[1.12.x] Near Future Technologies (September 6)

[linuxgurugamer]

While I normally don't do release announcements in threads other than my own, I feel that this deserves it:

Better Time Warp, new release 2,3,7:

Fixed dropdown offset for when no probe control
Fixed issue when timewarping >stock max, Inactive Resource Convertors could use fuel more rapidly

 

[Citizen Joe]

Is there any chance the 2.5m to 3x 1.25m adapter in this picture will make a return? Its missing completely and was very useful for a lot of my designs in the past.

Also, the SE-4 looks kinda wonky too and doesn't fit with the rest of the multi-adapters. Yellow tube master race.

Edited April 13, 2017 by Citizen Joe

[lewiivann]

Anyone know why my IVA for the Mk3-9 Command Pod is broken? all the gauges such as the ones for electricity, mission time and other resources have something like [#fff88] in the labels. 

 

Also IVA resolution is terrible.

 

Thanks in advance 

[Beale]

3 hours ago, lewiivann said:

Anyone know why my IVA for the Mk3-9 Command Pod is broken? all the gauges such as the ones for electricity, mission time and other resources have something like [#fff88] in the labels. 

 

Also IVA resolution is terrible.

Great feedback.

11/10.

[Stone Blue]

3 hours ago, lewiivann said:

Anyone know why my IVA for the Mk3-9 Command Pod is broken? all the gauges such as the ones for electricity, mission time and other resources have something like [#fff88] in the labels.

You have an outdated version of RPM...??

3 hours ago, lewiivann said:

Also IVA resolution is terrible.

You need to set the texture resolution to at least "half res", in the game settings...

Edited April 15, 2017 by Stone Blue

[Crimeo]

Hi, I have ongoing problems with this mod, maybe there's a known fix: It routinely happens that at about 1000x time warp or above, reactors spontaneously stop producing EC for no clear reason. In stock this wouldn't be SO bad (although often very annoying, such as drills shutting off and having to be manually restarted), but with other mods, this causes lots of Very Bad Things (R) to happen, such as cryogenic kerbals to thaw out and die, life support systems to fail killing everyone, etc.

Is there a fix to make reactors work properly at ALL warp speeds?

Edited April 15, 2017 by Crimeo

[Nertea]

4 minutes ago, Crimeo said:

Hi, I have ongoing problems with this mod, maybe there's a known fix: It routinely happens that at about 1000x time warp or above, reactors spontaneously stop producing EC for no clear reason. In stock this wouldn't be SO bad (although often very annoying, such as drills shutting off and having to be manually restarted), but with other mods, this causes lots of Very Bad Things (R) to happen, such as cryogenic kerbals to thaw out and die, life support systems to fail killing everyone, etc.

Is there a fix to make reactors work properly at ALL warp speeds?

Considering that this is not a known issue, and very easy for me to test (I don't see it), I'd have to say some kind of mod conflict is occuring. A full mod list is a great first step, plus more detail... does the reactor shut off, do you have enough radiators, etc?

[Crimeo]

The kerbalism dude (ShotgunNinja) just added a feature that checks for this sort of thing and cuts off time warp if any parts are "acting incoherently in warp" -- in my case, when I have that feature on, his mod detects the near future reactors as such problem parts, cuts off time warp at exactly the point in time they were causing problems, and when turned off, re-allows time warp again. So he probably knows exactly what's going on in detail and is the most likely efficient person to ask, versus me attempting to isolate it out of a position of total ignorance. I don't think he made the feature specifically for these parts, it might just be generic to many mods, but still, he probably knows precisely what's up.

My mod list is huge (though I did experience this back when I only had like 10, unfortunately don't remember which ones), I'm having issues moving them out of the folder due to being used by other programs right now. Will work on that and restart and give exact reproduction steps and stuff now, but wanted to post the above lead first.

Edited April 15, 2017 by Crimeo

[Nertea]

40 minutes ago, Crimeo said:

The kerbalism dude (ShotgunNinja) just added a feature that checks for this sort of thing and cuts off time warp if any parts are "acting incoherently in warp" -- in my case, when I have that feature on, his mod detects the near future reactors as such problem parts, cuts off time warp at exactly the point in time they were causing problems, and when turned off, re-allows time warp again. So he probably knows exactly what's going on in detail and is the most likely efficient person to ask, versus me attempting to isolate it out of a position of total ignorance. I don't think he made the feature specifically for these parts, it might just be generic to many mods, but still, he probably knows precisely what's up.

