Looking for help with your mod?

[mousebyte]

Maybe I can be of some assistance! Long story short, I'd love to contribute to the community, and have the experience of working collaboratively on a project. I figured a good place to start would be by helping to maintain and develop a mod.

I'm a comp sci student about to graduate, although I am admittedly mostly self-taught. I have a good amount of experience in C# and C++ primarily, and while I've never attempted to mod KSP, I am a fairly quick study (and by that I mean I'm willing to dedicate large chunks of time to figuring stuff out). If you're looking for some help, and are willing to give me a chance, it would be my pleasure.

[pellinor]

14 hours ago, mousebyte said:

Maybe I can be of some assistance! Long story short, I'd love to contribute to the community, and have the experience of working collaboratively on a project. I figured a good place to start would be by helping to maintain and develop a mod.

I'm a comp sci student about to graduate, although I am admittedly mostly self-taught. I have a good amount of experience in C# and C++ primarily, and while I've never attempted to mod KSP, I am a fairly quick study (and by that I mean I'm willing to dedicate large chunks of time to figuring stuff out). If you're looking for some help, and are willing to give me a chance, it would be my pleasure.

There is lots of existing code here that could do with some more attention, and pretty much all modders are happy about contributions. I'd recommend you to find something that you want in the game and start digging into that. Like bugs in a mod you like or an extra feature. For me that was continuous scaling and bugfixes for TweakScale, and later smooth acceleration for IR.

Some ideas:
* From my part, TweakScale could use help in several areas, like support for the new stock part-upgrade mechanic, investigating interaction issues with other mods, or de-Linq-ing (for garbage reasons). (see github issues)
* KCT seems to be under heavy development by someone with very limited time
* iirc KCT-KIS-integration is something both parties would be interested in but have more pressing things to do
* KOS is a highly collaborative project which could use more helping hands

Edited November 29, 2016 by pellinor

[mousebyte]

Thanks for the reply! I've actually been looking at KCT recently and I think I'll clone it and see if I can't help out a bit. I'll check out TweakScale as well! I take it Linq is causing some performance issues then? I could definitely help out with that too. I think ReSharper has an unhealthy addiction to it.

Edited November 29, 2016 by mousebyte

[DStaal]

Another avenue is to look for mods that no longer have a maintainer and bring them up to working with current KSP.  Things like ScienceAlert or Trackingstation Ambientlight.

[pellinor]

1 hour ago, mousebyte said:

I'll check out TweakScale as well! I take it Linq is causing some performance issues then? I could definitely help out with that too. I think ReSharper has an unhealthy addiction to it.

Thanks, any help is welcome. It has been a recent advice for the modding community to have a look at garbage reduction. As a c++ guy my knowledge about garbage is very thin, and I can't really tell how much there is to gain. At least TweakScale does its work when parts come to life, so any performance impact should only happen at occasions like vessel loading.

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Garbage_Reduction

[mousebyte]

As someone who started out in C# and now prefers C++, I think GC is honestly more trouble than it's worth when it comes to performance critical applications. I've done some reading on it and I'm still not quite clear on what goes on under the hood in managed code environments. Guess that'll make this a learning experience.

I've started sifting through the community API documentation as well, it'll probably take me a while to build up my mental model enough to be of any use. If you've got advice on where to start I'd welcome it, otherwise I figure some poking and prodding at stuff will be most helpful for me.

Edited November 29, 2016 by mousebyte

[pellinor]

I would say don't try too much to understand everything, take existing mod code and try to understand or change something specific. For finding API pieces, the best way is often to find a mod that does something similar and look at its code. That and the symbolic information that visualStudio draws from the game libraries. And don't be shy to ask specific questions.

[Yemo]

You could start small by implementing a very confined set of changes.

Or you could take a look at abandoned (plugin) mods and try to reivive one, which happens quite often.

RemoteTech is in the process of changing, but that is perhaps not something for starters.

 

If you are interested in making very small plugins, there are two mod requests I have which have not been implemented as far as I know:

1. Make all kerbals have full experience from the start (upon bein recruited and upon being rescued). Since exerperience is questionably balanced in ksp, it would be great if it could be removed. There is no reason why a cosmonaut needs to fly to another celestial object to learn to repair rover wheels...
There are mods which deal with experience already, but non which simply "deactivates" it by giving all the experience at the start:

2. Bring back the subassemblies category to the main category screen instead of hiding it behind an additional click (enable advanced mode - top left corner) in the VAB/SPH. There are mods dealing with custom categories, yet I m not aware of any which brings back the subassemblies button where it belongs.

[Padishar]

23 hours ago, mousebyte said:

I've done some reading on it and I'm still not quite clear on what goes on under the hood in managed code environments. Guess that'll make this a learning experience.

For useful background reading about garbage collection matters, you would do well to check out some of the following threads:

Also, check out this page from the Unity docs...

https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/performance-optimization/optimizing-garbage-collection-unity-games