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Jeb's Life: A Kerbal Novel


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*Edit: I will list each chapter as it is available below. ALWAYS download from this post to ensure you use the most up-to-date version*

Chapter 1 DXX Download

Chapter 2 Download DDX

Chapter 3 Download DDX

Chapter 4 Download Beta

Note: Chapters marked with DX are final and have been played by others and cleaned up of any glitches, errors, or generally broken bits.

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Hey all,

I've been browsing the forums and it looks like this is a pretty good place to share missions and mission ideas for Making History? I got the DLC day one and have been playing around with the editor ever since. It's powerful, but a bit tricky.

That being said, I'm trying to formulate some cool ideas for unique missions and wanted to get your thoughts. I'm a writer by day and love sharing stories. Instead of just doing recreations or one-off missions I thought it would be cool to do a very narrative-driven set of missions that follow each other logically. For example, if you download and play mission 4 and finish it, when you start 5 everything would be in the same place you left it for a bit of continuity.

I'm just curious if any of you would be interested in Kerbal missions with a lot of text and story based narrative (that is funny, don't worry) and a mini novel-like approach to missions with each one named with a chapter number in it. The story would follow Jeb from his first day after graduating the Kerbal Space Academy and a rather mundane mission, eventually leading to more elaborate missions exploring the solar system.

My first test mission is almost finished and I will upload it here in the coming days for a quick example if anyone wants to see what I mean. I'm still trying to learn everything well enough to actually tell a story though.

Thanks everyone!

PS-here's Jeb leaving the academy and being swarmed by fans.

screenshot15.png

Edited by Disparia Books
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20 minutes ago, Disparia Books said:

I'm just curious if any of you would be interested in Kerbal missions with a lot of text and story based narrative (that is funny, don't worry) and a mini novel-like approach to missions with each one named with a chapter number in it. The story would follow Jeb from his first day after graduating the Kerbal Space Academy and a rather mundane mission, eventually leading to more elaborate missions exploring the solar system.

Yes!!!

I don't know how many missions I'll be able to make myself, but as a fan-fiction writer, this is one of the things that occurred to me when @SQUAD first announced Mission Builder in the KSP weekly reports. And now that I've had a chance to play around with it, I totally agree there is a lot of potential for story-based missions!

I would love to see you do this. And other writers, or future mission-builders, as well!!!

:cool:

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1 minute ago, Just Jim said:

Yes!!!

I don't know how many missions I'll be able to make myself, but as a fan-fiction writer, this is one of the things that occurred to me when @SQUAD first announced Mission Builder in the KSP weekly reports. And now that I've had a chance to play around with it, I totally agree there is a lot of potential for story-based missions!

I would love to see you do this. And other writers, or future mission-builders, as well!!!

:cool:

Cool, glad to hear it. I'm going to spend a bit more time practicing and then upload the first. I will probably stream building sessions off and on too.

I've got some fun tricks for creating a story that will make it feel a bit more alive. Thanks for the motivation-even one person being excited makes me happy to do it!

 

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This is the sort of mission/mission set I was thinking of when I told people that MH was SQUAD's answer to players complaining that Career mode has no story behind it.

I would be interested in giving it a spin once it is ready.

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22 minutes ago, Disparia Books said:

Cool, glad to hear it. I'm going to spend a bit more time practicing and then upload the first. I will probably stream building sessions off and on too.

I've got some fun tricks for creating a story that will make it feel a bit more alive. Thanks for the motivation-even one person being excited makes me happy to do it!

I've built a couple simple missions, but honestly only scratched the surface of what you can do with it.

I'm just excited to see someone else have the same line of thought... there is SOOOOO much you can do with just the pop-up windows alone to add a story-line into a mission. :D

Edited by Just Jim
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22 minutes ago, Just Jim said:

I've built a couple simple missions, but honestly only scratched the surface of what you can do with it.