My mod list is huge (though I did experience this back when I only had like 10, unfortunately don't remember which ones), I'm having issues moving them out of the folder due to being used by other programs right now. Will work on that and restart and give exact reproduction steps and stuff now, but wanted to post the above lead first.

If Kerbalism is responsible that's probably not my problem anymore... @ShotgunNinja, could you elaborate?

Edited April 15, 2017 by Nertea

[Crimeo]

No no, it's not kerbalism CAUSING it, it was kerbalism (partially) FIXING it, although the problem is kerbalism wasn't completely fixing it -- it was just not allowing time warp so that you don't encounter the problem, which stops kerbals from dying, sure, but still doesn't allow going to high time warps... I mention it because if Ninja is detecting the issue, he might know what's going on, that's all.

Anyway, in the meantime, I stripped out all my mods for debugging. So now I only have in my folder:

• Near Future Electrical
• B9 Part switch
• Community Resource Pack
• Cryo Tanks (just so I have something that uses a lot of passive ECs for testing, that's all)
• Squad
• ModuleManager

I can still replicate the problem. I'm using this setup:

It happens when there's a significant EC user (the cryo tank here). The reactor makes enough ECs to power it easily, and has enough cooling (at optimal 800 degree temp as shown, stable). But when you go into higher warps, the EC's bounce around erratically, temporarily hitting zero (which could kill everyone with a life support mod, etc.)

Having tested it more closely now, the exact pattern is:

1) The ECs always start to drain while the warp is going up specifically. In other words, during the transition time when thewarp number is counting up on the screen, but before it hits the next incremental level. Such as when going from 100 to 1000, while it's still counting at 697 or 823, or whatever, the ECs are draining. This actually happens at EVERY warp increase, which I didn't notice before, because it's more minor for lower warps.

2) Once it gets to the requested increment (once the count up completes), it stops draining and on lower warp speeds, fills back to full again. On higher warp speeds, it actually stays partially empty, and sits still. In the above screenshot, EC was just sitting there at exactly 100 not going up or down, at full warp (but it had hit zero while spooling UP to full warp, which is when people die, etc.)

3) It also does the draining while counting thing on the way down too.

 

Also notice that the liquid hydrogen levels are less than full: this demonstrates the fact that ECs temporarily hitting zero is not just a graphical glitch, etc., but is actually having effects on the spaceship as if out of electricity (in this case, causing boiloff to have started to occur during the count up, but in other mods, would cause kerbals to die, would cause vanilla drills to shut off, etc.)

The console shows nothing at all for logging, just regular booting messages, then squat.
 

Edited April 15, 2017 by Crimeo

[Crimeo]

Update: Actually apparently the using of ECs isn't even necessary. I took out cryotanks too--so just pure vanilla KSP + near future electrical and its dependencies--and make a ship that was only a command pod, reactor (the 400 ec/s one like above), and 3 medium radiators. It still does it even though nothing is using power. With those exact parts, it very consistently hits the following exact numbers, every time:

from warp 1 to 5: temporarily becomes (0.05) EC drain, then back to 0 drain and full (or close enough to not show up due to rounding)
from warp 5 to 10: temporarily becomes (0.06) EC drain, then back to 0 drain and full
from warp 10 to 50: temporarily becomes (0.5) EC drain, then back to 0 drain and stays partially empty (849 / 850)
from warp 50 to 100: temporarily becomes (0.63) EC drain, then back to 0 drain and stays partially empty (849 / 850)
from warp 100 to 1000: temporarily becomes (11.25) EC drain, then back to 0 drain and stays partially empty (838 / 850)
from warp 1000 to 10,000: temporarily becomes (112.61) EC drain, then back to 0 drain and stays partially empty (725 / 850)
from warp 10,000 to 100,000: temporarily becomes (1126.5) EC drain, then back to 0 drain and stays completely empty (0 / 850)
Clearly, the drain rate and the amount less than 850 ECs are both changing directly proportionally to the warp speed, at least for multiples of 10 (dunno why the 5 and 50 don't line up quite the same). Both numbers also appear to be the same, like when 11.25 drain during spool up, it's also about that much missing from the total EC battery at the end too.

On the way back down, all of the same above numbers change from drains to recharges of the same rate (so 112.61 drain during spool up becomes 112.61 recharge during spool down, then stable at 849, etc.)

I also tested the exact same setup using 3 gigantor solar panels instead of the reactor as a control, and saw absolutely no change to ECs during any time warping, temporarily or permanently. Just sat at full power the whole time.

Next I tried a reactor + gigantor solar panels. Even without turning the reactor on, the warp shenanigans started happening again, though the numbers were slightly different than above. So maybe it's a problem with the battery portion / storage of the reactor, not the power generation part?

