[1.7 - 1.9] Kourageous Tourists - tiny mod making tourists less helpless

[whale_2]

13 hours ago, Mark Kerbin said:

@whale_2 May i suggest adding in "parasailing contracts" because why not?

On the second thought - this would require changing conditions for allowing EVA for tourists. Or maybe impose some safety measures like for beginner skydivers - certain minimum altitude, relatively low speed and automatic chute deployment after a second or two... Sounds legit?

[Mark Kerbin]

1 hour ago, whale_2 said:

On the second thought - this would require changing conditions for allowing EVA for tourists. Or maybe impose some safety measures like for beginner skydivers - certain minimum altitude, relatively low speed and automatic chute deployment after a second or two... Sounds legit?

Hmm. Perhaps there should be two sets of tourists in the background, "atmospheric" and "extra planetary". The atmospheric dudes want to do kebrin stuff, such as going to certain kerbin (landed) bases, biomes/ waypoints (mountain peaks or Anomalies?),  and of course parachuting! This would allow for a separate ranking system, so you could let the parachute tourists do their thing.

Also sounds pretty legit. 

 

[whale_2]

I don't like the idea of two sets of tourists. Seems like a complication without any particular benefit... I'd rather just let out tourists that pay for parasailing.

Edited March 29, 2018 by whale_2

[Errol]

4 hours ago, whale_2 said:

On the second thought - this would require changing conditions for allowing EVA for tourists. Or maybe impose some safety measures like for beginner skydivers - certain minimum altitude, relatively low speed and automatic chute deployment after a second or two... Sounds legit?

I love this idea. This way tourists can't join jeb on his space-dive HALO jump, but can still get the thrill of stepping out of a perfectly fine aircraft..

[whale_2]

Just tested that skydiving stuff... 

There are some bad new and good news. Bad news - if you bail out the tourist, deploy his chute and leave him to his own switching back to the plane, the poor tourist won't survive landing - I think because of too high horizontal velocity. However the good news is - if your plane is stable enough so it can fly without control input and it doesn't fly too far away and you control your tourist's descent with chute control, so he lands softly, then after he lands you can switch back to the plane and fly it back to the runway, or bail out second tourist and so on. I managed to jump and land two of them and land the plane back on the runway. The farthest I was from a plane was 12.5 km. So probably paragliding contracts could be implemented.     

[Quoniam Kerman]

Paraplanes are controlled like planes, so if you don't perform s-like maneuvers, they will still gather speed while diving. It is not a standard parachute you musty act as if it was a planes with no engines that goes too fast for a safe landing; some accrobatics are necessary to slow down t safe landing speeds.

 

But nevertheless, being able to,make tourists go out on EVA would resolve some contract problems where you've got to send tourists somewhere but you don't want to spend too much money or end up with no fuel at the destination and want to send a rescue ship, but in stock game, you can't tranfer them from one ship to another. One day I had a mission contract to land an outpost on Eve, but I couldn't design an outpost that big with enough delta-V to take off from Eve and come back. I wanted to take the tourists with me on the outpost, but I never did the mission as I knew I couldn't transfer tourists on any other spacecraft by foot on the surface of Eve to the smaller return ship. I think I'll go with some other craft like an Endurance Ranger shuttle or something... I know that mission contracts about planetary outposts ask for specific crew capacity and don't need that capacity to be fully crewed (mission asks you to land a twenty people craft, you still can complete the contract even if your 20 seat structure is crewed by one guy) but I wanted those seats to be useful somehow...

Edited April 6, 2018 by Quoniam Kerman

[Mark Kerbin]

@whale_2 Hello again =)

Can I suggest you have a look at the stage recovery mod? It might help with the whole "kerbal jumping out of plane and I can't control both" situation.

Idk just a thought. 

