[1.8.x] Monthly Budgets 5.0.1 (22/12/2019) - UP FOR ADOPTION

[severedsolo]

1 hour ago, Filigan said:

the one smal bitter pill is that this mod feels a little awkward alongside Strategia. I'm not quite comfortable to ask for it, since i cant come up with any good ideas myself, but maybe sometime in the future you (and nightingale), or some other talented player comes up with a compatibility patch.

 

What's the issue with Strategia? As long as you stay away from "Free Ice Cream" I think it should be ok? I may be able to fix some things, but need to know where the issues are.

[Filigan]

I wouldnt even call it an issue (free icecream asside ^^), it just feels strange at fist climpse, when you look at things like the mun/minmus/insertplanetname program, the Probe strategies, to boldly go, or Massive Scale launches, .. where Money rewards play a big role.

Those rewards on one side might be very handy to take on projects, like upgrading buildings, that would otherwise exeed your budget. However, you have to be very carefull with your timing otherwise this money will simply "vanish" at the end of the Month, this is what i acutally talk about.

[severedsolo]

29 minutes ago, Filigan said:

Those rewards on one side might be very handy to take on projects, like upgrading buildings, that would otherwise exeed your budget. However, you have to be very carefull with your timing otherwise this money will simply "vanish" at the end of the Month, this is what i acutally talk about.

It shouldn't be "vanishing money" at the end of the month. If your current funds are higher than the budget that would have been allocated to you, it just doesn't give you anything, and deducts your costs from your available funds.

You aren't losing out, because costs are deducted from budgets too.

[Filigan]

hm... ok picking some rather random numbers here:

Montly budget 100.000

Montly cost: 20.000

Current funds: 0

Finishing the Mun Program on the last day of the month: gain 25.000

Next Day i get my new budget funds get set to 80.000

 

in a situation like this the 25k reward for finishing the mun program will more or less be "lost", unless i sneak in a quick construction order, before the new Budget get calculated.

 

 

 

Anyway, i will just keep playing for now, since this budget in a form like this is a very new experience and maybe i just need to get used to it 

[Shadriss]

I think you have it wrong, Fiigan...

Using your numbers. your funds at EOM would be 125,000. The mod would then hit EOM, see you have more than the budget of 80,000, and then subtract ONLY the 20,000 in monthly costs. This would leave you with 105,000 in funds, with the only 'loss' of funds being the actual costs.

 

On another note, I like the idea shown here. I wonder if, however, a hybrid solution between this and stock might be more realistic. NASA was government funded, and that style applies to this mod pretty decently. But did they not also take outside contracts for satellite launches, providing a second income source? As I understand it, this mod removes the additional funding contacts would create. The budget calculation based on reputation is a good idea... I just wonder if converting all contracts fund rewards to reputation gains instead doesn't kill some of the drive. I haven't had a chance to mess with this yet (waiting for the full 1.2 version), but I'd imagine any government (especially a Kerbal Government who watches rockets explode have rapid unplanned disassembles on a regular basis) would encourage private sector contracts as a way to defray costs. In short - the budget mechanic I explained above could still be used as a kind of fallback for when contract rewards aren't providing enough funds for... whatever.

[severedsolo]

@Shadriss I've added an option to disable the contract interceptor. Release Soon™ (also thank you - you explained that much better than I did)

Edited October 13, 2016 by severedsolo

[Shadriss]

Here to support! And thanks for that option... and the oh-so-clear release date! In the meantime, I've installed the prerelease, and I do have one other request/recommendation - replace the sliders with direct number inputs for the multipliers. That way, if I want an EXACT number, (say 2500) I can type it instead of fiddling around with a slider until I get frustrated and say close enough.

[severedsolo]

1 hour ago, Shadriss said:

replace the sliders with direct number inputs for the multipliers. That way, if I want an EXACT number, (say 2500) I can type it instead of fiddling around with a slider until I get frustrated and say close enough.

Blame Squad. The stock settings have sliders, I don't think there is a way to input directly (without writing a GUI myself, but that's a hassle).