Edited April 15, 2017 by Crimeo

[Nertea]

Well the radiators are the power use there... so there's your drain.

You're running to the age-old KSP resources problem. Let's break down the steps:

• Reactor adds 400*(time step) Ec (let's call it P)
• P Ec is added to the reserve
• Radiators subtract 3x0.125x(time step) Ec (let's call it D)
• D Ec is removed from energy reserve (let's call it C)

Let's check the test cases:

• At 1x timewarp, D is 0.015 (0.04*0.125*1), P is 8. So if C > D, it's ok. You have 850 Ec of storage... so it's cool. I assume you placed the radiators last, so they are handled after the reactor. If you placed the reactor last, you would see no visible drain.
• At 10000x timewarp, D is 150. So if your test case, you have enough C to take the draw, but there is a delta of some number (~125).
• At 100000x timewarp, D is 1500. So in your test case, you... don't have enough Ec for this to work. C < D at this timewarp level. So zero.

Basically, it's the direct results of a subtractive/additive resource system that doesn't handle flows. 

It gets even worse because some KSP modules count their Ec changes at different times. So some parts (resource converters, like the reactor) reassess the rates at the selectable timewarp intervals (ie at the end of the spoolup/down) and others do it for every timewarp level. So that is why you are seeing the error that accumulates in this period. There's very little I can do to solve this other than rewrite every stock Ec draining module to be managed by a vessel-wide power controller... which has its own problems plus is a very lot of work.

The only thing that universally solves this is that you must ensure that you have enough battery capacity to take 100% of your drains at max timewarp. So typically draw*0.04*100000. That's why reactors have such a large battery storage in them in the first place. It might not be a bad idea though to baseline that buffer storage to be sufficient to manage the drain for enough radiators to fully cool the reactor. It used to be, but some things changed since then. 

[eberkain]

3 hours ago, Nertea said:

Basically, it's the direct results of a subtractive/additive resource system that doesn't handle flows. 

My understanding is that Kerbalism strives to change this by using a resource cache and a new warp helper module.  @ShotgunNinja talks about it here.  https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/issues/96

[Nertea]

19 hours ago, eberkain said:

My understanding is that Kerbalism strives to change this by using a resource cache and a new warp helper module.  @ShotgunNinja talks about it here.  https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/issues/96

Yup that is a good summary of the problem, and exactly why there's no good way to fix it.

Near Future Tech Development Log #3

This week was a bit low on the content side. First, I did some more work on localization and propagating balance values from spreadsheets to cfg files. Boring, but has to be done. Some code revisions were also made to the reactors in order to overcome some minor bugs. These improvements are primarily targeted towards the use of the Kerbal Atomics-NFElectrical patch but should provide some more stability in some edge cases for NF Electrical itself. Currently, I'm really looking to improve the functionality of the KA/NFE integration, so if you're used it, or use it, and can think of bugs you've found, please raise them in the Kerbal Atomics thread.

On the art front, much more boring. I have been planning a big rework of the CryoTanks package, fixing many balancing problems, converting the plugin to use new methods I developed for FFT, and improving the tank art considerably (was getting a bit dated). A main design goal is to make each tank structure be toggleable so that you can use them radially or inside trusses. In addition, new 5m tanks! This has taken a very large amount of work and far more time than expected, but this week I got all 4 inline sizes unwrapped and have almost finished their textures (only the 5m model remains). Here is a draft render showing off all the variants for the largest tank size in each category.

As for quality, well, all these parts have considerably improved foil textures and normal maps. I'm looking to show them off ingame relatively soon!

[Wyzard]

I'm glad that you're preserving the white texture variant in the model rework – I always use that instead of the default orange.  (More distinct from the stock orange tank, and white just seems like the "right" color for something cryogenic.)

[Crimeo]

@Nertea Okay well that is disappointing there's no "cure" but huge battery buffers at least is a solution I can use to make it playable. Thanks! Especially the helpful equation, even.

[Rodger]

Looking forward to the new trussless option! Another suggestion while you're on the cryo tanks would be another switchable option for trussless but with the 2.5m rings at the end of the 3.75/5m tanks (or 3.75 ring on the 5m), for stack use with the tanks being wider than the rest of the stack.

[Nertea]

20 hours ago, Rodger said:

Looking forward to the new trussless option! Another suggestion while you're on the cryo tanks would be another switchable option for trussless but with the 2.5m rings at the end of the 3.75/5m tanks (or 3.75 ring on the 5m), for stack use with the tanks being wider than the rest of the stack.

