OPM in stock?

[Red Iron Crown]

On 8/11/2016 at 7:56 AM, AlamoVampire said:

@Hevak firstly, i dont code,thus a mod that is designed to allow scripting is a no go. Period. Beyond that is not being discussed. Secondly to me a mod not improving Ksp gameplay or being directly utilized such as mechjeb or chatterer and is laying dormant, is a mod that has no place eatting resources. It would be like getting TAC life support and never launching a kerbal, or say getting kerbal alarm clock and only running a single mission and never setting an alarm. To that end, i dont code and do not alter files for ksp, thus its wasted resources. I dont expect you understand what im driving at.

I don't think you fully understand what ModuleManager does, or what it is for. It is exactly intended to prevent editing of stock KSP files or files from other mods, it allows mods to edit cfg files on the fly as they are loaded so that directly editing the versions on disk is unnecessary, essentially allowing mods to modify stock and other mods at runtime while leaving the originals intact. After loading it does nothing and consumes no resources outside of a few kB of RAM. 

It is not a programmer tool, though writing the cfgs for it is a bit like programming. It is a framework that allows other mods to work properly, especially with each other. Sort of like how Kopernicus is a framework for making or modifying the existing celestial bodies. 

You are certainly free to not use mods that you don't want, but I think denying yourself MM does you a great disservice and hugely limits which mods you can use (because MM is so immensely useful, nearly every mod depends on it). 

[Alshain]

On 8/11/2016 at 5:26 AM, AlamoVampire said:

@Hevak firstly, i dont code,thus a mod that is designed to allow scripting is a no go. Period. Beyond that is not being discussed. Secondly to me a mod not improving Ksp gameplay or being directly utilized such as mechjeb or chatterer and is laying dormant, is a mod that has no place eatting resources. It would be like getting TAC life support and never launching a kerbal, or say getting kerbal alarm clock and only running a single mission and never setting an alarm. To that end, i dont code and do not alter files for ksp, thus its wasted resources. I dont expect you understand what im driving at.

ModuleManager is a library and API used by other mods so that they don't have to each maintain a set of code that essentially does the same thing.  It kinda works like this.  Squad releases a new KSP version, it breaks something.  Sarbian releases a new ModuleManager version, all mods depending on it now work again (assuming no other issues in their unique code).  Without the common library, each mod developer would have to fix the problem on their own.  So dozens of programmers using their time to fix one bug instead of one programmer fixing the bug and everybody else reaping the benefit.

You may not know it but you have hundreds of thousands of these code libraries on your computer.  Unless you suspect it is malicious (which I can confirm MM is not) or badly programmed with inefficient code (which I can confirm MM is not) then there is no cause for alarm.  You are actually more likely to end up with more efficient code with libraries than without, again back to multiple developers developing the same task in their own way, at least one of them is going to do a bad job of it.

Edited August 16, 2016 by Alshain

[RocketSquid]

On 8/11/2016 at 6:26 AM, AlamoVampire said:

@Hevak firstly, i dont code,thus a mod that is designed to allow scripting is a no go. Period.

Module Manager patches are no closer to scripting than stock configs are. I think I can safely say that most mod users who have MM do not code, and in many cases haven't the slightest idea what ModuleManager actually does.

[AlamoVampire]

I seemingly cant post legit concerns with out getting mocked. Thus i delete this posts. I have legit concerns about modulemanager and you people think me a lunatic. 

The fact you people choose to belittle me, mock me and ride me made me delete and alter this to what you see. 

This is a sad affair when people choose to malign and mock instead of understand. My final words are thus: module manager should NOT BE REQUIRED. It should be an OPTION. Its that simple. 

I saw it making changes with out my consent. I do not like that. Respect that from me.

 

Edited August 17, 2016 by AlamoVampire
Haters and mockers make posting impossible

[regex]

9 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

I ran OPM and Kopernicus ONCE. Saw that module manager was altering my game by applying updates. Updates I did NOT agree to or ask for. This to me is virus and malware behavior. Yes I do know that you can set it and forget it.

It's interesting that literally thousands of players use these mods and we have ... zero recorded incidences of malware activity that I am aware of.  There is a reason source code for mods must be available if the mod is advertised on this site.

If that's not enough, Squad hired modders who use ModuleManager in their mods.  If you can't trust Squad how can you trust KSP?

9 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

But as I have 0.0000 skill as a programmer I stay away from things that allow coding. There is a dark reason for this and frankly I will not share.

Not sure if trolling ...

Seriously baffled right now.

[AlamoVampire]

I leave you this: under the loading bar it says module manager is applying updates. 

Thus i stand on what i said.