I'm just excited to see someone else have the same line of thought... there is SOOOOO much you can do with just the pop-up windows alone to add a story-line into a mission. :D

Let me (us) know when you have something to share. I feel it valuable to share ideas as early as possible so the community can learn as much as possible as quickly as possible;)

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13 minutes ago, Disparia Books said:

Let me (us) know when you have something to share. I feel it valuable to share ideas as early as possible so the community can learn as much as possible as quickly as possible;)

Oh, absolutely! It's just right now most of my time is spent writing my Saga on here, and the rest I'm still helping out on a project I can't really talk about. So I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to sit down and write out a mission, at least in the near future. But I have a couple ideas rolling around my head, so when I do have something finished, I'll immediately post it to the mission sub-forum. :)

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6 minutes ago, Just Jim said:

Oh, absolutely! It's just right now most of my time is spent writing my Saga on here, and the rest I'm still helping out on a project I can't really talk about. So I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to sit down and write out a mission, at least in the near future. But I have a couple ideas rolling around my head, so when I do have something finished, I'll immediately post it to the mission sub-forum. :)

Do you happen to know if a YouTube video tutorial or a page here that explains how and where to upload files? That's the one thing I haven't learned!

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Well, I'm here for more than a year and usually I'm the guy that only observes. But I had to comment on that just to encourage you...

Also got the DLC on day one and I'm really looking forward to play you guys' missions, since I'm not so creative and can't come up with my own, especially regarding narratives.

So, go on and let's see what Jeb is up to at the KSC :D

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9 minutes ago, Disparia Books said:

2. Where the best places to upload on this forum and anywhere else might be. 

OK, second question first. As far as this forum, you're already in the right place to post new missions. In fact, if they're for what you're proposing in the thread, I would just edit your original post and add your new missions into that, when they're ready.

As far as other forums, I'm not sure, but I think CurseForge has set up a new section for mission sharing.

16 minutes ago, Disparia Books said:

1. How to upload at all. Not sure how to create and export the mission from the game itself.

Again, I'm still teaching myself how to build more elaborate missions, but once you're finished, there's a button to export them as a zip file. I don't remember off-hand where... sorry... I can go check later, but right now I'm trying to land a big colony piece on Minmus... and type at the same time. 

Hey, if anyone from @SQUAD is reading, or anyone else for that matter, do you know if there are any mission builder tutorials available on-line?

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1 hour ago, Just Jim said:

OK, second question first. As far as this forum, you're already in the right place to post new missions. In fact, if they're for what you're proposing in the thread, I would just edit your original post and add your new missions into that, when they're ready.

As far as other forums, I'm not sure, but I think CurseForge has set up a new section for mission sharing.

Again, I'm still teaching myself how to build more elaborate missions, but once you're finished, there's a button to export them as a zip file. I don't remember off-hand where... sorry... I can go check later, but right now I'm trying to land a big colony piece on Minmus... and type at the same time. 

Hey, if anyone from @SQUAD is reading, or anyone else for that matter, do you know if there are any mission builder tutorials available on-line?

Good ideas, thanks for that. I will start posting them here as I finish them. Hopefully the first one will be ready in a few days!

As for how to do it, I will complete my mission and see if there is something rather obvious and go from there, but yeah, I'm open for tutorials. Thanks mate :)

 

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2 hours ago, Disparia Books said:

1. How to upload at all. Not sure how to create and export the mission from the game itself.

2. Where the best places to upload on this forum and anywhere else might be. 

Thanks!

I use Google Drive; the mission zips are rather small, so Dropbox is another free option. As for how to export the zips, you have to open the briefing from the editor, export's in the bottom-left corner.

From what I can tell, the way nodes in missions work is there's a current node and every node linked out from it, plus all catch-all nodes, are constantly checked for their condition being true (for many nodes like display message, it's always true). Once one of those node's condition is met, it fires and replaces the current node.

This means missions are mostly linear with some branching possible. Loops should also be possible. The major restriction from this is that there's no memory/backtracking, so catch-all nodes can't just lead down a path that does something and then you return to the main events, they must either end things or lead back to some specific part of the main events.

You can probably do some clever stuff to make up for this shortcoming. Consider a murder investigation story in which the action of entering a specific pod from a set of three proceeds with an investigation into the person associated with the pod. You could "remember" which paths were dead ends by blowing up the pod for them before returning to the pod-selection node.

Edited by Nebbie
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Okay! Phew! I've spent the past 2 hours troubleshooting a mission node that wouldn't activate no matter what. I wanted to have players EVA to simulate picking up supplies for part of the mission but had to scrap it, as it completely stalled everything. I will need to figure that out later.