[whale_2]

@Mark Kerbin, thanks, I'm quite aware of Stage Recovery and FMRS, even made a patch for it. I'm just not sure what is the best strategy here - auto-recovering of parachuted kerbals, auto-landing of them, or just putting the aircraft into circling pattern above parachuting kerbals. Problem is - the mod is not particularly popular, so getting a significant feedback of what is better is complicated. Right now I'm struggling with automatic parachute deployment, for some reason it doesn't work as I expected. I hope to fix it someway, make intermediate release and wait for any feedback...

[Mark Kerbin]

1 hour ago, whale_2 said:

 Problem is - the mod is not particularly popular, so getting a significant feedback of what is better is complicated. 

Yeah I did notice that.

Its a shame really. Tourists are really useless without this. Maybe stick a link to it in your signature. 

 

As for the recovery options, I would go with the auto recover option. But thats just me.  

[reducing]

Not sure if you're still stuck on the parachutes but that's not a deal breaker for this new update. Moving tourists is so easy with this mod and keeps part counts down. Thanks for your work on it!

[whale_2]

Thanks. I still hope to make some upgrades to it and proper 1.4.x release.

[reducing]

10 hours ago, whale_2 said:

.....and proper 1.4.x release.

Hate to ask this question but does the last release work on 1.4.3? 

[whale_2]

12 hours ago, reducing said:

Hate to ask this question but does the last release work on 1.4.3? 

Uhh, I didn't try it as is, I only have a recompiled version where I try to make paragliding work, so I encourage you to try latest released version and if it doesn't work, I'll quickly put a recompile (probably without paragliding at this moment)

[reducing]

14 hours ago, whale_2 said:

Uhh, I didn't try it as is, I only have a recompiled version where I try to make paragliding work, so I encourage you to try latest released version and if it doesn't work, I'll quickly put a recompile (probably without paragliding at this moment)

Sure I'll give it a try. Thanks for everything!

[Mark Kerbin]

@reducing

@whale_2

Most recent version is functional as far as I can tell.

[Lisias]

Hi, @whale_2 .

I think I mitigated the selfies being taken too soon to get the emotions from the Kerbals registered on the shot. I'm still working on it, but for while, this thing is working for a few Kerbals. Big parties, however, are still a problem - but I could get some results by firing a sequence of Selfies so one of them ends up registering some emotions fired by the previous ones.

I made a pull request here:

https://github.com/whale2/KourageousTourists/pull/3

 

Edited January 16, 2020 by Lisias
Tyops! As usulla... =P

[whale_2]

18 hours ago, Lisias said:

Hi, @whale_2 .

I think I mitigated the selfies being taken too soon to get the emotions from the Kerbals registered on the shot. I'm still working on it, but for while, this thing is working for a few Kerbals. Big parties, however, are still a problem - but I could get some results by firing a sequence of Selfies so one of them ends up registering some emotions fired by the previous ones.

I made a pull request here:

https://github.com/whale2/KourageousTourists/pull/3

 

 TBH, I didn't update this mod as apparently not a lot of people are interested in it. I tried to make paragliding contracts when 1.4 came out with EVA parachutes, it didn't work (kerbals just smashed into the ground, I later guessed due to excess horizontal speed) and I started doing something else. Sure, KerbalFSM could have changed in later versions, I will look into it, thanks for the PR. And maybe finally fix paragliding. 

Edited January 16, 2020 by whale_2

[Lisias]

19 hours ago, whale_2 said:

 TBH, I didn't update this mod as apparently not a lot of people are interested in it. I tried to make paragliding contracts when 1.4 came out with EVA parachutes, it didn't work (kerbals just smashed into the ground, I later guessed due to excess horizontal speed) and I started doing something else. Sure, KerbalFSM could have changed in later versions, I will look into it, thanks for the PR. And maybe finally fix paragliding. 

If KerbalFSM had been updated to make Kerbals a bit smarter when by their own (and I think it's reasonable to assume it wasn't, given the current development focus), you can "cheat": monitor the height to the ground and when it reaches a threshold, recover the Kerbal and make the contract fulfilled.