What you can do though, is open up your persistence file and look for "BudgetSettings" - all the options are in there and can accept exact numbers, assuming you use the right format (basically, don't try and use decimals for anything but friendlyInterval). The names aren't as friendly, but you should be able to figure out what they do. The only one that may not be obvious is "friendlyInterval" which is " Budget Interval (Kerbin Days)" in the old version (it's called "friendly" because the game logs time in seconds, but I didn't want you to have to put seconds in, so I convert it for you).

Without further ado:

Monthly Budgets 2.0 Released!

• Recompiled against KSP 1.2
• Integrated settings into stock difficulty menus
• Data is now saved in the persistence file and not in a separate file.
• Fixed toolbar not destroying itself properly.
• Mod will no longer unexpectedly kill itself if the first save loaded is not a Career save.
• Added "Emergency Funding" option to GUI. Note this costs rep, and has diminishing returns. Full documentation will be added to first post.
• Fixed EVA kerbals counting towards Vessel maintenance costs.
• Added option to disable the Contract Interceptor.
• Added option to have reputation automatically decay by a set percentage each budget cycle.

-----------------------

*Please note the major version number change. This is NOT backwards compatible with previous versions of this mod (1.2 pre-releases not withstanding). At the very least it will reset all your settings, and force a budget cycle straight away. Not sure what else it will do/if it will even work, I didn't test it, as it's a major version change. Incompatible with KSP 1.1.3.*

 

Edited October 13, 2016 by severedsolo

[maculator]

36 minutes ago, severedsolo said:

Data is now saved in the persistence file and not in a separate file.

I wonder whats the benefit of this? I always thought saving in seperate files is the way to go since the persitence gets bloated anyways?

I'm just curious.

[severedsolo]

2 minutes ago, maculator said:

I wonder whats the benefit of this? I always thought saving in seperate files is the way to go since the persitence gets bloated anyways?

I'm just curious.

The new stock settings menu (which is all the configurable stuff) saves itself to persistence anyway. This left me with one line (lastUpdate) - seems a bit silly to create a whole new file for one line.

 

Edited October 13, 2016 by severedsolo

[maculator]

Thanks for the reply. I usually switch mods at some point of a play through and then when I browse my persitence (because I'm bored and curious) I find all kinds of stuff in there wich I know I havent been using in years.

[severedsolo]

12 hours ago, maculator said:

Thanks for the reply. I usually switch mods at some point of a play through and then when I browse my persitence (because I'm bored and curious) I find all kinds of stuff in there wich I know I havent been using in years.

It's just easier, if every mod had to open their own stream and write their own file every time the game saved it would cause slowdown (reading/writing to a Hdd is slow - doubly so for small files, as they probably aren't all stored in the same part of your hard drive) - better to use the stream the game has already opened, and just tack it onto the write thats already being done.

[klgraham1013]

Thanks for the update.  Looking forward to giving this a try.

[aquilux]

Oooohhh boy! I've been looking for something like this for a while! This is much more like real life budgets work, though those are usually yearly (Source: was in the navy for 8+ years. October got really interesting as you either tried your best to spend what you had left to maximise what you got paid, or had you transferring fuel between jets because you're coming up short and can't fly some of them but have to keep flying). I even got to the point of requesting it. I had thought the mechanics through a fair amount so if you want to you can take a look at my super old mod request here: 

 

[severedsolo]

@aquilux - You clearly travelled back in time and stole my idea. Only explanation for it

In all seriousness, that's scary... pretty much everything you put there is stuff that's already in the mod. I don't remember reading your post beforehand, but I did spend a little time reading threads about budgeting mods/funding changes to see what people wanted from it, and incorporating stuff I liked. (Most of it came from the "Rethinking KSP's career mode" thread actually, if I remember rightly.) Maybe I did read your post, and just forgot about it.

I feel like I inadvertantly ripped you off but hey, at least you'll enjoy the mod.

 

[RabbitOfDogs]

@severedsolo I've been using your mods since it was just the space station contracts... Somehow I never noticed this one!

Downloaded...

Installed...

Here we go!