I'm HOPING to have this mission done and uploaded tomorrow evening at the latest. It all works (including points), so I just need to tweak the text and titles of nodes. The mission summary itself introduces the backstory for the series and sets up Jeb's motivations, history, and future plot points.

FYI: The series will be completely stock to make it as accessible as possible.screenshot16.pngscreenshot18.pngscreenshot19.png

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28 minutes ago, Radiatin said:

I think one major thing that would make such a series awesome is if you had fixed locations and bases for Jeb to visit, to sort of set the lore. So Jeb would have to get his Antarctic training at the base there.

Consider it done. As long as the editor cooperates I'm going to keep existing vehicles in their final spots between missions (though it might get complicated). I LOVE the "anywhere base" feature, so props to @SQUAD for that.

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Doing this might be difficult... although maybe you could make an "installer"(can be a simple batch file) for new chapters. All it would do is extract the archive files and copy the persistence file from the previous mission, provided it's possible to create a permanent save.

Good luck! I do think this will be quite fun, and definitely hilarious.

Edited by Bill Phil
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43 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Doing this might be difficult... although maybe you could make an "installer"(can be a simple batch file) for new chapters. All it would do is extract the archive files and copy the persistence file from the previous mission, provided it's possible to create a permanent save.

Good luck! I do think this will be quite fun, and definitely hilarious.

Doing something like that would make life easy, but i have a potential workaround (wont know intil i try a few more though). A persistent file...That sounds like a job for... @The White Guardian

:wink:

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NEARLY DONE!

I wanted to share quickly a few things that I've learned and a few things to look for when I upload my mission. Hopefully this helps anyone else working on more elaborate missions too. Sorry in advance for the TLDR...but it should be helpful:

1. With 2 books under my belt and a decade of writing professionally, if I've learned anything it's that consistency, continuity, and attention to detail matter as much as anything else. I'm using the types of dialog options as a way of representing different types of communication. I have the Kerbal dialog (from Gene etc) in the center window, I have narrative and exposition as just raw text (no box) situated at the top center of the screen under the altimeter, and actual spoken dialog is in the center (not the Kerbal window). When I share this, please let me know how this all feels. I've played around with the length of time text stays on screen and need feedback on how to improve the overall flow. I figure longer is better since, playing on 1080p at least, there is plenty of room to see the world and keep text up, so it isn't blocking anything. But everyone uses different resolutions/monitors. From what I've seen, it works pretty well as a way of immediately telling you what type of information you are reading based purely on location.

2. Some concessions will need to be made, at least for now, in creating exposition and dialog. The builder isn't set up to handle it super well. Timing is your best friend (so is the 'pause mission' button for kerbal text).

3. You can force cinematics, but they are janky. Altering and locking camera controls help create a more cinematic experience (you'll see what I mean when I upload). But the cuts to and from different angles are really abrupt. Nothing we can do about that now.

4. From what I've seen you CANNOT A: spawn a kerbal/vehicle that you control on the ground and have another one falling from the sky from a set height, on a sub-orbital trajectory, or have one start stages unless you switch to it. Yes, I was considering how to have a craft randomly fall from the sky for...humorous purposes, but as of now I don't think it can be done. On that note you can't spawn a vessel on the pad (or anywhere) and have it launch unless you switch to it first (in other words, you can't use a row of SRB's as fireworks to cheer a kerbal for doing a mediocre great job). If anyone has ideas for a workaround please share here.

5. Persistence. As of now I don't know how to create a persistent file for crafts. The idea is that certain vessels and items will stay where they are between missions for continuity and story purposes. My current workaround is still in testing but involves ALWAYS loading the previous save file then renaming it and deleting unnecessary nodes before creating a new mission. By doing that it automatically stores and saves your pre-created vessels AND their locations. Don't like their locations because the player would have landed somewhere else? Just drag them where they 'should' be. This makes it easy to not need to rebuild things or reload vessels for continuing missions.

That should be it for now. I will have the first mission done soon. The objectives themselves are not super crazy (no landing on Eve and taking off with an SSTO made of cheese and struts), because it was designed to introduce the characters, story, and future conflicts as well as test the logic. But it's still fun. I will be back soon with more updates. Feel free to add your thoughts to anything I mentioned above. Thanks all!

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