FlowerChild

Hence my strong suspicion Well, I'm sure it's something we could work out even if it's just through a version numbering scheme that say reserves the minor number for spin-off versions or what have you, but if we don't have to do that, all the better, and I'd prefer avoiding having to manually integrate changes to the main branch into my own anyways

Oh, that's no problem man, and my apologies if that was out of line. Honestly, I'd prefer not doing that as well, and it was simply a matter of taking your license at face value and doing so for expediency given I had been working on BP support for a couple of weeks straight and was wanting to get this release out the door so I could move onto other things. My intent with that was to readopt the main branch if feasible in the future anyways. I understand your point there entirely, although I doubt it would be an issue for BTSM in particular given it's pretty much a total conversion that runs with a very limited subset of mods. Thus I think the chances that players will be mix and matching various versions in combination with other mods is relatively low. Yup, absolutely man, and that would be my personal preference as well. The logging verbosity certainly wasn't a big enough issue for me to branch off like that, it was more of a "well...since I'm here anyways I may as well" kinda thing. Yeah, I'm not sure either, but it was apparent from the previous discussion that it was an issue that would take a lot of effort to sort out, and I strongly suspect that it may boil down to a stock issue that we may or may not be able to do anything about anyways. I opted to disable the orientation stuff on the solar panels, again for expediency and under the theory that I'd rather players not be punished for something that may be entirely out of their control. While I wasn't originally too keen on it due to potential performance drain, I actually became rather fond of the orientation tracking on panels as bringing extra considerations into play in terms of properly aligning your vessels for long term use, so I think my preference would be to keep it if possible.

@jamespicone: Earlier today someone reported in the BTSM thread that if you toggled the flow state of resource containers off, that wasn't being respected during background processing. I just came up with the following modification for GetVesselData() within BP that changes things to take that into account: foreach (ProtoPartResourceSnapshot r in p.resources) { if (r.resourceName == null) { Debug.LogWarning("BackgroundProcessing: Null resourceName."); Debug.LogWarning("BackgroundProcessing: Resource values: " + r.resourceValues); continue; } // FCMOD: Code added to check flow state of resource bool bFlowState; if ( bool.TryParse( r.resourceValues.GetValue("flowState"), out bFlowState ) ) { if ( !bFlowState ) { continue; } } else { Debug.Log( "BackgroundProcessing: failed to read flow state" ); } // END FCMOD if (!ret.storage.ContainsKey(r.resourceName)) { ret.storage.Add(r.resourceName, new List<ProtoPartResourceSnapshot>()); } ret.storage[r.resourceName].Add(r); } Modified code marked with comments, surrounding code listed for context. Feel free to do whatever you wish with that if it's helpful to you. Some limited testing indicates that it works well. I also tried accessing resourceRef within ProtoPartResourceSnapshot directly previous to that to get the flowState, but that was predictably set to null for background vessels. I'll likely be shipping a slightly modified BP .dll with BTSM to take into the account the above, and also to disable orientation as a consideration on solar panels due to all the stock issues with it that we've been discussing over the past couple of pages, as well as suppressing some debug output about missing modules that tends to spam with Deadly Reentry installed as we previously discussed. I'll try to stick as closely to your version numbering scheme (including in the assembly) as possible to avoid messing with your versioning system in cases where a player might have multiple BP .dlls installed. I'll also of course be happy to share any changes I make where they might be beneficial to a non-BTSM specific audience and be including a copy of your license along with the download.

Yeah, or maybe a sign is getting flipped somewhere. The more you describe all this, the more I'm wondering if this might just be a bug in stock that no one has ever really noticed or complained about since it's largely irrelevant there. I'm taking some amusement out of this actually as I've always found it interesting to ponder how in our physical universe position is relative while rotation seems to be absolute, yet here in KSP, the reverse seems to be true I'm not really in a good position to test right now as I still have the various bits of the resource processor code strewn about my garage and I'm trying to get those back together before moving onto this next part

It's the ecliptic part that is rather worrying to me, as if you're off the ecliptic visiting a body with any significant orbital inclination (or say trying to intercept an asteroid), then you won't be aligning your solar panels to it. If that means there's no way you can align your craft to keep tracking panels aligned, then it's potentially a rather large problem as it could mean ships dying off with nothing the player can really do about it. If not, it may be rather confusing, but shouldn't have all that much impact in practice. Ships with fixed panels are a whole other story mind you. If you can't point them at the Sun and switch to another vessel for a shortish amount of time without knowing they'll be pointed vaguely in the same direction when you get back, or while they're being updated in the background, then that's also a rather large issue. An additional question I have about this is whether the shift in orientation happens only when the vessel is made active again, or if it applies to the background updates as well. I'll likely setup some debug output to test that.

