Mod update for 1.1 - how long it will take after 1.1 came out?

[omelaw]

Well, I expect mods made by squad dev will be updated earlier then others (because they saw code and already know what exactly changed in 1.1)

maybe a week later after update?

[Streetwind]

Precisely 438.3495 zorqs and 24574.1 flaps after the start of the upload of v1.1 to the Steam content distribution network, but only if @KasperVld is the one doing the uploading.

I know this because my magic crystal ball told me so.

Edited February 25, 2016 by Streetwind

[FancyMouse]

I thought parts in Asteroid Day is becoming stock in 1.1? Is that what you care about?

[federicoaa]

39 minutes ago, FancyMouse said:

I thought parts in Asteroid Day is becoming stock in 1.1? Is that what you care about?

The probe and solar panel, the telescope is still outside stock.

[Stone Blue]

4 hours ago, omelaw said:

maybe a week later after update?

Ahhhhh...... SOOooooo young and naive to the reality of KSP....

Maybe this could be a new pool after 1.1 drops: How long before all mods are updated for 1.1... LOL

Edited February 25, 2016 by Stone Blue

[FancyMouse]

Just now, Stone Blue said:

Ahhhhh...... SOOooooo young to the reality of KSP....

Maybe this could be a new pool after 1.1 drops: How long before all mods are updated for 1.1...

Before that, the question is, how many will be eventually updated for 1.1...

[Temeter]

More importantly, how much longer does it take until 1.1 gets released in the first place, it's taking so long ~

Edited February 25, 2016 by Temeter

[GreeningGalaxy]

There are three main ways to answer this.

1. The hard way: Bother people who like statistics and see if you can find anyone who collected complete data on how long it took, on average, for mods to update in past big version releases. Failing that, start trawling GitHub pages and look at version histories individually. With a big enough sample, you'll probably get a fairly good idea of what it will be like after 1.1 drops, if it's important enough to you that you're willing to spend a few tens of monotonous hours on that sort of thing.

2. The easy way: Don't bother asking. Mods will update when their creators get around to updating them, and not a moment sooner. There's no way to predict the future on that.

3. Get someone to to tell you their general opinion based on past experience.

My guess is that there will be a few categories of mod update characterstics after a release as big as 1.1 promises to be:
- Mods which are small enough to work fine in 1.1 without any tweaks from previous versions. Probably a pretty short list, given how much is slated to change.
- Mods which only require a few obvious fixes and need only a few minutes of their maintainers' time before they'll work. Expect these to update within hours or days of the release. Also probably a pretty short list, limited to small mods that don't have a lot of stuff in them to break.
- Mods which need substantial effort to work. Big mods (I.E. B9 Aerospace, KSP Interstellar, MechJeb, etc.) which add a lot of new material will take much longer to update. In the past, we've seen updates come around for big mods within a week or two of the release, or not until several months later. It varies a lot depending on how much time a given modder has to work on their project.
- Mods which never update. Some mods may have had their creators move on from them sometime between the last big release and now, and simply will not have a maintainer around to update them, while for others, it's quite possible that the new version will break them so thoroughly that their creators will give up on them.
 

Generally speaking, mods will update after a time roughly proportional to how complex they are. Simple mods that add one or two parts might just work right off the bat, while ones that significantly restructure the game will need more attention before they'll work.

Don't hassle modders to get their updates out faster - Rest assured that they're already working on them as fast as they care to, and are unlikely to speed up if you bother them about it.

[Peder]

"Mod update for 1.1 - how long it will take after 1.1 came out?"

The most popular mods are typical updated within 1-7 days.
During the next 14 days the majority of the other will be ready.

[SAI Peregrinus]

There are a few other ways to answer as well:

Have a ton of money, and hire the authors of the mods you want (or other developers with equivalent skills) to work full-time on them, allowing for fast updates.

Have a ton of free time, and update the mods yourself.

Buy Squad and get them to incorporate the mods you want into the stock game so they're ready upon release.

Etc, etc.

[Cornholio]

41 minutes ago, GreeningGalaxy said:

There are three main ways to answer this.

1. The hard way: Bother people who like statistics and see if you can find anyone who collected complete data on how long it took, on average, for mods to update in past big version releases. Failing that, start trawling GitHub pages and look at version histories individually. With a big enough sample, you'll probably get a fairly good idea of what it will be like after 1.1 drops, if it's important enough to you that you're willing to spend a few tens of monotonous hours on that sort of thing.

2. The easy way: Don't bother asking. Mods will update when their creators get around to updating them, and not a moment sooner. There's no way to predict the future on that.

3. Get someone to to tell you their general opinion based on past experience.

My guess is that there will be a few categories of mod update characterstics after a release as big as 1.1 promises to be:
- Mods which are small enough to work fine in 1.1 without any tweaks from previous versions. Probably a pretty short list, given how much is slated to change.
- Mods which only require a few obvious fixes and need only a few minutes of their maintainers' time before they'll work. Expect these to update within hours or days of the release. Also probably a pretty short list, limited to small mods that don't have a lot of stuff in them to break.
- Mods which need substantial effort to work. Big mods (I.E. B9 Aerospace, KSP Interstellar, MechJeb, etc.) which add a lot of new material will take much longer to update. In the past, we've seen updates come around for big mods within a week or two of the release, or not until several months later. It varies a lot depending on how much time a given modder has to work on their project.
- Mods which never update. Some mods may have had their creators move on from them sometime between the last big release and now, and simply will not have a maintainer around to update them, while for others, it's quite possible that the new version will break them so thoroughly that their creators will give up on them.
 