[aquilux]

2 hours ago, severedsolo said:

@aquilux - You clearly travelled back in time and stole my idea. Only explanation for it

In all seriousness, that's scary... pretty much everything you put there is stuff that's already in the mod. I don't remember reading your post beforehand, but I did spend a little time reading threads about budgeting mods/funding changes to see what people wanted from it, and incorporating stuff I liked. (Most of it came from the "Rethinking KSP's career mode" thread actually, if I remember rightly.) Maybe I did read your post, and just forgot about it.

I feel like I inadvertantly ripped you off but hey, at least you'll enjoy the mod.

 

Hey, this is a good thing for me. I had requested someone make it as I do not have the required skills. Now you have.

[AliceTheGorgon]

[removed]

Edited August 24, 2017 by AliceTheGorgon
Pruning old internet accounts.

[Snillum101]

2 hours ago, AliceTheGorgon said:

I'm getting a weird thing where every time I exit the VAB it ticks over the budget, subtracting the crew wages, and dropping my rep to 0 (even though rep decay seems to only be set to 10%).

It doesn't seem to happen on a completely new save, but I've got a save that it's 100% reproducible on:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4ps98pMWaZnWUdDZDBkemZYeTg/view

The save had some other mods at the start (nothing that seems like it should cause this though), but it's still reproducible when loading it in a KSP install with only Monthly Budgets.

Edit: It also seems to do it when selecting "Launch" from the VAB instead of exiting.

I'm also getting this behaviour when launching and when exiting the VAB. Not 100% of the time but often enough to cause issues.

 

Really like the premise of this mod though.

[severedsolo]

@AliceTheGorgon @Snillum101 - Yeah thanks for that. In previous versions the mod didn't save while you were in the editor for reasons that escape me now. This used to be fine, because we had a separate file we were reading from, but as we're now saving to the persistent, the game is saving it without those lines. When you exit the editor, the mod notices and tries to correct it.

The rep thing is a separate issue which was exposed by this, I was converting the RepDecay setting twice, so effectively it was trying to take 100% of your reputation instead of 10%....

While debugging I also noticed an issue where it was trying to check how long it had been since lastUpdate before it had loaded it from the persistent file, so I changed it to initialise with garbage data, and stop processing if it finds that garbage data.

So: Monthly Budgets 2.1 Released!

• Fixed data not saving in the editor.
• Fixed RepDecay taking 190% of your rep instead of 10%

@AliceTheGorgon - the save you provided seems to have something wrong with it's lastUpdate parameter (probably due to the editor issue) - so the first time you try and load that save it may try and run a budget cycle anyway. Subsequent saves and reloads work fine.

 

Edited October 15, 2016 by severedsolo

[AliceTheGorgon]

[removed]

Edited August 24, 2017 by AliceTheGorgon
Pruning old internet accounts.

[Shadriss]

Hip hip hooray! It's bug-stomping daaaaaaaaaaaay!

I love an author that responds...

[loki130]

Is it possible to have half-days in the budgeting time? I'm thinking of playing with quarterly budgets, but that's 106.5 days.

[severedsolo]

27 minutes ago, loki130 said:

Is it possible to have half-days in the budgeting time? I'm thinking of playing with quarterly budgets, but that's 106.5 days.

Yup, you'll have to go into your persistence file and change friendlyInterval directly (I think the sliders only do whole numbers) but it won't freak out if you feed it a decimal for that particular parameter.

Just bear in mind that the update interval is accurate to the second, but the Gui is only accurate to the day, so if you start feeding it decimals the "next budget awarded" in the gui may be off by a day sometimes due to rounding.

 

Edited October 16, 2016 by severedsolo

[loki130]

Thanks. Also, if you happen to take requests, I have a couple ideas:

First, it would be nice to have a mechanic to retire old satellites, when they have no more function or when they fall out of contact, in order to reduce costs.

Second, I'm not quite sure how you'd implement this, but it might make sense to make multiple deaths in a single crash have a lower impact than the same number of deaths in consecutive crashes--the idea being that the public can forgive a single failure that happened to involve multiple kerbals more than repeated failures (And also I won't worry about losing over half my funding in a single Mk1-2 crash).

Thanks for your work.