Just a note on this which might be helpful in testing it (I'll try to look at it myself tomorrow), is that I suspect if it is maintaining orientation relative to anything, it would be to the current reference body, rather than just the Sun. In other words, if you're in orbit around Kerbin or the Mun, I suspect it would maintain orientation relative to it rather than the Sun. Not certain of that of course, but it's a hunch I had when the previous poster mentioned this that I was planning to test out myself, and which might be helpful in your own tests. The only reason I could see for it doing this is if it was keeping track of its position and orientation in some kind of local coordinate system.

Well, even if it's the case, it may not be a bug, but rather just the way KSP works. I also doubt it would be much of a problem during play considering it would mean you can just orient a craft towards the sun even with fixed panels and not worry about it. I'll have to check that myself the next time I have a chance as I'm interested in knowing which way it behaves.

You'd have to constantly reorient that vessel manually even if it was active then, and say if you were applying time accel. It sounds more like a problem with the vessel design that's just been exposed by it having resource processing applied to it in the background, rather than a problem with how the resource processing is being applied. I'd say it would probably make sense to complete that mission without BP installed, and then start designing vessels suited to it with it installed afterwards. Not certain on that one, but I didn't think so.

Why not just use tracking panels to make sure they can always "see" the sun? That's taken into account by BP, and will work fine as long as you make sure to orient your ship appropriately. If you take a look at the screenshots Rengrade posted on the previous page, that's what the vessels are designed to do, and it looks like the one that he has in orbit around Duna in the middle is oriented for maximum sun exposure as the ship orbits Duna, and Duna in turn orbits the sun. Those are also all far more complicated cases than you are likely to encounter in stock.

If it comes to that, I think there may be some wiggle room for some fairly straight forward optimization in for example cutting down on the number of conditionals required to process modules. Like from previously looking through the code, I think there's an opportunity to move the stock modules you are handling (solar panels, generators, etc.) into update functions that are consistent with those used for custom module handling so that they wouldn't have to be constantly tested for with each update. It's also possible that branch prediction may make any gains from that negligible anyways. But really, from the results that are being reported, I don't think even going that far is really necessary at present. I think I mentioned before but one of the things that attracted me to BP was the way it was obviously structured for performance in the first place, and those kind of high level optimizations are usually where you get the most gains anyways. Very happy to see it standing up to this kind of stress testing, even if I'm not entirely surprised by it I think that might be more confusing than anything, especially if SAS can't be enabled or what have you. Given tracking solar panels are taken into account as well, I'm not sure if it would serve much purpose since you can just orient your vessel to make sure the sun remains along the axis of rotation of your panels.

@jamespicone: Just a heads up man that there's a lot of stress testing going on by players in the BTSM thread right now that you might find interesting. So far BP is holding up remarkably well to everything that is being thrown at it within the confines of what one might expect in a typical game. As a result I'm going to be moving forward with making BP a full dependency for BTSM and implementing the remaining modules that could benefit from it (namely the resource production parts I have in the late game)

... I'm really commenting once again in this thread against my better judgement, but seriously Max, I'm having a very hard time understanding how an official representative of Squad is referring to a constant barrage of racism, homophobia, sexism, and just about every form of bigotry and base impulse known to man as "downright pleasant", and then making an implied recommendation that others here should delve into and wade around in that cesspit as some kind of enriching educational experience. Meanwhile you guys seem committed to creating a kid friendly and generally inoffensive game that seems to be heading in the direction of promoting gender equality and general fuzzy bunny feelings. I just don't get it.

Riiiiight...and the reference to Minecraft and the drama there was just making friendly conversation. Look man, both you know, and I know, the message that was intended to convey, and it was done quite effectively. Message communicated and received. You win.

I'm sure there are some very nice individuals on 4Chan. However at a certain point a symbol becomes so tainted by the actions of people that have displayed it in the past, that there's no separating the symbol from the historical associations. I am not lying or exaggerating in saying that the previous "we are watching" post has made me physically afraid in a very real way due to my past interactions with that community, so I think it's a good time for me to step out of this conversation.

Considering that members of the extended 4Chan community have been behaving in ways as of late that are so extreme it's actually become news worthy, I don't think that's an unfounded fear, no.

Thanks for proving my point then, as that's not the least bit menacing. Or that.