Generally speaking, mods will update after a time roughly proportional to how complex they are. Simple mods that add one or two parts might just work right off the bat, while ones that significantly restructure the game will need more attention before they'll work.

Don't hassle modders to get their updates out faster - Rest assured that they're already working on them as fast as they care to, and are unlikely to speed up if you bother them about it.

"I don't know and I'm annoyed that you asked."

[sal_vager]

This really belongs in addons.

As to the question, the answer is "No one knows".

[DerekL1963]

15 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

As to the question, the answer is "No one knows".

You could always ask the Magic 8-Ball.

[HebaruSan]

1 hour ago, GreeningGalaxy said:

1. The hard way: Bother people who like statistics and see if you can find anyone who collected complete data on how long it took, on average, for mods to update in past big version releases. Failing that, start trawling GitHub pages and look at version histories individually. With a big enough sample, you'll probably get a fairly good idea of what it will be like after 1.1 drops, if it's important enough to you that you're willing to spend a few tens of monotonous hours on that sort of thing.

In the specific case of 1.1, this method would likely give an underestimate. In previous releases (at least going back a few years), the same version of Unity was being used, which meant that if a mod developer wrote code that depended on that version of Unity, it might still work after the upgrade. Since 1.1 is switching to Unity 5, any code dependent on retired parts of Unity 4 (such as most of the UI, I believe), or on any KSP code that was dependent on such, needs to be rewritten. This means that more mods are affected, and the effect on each mod is more severe than in previous releases. It might make sense to weight the numbers for mod update time by the development time of the underlying release, since the factors that are making 1.1 take a long time will probably not be limited to just SQUAD.

[WWEdeadman]

Honestly, since 1.1 is upgrading to Unity 5, and seeing how much stuff Squad had to completely rework in the game for that, I expect pretty much every single mod in existence to not work the way it should,, without an update, on 1.1.

That said, some might even break to an extent that the creators won't want to fix them. I don't expect that to be many, though.

All in all, I'd say we'll see small mods updated within a few days, and bigger ones within 2 weeks or so. I doubt that a lot will be ready within hours, like on previous updates, though.

[Stone Blue]

I say minimum 4 weeks for 75% of the current mods out there, to be updated for 1.1....

[Padishar]

1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:

Since 1.1 is switching to Unity 5, any code dependent on retired parts of Unity 4 (such as most of the UI, I believe), or on any KSP code that was dependent on such, needs to be rewritten.

1 hour ago, WWEdeadman said:

Honestly, since 1.1 is upgrading to Unity 5, and seeing how much stuff Squad had to completely rework in the game for that,

Why do so many people think that the old GUI/GUILayout API has been removed from Unity 5.  This is not the case.  Squad didn't have to completely rework very much at all.  The wheels, yes.  The UI, no.  They chose to rework the UI because the new UI API in Unity 5 is significantly better than the horrible mixture of 3 different, rather poor APIs that KSP currently uses.  Mods will almost certainly continue to use the old UI system for a considerable time before switching to the new API (if they ever do).

[CobaltWolf]

Don't part mods have to be updated and reexported through Unity 5, even though we're not getting PBR? If so that will actually be the death for any mods whose creators have left, for example HGR.

[NathanKell]

@Padishar OnGui is slooooow, everybody should switch. :]

[sarbian]

And it eats memory

[Svm420]

15 minutes ago, sarbian said:

And it eats memory

Is that the "memory leak" everyone claims?

[sarbian]

(I wrote a long post to explain this but closed the wrong windows after uploading the image in this post... so you get the Wikipedia version)

No, it is not the same thing.

Unity uses mono. When you store object (information) in mono it allocate some memory. This memory is not freed immediately when the object is not needed anymore. Mono periodically scan the whole memory to remove from memory all the unused objects. This is called Garbage Collection

The old UI allocate a lot of object each frame. So you have a bunch of memeory allocated x times per seconds. And when mono need to free that the game freeze shortly. It is the KSP stutter.

My GCMonitor shows that if you open the UI and configure it to show the mono memory. The little red bar at the bottom shows when mono free memory

 

Edited February 25, 2016 by sarbian

[Svm420]

Thank you for the informative post. Will this stutter/GC improve with 1.1, or is that not able to be foreseen?

[sarbian]

Hard to tell. With less garbage one can hope.

But as it was said earlier in the thread the old UI is not gone and mods will most likely still use it. The "new" mono UI was actually added in Unity 4.6 and is already available in KSP 1.0 but nearly no mods use it (only 1 AFAIK). Myself I was waiting since using the same UI system than the dev should hopefully make the transition a bit earlier (may be able to reuse some of their calls).

[Crzyrndm]

1 hour ago, NathanKell said:

@Padishar OnGui is slooooow, everybody should switch. :]

After everything else is working. Uptake will depend a lot on what is required for the new system to work nicely (threshold isn't exactly high here, GUI/GUILayout are a PITA to work with, but the existing plugin (I forget which one) that did use the new system didn't exactly look nice to work with either)

Edited February 25, 2016 by Crzyrndm