[RocketSquid]

Just now, AlamoVampire said:

I ran OPM and Kopernicus ONCE. Saw that module manager was altering my game by applying updates. Updates I did NOT agree to or ask for. This to me is virus and malware behavior. Yes I do know that you can set it and forget it. But as I have 0.0000 skill as a programmer I stay away from things that allow coding. There is a dark reason for this and frankly I will not share.

It does not have the ability to alter anything except for .cfg files, which cannot physically affect anything outside of the game. Anything MM could do, you could undo by just deleting. Also, you did agree by installing it.

Just now, AlamoVampire said:

If I do not know what changes are actively happening by way of a change log for example, the change may be malicious. The change may be benign. I just do not know. If I do not know, I do nor use. It to me is akin to me making you a meal, deliberately refusing to tell you what is in it or if it has allergens. You would not place a bet on your health but some mods demand I place a bet on: my games health, my other mods health and most importantly my machines health. This is an unacceptable risk. Period.

First, it would be more akin to you only giving the ingredients if specifically asked. You can quite easily see the changes, just look for MM patches. Kopernicus doesn't have any of its own, and OPM only modifies Kopernicus and stock science experiment flavor text. If you want to see exactly what it does, read this and then read the .cfgs in OPM and its various subfolders. That will tell you exactly what each patch does and what it modifies far better than a change log could.

 

In case you don't want to do all that, I happen to know what the MM patches in OPM do. Every patch called "planetname.cfg" edits Kopernicus's list of planets to include "planetname". For example, Sarnus.cfg edits Kopernicus.cfg and adds a planet called Sarnus in a particular orbit. The only exception is Eeloo.cfg, which merely edits Kopernicus's planet list to put Eeloo in orbit around Sarnus. Of the other configs, all but StockScienceMultipliers, OPM_Resources and OPM_ScienceDefs alter mods you don't have and are thus dormant. The three remaining patches, respectively, modify Kopernicus's planet list to change science values for stock planets, modify the contract generator list to ensure you don't get contracts to mine gas giants, and modify science definitions to add new flavor text.

Just now, AlamoVampire said:

This again is why OPM should be stock or at least be able to run with out module manager. 

It would be physically impossible for OPM to run properly without MM unless people are willing to do some serious work. If you are willing to do some serious work, I can probably walk you through updating the .cfgs to work without MM. Remember, the final effect will be exactly the same, but more likely to have errors and harder to update than if you had done it using MM, but if you're really that scared of a poorly worded loading message, go ahead.

22 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

I leave you this: under the loading bar it says module manager is applying updates. 

Thus i stand on what i said.

Read the MM thread.

 

[Alshain]

55 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

I leave you this: under the loading bar it says module manager is applying updates. 

Thus i stand on what i said.

It applies patches dynamically as it loads.  So basically it loads the part into RAM as a copy, then Module Manager tells the game to alter that part according to the scripts people make for it.  But it only alters the active copy in RAM, it doesn't alter the saved file on the hard drive.  So if you were to remove a particular patch and restart the game, it would revert back to stock.  This is what it is telling you at the bottom of the load screen, how many patches it is applying to the parts dynamically.  Some scripts alter more than one part, so that is actually informative for those of us who make MM patches.

If you want an example of what MM can do, just click the second link in my signature.  There are many patches there that range from simply ease of use changes to outright gameplay changes.  These are the same kind of patches that other mods use, they just bundle them with their own creations as well.  Most importantly, it is all script (i.e. text files outside of MM itself) and there is nothing that a text file can do to harm your computer.

One other thing, the author/maintainer of MM just got hired by Squad so that should alleviate concerns as well.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Alshain

[Red Iron Crown]

8 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

I leave you this: under the loading bar it says module manager is applying updates.

Yes, it is applying the changes requested of it by other mods. That's what it does, that's what it is for. The cfgs that it uses to apply these changes are readable in their mod folders.

The main problem it is meant to solve is mod interaction. Say I add TAC-LS because I want more challenge for crewed missions. TAC comes with a few parts, so those are usable, but what about adding the new resources to stock pods? Should the TAC maintainer include replacement cfgs for the stock parts to overwrite the regular ones? What if I then add another mod that wants to add something to the pods? Now I have two cfgs to choose from instead of the original, which have to be merged correctly for everything to work.

This is where ModuleManager comes in: Instead of maintaining separate configs, it lets the modder include scripts that change parts as they load, along the lines of "When loading Command Pod Mk1, add X Oxygen add Y water to its resources". This has two huge benefits:

- Multiple mods can make changes to the same parts without conflict

- Crowdsourcing mod support for other mods

The first is the obvious, immediately visible one as it removes the onus of the mod user to maintain cfg whiles when adding or removing mods. But the latter is almost as important: Because such a large pool of people know how to write MM cfgs it becomes much easier to make, say, a station parts pack work with a life support mod. Either mod can add this support, and users can tweak that cross support to their liking if they choose.

