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

[sjbuggs]

In a career game, is there a recommended route for raising the funds for KSC upgrades?  Although there is a role playing aspect to using MB + KCT to bank money, it still feels a bit exploity.

[severedsolo]

<Post removed as it's largely irrelevant to this mod. Development of Monthly Budgets will continue>

Edited May 27, 2017 by severedsolo

[smotheredrun]

Sorry to hear about your daughter.  That has to be rough.  You gotta take care of family first.  Thanks for the hard work.  

I have enjoyed Monthly Budgets for a long while now, and happily it has thrown a monkey wrench into my current career (forgot about a rather important contract = little to no money = sell sell sell!*) so now I have to work up my funds again!

 

*KCT is installed so I have had many ships and modules paid for and cued, and had to scrap them!  

Thanks again!!!

Edited April 14, 2017 by smotheredrun

[MarcAFK]

Just a small suggestion. The 'MonthlyBudgets' window calculates the due date by the original Kerbin calendar. It's out of whack when you use earth time.

If you change this to reflect the 'earth time setting' It would be good to add an additional 4 times multiplier to the 'friendlyInterval' in this case too. Not a big deal though. Everything else seems to be working as expected.

For anyone else using this with earth time, you can't really make the budget not become misaligned with the calendar. The best I could do was set the multiplier to 365 which ensured that I got 4 budgets a year, Each always falling on the same day which prevented the budget from creeping or receding as the years passed.

Edited May 2, 2017 by MarcAFK
Edit

[severedsolo]

Monthly Budgets 2.6 Released

• Fixed tourists being paid wages
• Recompiled for 1.3
• Added master "mod enabled" switch to difficulty settings.

NOTE: This build was originally made for 1.2.2 and then recompiled against 1.3 - it therefore hasn't been tested on 1.3 so please report any issues.

 

[theonegalen]

Thanks for the mod update!

[severedsolo]

Two releases in as many days - whaaaat?

Monthly Budgets 2.7 Released

• Budgets will no longer assume you live on Kerbin, and will be adjusted to match the solar periods of whatever the homeworld is (doesn't fix "Earth Time" - but if you are using RSS will no longer have to multiply everything by 4, and will also work with Planet Packs etc.)

The GUI will also reflect "local time" - so if you aren't using the stock system it will show "local time" as the next budget, and the settings will also use "local days" when working out when the next one should be.

Edit: Wow that doesn't even make sense to me. Let me try again:

If you are using a homeworld that does not have 6 hour days and 427 day years, Monthly Budgets will accomodate it in the GUI and settings menu. That is, you no longer have to do the math when adjusting your settings, MB will do it for you.

Edited May 29, 2017 by severedsolo

[Epiphanic]

I recently gave this mod a look and noticed a small bug (or graphical error). I had unassigned Kerbals costing $1000/month but the GUI predicted expenses line said $500/month. If I changed that particular slider in the settings menu the predicted expense line would update to exactly half of whatever the value was set at. I'm not sure if this is simply a graphical error or if the wrong amount is being deducted.

[severedsolo]

1 hour ago, Epiphanic said:

I recently gave this mod a look and noticed a small bug (or graphical error). I had unassigned Kerbals costing $1000/month but the GUI predicted expenses line said $500/month. If I changed that particular slider in the settings menu the predicted expense line would update to exactly half of whatever the value was set at. I'm not sure if this is simply a graphical error or if the wrong amount is being deducted.

Not a bug - that setting scales with a kerbals experience level. I would guess that your kerbals are level 0. Having said that, I could make that clearer in the settings.

[Epiphanic]

Thanks. They are level 0. I didn't know that Kerbal wages scaled with experience level.

[Rabada]

Is it possible to configure this mod to disable the budget caps? I would be happy if I could get a set amount of funds regularly after a set amount of time.

[klgraham1013]

2 minutes ago, Rabada said:

Is it possible to configure this mod to disable the budget caps? I would be happy if I could get a set amount of funds regularly after a set amount of time.

Yeah.  Same here.

[severedsolo]

3 hours ago, Rabada said:

Is it possible to configure this mod to disable the budget caps? I would be happy if I could get a set amount of funds regularly after a set amount of time.

No, thats exactly the opposite of what I was trying to achieve (it annoyed me that many mods would just keep heaping funds on you)

You are probably looking for either StateFunding or KSPCasher (there may be others, those are the ones I'm aware of)

[larkvi]

I have been playing with this mod in my current career save, and I have been enjoying it quite a lot--career's implementation of funds was always annoying and limiting. That said, there is this weird balance issue, where I have 50% reputation (on hard mode settings for funds/science/rep) which is not enough to upgrade level three buildings, but is essentially an unlimited amount of money for building rockets. I can build twenty 2-man orbital rockets or thirty satellite/probe missions to either of Gael's moons with my monthly (I have it set to quarterly) budget, so it seems like too much, except for the need to upgrade facilities. I wonder if significantly smaller budgets but the ability to assign some percentage of the budget to infrastructure (upgrades, repairs) might be a good fix. I would just use the amounts as annual, but then I would have to timewarp through a year every time I upgrade a facility, and unless I drastically extend timelines in KCT (already at 5x longer than normal), that doesn't seem like a great solution. 