If recovering the Kerbal is part of the contract, then respawn him/her on the ground at the position he/she was when was recovered.

-- POST EDIT ---

Better idea. Check Vessel Mover. When the Kerbal reaches the threshold, "land it" the way VesselMover does.

Edited January 17, 2020 by Lisias
post-edit

[whale_2]

7 hours ago, Lisias said:

If KerbalFSM had been updated to make Kerbals a bit smarter when by their own (and I think it's reasonable to assume it wasn't, given the current development focus), you can "cheat": monitor the height to the ground and when it reaches a threshold, recover the Kerbal and make the contract fulfilled.

If recovering the Kerbal is part of the contract, then respawn him/her on the ground at the position he/she was when was recovered.

-- POST EDIT ---

Better idea. Check Vessel Mover. When the Kerbal reaches the threshold, "land it" the way VesselMover does.

I though about dynamically adding a PartModule to parachuting kerbals that will "autopilot" them - basically just pitch up if they're going too fast. (They still can smash into some mountain, though, but this even adds a challenge )

[Araym]

On 1/16/2020 at 7:52 PM, whale_2 said:

 TBH, I didn't update this mod as apparently not a lot of people are interested in it. I tried to make paragliding contracts when 1.4 came out with EVA parachutes, it didn't work (kerbals just smashed into the ground, I later guessed due to excess horizontal speed) and I started doing something else. Sure, KerbalFSM could have changed in later versions, I will look into it, thanks for the PR. And maybe finally fix paragliding. 

... and that is a shame, because it's fun as hell to have the tourist hanging around

(You know that I'm a fan, since the suits I made for them I was away from a bit - a couple of years??? - but I'm returning, and if the mod in the actual state is still working in 1.8.1/1.9, I'm going to release a similar suit for the new kerbal suit models :-) )

[whale_2]

2 minutes ago, Araym said:

... and that is a shame, because it's fun as hell to have the tourist hanging around

(You know that I'm a fan, since the suits I made for them I was away from a bit - a couple of years??? - but I'm returning, and if the mod in the actual state is still working in 1.8.1/1.9, I'm going to release a similar suit for the new kerbal suit models :-) )

In fact I experimented a bit with paragliding - first thing - it seems that kerbals are more resistant to high speed "paralandings" in 1.8 and second - I managed to find an easy way to limit horizontal speed for them. Just need to polish out contract stuff.

Edited February 19, 2020 by whale_2

[linuxgurugamer]

31 minutes ago, whale_2 said:

In fact I experimented a bit with paragliding - first thing - it seems that kerbals are more resistant to high speed "paralandings" in 1.8 and second - I managed to find an easy way to limit horizontal speed for them. Just need to polish out contract stuff.

I assume you are now updating this for 1.8/1.9?  Please say yes, I'd like to add it to my career :-)

If you could ping me when an update is available, that would be great!

 

[whale_2]

46 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

I assume you are now updating this for 1.8/1.9?  Please say yes, I'd like to add it to my career :-)

 

If you could ping me when an update is available, that would be great!

 

Sure, 1.8/1.9 it is.

[linuxgurugamer]

On 2/19/2020 at 12:11 PM, whale_2 said:

Sure, 1.8/1.9 it is.

Any progress on this?

Just an FYI, since I wanted to use it, I downloaded and compiled it.  It was fairly easy, there was one line for the screenCapture which was obsolete, so I changed it as recommended.

 

Edited May 15, 2020 by linuxgurugamer

[whale_2]

On 5/15/2020 at 11:16 PM, linuxgurugamer said:

Any progress on this?

Just an FYI, since I wanted to use it, I downloaded and compiled it.  It was fairly easy, there was one line for the screenCapture which was obsolete, so I changed it as recommended.

 

Updating for 1.8 was a no-brainer. I even managed to safely paraglide dozen of tourists. I just need to make tourists who booked paragliding contracts able to EVA while in the air. Fairly easy, but not done yet.