Contract Pack: Giving Aircraft a Purpose (GAP) 2.11 - Milestones, Air Flights, Coast Guard (Now Updated for KSP 1.12.5)

[nightingale]

9 hours ago, Steven Mading said:

I frequently have problems with the contracts that are supposed to spawn tourists at the runway that you have to pick up (rather than ones you pre-load into the airplane).

The problem?  It spawns them about 200 meters up in the air.  So they die from the fall before I have anything to do with them.  I hacked my way around it with the "hack gravity" cheat.  I make gravity 0.02% of normal, let them slowly fall and live, then set gravity back to normal before I pick them up.

But it seems weird for them to be spawning that high up instead of on the ground.

I had that same report elsewhere, so safe assumption that it's a CC bug.  Hopefully will be fixed for next release.

[Hoody]

Can confirm. Once I started the passenger missions the dreaded Kerbals 200m in the air bug kicked in. If I stick to the plane building missions and milestones it all works, but passenger ones are messed up big time. Is this pack still under active development? I had a feeling I'd read that the developer was done with it? Such a useful addition.

[nightingale]

2 hours ago, Hoody said:

Can confirm. Once I started the passenger missions the dreaded Kerbals 200m in the air bug kicked in. If I stick to the plane building missions and milestones it all works, but passenger ones are messed up big time. Is this pack still under active development? I had a feeling I'd read that the developer was done with it? Such a useful addition.

Yes, I believe @inigma said that he was on hiatus.

Edited June 24, 2017 by nightingale

[Bit Fiddler]

this is odd as I have never seen this bug, and I do the tourist missions.   however this being said I have always loaded the tourists into the ship while in VAB/SPH.   I have never loaded them "from the runway" like you mention here.  I did not realize it was literally asking me to load them while in "flight mode".

[Dunbaratu]

On 6/23/2017 at 9:15 PM, nightingale said:

I had that same report elsewhere, so safe assumption that it's a CC bug.  Hopefully will be fixed for next release.

I had a look inside the .cfg files for GivingAircraftAPurpose and I noticed it's hardcoding the kerbal spawn altitude with an 'alt = nnn.nn" type of line.

It's not using ContractConfigurator's option to spawn at ground level by omitting the `alt = nnn.nnn` line.

The altitude given for things like Charter-Flight-4 (which is supposed to spawn 4 kerbals at the SPH for you to taxi over to to pick up), is 133m.  I'm pretty sure the terrrain altitude is nowhere near that high.

I commented out the "alt = " line from all the contracts where kerbals are meant to spawn on the ground to see if CC's defaulting to ground is working and if that fixes it.  I'll report more later when I get those contracts again and see if that fixes it.

I know CC had some trouble in the past with spawning on the ground and I suspect that maybe the maintainer of GAP may have resorted to the hardcoded altitudes to work around it... then perhaps SQUAD changed the terrain so it's no longer at the same altitude?

 

Edited June 27, 2017 by Steven Mading

[inigma]

1 hour ago, Steven Mading said:

I had a look inside the .cfg files for GivingAircraftAPurpose and I noticed it's hardcoding the kerbal spawn altitude with an 'alt = nnn.nn" type of line.

It's not using ContractConfigurator's option to spawn at ground level by omitting the `alt = nnn.nnn` line.

The altitude given for things like Charter-Flight-4 (which is supposed to spawn 4 kerbals at the SPH for you to taxi over to to pick up), is 133m.  I'm pretty sure the terrrain altitude is nowhere near that high.

I commented out the "alt = " line from all the contracts where kerbals are meant to spawn on the ground to see if CC's defaulting to ground is working and if that fixes it.  I'll report more later when I get those contracts again and see if that fixes it.

I know CC had some trouble in the past with spawning on the ground and I suspect that maybe the maintainer of GAP may have resorted to the hardcoded altitudes to work around it... then perhaps SQUAD changed the terrain so it's no longer at the same altitude?

 

Correct. At one point the Kerbals would spawn either under ground or in the air. If newer versions of CC allows specifying spawning on ground, feel free to tinker with the cfg to see if that changes it.  I admit I've been sucked into r/l and sometimes other games.  If anyone wants to help me maintain GAP, let me know. Anyone is free to submit changes in Github. Today is truly the first day things have settled down around me.  hopefully the summer is quiet and I can look at GAP in depth and try out the new versions of KSP and CC. Thanks guys for your loyal following!