[Rabada]

4 hours ago, severedsolo said:

No, thats exactly the opposite of what I was trying to achieve (it annoyed me that many mods would just keep heaping funds on you)

You are probably looking for either StateFunding or KSPCasher (there may be others, those are the ones I'm aware of)

I understand, and thankyou for the suggestions! I have not heard of either of those mods. Unfortunately, I looked into them, and neither mod fit the gameplay style I am looking for. Your mod was the closest that I was looking for. I really enjoyed  the challenge of trying to build cost effective rockets so that I could get the most out of my monthly budget without having to worry about trying to find contracts to fit the activity I wanted to do (for example, build a station in Mun orbit), or having to do contracts I don't want to do to get some money. I really enjoyed how my monthly budget increased as my reputation increased. I played with USI colonization and life support installed, and I wanted to maintain a permanent Kerbal presence in space, so I had to fit resupply shipments into my monthly budget. 

However, like Larkvi, I ended up getting stuck about mid game, once I try to move my space program beyond planting flags on the Mun and Minmus. (I try to avoid grinding Mun and Minmus landings for science and instead move on to Interplanetary projects) Once I was done with the Mun and Minmus, I ran out of things to spend the monthly budget because I would already have a ton of in low Kerbin orbit waiting for the their transfer windows to other planets to open up. Also like larkvi said, my monthly budget was much lower than the cost of the tier 3 building upgrades, so I could never afford them.

[severedsolo]

@larkvi @Rabada  -This has always been a problem with MB if I remember rightly. Mostly it's because the currency balance in KSP is waaaay off.

So right now you have a couple of options (I may have a code solution, which I'll talk about in a minute, but I don't know if it's going to work).

1) I personally, temporarily increase my budget multiplier when I want to do the Tier 3 upgrades. It's a little cheaty, but it does help. Once I've done my upgrades, I turn the option that penalises you for being under budget on (I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head ironically) - that way if I'm not spending the whole budget on my rockets, eventually it will even out.

2) If you are using KCT, you can pump money into building rockets just before the budget, and then cancel them once the budget fires. You'll get your funds back, and this will take you over the cap (MB actually only checks on the budget cycle, the rest of the time it's just going "is it time to do the budget yet? - Nope? then I'll just sleep for a few seconds and check again).

3) You could use CustomBarnKit to reduce the cost of the upgrades.

As I said, both of those are a little cheaty, and are more exploits than a solution, so let's talk about code solutions (again, I have not tested whether the KSP API will let me do any of this, so this is just an idea that may or may not happen at this stage).

 I could allow part of your budget to be "diverted" to a building upgrade fund. I'm not 100% sure how this would work yet, but in my head it works something like, a portion of your budget is added to a separate pot (that doesn't get capped between budgets) - when you try to upgrade a building, if there is enough money in the pot, the upgrade happens, otherwise it doesn't and you get an on-screen message telling you why (this may or may not work with KCT though, as that also overrides building upgrades).

[klgraham1013]

I like the idea of diverting part of your budget to facility upgrades.

I appreciate your dedication to your vision.  I would in no way want to force you to add a feature you are against.  However, speaking of diverting budgets made me think of a solution.  Commiting funds to a rocket you could not afford in your set budget cycle.  Those funds can not be returned and the rocket must be finished.  Perhaps all future funds must go to this project until it is finished, and you must eat any penalties you obtain. I don't know.  Just a thought.

[Jade_Falcon]

22 hours ago, severedsolo said:

 

 I could allow part of your budget to be "diverted" to a building upgrade fund. I'm not 100% sure how this would work yet, but in my head it works something like, a portion of your budget is added to a separate pot (that doesn't get capped between budgets) - when you try to upgrade a building, if there is enough money in the pot, the upgrade happens, otherwise it doesn't and you get an on-screen message telling you why (this may or may not work with KCT though, as that also overrides building upgrades).

I like the "diverted funds idea, Ive been using the second workaround myself, banking funds for the largest upgrades (upgrades that are significantly higher than 1,000,000.) scrapping built but unused craft.

Im not sure how it would work code wise, but my thought would be that you would have a "divert funds" button for your long term project (maybe 100000 or 500000 per button press), and that amount would be logged somewhere, and when you are ready to execute the project perhaps an "inject funds" button that would add the logged amount back to your current funds.  Maybe keeping it to a round number would allow adding funds the same way the cheat in the debug console adds funds. (That might work around KCT overriding the building upgrades since its using the funds the way you always would.)  One other way to approach it would be having a set amount diverted at the end of the month, every month.  Kind of like a budget line item for facility improvements.

