[1.0.2](May06/15) Smart Parts Continued: Activate Action Groups on set conditions

[Diazo]

I jumped the gun on taking this mod over, Firov has come back.

Find Smart Parts 1.6.3 here.

Edited May 11, 2015 by Diazo

[TheCardinal]

The problem i had, has been resolved. Multiple mods use the kspapiextensions.dll so multiple dll's of that name can be present. The Infernal Robots version of that dll was quite old. What i did was replace ALL kspapiextensions.dll's under the gamedata folder with version 1.7.4.0. That solved the problem, not only for Smart Parts but also for Procedural Parts.

Your idea proved to be right.

Thanks!

[Deadpan110]

Yey... this has been on my 'must install' mod list on many KSP versions for a long time...

~installs on KSP 1.0.2~

Thank you!!

[Diazo]

Good to hear the issue is fixed for you TheCardinal.

As I have officially taken over this mod, I figure now it the time to talk about where I see it going in the future.

First, the only issue that I am currently aware of is that parts are not not saving settings sometimes, I will be looked into this weekend.

More long term, and what I'm looking for player feedback on, I'm thinking about doing the following. (Most of the below changes are inspired by the desire for low part count, part bloat is one of my pet peeves.)

Add a Proximity sensor mode. (From thread in the suggestions forum)

Combine all the "trigger" parts into one part that you then select a mode on. (The timer, altimeter, empty fuel tank, radio, proximity)

Combine the Fuel Dump and Fuel Controller into one part with a mode select.

Remove the fuel breakers entirely, my Action Everywhere mod offers the same functionality without requiring adding an extra part to the vessel and I don't want to maintain two mods that do the same thing.

Note that these would not be ship breaking, I would leave the current parts them in the game and just hide them, then at some point far in the future actually remove them. (KSP 1.1 maybe?)

Thoughts?

D.

[johnsonwax]

The problem i had, has been resolved. Multiple mods use the kspapiextensions.dll so multiple dll's of that name can be present. The Infernal Robots version of that dll was quite old. What i did was replace ALL kspapiextensions.dll's under the gamedata folder with version 1.7.4.0. That solved the problem, not only for Smart Parts but also for Procedural Parts.

Your idea proved to be right.

Thanks!

So, this is why I think the mod community should try to work toward a community common dll. We not only have the problem of everyone getting backed up when firespitter wasn't updated for a week (talk about first world problems...) where if we had more contributors who could have pushed out an update, that would have been a bit smoother, but you also have the distribution problem noted here where incompatible versions are getting pushed around.

MM is pretty close to a community common dll at this point. Devs are removing it from their distributions because it's so common, and if you are using tools like CKAN it's easy to ensure that the single installation of MM is up to date - something you can't do with multiple installs. I've got kspapiextensions, firespitter, MM, AdaptiveDockingNode, BDAnimationModules, InterstellarFuelSwitch, KSP-AVC (which has a somewhat different approach to this problem), ModuleRCSFX, and RasterPropMonitor. Now, USI has his own tools that I don't think are used by anyone other than USI, which is just fine as is, but all of those others I listed are used by multiple mods on my system. Keeping them all in check is a nuisance.

It seems to me the community (including the devs) would be better served if many of those were merged into a handful of common dlls but in a single package, maintained by multiple people (sarbian could still 'own' MM, but if he had to step away for a while, any of the other guys could easily step in and push a maintenance release out), and pushed up out of the individual mods and into a single install. You'd keep MM as a single dll that handles all aspects of patching mods, you'd keep RPM as handling all aspects of IVA, you'd have one that handled all animations, one for all fuel and resource handling, etc.

My $0.02, easily offered since I'm not (yet) part of that dev community having to deal with it first hand.

[TheCardinal]

..... part bloat is one of my pet peeves ......

D.

Okay, you asked for it!

Don't just combine the different parts into one but remove the need for multiple instances of that (combined) part. In other words make a list possible with all kinds of conditions and actions which are all checked repeatedly and executed once the condition is true.

Example:

Fuel Stage 4 = 0 Actiongroup 1

Altitude > 10 KM Actiongroup 5

..

..

Altitude > 60 KM Actiongroup 3

Edited May 9, 2015 by TheCardinal

[Diazo]

Heh, there's my desire to reduce part count, and then there's going overboard.

No matter what I do I can't get it down to only a single part on the vessel. There has to be a Smart Part on a detached section to delay activate and KSP itself limits me to one staging icon per part. So if you want delay activating on multiple stages, you need a part for each stage as well.

Since I can't get it down to one part on the vessel, one action per part is the next logical step. It's clear to the player what is going on and it simplifies the code in the background immensely.

D.

[dtobi]

It's great you picked up the mod.

You can, of course, continue to use the "brand" Klockheed Martian.

Dtobi

[macdjord]

@Diazo: Feature request: Trigger on acceleration, velocity (surface and orbital), and air pressure.

Also, I would request you leave the fuel breakers in; I'd rather not have to download anothe mod just to keep that functionality.

[StahnAileron]

Hey Diazo! Thanks for picking this up!

Regarding the Fuel Sensor: I tried using this mod once to help control the Capacitors and EC use with NFTechs by Nertea. Using the Fuel Sensors (really resource sensors), I was able to control power drain well when I engaged my engines. However, I wasn't able to control charging my caps because the fuel sensors only read one way. Any chance of letting the fuel sensors fire off when a resource passes some mark while INCREASING? I think this would be even more useful now with ISRU implemented in the stock game. (e.g. auto-stopping drills and/or converters when tanks are topped off.) Oh, and add an auto-reset option to the fuel sensors as well if you're gonna implement bi-directional triggering.

And one small pet nitpick: during my use of this mod in 0.90, the AG selection with AGExt installed was set in clusters of "25"... And I say "25" because the first group was actually I think 24 and the last (10th) 26 because the first group went from 1 - 24 simply so the later groups could start on even multiples of 25... (If there was a Group 0, I wouldn't say anything...) Any chance you could shift that group selection grouping to actually be 25 AGs per cluster? It would match up with the columns in your AGExt mod.

Edited May 10, 2015 by StahnAileron

[Diazo]

@dtobi: Hey! Good to see you. I did not realize you still checked in with the forum.

On the Klockheed Martin brand, I actually posted that because I am not planning to use it and I did not want people to think so. (As I'm not picking up any of the other KM mods, I did not want to start confusion over it.)

@macdjord: Good suggestion on those, I agree they make sense in this mod.

On the Fuel Breakers, the Actions Everywhere mod that duplicates their ability is a tiny little mod that simply adds Crossedfeed Enable/Disable and Resource Lock Enable/Disable to fuel tanks. (It also adds some actions to other parts as well.) There is no GUI windows or anything else that it adds to clutter things up, it simply adds a few new actions to the available actions list when assigning actions to action groups.

Also, removing the fuel breakers is a long range plan I wanted player opinion on, it is not something that is happening soon.

@StahnAileron: Bi-direction triggering makes sense, I'll add it to the list.

On the odd action group selection with AGExt installed, that happens on my end as well and is kind of odd. I'll look into it.

D.

[Diazo]

Alright, as I was afraid of, I did not wait long enough before taking the mod over and Firov has come back to the KSP scene.

You can find version 1.6.3 of Smart Parts here.

Smart Parts is now found at this thread.