[Dunbaratu]

19 minutes ago, inigma said:

Correct. At one point the Kerbals would spawn either under ground or in the air. If newer versions of CC allows specifying spawning on ground, feel free to tinker with the cfg to see if that changes it.  I admit I've been sucked into r/l and sometimes other games.  If anyone wants to help me maintain GAP, let me know. Anyone is free to submit changes in Github. Today is truly the first day things have settled down around me.  hopefully the summer is quiet and I can look at GAP in depth and try out the new versions of KSP and CC. Thanks guys for your loyal following!

Okay that didn't seem to fix it (although with how much CC caches things in the game it's hard to tell if my edit actually took effect or if it's running off the old contract info stored somewhere in the save game.

Anyway, I noticed something this time - I was able to go "fly" the "Vessel" for the landed kerbal the K2 rescue mission spawned even before you get there (which shouldn't be allowed, and it doesnt' work from the map view but it does from the flight view where you click on the icon for the kerbal in the distance).  Anyway, when I did that I noticed the following:

The kerbal *DOES* spawn right at the ground.... at FIRST, for a brief fraction of a second as the scene loads in I see myself right down on the ground in the mountain terrain, with trees around me and everything.  Then, as it finsihes loading in the scene suddenly I'm teleported to up in the sky above the terrain, with the kerbal up at the problem altitude.

Something about the process the game goes through as it loads in the kerbal makes it suddenly be up in the sky, when it definitely wasn't at first.  I think something buggy is happening with the "when vessel state is 'landed', move vessel to be at terrain height upon loading" part of the scene loading algorithm.

Perhaps it's spawning slightly below the ground and being "popped" up?  I don't know.

 

[nightingale]

1 hour ago, Steven Mading said:

I had a look inside the .cfg files for GivingAircraftAPurpose and I noticed it's hardcoding the kerbal spawn altitude with an 'alt = nnn.nn" type of line.

It's not using ContractConfigurator's option to spawn at ground level by omitting the `alt = nnn.nnn` line.

The altitude given for things like Charter-Flight-4 (which is supposed to spawn 4 kerbals at the SPH for you to taxi over to to pick up), is 133m.  I'm pretty sure the terrrain altitude is nowhere near that high.

I commented out the "alt = " line from all the contracts where kerbals are meant to spawn on the ground to see if CC's defaulting to ground is working and if that fixes it.  I'll report more later when I get those contracts again and see if that fixes it.

I know CC had some trouble in the past with spawning on the ground and I suspect that maybe the maintainer of GAP may have resorted to the hardcoded altitudes to work around it... then perhaps SQUAD changed the terrain so it's no longer at the same altitude?

Yes, I think that it used to be in stock that "ground" level didn't take into account the KSC model (which is ~60 m above ground) - that's why there are ramps to get up to KSC all around it.  That seems to no longer be the case in KSP 1.3.0.

[Dunbaratu]

8 hours ago, nightingale said:

Yes, I think that it used to be in stock that "ground" level didn't take into account the KSC model (which is ~60 m above ground) - that's why there are ramps to get up to KSC all around it.  That seems to no longer be the case in KSP 1.3.0.

Okay here's another useful data point: for the contract where passenger kerbals spawn next to the runway.  They did spawn on the ground at first.  Then I taxi'd toward them from the plane spawn point.  They were clearly at ground level...

...until I approached within 300 meters of them.  At the very point where their distance marker registered a number < 300 meters they suddenly teleported from the ground to a point a few hundred meters in the air above where thy had been and started falling from there.

That number, 300, is suspicious to me.  It happens to be the "unpack distance" for landed objects on Kerbin.  (The distance when a vessel goes from merely being visual renderered to also having all the physics applied to it).

[nightingale]

1 hour ago, Steven Mading said:

Okay here's another useful data point: for the contract where passenger kerbals spawn next to the runway.  They did spawn on the ground at first.  Then I taxi'd toward them from the plane spawn point.  They were clearly at ground level...