[severedsolo]

2 hours ago, Jade_Falcon said:

Im not sure how it would work code wise, but my thought would be that you would have a "divert funds" button for your long term project (maybe 100000 or 500000 per button press), and that amount would be logged somewhere, and when you are ready to execute the project perhaps an "inject funds" button that would add the logged amount back to your current funds.

I think we have a winner. My initial idea was to divert the funds to a separate pot and have you use the GUI to activate the upgrade of the building. This would have needed code changes in KCT though as the Facility Upgrade event would never have fired, so KCT would have had to listen for an event fired by MB instead.

This is the best of both worlds though, you can just take the funds from the separate pot, and activate the upgrade as you normally would. KCT will be happy, and you have the funds.

Implementation should be easy, as the GUI is already in place I'd probably replace the existing "Emergency Funding" options with this. So the next question, and I'll open this one up to the floor, as I don't particularly mind either way:

It doesn't look like it would be too difficult to create a new strategy, so assuming I can get that working - would you rather have a fixed percentage of your budget diverted to the "slush fund" every cycle, or only when a strategy is activated? (the idea would be that you would activate the strategy when you are considering a big project/building upgrade, and would require a little forward planning)

Edited September 3, 2017 by severedsolo

[larkvi]

11 hours ago, severedsolo said:

It doesn't look like it would be too difficult to create a new strategy, so assuming I can get that working - would you rather have a fixed percentage of your budget diverted to the "slush fund" every cycle, or only when a strategy is activated? (the idea would be that you would activate the strategy when you are considering a big project/building upgrade, and would require a little forward planning)

On the one hand, I worry that this would push against the low limit on strategies. On the other hand, if higher-level strategies allowed you to commit more funds to capital expenses, that would make a lot of sense. It seems different from the other strategies in that it would be essentially required to progress, not just an interesting bonus.

A button is fine, though I feel capital expenses being funnelled straight out of the monthly budgets (perhaps with a slider for amount saved, from 10–50%) is more in keeping with how the mod works.

[Jade_Falcon]

I dont mind it being implemented as a strategy,  but how would that work for mods that change the strategy system, like Strategia?  Not that you want to have to plan around other mods, but IMO strategies make a lot more sense with it. (I think it would definitely be a Strategia-esque type of strategy, and thats a good thing!) 

@larkvi I agree, its would be an essential strategy, especially once you start working towards the higher end of the tech tree and for funding  the construction of advanced facilities and additional launchpads.  I think it would also make more sense than all of the other strategies (IMO the strategies work best when they are designed as a planning tool, like this would be)

Having said all of that, I think my vote would be for it to be a percentage, either through the GUI, or on the back end as a setting.  If though the GUI, technically you still could only use it as needed, if you can set the percentage to 0. (Just in case the strategy implementation proves problematic)

[severedsolo]

[severedsolo]

@klgraham1013@larkvi @Jade_Falcon @Rabada (sorry if I've forgetten anyone - and anyone else who is interested)

I've pushed a pre-release with the "big project funding" options in the GUI. - if you are interested you can get it here: https://github.com/severedsolo/MonthlyBudgets/releases/tag/3.0b1

I also re-wrote the saving mechanism completely, because when I first wrote it, I had no idea what I was doing and it had a dozen band-aids stuck all over it - so back up your saves, as something may break (at the very least I think it may trigger a budget straight away).

As I re-wrote a big chunk of the mod, I'm expecting something to not be working properly that I've missed, hence the pre-release.

Edited September 5, 2017 by severedsolo

[Jade_Falcon]

15 hours ago, severedsolo said:

@klgraham1013@larkvi @Jade_Falcon @Rabada (sorry if I've forgetten anyone - and anyone else who is interested)

I've pushed a pre-release with the "big project funding" options in the GUI. - if you are interested you can get it here: https://github.com/severedsolo/MonthlyBudgets/releases/tag/3.0b1

I also re-wrote the saving mechanism completely, because when I first wrote it, I had no idea what I was doing and it had a dozen band-aids stuck all over it - so back up your saves, as something may break (at the very least I think it may trigger a budget straight away).

As I re-wrote a big chunk of the mod, I'm expecting something to not be working properly that I've missed, hence the pre-release.

So far, no issues, seems to work as expected! The only thing I noticed was that the Big Project Fund amount doesn't need to display more than 2 decimal places. Will run through a few more months and see if anything goes off the rails.

[severedsolo]

2 hours ago, Jade_Falcon said:

So far, no issues, seems to work as expected! The only thing I noticed was that the Big Project Fund amount doesn't need to display more than 2 decimal places.

Ah yes, I always forget that Funding is a double, when the game displays it as an int. Suitably rounded off for the full release. I won't bother doing a new pre-release for something minor like that, but if any major issues occur I will do a new beta when I fix them.

Please test saving and loading too if you can.

Edited September 6, 2017 by severedsolo