Yup, and as I said myself about understanding why Squad may be seeking mediums of communication with less traffic, the signal to noise ratio may be a big part of that, so we agree on that point as well. I think a big part of the increasing negative attitude you may be (quite correctly) perceiving on these forums may be directly related to this issue actually: the sensation that the community is being slowly cut out of the loop and becoming less relevant in how the game is developing. I think that's potentially amplified by the impending "release version" of KSP, as we're beginning to feel like there's now a clicking clock on how long we have to provide feedback and be heard. Again, not certain if that sensation is accurate, but I do think it's present in a rather large volume as illustrated by this thread, and is at least implied in some of the more nasty comments I've seen directed at Squad. In fact, I think I've watched individuals essentially become more and more nasty as they seem to get more and more frustrated due to feeling they're not being heard, when they used to be rather reasonable individuals. Community management, especially on this scale, certainly isn't easy. While I might even agree with you on principle on that point, I think trying to convince a mass of people to shift direction and behave in a different manner might be an overly idealistic approach to things

I think the important part is not the largely identical mass of popular opinion, but the individual voices of dissent that may be mixed in with it and still present a compelling argument to their point of view. Moving to a different medium is certainly no guarantee of different opinions, especially in cases where a medium may actually wind up discouraging the free exchange of ideas due to creating a threatening environment. To quote one of my favorite NOFX songs: Given that being heard is almost the entire point of any form of communication (unless a person is fond of talking to themselves), I don't think the desire to know there's at least a chance that a message will actually reach the intended audience is symbolic of any form of ego. It's just indicative of a desire to know there's any point to your own actions.

Yup, other than living dangerously in even daring to speak poorly of 4Chan (yay for freedom!), that's the point I was trying to make with my previous post. The point at which Squad's official channel that they've setup for communication with the community becomes suspect as potentially being one of the worst places to actually do it, is also the point at which those channels of communication begin to break down. If they're trying to avoid the massive traffic here, then this strategy may be ultimately self defeating, as people will tend to naturally flock to whatever means of communication stands the most chance of actually getting them heard. At that point, the well moderated channels they've setup here cease to be of any real purpose. I'm honestly not sure what the solution would be as it's a complex system involving a fair amount of chaos given the number of individuals involved. With the small amount of experience I have dealing with mass internet communication, on a much smaller scale than Squad has to, the only thing I've found works decently is to delegate responsibility to a bunch of people to kick interesting posts up the chain of command to be brought to the attention of devs, as I strongly suspect the volume of traffic on these forums is too large for any individual to read, let alone consider appropriately.

I'm not sure if this point has been made before, but the only way in which I've felt impacted by this is in that it made me wonder "are the devs actually reading any feedback on the forums, or are they going elsewhere for it? Is there any point posting any feedback here if it is going to be ignored?" I don't know the answer to that, but I think that question being asked can be rather damaging, and it might be one of the causes behind people getting frustrated here. I think that a lot of the community revolves around the impression that player feedback matters to Squad, and the implication that what many of us thought to be the primary means of communicating that feedback, here on these forums, may actually be one of the worst places to do it, is a tough pill to swallow. Perhaps some of us then feel frustrated that the times we made the effort to provide well thought out feedback about the game, we may have been directing it straight to the circular file, especially when the more effective means of communicating seem to involve frequenting places like 4Chan that many of us likely don't want to have anything to do with. We have a nice safe moderated forum that Squad has setup for us here, where a certain amount of civility is guaranteed, but going to an environment that seems to operate on the principle of "we support totally free and open unmoderated communication, but you may have to endure death threats if you don't agree with the popular point of view", seems to be the preferable method to actually be heard. I can also see Squad's side of this in that I think it likely that there's so much traffic here on the forums that they may find it impossible to sort through the static and get to the actual signal. As a result, they may have a fairly natural tendency to move to other means of communication where the volume of traffic is more manageable.

It's really not as big a deal as it may appear, even with the current aero. It makes things *slightly* harder, but not so much so that I think it would really inspire anyone to go booster crazy. For the most part it just feels better. Beat me to making the same point

More importantly though, I think that ALL existing rocket designs for stock are going to be scrapped with this release given they're implementing a new aero model and are rebalancing the entire game I think this is the one release where people should accept that they'll essentially be starting over from scratch, and not sweat the details of it. The more "game breaking" changes Squad bundles into this release, the less chance they'll have to do that again in the future, and given they'll no longer be able to swing the "Early Access" flag whenever they make save-breaking changes post 1.0, and people will have a legitimate right to get ticked off about that kind of thing, that's rather important right now.

I like "Kerballs", or the more civilized "Kerboules" (which has evolved with time and common use to the simplified "Kerbools"). You've got to wonder after all, with the surface of Kerbin being so barren, what exactly are they going to use as their "gold standard"? In my personal Kerbin, taxidermy is a thriving business, and jewelry tends to be of rather questionable taste.

I believe it was first done in Arcturus Thrust Corrector, and also appears in KIDS and BTSM. I suspect there are some other mods that also do it I'm not aware of. So, really, it's been done plenty before. Just not by Squad I think with the changes in the aero model, all bets are off with regards to previous balance, so what qualifies as a nerf is entirely up in the air because we have no basis of comparison anymore. I think Squad has even stated that we're essentially going to be playing a whole new game.

In theory, yes, but it might get a little tricky as the background update functionality for the mod revolves around part modules, rather than Kerbals I suspect if you wrote a ModuleManager script to add a part module of your own creation to any part that can contain Kerbals, then you could hook it into Background Processing fairly easily.