seanth

There are other mods that provide greenhouses that work with TAC-LS

Just a heads up: food production will be changing soon. I can't say for sure how much it will impact things, but the food production will be slower.

Github: https://github.com/VigilanteInc/BioMass Settings to use with TAC: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/62631-BioMass-Ongoing-Development?p=922053&viewfull=1#post922053 Eventually we'll include a zipped up ModuleManager file that will configure TAC-LS vs just telling people the settings. Biomass is still in testing and development.

Cool. We've moved the test versions on to github: https://github.com/VigilanteInc/BioMass If you run into problems or have ideas/opinions, please post at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/62631-BioMass-Ongoing-Development. You can always submit issues on github, too.

It still doesn't work when the vessel does not have focus. It is still a planned feature.

Yes. You need the kethane dll for basic things to work. If you continue to have problems, please post at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/62631-BioMass-Ongoing-Development

Yes. Please see http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/62631-BioMass-Ongoing-Development?p=922053&viewfull=1#post922053 for settings to allow the two to work together. If you find problems, please don't hesitate to post them over at the biomass thread.

This is embarrassing, but you just found a bug that roboto and I had previously talked about, came up with a solution for, and which I completely ignored in the latest release. In the interest of full disclosure, here is the problem: Seeds germinate in light Biomass needs light to grow Biomass makes seeds...in light...and they germinate. Sigh. I will push an update to github tonight. It will add an additional button to greenhouses, basically allowing you to turn germination on/off. When off, seeds will accumulate. The only other easily implementable solution would be to introduce another part, which I would rather not do. It would add to part count (which some people have been vocal about), and would also potentially break existing craft. EDIT: github updated 2014-01-31 22:21:50 MT To make seeds germinate, click the "IR Light" button on the greenhouse. Make sure you turn it off if you want to accumulate seeds. Right now biomass starts making seeds only once a greenhouse is full. Would people like seeds to be made constantly, instead?

You shouldn't need to have them in the greenhouse as long as they are generally available. I like to transfer them to the greenhouse when testing as it makes it easier to see whether amounts are changing.

Ok. I see. Taking all the always active generators can be misleading, because some of those rxns assume a resource will be present which isn't always present. WasteWater, for example. I recently took the time to convert the masses of gasses and liquids to Liters vs kg for better TAC-LS integration. Here's a breakdown of net outputs, per large plant greenhouse, by difficulty level: Easy: 1kg seed yields 0.1kg seed. O2 net production: 0.002283L/sec. CO2 net consumption: 0.002283L/sec. H2O net consumption: 0.0000018L/sec. Biomass net production: 0.00033kg/sec Normal: 1kg seed yields 0.1kg seed. O2 net production: 0.00156L/sec. CO2 net consumption: 0.002133L/sec. H2O net consumption: 0.0000017L/sec. Biomass net production: 0.00013kg/sec Hard: 1kg seed yields 0.1kg seed. O2 net production: 0.001245L/sec. CO2 net consumption: 0.001706L/sec. H2O net consumption: 0.0000014L/sec. Biomass net production: 0.0000535kg/sec These values are just estimates, and will differ if you are using waste water instead of water (waste water results in more biomass) or both water and waste water. I think the CO2 values are high for Normal and Hard, but as guidelines, those values should be pretty close. More breakdown, assuming resources are not limiting and it's being used with TAC-LS and TAC is configured as I suggested in a previous post: Easy: large plant greenhouse fills with biomass in 6 kerbal days. Provides O2 for 3 kerbals. Produces 4kg seeds/kerbal day when full Normal: large plant greenhouse fills with biomass in 12 kerbal days. Provides O2 for 2 kerbals. Produces 3kg seeds/kerbal day when full Hard: large plant greenhouse fills with biomass in 24 kerbal days (close to 25% of a kerbal year). Provides O2 for 1.6 kerbals. Produces 2.3kg seeds/kerbal day when full. All these values are idealized. More testing is needed to make sure things work as advertised, especially since there are difficulty levels. Please do. Also, please downloading the newest from github to see whether the bug is still there.

I might know what is going on. I just made some minor changes to a few parts on github to speed up how the compressors release gas, and to help people out, I just recorded a video example of using a greenhouse. It's not a great video, does the job. After watching the first video, I recorded an addendum because I realized I made an error in illustrating biomass growth because not all of the seeds had germinated. Example: Addendum video: In general treat the plant biomass in the game as you would a real plant: to get the biomass to grow, you need light, water, carbon dioxide, and oxygen. If you are using biomass with TAC-LS and are attaching a greenhouse to a crewed capsule, you probably already have all of these resources available. If not, you can attach the provided tanks and compressor/release valve parts to turn oxidizer into oxygen and compressed CO2 into CO2 gas. In the video example I transfer the gasses and water into the greenhouse, but that shouldn't be necessary. I find it can be easier to make sure things are working if I transfer a small amount of water, CO2 and O2 into a greenhouse when it first starts so I can see the amounts changing

