Kulebron

586: We can't do this with an asteroid: (hmm should we submit a feature suggestion?) 585: But we can do this: 587: NASA does not want even to try. They want to divert asteroids away from the planet.

Whatever you name folders, you have to babysit all those files and archives. "Just download" expands to - right click, save to... - find that folder, save, wait download complete - open that folder and unpack the craft if it's zipped - unpack and don't forget to delete the archive - check if there's no extra folder or other junk like hidden OSX files. sometimes you'll need to clean up your downloads folder. Surely, this is doable, but I want to get rid of this workload. I hate babysitting computers and manually do what they can do without me. If you insist that things are easy to do, then we could as well skip windows-like file managers. Just start writing in shell: > CP my_file.craft Saves/yoursave/VAB. Or "$ wget http://myhosting.com/somespacecraft.craft -O /home/paul23/KSP_Linux/Saves/new_campaign/VAB/new.craft". That will do. I see your point that development costs, as you suggest, overweigh the gain here. But I think another way. If you propose absolutely private file sharing, then you shouldn't mention Dropbox, or forums ether. Just email. This file storage can be quite anonymous if it does not list files, nor store the owner bit in the file record. The rest -- http(s) transaction -- is much safer than other file sharing services. The only way to detect such activity is to sniff user's traffic, which is already a very severe breach. [added] If I were developing this service, I'd take into account your criticism on privacy and would change it so that hashes and keys are sent in post data and consequently not logged anywhere.

Awesome. I thought landing there was intentional. What about drogue parachute?

Rather than talk about the weather in words, let's show off our best photographs. Let's agree to post only what's near your house, where you're present, and own work only. You haven't photographed it, it didn't happen. My turn. Autumn was rainy and sunny on and off, and then someone turned the switch. This year it happened a week or two earlier the schedule. But anyway, gone are the nasty wet days, now it's only white furry snow! Just a notice: it's not polar circle, but the same latitude as London and Copenhagen.

Thansk for the vid! Looks great! I made another sketch, then thought it's not worth doing, but will post this anyway. The idea was to keep a bigger library of stock spacecrafts and improving them. If you keep versions separate, this might work. But I think the official library means assuming more responsibility and demands, and more effort, with not much gain. So this is a side product just to show:

Yes, this is also an option, I thought of it too. Just don't know if there are embeddable torrent clients available to be integrated and limited in use (you don't want to let someone hack it and make everyone share a huge video file ). [added] There's one more problem with torrents: how many files should each user seed? Example: there are 100 000 users and averagely 5 shared files per user. How should they be distributed between users so that every time you want any file, there's at least one seeder? I see, if there are 500K files shared, and the daily minimum is 1K users online, then veryone should keep at least 500 files to make every file available all the time.

This is simple and is doable when you need it only a couple of times. But even this way you can make mistakes, and mostly you spend time walking through the folders. I can assure you that I use PCs for 24 years, and still I can screw things up. Unpack everything in a folder with many files - then delete those one by one (and they have original timestamps, can't order by time), or drag a folder into another one accidentally, even without noticing. Even in command line you can do something wrong. If you need to share spacecraft, and this is done many-many times, you really don't want to do this chore over and over. And if you need to share a savefile, you don't want to have to write instructions like this: Someone will surely miss some step and put files in the wrong place. If there's a hash exchange, it would be like this: Sure, one can do without it. But if it's the same, why make user repeat it and make mistakes? It's like automatic and activator washing machines. Surely, I could wash things in activator machine, coming every 15 minutes to operate it, but why do this if there are automatic washers?

The OP video was hilarious! But I suspect the trick is that the bottommost part was the root part in this ship at that moment. When the root part explodes, all the ship disappears immediately. I would suggest some variants of scoring: <falling speed> / <ship mass>. (Limitations: 1) ship starts falling freely without propulsion and control surfaces, (to avoid retrobootster spam madness) 2) ship falls from within atmosphere, <70km.) Another way would be min(height, 1000m) / <ship mass>, and same limtations. This way you may throw the ship somehow higher, but not too far, and it does not matter how fast it was falling.

I agree that this seems a bit like a multiplayer placeholder and crutch. And I don't like social buttons either. But even when you have multiplayer, you sometimes need to just share a rocket/plane with someone else, and not in real time. I'm offline, that guy is offline, and we don't know when we can probably meet online. Then sending him a file is the only way, and I just propose to reduce workload and still keep simple the infastructure. If you have ideas how to make it without looking like social networks, please, post them here.