...until I approached within 300 meters of them.  At the very point where their distance marker registered a number < 300 meters they suddenly teleported from the ground to a point a few hundred meters in the air above where thy had been and started falling from there.

That number, 300, is suspicious to me.  It happens to be the "unpack distance" for landed objects on Kerbin.  (The distance when a vessel goes from merely being visual renderered to also having all the physics applied to it).

Yup, KSP treats stuff that's unpacked differently.  It puts stuff on the ground if it has a status of "landed".  But then when it's unpacked, it'll actually look at the altitude, and set the vessel to the correct location.  For correctly placed things this results in a barely noticeable jitter.  For stuff with the wrong altitude, you get massive insta-launches instead.

[Dunbaratu]

1 hour ago, nightingale said:

Yup, KSP treats stuff that's unpacked differently.  It puts stuff on the ground if it has a status of "landed".  But then when it's unpacked, it'll actually look at the altitude, and set the vessel to the correct location.  For correctly placed things this results in a barely noticeable jitter.  For stuff with the wrong altitude, you get massive insta-launches instead.

If I edited the .cfg files for a contract pack, after I already had been playing a career and have a saved game for it, do the new settings take effect for newly spawned instances of the same kind of contract in that career, or is there some cached data that remains in the save game that prevents the new .cfg file settings I made from being used?  (I'm not talking about the contracts I already accepted - I'd expect those to stay the same.  I'm talking about newly offered copies of the same kind of contract that didn't appear until *after* having edited the .cfg file) I ask because the contracts are still behaving like they have hardcoded altitudes for SpawnKerbal even though I commented the "alt = ...." line out of the config.  I'm wondering if I've actually accurately tested my change or whether I'm still seeing the effects of the old settings because something is cached.

 

Edited June 28, 2017 by Steven Mading

[nightingale]

1 hour ago, Steven Mading said:

If I edited the .cfg files for a contract pack, after I already had been playing a career and have a saved game for it, do the new settings take effect for newly spawned instances of the same kind of contract in that career, or is there some cached data that remains in the save game that prevents the new .cfg file settings I made from being used?  (I'm not talking about the contracts I already accepted - I'd expect those to stay the same.  I'm talking about newly offered copies of the same kind of contract that didn't appear until *after* having edited the .cfg file) I ask because the contracts are still behaving like they have hardcoded altitudes for SpawnKerbal even though I commented the "alt = ...." line out of the config.  I'm wondering if I've actually accurately tested my change or whether I'm still seeing the effects of the old settings because something is cached.

It's a bug in Contract Configurator (already fixed for the next release).  If you really want to hack it in the meantime, go to each contract-spawned Kerbal and add the following to them (or replace the existing value if one is there):

hgt = 0.276894391

 

[Dunbaratu]

8 hours ago, nightingale said:

It's a bug in Contract Configurator (already fixed for the next release).  If you really want to hack it in the meantime, go to each contract-spawned Kerbal and add the following to them (or replace the existing value if one is there):

hgt = 0.276894391

 

Okay I'll try that for now.  So is the problem that they spawn with their feet under the ground and that makes them "collide" with the terrain?

[nightingale]

No - the problem is that it now seems taking the KSC model's height into account if a height isn't specified in the save, which ends up putting it incorrectly into the air.  It could arguably be a stock bug, but non-modded KSP would never have a vessel without the height specified in the save, so it's not 100% clear.

And note that "height" and "altitude" are two completely different things of course, just to make things complicated.

[goldenpeach]

When I try to build the craft for the first glider/airplane contract, the mod doesn't seem to detect the wing(the one given by purchasing it from the starting contracts) I'm using for it.

 

Is it a known problem?

[occ]

On 6/28/2017 at 0:30 AM, nightingale said:

It's a bug in Contract Configurator (already fixed for the next release).  If you really want to hack it in the meantime, go to each contract-spawned Kerbal and add the following to them (or replace the existing value if one is there):

hgt = 0.276894391

Great, but as someone who does not know which contracts those are, (I haven't played GAP that much) could someone list the files I need to do this to?

[nightingale]

On 02/08/2017 at 1:09 AM, occ said:

Great, but as someone who does not know which contracts those are, (I haven't played GAP that much) could someone list the files I need to do this to?