Their are other functions of MM as well, but that's the big one that makes it so popular.

[Harry Rhodan]

9 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

This is a sad affair when people choose to malign and mock instead of understand. My final words are thus: module manager should NOT BE REQUIRED. It should be an OPTION. Its that simple. 

As far as I know it isn't required. You could simply remove MM and then read through the patch files and try to apply every modification that they would have done automatically to the relevant files manually. Depending on the amount of patches this might take you from a few hours to a couple of weeks and you would have to do it anew for every update of the mod or the game.

[TheSaint]

15 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

I leave you this: under the loading bar it says module manager is applying updates. 

Thus i stand on what i said.

You do realize that, technically, any dll file that is executed by the system could contain malware, don't you? So if you don't trust Module Manager because you think it could be downloading malware onto your system, you therefore logically cannot trust any mod which contains a file with a dll file extension. I think that if any KSP mod were installing malware word would get around pretty fast. 

If you really want to be safe, do what I do. I have my gaming PC, where I do all of my gaming, web surfing, etc. All of the high-risk activities. If it gets compromised, I lose nothing of consequence. I can format the hard drive, reinstall the OS from scratch and have it back to exactly where it is right now in about an hour. Then in the office I have the secure PC, which is a cheap office-grade PC with a ton of storage. I do all of my financials, photos, work-from-home access, etc, on that one. When I'm not using it, it's turned off. The odds of it getting compromised are much lower. 

[Alshain]

4 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

You do realize that, technically, any dll file that is executed by the system could contain malware, don't you? So if you don't trust Module Manager because you think it could be downloading malware onto your system, you therefore logically cannot trust any mod which contains a file with a dll file extension. I think that if any KSP mod were installing malware word would get around pretty fast. 

That is why Squad requires the source be published.  If any one mod developer did something... unethical... a potential dozens of programmers are there to find it.  It's not a perfect guard, but there are other ways people find problems like that too.  Add them all together and it's pretty hard to get something by everyone.

I feel like this conversation/education of MM and mod security is very important, but also completely dragged the original topic off onto a rabbit trail.  Since @Red Iron Crown is here, maybe this conversation could be split?

Edited August 17, 2016 by Alshain

[Red Iron Crown]

I have good reason to believe AlamoVampire is satisfied with ModuleManager's safety, so I don't think this particular line of discussion needs to continue or be split off.

[Van Disaster]

I think there is a point that needs to be made here for someone who's not aware of how computers work:

* The code which makes up a program is stored on your storage device ( call it disk )
* When you run a program, a copy of that code is loaded into memory
* When that program loads data from the disk so it can do it's thing, a copy of that data is loaded into memory, and the program proceeds to merrily modify it and do whatever else it wants.
* If the program has to save something, only at that point is the original data on disk modified.
 

Modulemanager modifies the copy of data in memory every time you load the game, so the original data on disk doesn't have to be touched. That's the whole point of it. If you don't want ModuleManager, then you'll have to edit the original data on the disk, including quite possibly original Squad files. Every time you update the game, or refresh your install, you will need to do those edits again.

Edited August 18, 2016 by Van Disaster

[AlamoVampire]

This mod frankly needs to be stock. The headache is it causing me to try to make work, which its REFUSING to work, as in, its bloody hanging up while trying to load KSP, is just not worth the blasted headache. More information on my issue can be found in the OPM thread. 

[Alshain]

It doesn't work so you want it to be stock?  That makes absolutely no sense at all.

[TheSaint]

Works fine for me. I was just sending a probe to Sarnus last night. 

[Red Iron Crown]

12 minutes ago, Alshain said:

It doesn't work so you want it to be stock?  That makes absolutely no sense at all.

Presumably if it was stockified it would work right out of the box and wouldn't require any troubleshooting.

[AlamoVampire]

@Red Iron Crown Is right. 

[Alshain]

1 hour ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Presumably if it was stockified it would work right out of the box and wouldn't require any troubleshooting.

Oh I see now, I don't know why that didn't click when I read it the first time lol.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

IMO adding one or two new bodies designed to be more challenging than the current ones would be a nice addition for the veteran players. At the same time, I am more inclined to favor the development/enrichment of the current ones- I think adding some (more or less avoidable) dangerous elements would be fun, and would add challenges and bragging rights for the more experienced players.

Edited August 19, 2016 by Waxing_Kibbous