I guess they decided to not maintain a feature-rich website, which is really hard. I guess first of all they decomissioned because websites require a lot of maintenance: server side has bugs, client side sometimes has HTML/CSS formatting issues. File storage with pure API and no web UI is simpler. It has just two addresses and storage software like Redis or even memcached. They only need to check a security key on upload and user quota. Maintaining this is a lot simpler, and web UI with a catalog can be created by third-party developers.

Watched the videos, looks impressive. Unfortunately, there's no video of file exchange there, so I'll try this myself. And it would be great to have at least file exchange in the standard version, because this will bring this collaborative functionality to much wider userbase.

I think it's the music that murders it. The HID plugin is very impressive, btw.

I'm thinking in Javascript logic, but if I understand correctly, UI is written with event-driven frameworks anyway. So here's the loading logit that I'd implement: Why do I suggest a text input? For instance, in Linux (Ubuntu + MATE DE) there are two conflicting clipboards, so I wouldn't rely on clipboard completely.

Ok, thanks!

...And assembe a linux kernel without a single shell script.

Has anyone assembled scaled models? How much time it takes? What do you do with them after? Here's what my friend gave me as a birthday present. He's fond of modelling, buys scale models and builds the scenes for them, or buys such sets and glues them. I wasn't doing this, but it's even more interesting. Non-experts hardly can make you a good gift in your field, but they can make great gifts in their fields. Proton with Astra block (ISS I suppose)

An example of how upload algorithm should work. I'm not fluent with block schemes, so I just drew it consistently: square is action, rounded is content.

Technical example: one craft file is 220kb, compressed with xzip it's 11.7kb (almost factor of 20), so sharing or downloading just one craft generates less data traffic than opening a single web page.

Oh, yeah. I see these disgusting announcements quite a lot. You stop noticing them and get a sick pleasure thinking what's behind the link.

Looks incredible. Reminds me of Terragen render engine I played with 10 years ago. Still hard to believe this is all generated live on a usual PC.

Subassemblies UI:

I would be happy to leave a ship to a Kerbal to land somewhere, with good precision and minimum dV. But before that you must land on that body within some distance yourself, or inside a biome. In this maneuver high courage means closer to suicide burn, and less courage makes kerbal do a conservative brake and hover landing. Better if this is calculated in background, so you can just leave the ship and see from tracking station.

UI sample: load dialog checked that clipboard is a valid hash and put it in the text field, ready to be downloaded. (Users should be able to write the hash manually, in case someone wrote it on a paper. Why not?) load dialog before unlocking sharing dialog: toolbar: share button slides out when you hover the save button. Leads to "unlock file sharing" dialog if it's not unlocked. ...and this should apply to subassemblies as well. No need to make the creator assemble them as craft and then the receiver re-save as subassembly. And by the way, this can be done just for paid users. Website UI has this button: A pair of hashes is generated on server side, one is given here. When user unlocks sharing in his copy, the other hash is sent to his client, and it will be used as a key. (A asymmetric encryption may also be used, to prevent one key being used by many users.) Again, this hash also has a prefix to allow easy recognition from clipboard. Enter the game, there's a menu in the very first screen: [ connect to craft sharing ] and there's a dialog: [ enter the code ] [ ok ] [ cancel ] (when the dialog loads, you may want to check clipboard contents and paste it already for the user, letting him just click "ok") Then, user saves the crafts to the main site storage. Of course, there should be a limit to prevent spamming, or a paid file share extension if someone pastes 10000 files. Then it becomes a good way to filter out those who play cracked copies: "why don't you paste a hash, man?"

Users of KSP should not have to deal with all this file tree and archives madness. At least it should be easy to share a crafts and savefiles. Here's just one example of what it takes to make a challenge with a game save: Aren't you sick of those archives to download and extract? Cleaning up the download folder? Having 100 formats of archives and 100 flavours of dir structures? I think, for the sanity and to reduce this friction of community interaction, it's reasonable to have a file sharing service to host .craft as text or g/x-zipped (xzip compresses savefile by the factor of 20). Sharing or getting a craft should be a button among save/load. For simplicity, to not invent a whole new UI, it would be just enough to generate a 10-digit alphanumeric hash (like on youtube, aBcD0123eFg, maybe with a prefix like a hashtag: #kspcrft123bnXtD, #kspsv123bnXtD), and copy it to system clipboard, and be able to paste it from a clipboard. I'm aware that easy reading files from internet may lead someone to find and exploit a buffer overflow error. But that's possible even now, with a usual KSP: there's no safety check of downloaded files either, and actually user-created (always different) archives may contain other malicious payload. See the next post for UI sketches.

This is "who has more RAM" challenge. Basically, you need to stick ladders retrograde to your ship and put kerbals on them.