You should now be able to just grab the new Contract Configurator, cancel the existing contract and then be good to go.

[The Mechanic]

First of all, this is a great contract pack.

However, I had an issue with the first barnstorming contract. Whenever I accepted it, it would automatically fail on launch. Since I didn't find anything about anyone else having this issue before I did some digging through the log and managed to track down the cause.

[LOG 12:25:35.936] [INFO] ContractConfigurator.FacilityRequirement: Contract Wright-Barnstorm: requirement Facility was not met.

In the file for the contract (Wright-Barnstorm.cfg), it said this in the relevant section for the facility requirement:

	REQUIREMENT
	{
		name = Facility
		type = Facility
		
		facility = ResearchAndDevelopment		
		minLevel = 3
		
		invertRequirement = true
		
	}

I'm not sure what this is supposed to do but it doesn't say anything in the contract text about the level of the R&D facility. Mine was still level 1 and it's an early contract so a level 3 facility requirement doesn't really make sense? I assume "invertRequirement = true" should turn this into any level but level 3? I changed this to:

	REQUIREMENT
	{
		name = Facility
		type = Facility
		
		facility = ResearchAndDevelopment		
		minLevel = 1

		// invertRequirement = true
		
	}

This stopped the contract from automatically failing on launch the next time I attempted it.

[Beetlecat]

8 hours ago, The Mechanic said:

First of all, this is a great contract pack.

However, I had an issue with the first barnstorming contract. Whenever I accepted it, it would automatically fail on launch. Since I didn't find anything about anyone else having this issue before I did some digging through the log and managed to track down the cause.

[LOG 12:25:35.936] [INFO] ContractConfigurator.FacilityRequirement: Contract Wright-Barnstorm: requirement Facility was not met.

This stopped the contract from automatically failing on launch the next time I attempted it.

Awesome! I'll have to make this tweak. I've been wanting to try this one.  If the facility level requirement wasn't met, wouldn't that preclude being offered it in the first place? An apparent bug.

[inigma]

I really need to dig back into KSP and fix some of the bugs you guys have reported. heh.  If anyone wants to take over the mod though, they are welcome to offer.   This seems like the never-ending "I'll get to it just after I finish my current project..." project. I'm working on setting up a website for a friend at the moment. It's the only project I have remaining this summer.

Edited August 25, 2017 by inigma

[The Mechanic]

15 hours ago, Beetlecat said:

Awesome! I'll have to make this tweak. I've been wanting to try this one.  If the facility level requirement wasn't met, wouldn't that preclude being offered it in the first place? An apparent bug.

I'd think so but it did show up and then failed only after switching to an active vessel (so either on launch or when switching to a plane on the runway for example). Maybe @nightingale has an idea what's going on there? 

Also, since the contract is only supposed to show up for R&D levels 1 and 2 it might be more in the spirit of the contract pack to do it this way (hopefully I got it right how this works ) :

	REQUIREMENT
	{
		name = Facility
		type = Facility
		
		facility = ResearchAndDevelopment		
		minLevel = 1
		maxLevel = 2
		
	}

 

Edited August 26, 2017 by The Mechanic

[RHodeidra]

Anyone mind telling me if this pack (which seems quite nice) is 1.3-acceptable?

[Jacke]

1 hour ago, RHodeidra said:

Anyone mind telling me if this pack (which seems quite nice) is 1.3-acceptable?

I took a quick look and like most Contract Pack mods, it's a series of configs for Module Manager and Contract Configurator.  If you have those mods for KSP 1.3.0, this mod should work under 1.3.0.

[EladBebe]

On 8/6/2017 at 9:22 PM, nightingale said:

You should now be able to just grab the new Contract Configurator, cancel the existing contract and then be good to go.

Can anyone tell me if the mod is playable if I’m having the latest Contract Configurator  and KSP version 1.2.2?

I’m still experiencing “Kerbals falling from the sky” as I approach them on K2 rescue mission...

Is there a fix to it?

Would really appreciate any help as this mod looks Awesome (:

[oniontrain]

This was my absolute favorite contract pack, I'm going to just install it in 1.3 with the latest CC and report back when I get some time.