Athywren

You are a beautiful person. I'll go check it now. See my face? This is my happy face. Works perfectly. Now, to make sure the mission objectives are clear to the end user, design a decent flag for the Kerbal Resources Department (the placeholder I'm using is amazingly ugly), maybe tweak the rewards, and get ready to release it into the wild when you update.

You are a beautiful person. I'll go check it now.

Well ..... I'll delete the post then.

Well, I suppose I could have them stage a horrific accident for each of these shadowing contracts, just to hammer the point home, have that Men In Black moment. "I wasn't training a partner; I was training a replacement... aaaaaaaaaagh!" If there's a way to have it check on level up, it seems like that might be more efficient while still being quick to respond, but I guess you would've mentioned that if it was possible. Anyway, I'll see if I can make it work as it is for the time being - even if you update it, I really need to get a decent grasp on the way expressions work in this for my other half-implemented and planned contracts, so it's worth it either way.

If that is the issue, would it come up as complete if I just stuck timewarp on for a while after completing it, or is it a realtime thing? (Anyway, thanks, that would be a much simpler solution if it fixes it.)

Cool, thanks. I'm not sure it'll give the full picture, but the contract I'm working on comes up when you've got your most experienced pilot, engineer, or scientist up to a certain level and nobody at the level just below them - if they're at 2, nobody's at 1, if they're at 3, nobody's at 2, etc. The contract has you train up another Kerbal in their career path to the level below them so you have an experienced backup in case of accidents. That part works exactly as I want it to, but it currently only completes the contract when you hire a new Kerbal (it's not just the scene change, and it's not just the hiring of a new Kerbal without regard to whether the parameters were fulfilled - I tested both of those possibilities (although, now that I think of it, I haven't tried sending out another ship, but, even if that does help, it's not a very clean solution)) hence my thinking that I need to have it recount the Kerbal list after recovery. My stab in the dark solution is to leave the parameters enabled on state change - I originally had them disable, but it occurred to me that maybe that was stopping it from completing the contract. Like it said, not a great deal of logic to it, just a hope, but it's easier and more efficient than working unnecessary expressions in if it works - I want to keep it as small as possible.

I'm a big fan of these updates. At least, I assume I'm a big fan - each time I try loading after installing the new update, I get a notification telling me that it's been updated. Thanks, Athlonic, I love this mod.

Oooookay. I'm either an inch or a mile away from having the first part of my contract pack available for downloads - it's actually up on GitHub now, but you have to hire a new Kerbal in order to finish the contract, so it's not exactly working as intended just yet, and there's no point actually posting it until it is. On the off chance that it's a mile rather than an inch, could I get a quick bit of feedback on something? If I use the OnParameterStateChange() behaviour with the ReturnHome parameter, will that allow me to run an expression on recovering a craft? I'm in the middle of testing one possibility that might make this redundant, but I think the problem I'm having is that the Kerbals list needs to be recounted after meeting the contract parameters, hence the current need to hire a new crew member, and I'm hoping that just having it count through the list on recovery might make it work if my current idea doesn't (and it probably won't because it's a stab in the dark with the hope of avoiding putting real work in, and there's only a sliver of logic to it).

Marvelous! In that case, I'll run away with the dev version this weekend, and maybe figure out how to put things on github, on the off chance there's anyone else out there who wants to work with the Kerbal Resources department and get paid for training up their crews. Thanks.

Hello again. I've been working on my contract idea on and off in spare moments over the past week or so, and I think I have the shape of it pretty much right. I kept coming up with an issue that didn't seem to make sense, though, because I think I'd confused myself on something. The requirement "HasCrew", I'm pretty sure, refers to the entire space program, right? That's the entire collection of Kerbals you've hired? But the parameter "HasCrew" seems to be specific to a single vessel. Is that right? If so, is there a parameter that corresponds to the "HasCrew" requirement?

You missed out the Squad folder. Default\Squad\Parts, not Default\Parts.

It's such a relief to see someone talented do this. I was trying to make a couple, but my graphical skills are... absent. Yours look really good. (I like your older textures, too.)

I get the feeling that this isn't something I'd be of any help with... but surely there must be a texture map for them hidden away somewhere, because they work with the default textures? Could be that I'm missing something though - textures and I aren't really on friendly terms most of the time. Anyway, I'll see what I can do with the basic head stuff and get a couple uploaded. They'll be .png files, though, because I can't get it to work when I save them in .dds format, but I'm sure it'll be fine until someone does a proper job of it.

It's just a straight vertical flip, then it works fine. Hair in the right place, eyelashes in the right place, no seams, perfect. Only problem is that the state of Kerbal dentistry has suffered terribly - lady Kerbs have no teeth with a custom texture. I think there must be a separate texture for their teeth, because the only change I made between the default texture I extracted from the .assets file and the custom was the hair colour.

Thanks, I'm giving it a try right now with a couple of differently flipped images. Given how the textures were broken, it actually makes a lot of sense that this'll work... bit embarrassed that I didn't think of it myself, actually... I'm gonna blame my total lack of experience with modding textures.

Weirdly, this seems to be the case with the new texture too. I didn't want to wait for modders with graphical skills to do it, so I extracted kerbalGirl_06, had a play with it, and stuck the results in the heads folder. With the orientation it has coming out of the assets file, the hair ends up around the neck, with a bald head and various weirdnesses. Flip that up, and the hair seems alright, but the eyelashes are off to the side, you've got a tongue for a pony tail, and the back of the head has a wide seam. What did you do, Squad? What did you do?! Maybe if you flip the head part of the texture, but leave everything else more or less where it is, it might work? I was hoping to have a couple of basic textures to throw online until someone with the right skill got around to doing it right, but... this is a bit beyond me. I think I could probably work out where everything goes eventually, definitely before heat death at least, but I'm not sure it would be worth it by then.

