Mod for Making Custom Tech Trees Easily

[xXIndestructibleEVAXx]

Hello, does anyone know of any mods that allow you to easily make your own tech tree by simply moving nodes around in a simple, possibly in-game format? I honestly have no idea how to write .cfg files, and I would like something simple and compatible. It could, perhaps, simply allow you to make your own nodes simply by moving parts, or just move nodes around. Does anyone know of a mod like this, or have the time and skills to make one?

[Streetwind]

There used to be a third party external graphical UI app in development for Alternative Tree Configurator, but I believe it died along with ATC when it stopped updating.

Ultimately making such a program is orders of magnitude more difficult and time consuming as just making a tree in config file format. It's not at all as hard as you think it is. You simply find an existing tree definition for TechManager (the current mod of choice for custom tech trees), copy the header and one of the node definitions into a new file, and work from there. Each node definition is a single block of text that can be copypasta'd in the blink of an eye. The remaining work - giving the node a new name, setting cost, deciding on dependencies, hardcoding part assignment and such - are no slower and no faster done than they would be in a graphical editor. And that is the majority of the work you're going to be doing in making a tech tree.

A graphical editor would have just two advantages: one is sussing out the node positions. Admittedly the coordinate system used is extremely arbitrary. But thankfully you can at least test relatively painlessly with KSP itself, since tech trees are loaded along with the save file, not with the game client. That means you don't have to restart KSP for every change in the config that you make. You just have to quit to main menu, make the change, then load the savegame again and look into the R&D building.

The other is deciding on an icon for your node - largely because there's no proper documentation of the names of icons that are actually there for you to choose from. I frankly have no clue where people get them from. Ultimately I always end up grabbing someone else's tree config and looking up the icon names in that.

[DirtyFace83]

This might be what you're looking for?

Be warned though, it's not pretty and there's quite a few bugs. But as Streetwind said, just opening ready made .cfg files like this one and doing it with notepad is not so difficult once you know the non display name (the name the game uses to find stuff, not the name you see) of the part and tech you want to edit.

[Superfluous J]

People have wanted this (and tried to code it) since the day the tech tree came out.

I think what we need is a mod that makes making tech tree mods easier.

[smjjames]

According to the latest dev tuesday, they're actually making it possible to mess around with the tech tree more easily like the OP said.

[Technical Ben]

According to the latest dev tuesday, they're actually making it possible to mess around with the tech tree more easily like the OP said.

Hopefully so, it does seem to be in the works. (Even craft stats in game??!?!?!)

[BudgetHedgehog]

According to the latest dev tuesday, they're actually making it possible to mess around with the tech tree more easily like the OP said.

You may have noticed the paragraph after that, too:

Will these tools be available in the release version? The answer right now is, I don’t know. I'm building the toolset for our own use here at the moment, as that’s what’s required of it. Writing release-quality code, even for debugging tools, inevitably takes a lot more time. However, if by the end of the rebalancing and testing phase we think these utilities are presentable, then we might leave them in, along with the rest of the debug toolset. But we’ll see about that when we get there. No promises yet.

So I guess the OP should read 'make that tech tree editor good enough to be left in the game'.