Ok. Let's see if I can tackle these, more-or-less in the order things were in I'll talk to roboto about this. I've never had a broken one, myself, but I also have not tried landing one anywhere. We've had other people break greenhouses before and I think roboto has a solution in mind. Just pushed a change to github that will hopefully fix this. If this doesn't fix it, I'm not sure why it is still greyed out. The koylent maker is an unfinished part, so the texture isn't finalized yet. Yes, you can move the functionality onto one of TAC's hockeypucks. Are you asking for a 1.25m version of the koylent maker? It is possible to accidentally kill off all your biomass, either through over harvesting or not providing the greenhouses with enough light. We implemented seeds when we found ourselves in situations where we have killed off everything by mistake. Because biomass respires (consumes a bit of itself and oxygen to stay alive), even if you transported new biomass, you would arrive with less of it then what you started with. Think of seeds as stable ways to transport biomass. I get where you are coming from. Right now one large plant greenhouse produces enough O2 for 3 kerbals on easy mode. I can probably game the numbers to make the greenhouse support 3, or even 6 kerbals on Easy mode. For an idea of how big the large greenhouses are, picture a compact car's parking spot, roughly 2m by 3.25m. Now imagine growing enough food in that area for a child. Every day. So on hard mode, a single greenhouse probably won't produce enough food for 1 kerbal. On easy mode, I would lean to one greenhouse supporting 3 kerbals, but can see a case for it supporting more. Certainly not 18, though. The small greenhouses are going to be scientific experiments as well. They are there to help teach the player that X kg of biomass produces Y L of O2. That way they can start making informed build decisions using actual in-game science experiments. They are meant for use in near-Kerbal orbit, early in career mode, to let the player figure out how to use them. They are not meant for later deep-space missions. Though they might be handy in testing how well plants grow closer to and further from the sun. So, yeah: think of them more as science experiments and less as things to maintain stations with. Check out the aquatic greenhouse. When full and functioning it should weigh around 35tonnes. That's approximately 6x heavier than the empty version, and is a significant amount of water to transport up. I would not want to launch a completely full aquatic greenhouse. The aquatic greenhouse doesn't produce seeds (you could have a small plant greenhouse just for producing seeds), but it does produce a lot of biomass. I am confused why people are launching lots of seed boxes up. Why not a single seed box, and then let the biomass grow like it is supposed to? Are people trying to fill a greenhouse as quickly as possible? If that's the case, wouldn't it be easier to adjust the amount of biomass in a greenhouse when building a craft? This is a stupid question, but, do people realize that biomass increases over time? You don't need to just use seeds to get biomass. You just...let it grow. If people are frustrated about the amount of time required, think about how a kethane probe needs to be selected and just allowed to do its polar orbit. I have just let my computer run overnight while scanning for kethane. Turns out the phrase "watching grass grow" is for real. Now, if your frustrated about not being able to select other ships while a greenhouse does its thing...I want that to change, too. Feedback is good, especially specific suggestions. Bug fixes are even better.

I...don't know where those numbers are coming from. I can find some of those values in how the cfg is set up. Are you getting these values empirically from a craft? If you can help me understand where those #s are coming from I can see if I can help explain better Consumption is units/second. So, for example, in "normal" difficulty the large plant greenhouse consumes 0.00213333L of CO2/second and produces 0.00013186kg biomass/second. Each seed box comes with 2kg of seeds if you don't tweak things. The conversion of seeds to biomass is 1:0.1, as in 1kg of seeds will germinate to give you 0.1kg of biomass. To fill the plant greenhouse on normal difficulty, you would need 250kg of seeds. Or you could germinate the seeds and allow the biomass to grow to capacity. Think that's too low of a conversion? As for the small plant greenhouse, I can't replicate the bug you are seeing. Here's a quick test craft I made: It could just be that what I have is slightly different than the github version you have. People can check out the tool I use for helping in calculations here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ca0aushu5un6cmn/Public%20BioMass%20Calculation%20Helper%20v3.xls Edit: Github updated as of 23:47 MT 2014-01-28

Head over to a biomass thread and ask for help there? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/62631-BioMass-Ongoing-Development

Your question should have a straight forward answer, but the truth is the testing has not reached that far. Thus far we have looked the the large plant greenhouse, the bioreactor and tonight I'm updating the microbiome. Given things are not locked down, I can tell you the plan and you can off feedback. With your feedback, I can expedite getting the food part working: Food will be a combination of Biocake and seeds, combined in the "Koylent" maker to make food. So to make food, you'd need these parts in these states: ---A plant greenhouse filled with biomass. The plants only start making seeds when they run out of room to grow. ---Activate the biomass harvester in the greenhouse. This will make biocake. ---Have the "Koylent" maker hooked up. This will convert the biocake and seeds into food. For TAC-LS use, 1 Kerbal consumes 0.317kg of food every 86400 seconds. Thus far my focus on TAC-LS compatibility has been focusing on oxygen production. My sense is that, on the "easy" difficulty, a single large plant greenhouse should only produce enough food for 1 kerbal. I just did some simple maths and came up with 1 greenhouse supporting 18 kerbals (!!!!). Clearly this is too much of a cheat. Thoughts? Ok. That's clearly a bug. I will look at it and update github tonight if it's a trivial fix. Keep in mind the small greenhouses are meant to be 1/4 as effective as a single large one. It's meant to be a tradeoff between launch mass and efficiency. You can more easily launch small ones, but you need more of them.

