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A plea to ALL modders, large and small!

tg626

By tg626
in KSP1 Mod Development

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tg626

tg626

Posted
Posted

I think it would be wise to, as a community, agree to avoid the inclusion of "agencies" in mod packages. As of .90 KSP does NOT gracefully deal with contracts offered by agencies or involving parts belonging to *removed* mods.

We should be able to "test drive" a mod and not have it break a save game, IMHO. For those mod authors who feel that "part testing" of their custom parts are a must, may I humbly suggest the following:

ArchiveRoot-\

  • Agencies->
  • GameData-\

  1. [*=1]Modname->
  2. readme.txt




    Place an explanation in the readme.txt to put "Agencies" in the Modname folder, with the caveat that if they do they risk savegame corruption if they later remove the mod.
    Those blindly copying the gamedata folder will get only the mod, those who bother to read will get the full experience.
    Of course ultimately I would wish for the game to see the mod is missing (nonexistent agency or part) and simply remove the contract but until it does I think this would be wise.
    Signed -
    A poor blighter who just spent a few hours trying to figure out why KSP had gone totally t**s up...
    :P
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tg626

tg626

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Thanks for the [redacted] advice, but the whole idea is to avoid the trouble in the first place - to anyone new to modding, and anyone else who hadn't encountered this before, it's a very easy trap to fall into.

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DMagic

DMagic

Posted
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When a contract is generated it gets assigned to an agency (sometimes randomly, sometimes not), which is then saved along with all of the other info about the contract.

If you delete the agency definition (there are simple config files for these, along with the two flag textures) after you have accepted and saved a contract offered by that agency all sorts of bad things can happen.

The next time the game loads a contract with that agency it can't find it and freaks out, this causes some problems with loading contracts (they don't show up correctly in the Mission Control Center).

Much more importantly, it breaks saving contracts, which breaks saving the contract scenario module, which prevents KSP from saving at all, which prevents you from changing scenes. It basically breaks the game.

It would be really easy for Squad to fix this, so hopefully they have in 1.0. But it can be a major problem for now; it's why I have a disclaimer about the issue on the first post of DMagic Orbital Science and an explanation of how to fix it.

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DMagic

DMagic

Posted
Posted

Completed contracts screw it up too, you have to remove them from the save file by hand, or delete them through the Alt+F12 menu.

You also have to be careful when removing contracts that none get offered by the same agency while you're doing it.

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Cydonian Monk

Cydonian Monk

Posted
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Sooo, if I remove all relevant agency contracts from the lists and then uninstall the mod will that be fine? What about completed contracts from that agency?

You need to remove all contracts related to that agency, completed or not. When I last bumped into this myself I deleted the entire contract scenario module and went on with life, but it's easy enough to remove each invalid contract from the persistence file. Use Notepad++/vim/your text-editor of choice - no way to do it in game or use Alt-F12 (edit: forgot about that). And of course delete the agents from the mods before you restart KSP.

I had honestly considered writing a short plugin to block all contracts (I was at the point where they were mostly irrelevant), but figured it was easier to just scrub all the mods of their agents.

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DMagic

DMagic

Posted
Posted
I'm creating my agency definition now, and it's just the name, empty description and logos. Will agency contracts appear if your agency has no mentalities?

They should, plenty of contracts just ask for a random agency.

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Beale

Beale

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Posted
Wouldn't the removal of agency definitions also remove the associated manufacturer tab in the VAB/SPH part list filters?

I've lost a few saves to this without ever knowing...

Keep agencies risk saves, remove them and lose part filtering / contracts. :huh:

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

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Svm420

Svm420

Posted
Posted
Wait, you actually use the "stock" manufacturers tab for part selection?

Shameless plug ;)

I don't even see the point of agencies for contracts. Who the heck cares who gave you the contract are there people out there refusing contract till they get an agency they like? Is it not possible to have manufacturer for parts without adding a new agency? I can't believe the methods squad uses at times for thing like this or kerbal names=profession. Strikes me a laziness not finding a more robust solution. Hope this is alleviated in 1.0.

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CaptainKipard

CaptainKipard

Posted
Posted
How about you just don't delete the agencies subfolder of any mods? That seems better than asking everyone to add a step to their installation processes.

I've let people know in my documentation that they have these two options. I guess there's not much beyond that that you can do.

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Raven.

Raven.

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It is generally a bad programming practice on Squad's part to not account for a missing agency in code that accepts plain text files as input. There should had been some kind of error or exception handling in place for this type of situation. Really, the fact that KSP craps out with a missing agency is a major KSP design flaw.

With that being said, there could be several things that could be done to mitigate this on our part. Most players are not going to know to keep the agencies sub-folder around after deleting a mod. In fact, most of them won't, and will complain if they have to leave part of the mod left installed when they want it gone. One option would be to take the stance of the Skyrim mod community: the uninstallation of mods with an existing save is unsupported. Period, end of discussion. Another option is to have a subfolder in GameData called "CustomAgencies," of which modders can agree to stick all of the custom agencies they create. This has the advantage of the user being able to uninstall a mod without having to leave behind one subfolder of a subfolder.

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CaptainKipard

CaptainKipard

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Another option is to have a subfolder in GameData called "CustomAgencies," of which modders can agree to stick all of the custom agencies they create. This has the advantage of the user being able to uninstall a mod without having to leave behind one subfolder of a subfolder.

This is worth discussing more. Does anyone know what happens with duplicates?

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Svm420

Svm420

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Posted
How about you just don't delete the agencies subfolder of any mods? That seems better than asking everyone to add a step to their installation processes.

As opposed to asking every single user who downloads a mod to add a step to there uninstall process yeah that is totally more right. /s There are more users than there are modders it would help more people for the modders to take task of not forcing pointless agencies that ruin saves on the end users. Thanks!

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