Thanks, I'll check the Tourism pack out tomorrow, see what I can learn from it. You've written a brilliant tool here... I'm sure you know that, but, you know, it needed to be said. What I've got in mind is a two part thing. The first is a contract that shows up if you have a single kerbonaut on any of the career paths shooting ahead of their colleagues in terms of level, and offers you a decent bit of reputation for training up a backup, for in case it turns out that sitting on top of several hundred tons of highly compressed explosive chemicals is somehow dangerous. The other is for when the astronaut complex is a little upgraded, and you've got a decent collection of crew members. It offers a little cash and reputation for training a certain percentage of your kerbonauts to different levels, so a group of 20 would have a contract for getting maybe 16 to level 2 or above, one for 8 to 3 or above, 4 to 4 etc. Basically, it's an HR mod (because, hey, just because they're weird little green fictional people, that doesn't mean they don't have a right to continuing education and professional development!) I've actually got it working in a Conan The Barbarian kind of way, but it definitely needs a bit of... pruning.

Excellent! I thought it would work, but it was a hastily thrown together bit of nonsense based on very quickly skimming the wiki and making assumptions (like that a parameter with a default probably doesn't need to be defined if it's only going to be defined as its default). What I'm trying to have it look for is a single crew member at level n, and that there are no crew members of the same career path between level n-1 and 5 other than the one at n, so if minXP=3/maxXP=5/maxCount=1 works, and min&maxXP=4/maxCount=1 works, then the crew member at 4 must be the one in that range. I can think of a much simpler way to do it, which would be to call for the highest level crew member with the required trait, then check the count between n-1 & 5 to make sure there's the skill gap. I just don't know how to do that yet. I'll have to have a proper go at the wiki in a bit. For now, though, I'm done pretending to be an adult for the day, so I'm going to take the brute force route first - see if I can make it do what I want before I figure out how to finesse it. I'm more excited about this than is healthy...

Ohhh yes, I approve of this mod! Ok, so I've got an idea for a collection of training incentives contracts - you know, like an NVQ in being an astronaut... I would take the hell out of that course - and I've had a look through the wiki but I want to quickly check that I have a clue before I dive in and start fiddling with things. If I were to use the following code, would it come up when your space program only has one crew member of the specified trait and level, and no crew members ahead or one level behind them? Say, one pilot at level four, and maybe twelve pilots at level two or lower, but none at three or five? REQUIREMENT { name = All type = All REQUIREMENT { name = HasCrew type = HasCrew trait = Pilot minExperience = 4 maxExperience = 4 maxCount = 1 } REQUIREMENT { name = HasCrew type = HasCrew trait = Pilot minExperience = 3 maxCount = 1 } } I'm pretty much certain it would, but I thought I'd ask before I start down a rabbit trail and find out that HasCrew actually only refers to space craft or something. Also, is it safe to leave the parameters I have out - minCount and maxExperience - or do they need to be included even though they have defaults?

Aw, poo. Well, I guess it would be taxing to model that many bodies at once, even if it's not modelling the gravitational forces most of the time. Yeah, I know, incredibly unlikely, but I like to have things to worry about - I can't always set my orbits inside of the bodies being orbited. Maybe there's a chance of solar flares being implemented at some point, or something... or I could just trying being more reckless with my docking procedures, I guess. Awesome. I've had a few close shaves with launch debris in my more cluttered games, but I've never experienced death by satellite. It probably helps that I don't have many satellites - I don't use Remote Tech, though I have been planning on adding it into my game. I wonder how landings work with RT and Deadly Re-Entry?

So, I have plans for a space station in a Kerbolar orbit, between Kerbin & Duna... would such a structure have to worry about asteroid impacts? That would be so awesome... I mean, terrible and horrifying, but awesome. It would be good if it was something unlocked by researching advanced astronomical optics or something. Either space telescopes, which would be awesome anyway, or the building of telescopes on the ground to track such objects. This is just me speculating, of course, I have no reason to believe that this is how it will be.

I almost always use jets to reach the 10-20k mark now. As long as you have enough of them to put enough go behind your ship, they're a really reliable way to reach those altitudes and set off your rockets with a far more fuel efficient starting point. Hopefully the high cost of the jets will be counterbalanced by allowing recovery of de-orbited parts (assuming they don't 'splode on landing (parachutes, yay!)) when finances are introduced.

Thank you for this tutorial. I'm currently on my third attempt for my first docking sequence. (Unless you count the two times where I released my solid boosters a second or so too soon and ended up with a remote controlled fireball, which I don't, because it hurts my brain to be reminded of such foolish mistakes.) I made it to step 1 without any major trouble, but ended up futzing around at the intersect and, rather than getting a lovely circular orbit and a healthy approach, ended up giving myself a perfect trajectory for the Mun. I'm a bit worried that I'm being over ambitious for my first docking procedure, since it's a docking port adaptor. I'm turning the (I assume) standard clustered triple docking port that came as standard with my orbital spacedock into a radially mounted quad port, which is required by the design of the long range, manned ship that I'm planning to launch soon. Assuming I manage this docking procedure, soon Kerbals will be seeing, with their own eyes, that which they have so far only seen (in my imagination) on computer screens! No more shall robots have all the fun! Anyway, it's looking promising now, so I'm going to stop thanking you for helping me make it work, and make it work. (Thanks!) -edit- Sweet monkey god! Apparently my RCS thrusters are very, very slightly misplaced, I'm going to have to look up how to place them perfectly... still, docking achieved! Thanks again.