But luckily they had used a ton of electrical tape so it didn't come crashing down! :sarcasm:) I'm so sorry for neglecting this.

I have no news at this time. Teknoman is still working on the configuration system.

That's fine of course, but why not choose CC-NC-ND? That way, if something happened to the site you uploaded it to, people would be able to quickly reupload it and ensure that your work continues to be available even if you don't immediately notice. CC-NC-ND would prevent commercial exploitation of your work or remixing, if you don't want people to do those things without your permission.

The configuration files that come with Kopernicus will be licensed under the LGPL or other free licenses, and derivatives of them can be distributed under those terms. You will definitely not need any special license terms for configuration files you create all by yourself. You can release them under any terms you like. The LGPL license we have chosen for Kopernicus would, as I understand it, preclude us attempting to restrict your ability to use the software for any lawful purpose. I'd encourage you to choose GPL or Creative Commons licenses for your planet packs, but it's not up to us what terms you offer your work to others under. People making overbearing terms for interacting with their mods ("no using my stuff, even by reference", "you only have permission to use this resource for your parts because I graciously condescended to give it to you") etc are possibly-able to do that only because their mods are licensed under non-free terms. Kopernicus is Free software, so you're safe from that sort of thing now and forever. Even in the case of proprietary mods, I wouldn't bet on those sort of restrictions being enforcable at all, but I'm not a lawyer.

We'll make sure to support these, since Kopernicus is partly to support RSS and RO, and you need FAR and DR for RO. I wouldn't expect problems. I need to try Kopernicus on my RO installation and see what happens...

Rings are something we've talked about, yes, and I'd consider it not Sentar without rings Also, several Sol system bodies have rings, most notably Saturn, so we'll need rings for the primary mission of Kopernicus anyway.

1. That is a difficult question that we are investigating along a number of lines. 2. It is fully integrated with the science archives and new planets can have custom biomes.

Yes, that's actually good news for us - we've been talking, and we've got Krag's blessing to port the PlanetFactory default planets to Kopernicus. So, there should be no problems porting PF configurations that depend on PF planets (e.g. Sentar) to Kopernicus, and also you'll be able to enjoy Krag's classic planets and the technical advantages of Kopernicus at the same time.

An interesting thought, although the problem of successfully suppresing the "center" body would be challenging as it might come up in a lot of places.

It's between Dres and Jool and has a florid magenta orbit.

He had good advice. It's the most logical way to approach the problem. It wasn't easy though, and I can see how someone might well have concluded that it wasn't possible. We even thought for a while that there would have to be some after-system-spawning tweaking, until Teknoman unexpectedly found a way to avoid that.

I submitted a pull request for MechJeb2, fixing a minor graphical glitch involving the rover autopilot waypoints on non-canonical planets. I couldn't find anything else that might cause issues between Mechjeb2 and Kopernicus. Thanks again for the head's up.

Yes, the test planet Kopernicus is currently hardcoded into the dll, but we definitely want to do it in such a way that cloning templates is not required. Apart from the technical differences, the ability to create planets de novo should be one of the advantages of Kopernicus.

Should be Real Soon Now , basically, the problem is that it just adds one particular planet that sort of resembles Mars but has oceans and a thick atmosphere. (And is farther from the sun than frozen Eeloo; I guess those oceans _are_ oil after all.) The objective is to make a mod that people can configure to add any planets they like. So integrating a configuration system that will make that possible is the biggest single thing that still needs to be done. We still need to do rings and terrain scatter for it to be feature-complete for the first release, but I suppose the first beta release doesn't have to wait for that. I'll talk to Teknoman about it.

Kopernicus seems to be showing up in the MechJeb Delta V stats for me. I did grep the mechjeb2 source for fixed references to celestial objects, though, and found something in the rover autopilot code. I'll test that out.

We were just talking yesterday about making a documentation wiki yesterday. It does seem like an important practical aspect of the project...

I don't see why it would be a problem, but don't want to mess with the currently-static planet generating code at the moment to try it out. I'll give a gas giant a try when the configurating system is up and running (presumably the next goal for after we get oceans working... and after that, we the only need to figure out rings and terrain scatter to have the basic functionality complete.) You'll have full control over which if any PQSMods get applied and things like the atmosphere color, so I think fully-custom gas giants will be no problem.

This is really, really brief (sorry, I'm kinda tired): You'll basically need to follow the instructions for making a mod (e.g. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Setting_up_MonoDevelop and the other tutorials) except download the code from GitHub for Kopernicus rather than writing your own. Build the project. You'd then have to make a directory structure for it in your KSP GameData folder and move the dll you just compiled and the various Kopernicus data files (image maps) into it into Plugins and PluginData subdirectories. I think we'll have oceans working soon, and rings are on the agenda. We have some novel ideas about how to implement them procedurally to give planet designers a lot of flexibility in making ringed worlds.

In other good news, the biomes seem to be working correctly now. It should be possible to easily support dozens, and maybe even hundreds, of biomes, if one has the patience. (Of course, that would have interesting effects on science balancing. But you could make rovers really fun and practical.)

I hope we'll be able to do both of those things soon. With no configuration system yet, though, it would be premature

I think we'll probably be able to release a testing version next week, possibly for a sort of public beta. In the meantime, if you're super curious, anyone can visit the project's github page and compile it yourself. It's not too hard. (Email me at bryce.schroeder@gmail.com if you can't find some of the image files it needs - Kopernicus currently depends, for testing purposes, on some image files from RealSolarSystem.)

I'm not sure. I think we'll have a better idea once the configuration system is solidly underway. Some features to support the PF CE paradigm of planet creation (clone and modify) are planned, although the planets produced will still be introduced into the game through systemPrefab injection as with other Kopernicus bodies.

As elaborated on here by Teknoman and me, that will depend on what set of planets you use with it. But if you only use it to add, say, one small planet, it will use much less RAM. Progress update: Teknoman says he will be working on atmospheres today, and I am making a preliminary investigation of oceans. If I finish first, I guess we're going to say that the oceans are made of vacuum pump lubricating oil