If I can make it work without more texture space, I'll do it. 

21 hours ago, Wyzard said:

I'm glad that you're preserving the white texture variant in the model rework – I always use that instead of the default orange.  (More distinct from the stock orange tank, and white just seems like the "right" color for something cryogenic.)

The new normals and better meshes should make the isohedral tanks look better too :). In addition it may not be clear, but there's quite a hue shift from orange-peel orange to goldish in this update for the foil tank.

[Venshayde]

I have a problem.

The last ksp near future propulsion I played on before I went on hiatus was 0.6.0 I believe. 

I built a big ship that I spent a lot of time on and I can't get it to load. I've since fresh installed ksp with all the mods I had, but the updated versions, but my craft file says it won't load in VAB because the following parts are missing:

orbitalEngine-25

orbitalEngine-375

Does anyone know a fix for this? I've tried to get back into ksp multiple times but without these crafts I just have no more motivation to try and re-build it. 

 

[HoveringKiller]

1 minute ago, Venshayde said:

I have a problem.

The last ksp near future propulsion I played on before I went on hiatus was 0.6.0 I believe. 

I built a big ship that I spent a lot of time on and I can't get it to load. I've since fresh installed ksp with all the mods I had, but the updated versions, but my craft file says it won't load in VAB because the following parts are missing:

orbitalEngine-25

orbitalEngine-375

Does anyone know a fix for this? I've tried to get back into ksp multiple times but without these crafts I just have no more motivation to try and re-build it. 

 

Download an older version of near future, as these parts were soft depreciated in one of the last patches (I believe) so they won't break ships, but can't build with them anymore. I would suggest to change up your ships in VAB, but be cautious. When the final update rolls out for these mods, I believe that these parts will be hard depreciated, which means it'll break any and all ships you have in game.

[Salvator]

Hi, i wanted to ask, what is the scond slider in "advanced control" options of nuclear reactors. The first is max temperature, i recognized that one.

[Venshayde]

1 hour ago, HoveringKiller said:

Download an older version of near future, as these parts were soft depreciated in one of the last patches (I believe) so they won't break ships, but can't build with them anymore. I would suggest to change up your ships in VAB, but be cautious. When the final update rolls out for these mods, I believe that these parts will be hard depreciated, which means it'll break any and all ships you have in game.

I tried installing the version I had since I had it saved on my external HD, but the current ksp is incompatible as it crashes when I try and load into a game

[Gorby1]

Regarding the Orbital LF engines;

1 hour ago, HoveringKiller said:

these parts were soft depreciated in one of the last patches (I believe) so they won't break ships, but can't build with them anymore. I would suggest to change up your ships in VAB, but be cautious. When the final update rolls out for these mods, I believe that these parts will be hard depreciated

I must have missed that post, is that correct? I don't understand why the older LF engines wouldn't be left in there...

[Nertea]

2 hours ago, Venshayde said:

 

I have a problem.

The last ksp near future propulsion I played on before I went on hiatus was 0.6.0 I believe. 

I built a big ship that I spent a lot of time on and I can't get it to load. I've since fresh installed ksp with all the mods I had, but the updated versions, but my craft file says it won't load in VAB because the following parts are missing:

orbitalEngine-25

orbitalEngine-375

Does anyone know a fix for this? I've tried to get back into ksp multiple times but without these crafts I just have no more motivation to try and re-build it. 

 

The most recent versions of NF Spacecraft still has those engines in although they won't appear in the VAB. What version did you install? 0.6.0 was when the old engines were deprecated.

1 hour ago, Salvator said:

Hi, i wanted to ask, what is the scond slider in "advanced control" options of nuclear reactors. The first is max temperature, i recognized that one.

Auto-shutdown at some timewarp level.

52 minutes ago, Gorby1 said:

Regarding the Orbital LF engines;

I must have missed that post, is that correct? I don't understand why the older LF engines wouldn't be left in there...

Because having models that look like butts hanging around isn't something that I enjoy... They're only still in to give people time to change over.

[Gorby1]

21 minutes ago, Nertea said:

Because having models that look like butts hanging around isn't something that I enjoy... They're only still in to give people time to change over

LOL - I happen to like the look of them, call me crazy. I also liked having the option of using the old LFO engines or the new Mono ones.

I know you include the cfg to make the new orbital engines LFO instead of Mono, but have you given any thought to making them switchable in-game, within the editor? That would check all my boxes and I wouldn't have any butts hanging off the end of my rockets  

Edited April 18, 2017 by Gorby1