Currently Biomass does not produce materials when not focused. This is a major oversight that needs to change. Roboto and I have been actively discussing the best way to do this: wait for TAC-LS to come out with a greenhouse part and then use their dlls? Recruit someone to write our own custom dll? Suggestions welcome

Oh, I know. I would just like to use your currently existing code with the greenhouse mod we have, since we already have a huge overlap in users. EDIT: Biking home from work I stopped by a compost pile and was reminded of what alwaysOn would be used for for things other than Greenhouses: ---Simulating a leaky hull(this can be done with stock Squad generator module, though) ---Any spontaneous chemical reaction ---Breakdown of biological waste ---Really any spontaneous chemical/biological reaction.

+1 this feature request

I believe the problem was on our end. I just pushed an update to github that should place the larger greenhouses into the Advanced Electrics node, and the new 1/4 size greenhouse into the Electrics node.

Hmmm. We're aware of things not working well above 50x timewarp. Above 10x timewarp is a new one. Keep in mind that, as you move away from the sun, the greenhouses will be less efficient when using just light from the sun. If you were not using the onboard lights in the greenhouses, maybe they got too far from the sun and were not producing enough oxygen? It could also just be a limitation of the generator modules Biomass currently uses. I hesitate to suggest this, but there is a way you could cheat: The dll that comes with TAC-LS allows it to do basic calculations to give the appearance that Kerbals continue to respire, drink water, etc. when the craft is not selected. As of right now Biomass does not do this. What you _could_ do is have a few Biomass greenhouses running. Deselect your ship, increase the time warp, swap back when TAC-LS gives you a warning, and reselect the ship. At normal time, replenish your O2 tanks from the greenhouses. Deselect, timewarp, repeat. You could also use an oxygen compressor to release oxidizer fuel pressure to make oxygen. You would sacrifice oxidizer for breathable oxygen, but it's an option. The longterm solution to this timewarp problem is to either write a custom dll for biomass that would replicate some of the features TAC-LS has, or see whether Biomass can just use TAC-LS's dlls. <shrug> I'd love to see some images of your ship, if you're willing to share.

Github updated: --BioReactor rates tweaked. Only "normal" difficulty --Densities of some resources and flow modes changed to play nicely with TAC Life Support (thx to koksny for catching this problem) --Biological science experiments allow for data collection (thx to koksny for suggesting this fix) --New Aquatic greenhouse skin (model and lighting still being worked on) --New Small greenhouse introduced. Only "normal" difficulty Opinion poll: should parts involved in generating biofuels have difficulty levels, or limit the difficulty levels to just the greenhouses? Right now, the BioReactor will produce 21L of liquid fuel ever kerbin day. Too slow for easy, but just right for hard mode?

I'm just not comfortable talking biomass in the TAC-LS thread. It's a courtesy/respect thing for TAC-LS.

In looking a little closer, it looks like the BioMass mod currently has some densities that are not what they should be. In our defense, we hadn't gotten to testing them and didn't notice. Please try making the following changes: --BioMass_b.cfg ---Waste should have a density of 0.00045 ---Food should have a density of 0.001125 I will update github with those changes tonight. With those changes to BM+S and the settings given in the images above, the resources of TACLS and BM+S should have exactly the same values and there will be no need to delete any files. What might also be happening is that TAC-LS and BM+S have different flow modes set for some resources. In general, BM+S has solids set to STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH. Please try changing the BM+S flowMode for Food and Waste to ALL_VESSEL. This could, potentially, cause problems with the Microbiome automatically consuming Food, but might solve your transfer problems. The Microbiome will be updated soon to try and make it so it doesn't automatically import food to break down (the mystery goo demands food!). If that does not solve your problem we'll have to dig deeper and figure out what is going on. As for what Density does: the game engine uses the density value in the RESOURCE_DEFINITIONs to calculate the mass of parts (and craft) that hold fuel. The example I use a lot is that a solid fuel booster holds 433L of solidFuel, which has a density of 0.0075. 433L*0.0075tonnes/L=3.2475tonnes. Plus the parts default 0.5tonnes=3.7475tonnes(the weight of the entire part). This matters in TAC-LS and BM+S because both do calculations of L/s or kg/s, which translates into things like L of O2 or kg of biomass.

I'm happy to help, but maybe we should do it in the Biomass thread?

Yeah. The Biomass mod does not use a 1unit/kerbal/day system, so not only does Biomass require different consumption values, the density definitions are different. I recently posted some test setting for people using TAC-LS and Biomass to try out: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/62631-BioMass-Ongoing-Development?p=922053&viewfull=1#post922053