BryceSchroeder

Can you email / gchat me? My address is bryce.schroeder@gmail.com Teknoman, NathanKell and I have been discussing the project via gchat. Thanks!

Probably less, but memory usage will depend on what you do with Kopernicus. PlanetFactory came with a substantial number of new planets, which I suspect is what caused its memory usage to be so high. Kopernicus is more a "mod that lets people add planets or replace the stock system entirely" than a "mod that adds planets." It'll probably come with various examples, but its memory usage will depend heavily on what set of planets you're using with it. I haven't yet experimented with how various memory-saving plugins interact with Kopernicus. I would not anticipate any compatibility problems, though - when you create the planets by replacing the systemPrefab, as we've done, most ancillary things seem to just work.

Thanks for the encouragement. Those sound like cool planet ideas! We all have a variety of planet ideas, but of course, the focus with Kopernicus is letting other people (such as you) realize your planet ideas, be they simple or complex. Right now, Kopernicus is... sort of Mars with no atmosphere. Oh well. Some progress with biomes has been made: (Pardon the odd values, still working out what all the science-related numbers do. But at least it shows up in the archive correctly now.)

Almost certainly yes, and probably in the first release. I'm looking into it in more detail at the moment (currently, the custom testing planet has a clone of Dres, which is not very interesting in that respect...)

Sure, thanks! You can also email me if you like, bryce.schroeder@gmail.com.

Hi VonFrank, 1. The functionality of modifying stock planets' appearance and other properties is planned. Renaming them may break other mods, though. In particular, renaming Kerbin has been problematic for other mods that have tried to do that. 2. Yes, but only if their order or hierarchical position in the solar system changes. The Science Archive makes its planet menu from the planetary system. I suppose technically one could hack it so that it sees a different version from the rest of the game, theoretically. 3. I haven't looked into contracts yet, but I don't see why not at this point. It's certainly a goal, but I don't know how close we are to achieving it.

Thanks. Yes, it will need that capability, since the goal is to support modeling the real solar system, which has four gas giants, and stock KSP only has one.

We've decided, at least for the time being, to generate the PQS of the new planets after the system has been spawned by KSP. This was not an easy decision, as it goes against the grain of our technical aspirations with this mod, but after essentially two days of fruitless work on the problem, it's time to be pragmatic and move on. This is not to rule out a return to the question in the future, of course. (Also, note that this is not the same approach that PlanetFactory used.) Basically, the technical problem seems to be that there is no way to copy (and alter) a prefab without Instantiating it, which seems to trigger diverse and complicated Bad Things. Even after a whole day of hacking on it, I was only able to kill one or the other of the following bugs: (1) it is impossible to launch anything, (2) it is impossible to see the new planet. So, for the time being, we're moving our application of PQSmods to the new planets from prefab-modification-time (where we do everything else) to after the PSystem has been created from the (replaced) systemPrefab. This will allow us to redirect our development efforts toward getting this project usable rather than struggling with something that Unity has made very difficult (because there's no first-party-developer reason to do it).

Full Science / Career compatilibity is part of the basic goals for the mod, yes.

Demonstrating re-arranging stock bodies; in this case, a Pol is inserted orbiting Dres. Modifiying stock bodies will be necessary for backward compatibility with PlanetFactory, as well as supporting new systems that contain stock planets as part of their complement of celestial objects. Jeb is smiling, meaning that he approves of this endevour, presumably.

Sure. What's your username on github? (edit) Nevermind, I took a wild guess that it's the guy named NathanKell with the same avatar. I hope. Also, Teknomann117 and I have been coordinating our efforts with gchat, but I also have an IRC channel we can use if you don't like gchat or something.

I think the long term solution to that is something along the lines of letting the planet author define the broad strokes (mountains and oceans, biomes, etc) and then letting them specify parameters for procedurally generated local terrain features (i.e. features on the order of 100m and smaller.) Thanks; is it on github or some other place already?

Thanks for the info. There is a git repository now: https://github.com/BryceSchroeder/Kopernicus NOTE: This currently does nothing useful for the non-developer user, I'm just pointing out the existence of the repository here for those who may be interested in following this as it progresses.

I'm already creating my own PSystem, but, presently lacking any infrastructure for creating or loading planets, I just rearranged the stock ones. I'm working on creating PSystemBody objects now and the goal is to create and arrange the celestial objects de novo from a configuration file, rather than duplicating and modifying stock planets. In any case, the hook I am using is the one you suggested - Kopernicus replaces PSystemManager.systemPrefab before KSP uses PSystemManager.systemPrefab; KSP does all the spawning of planets. I agree that this seems like the best approach and seems less likely to be disturbed by changes to KSP. (By not having as much redundant code.)

As of now I have succeeded in creating a new PSystem object, however I have not yet meaningfully tested it. (I know it worked only because I replaced the Sun with Kerbin, a decidedly ironic test in light of the name of this plugin, and achieved interesting results such as asteroids orbiting Kerbin and perpetual darkness o'er the land.)

