Changes to nodes and interplanetary UI?

[Zo San]

So I played a decent amount of KSP around the end of 2015. Finally I'm back, updated the only mods I was running (Kerbal Alarm Clock and Kerbal Engineer), and reloaded my old save. There were a few minor issues but mostly things seem to work with my old save.

The problem started when I tried to simulate an interplanetary transfer to Moho. I get up into a stable orbit and then I want to start planning the maneuvers to escape Kerbin's gravity, align with and intercept Moho, etc. Maneuver nodes within Kerbin's system seem to work as I remember them more or less, but when I zoom out to an interplanetary view it feels like there are UI elements missing.

1) I remember there being icons that showed where the planets were located. Now all I see is the colored orbit line itself which is brightly colored where the planet has most recently passed and fades to pale where it was a longer time ago. No icon to select or anything else.

2) When I make maneuver nodes in the interplanetary view, I can create them, manipulate them, see the resulting trajectories etc, but then when I click anywhere else to deselect it, the node icon (the little honeycomb) vanishes. The dotted trajectories are still there and if I very carefully hover in that general area I can sometimes select it again, but that icon that makes it easy to spot and select the node just disappears. This doesn't happen when I make maneuver nodes in Kerbin's SOI, only in the interplanetary region.

3) I feel like there used to be a lot more information when you set a planet as target and tried to plan a maneuver to intercept, such as closest approach/pass etc. I can't see this info any more, and have only been able to occasionally get up that relative planar angle figure (forgot the technical name)

Do any of these things sound normal or like they are caused by my own errors, or perhaps caused by the mods, or perhaps caused by my old save? I feel like something's not quite right here.

Thank you very much for reading!

[bewing]

Hmmm, this is a tricky one. Are you looking at this from the Tracking Station, or from the map view of some ship? Have you upgraded your Tracking Station to tier 2?

1. To be extra cute, the planets are supposed to fade in as you zoom out to interplanetary scales. But they are supposed to show up in less than a second. So what you are seeing sounds like a bug.

2. The little honeycomb should always be visible. Always. Sounds like a bug.

3. The close approach and intercept marker algorithm is having a little bug issue at the moment -- that is probably already fixed, but we need the new version. So this is the only one that sounds like what I'm seeing.

Issues #1 and 2 sound like they may well be coming from one of your mods. Is it possible to temporarily switch back to stock to see if they still act the same?

[Zo San]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

Hmmm, this is a tricky one. Are you looking at this from the Tracking Station, or from the map view of some ship? Have you upgraded your Tracking Station to tier 2?

1. To be extra cute, the planets are supposed to fade in as you zoom out to interplanetary scales. But they are supposed to show up in less than a second. So what you are seeing sounds like a bug.

2. The little honeycomb should always be visible. Always. Sounds like a bug.

3. The close approach and intercept marker algorithm is having a little bug issue at the moment -- that is probably already fixed, but we need the new version. So this is the only one that sounds like what I'm seeing.

Issues #1 and 2 sound like they may well be coming from one of your mods. Is it possible to temporarily switch back to stock to see if they still act the same?

Thank you so much for the response bewing! This was from flight mode map view with a ship, and yes I do have the tracking station upgraded to show conics.

Here's an update and what I've done so far. First I tried restarting several times in both x64 and x86, as well as doing quick save and reload to refresh the scene (read about similar problems elsewhere and they said that it helped), but none of those things worked. I investigated it more closely and realized that the craft icon and honeycomb node icon would appear in the interplanetary region if I zoomed in a great deal, but would vanish as I zoomed out far enough to do anything useful like see how my maneuver node trajectories were changing. That seemed to be the underlying issue (icons vanishing when zoomed out) but I couldn't figure out what was causing it.

Then I saw your reply and went with your idea to disable the mods (silly of me not to try this earlier, but thank you again for the recommendation). I pulled both mod folders out and started the game - BAM, things looked completely different. Suddenly I can see all the icons again even when zoomed out. The crafts, the ascending and descending nodes, the close approach, the maneuver node honeycombs, the planets, everything. I basically had no icons earlier but now it looks like before and feels right again.

Here's the weird part though: I put both mods back one at a time, and tried both x64 and x86 launches and nothing has broken it. Now I have both mods running again like I did before and the problem hasn't come back. I was hoping to figure out what caused this glitch and how to fix it but unfortunately I have nothing to report beyond my experience here. Thought I would write it down anyway in case anyone else has a similar issue or it helps track down the bug. I will update this thread if I encounter it again and can try to isolate what happened.

[bewing]

9 hours ago, Zo San said:

I pulled both mod folders out and started the game - BAM, things looked completely different. Suddenly I can see all the icons again even when zoomed out.

Which two mods are they that you are running? Knowing that would give us a little extra info, even if uninstalling & reinstalling fixed it. Glad to hear it's working!

[Zo San]

4 hours ago, bewing said:

Which two mods are they that you are running? Knowing that would give us a little extra info, even if uninstalling & reinstalling fixed it. Glad to hear it's working!

Oh apologies, I mentioned it in the first post but it was in passing - they are Kerbal Alarm Clock (3.7.1.0) and Kerbal Engineer (1.1.1.0) which to my knowledge are the newest versions of each. My KSP clilent is being auto-updated by Steam and is currently 1.1.3.1289.

[bewing]

No, my fault for not rereading with some care. If this ever happens again, I'm going to bet that KER is the culprit -- so try removing that one first and leaving KAC there, and see. And yes, please do let us all know. Mod conflicts are hard to spot, and you've almost got this one pinned down.

[Snark]

Glad to hear it got sorted out!

Since this sounds like a technical issue with mods, rather than a problem with gameplay per se, moving it to the technical support forum for modded installs.