Yeah, I think many people, especially people coming mainly from the Windows world, do not understand how forking works in practice and in particular how rare it is. As for me, well, I'm only doing this because I need a mod that does this... so I really have no problem with not having tight control. I'm quite interested in collaborators. I'll be setting up a repository for the source, either when it comes time to release or when someone seriously wants to collaborate. I have no plans to have anything other than text-editing as a UI, but as with stars mentioned above, I would be happy to accept a patch in the future which added that. Basically, I'm very comfortable with editing text files, as are most current modders -- but there's a definite selection effect there; presumably some people don't create mods because of the text-file editing involved. So this would be a good feature - just not one I'm personally highly motivated to prioritize. Another way of doing this would be to make a cross-platform GUI program running external to KSP that can generate the requisite text configuration files for a planet mod (using this or some other planet replacer mod) based on the user's interaction with the program.

I don't see why it wouldn't support this in the basic sense of having multiple stars orbiting, say, a black hole, and each in turn orbited by a planetary system, but I have no specific plans to do the other things that would be properly necessary to support this (deal with solar panels correctly, for example.) That said, it will be open source, and I wouldn't refuse a high-quality contributed patch adding this functionality. Thanks for your encouragement.

Do you have any specific requests or suggestions for supporting RealSolarSystem? I used to use RSS with a configuration file that also made use of the PlanetFactory planets, but what I'd really like to see, of course, is something with all major moons and dwarf planets supported, not just a small selection. I don't yet know how feasible that is, or if KSP necessarily loads all the planet data at once (in which case the answer is probably "not very feasible," at least without overcoming that first.)

No, although that is a really cool idea (and I will try not to do things that would preclude the use of this project as a basis for such a mod). This is intended as an open-source replacement for PlanetFactory, with a specific emphasis on supporting the needs of realism mods that replace the Kerbol system with the Sol system. (I suppose that might include procedurally generated microterrain, but first things first.)

In response to the license terms that are preventing community maintenance of the existing planet creator mod (discussed here), I've started working on a replacement mod for KSP. I am interested in community input about what people desire in such a mod. Planned features: - Free software (LGPL) license - Well-documented code - Create the system de novo, rather than be based on copying stock planets. - Particular attention given to supporting the Sol system. Not part of the scope of this project: - Extensive new planets created by me. I might create some kind of example planetary system, but it will not be very sophisticated or detailed. - Any in-game interface other than possibly selection of which system to use. Thanks to aftokinito, for technical input, and metaphor, for suggesting the name "Kopernicus." At this point, I haven't done much, although I do have code for a plugin now that executes just before the default (i.e. Kerbol) system is spawned, and should be able to insert its own planetary system instead and have KSP spawn that one through the same means it would normally use to spawn the default system. (Which is, I think, the essential proof of concept for aftokinito's plan described in the other thread.) GitHub link, for the adventurous: https://github.com/BryceSchroeder/Kopernicus Note that this mod is NOT COMPLETE, even in a beta state; it currently just adds one planet. The released version will allow essentially arbitrary planets to be added. See the readme file for details.

Kopernicus sounds promissing. Update: I had some stuff come up today and didn't get to do much on this; will work on it tomorrow Link to new thread for posterity: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/88168-Early-development-0-24-Kopernicus-Planetary-System-Modifier

Okay, so I don't anticipate having any time to work on this tomorrow, but I think I can do this project starting Thursday. Thinking of naming it Kerbig after the astronomer George Herbig, any other ideas before I've typed "Kerbig" too many times to rename it? Thanks again for your input. I'll start a new thread for its development Thursday if nothing comes up.

Thanks for the well-wishes. Well, I've gotten a trivial plugin to compile and run successfully, so that's the annoying infrastructural aspects out of the way. (And oddly it was way less of a fuss than the time I tried just making a new part model and had to mess around with Unity and blender for... too long.) I'm gathering that backward compatability with existing planet packs would be something important to shoot for. I will try keep that in mind. Thanks.

I will look into this as it sounds reasonable. Of course, I do not yet know enough about KSP modding to know how to run my own code at arbitrary points in the course of the game loading (i.e. "before the PSystemManager spawns the default PSystem") So, I'll have to figure that out first. Thanks for the input.

I'm a programmer and after tomorrow I should have time to work on a replacement for this. I've programmed C# before but never modded Unity - assuming I can do this with all Free software (excepting Unity itself of course). If someone else is already working on this, please let me know ASAP so we can coordinate our plans. Obviously the replacement will have to be under an open source license to prevent this kind of silliness with things being abandoned. Also, I'm mostly interested in Real Solar System, so if anyone has suggestions on who I should contact to get their feature wishlist in a planet-adder-modder-thing, please let me know. Sorry to just sort of "appear" like this; I've been on an extended KSP hiatus to study for a medical licensing exam, so I had no idea that this mod was no longer being maintained until I just went to get it today... Also, note that I am not expressing an intent to design any planets other than what may be trivially necessary to test the system. My email address is bryce.schroeder@gmail.com if you wish to contact me directly. Sometime Thursday I should have time to study the feasability of doing this in more detail.