Kerbal Space Program 1.4.4 and Making History 1.3 launching today!

[razark]

2 hours ago, Leo_G. said:

Seconded.  I could not find any reply to this question, but it really should be addressed. The Steam Workshop should be hosting all the mods so everyone can enjoy them with easy installs.

Everyone?

[JAFO]

3 hours ago, Leo_G. said:

The Steam Workshop should be hosting all the mods so everyone can enjoy them with easy installs.

Who is this "everyone" you speak of? Lots of us, myself included, do not have the game installed via Steam.

[4x4cheesecake]

4 hours ago, Leo_G. said:

The Steam Workshop should be hosting all the mods so everyone can enjoy them with easy installs.

No.

Not everyone uses steam and everyone who installs mods should not run KSP through steam since you cannot deactivate the update function and every update can break the mods. Just take a look at the kopernicus release thread and how many people asking for an update to 1.4.4. and there are several other mods which need an update to run properly at the latest release of KSP.
It is way easier to manually install mods or use CKAN than undoing an game update to get the mods working again.

Actually, I don't like the workshop integration at all...

edit: huh? Guess I missed the 9th page

Edited July 9, 2018 by 4x4cheesecake

[Leo_G.]

2 hours ago, razark said:

Everyone?

 

1 hour ago, JAFO said:

Who is this "everyone" you speak of? Lots of us, myself included, do not have the game installed via Steam.

 

1 hour ago, 4x4cheesecake said:

No.

Not everyone uses steam and everyone who installs mods should not run KSP through steam since you cannot deactivate the update function and every update can break the mods. Just take a look at the kopernicus release thread and how many people asking for an update to 1.4.4. and there are several other mods which need an update to run properly at the latest release of KSP.
It is way easier to manually install mods or use CKAN than undoing an game update to get the mods working again.

Actually, I don't like the workshop integration at all...

edit: huh? Guess I missed the 9th page

Look, even I don't use the Steam version of KSP, but a lot of people do.  For those people there are a ton of mods that don't need to be updated every release (Mini Airbrakes is one of my personal favorites), and they should have the ability to install them easily.  People that use Steam might not the most technically oriented (read: intimidated by the command line).  Beyond this, getting CKAN to work is dodgy at best since it requires you to install Mono and root around a bit in the terminal (at least on a Mac or Linux system) to get it running in the first place.  (Yes, I know Linux people are used to the command line, but a lot of Mac people aren't.)

Compare this to the mods for Surviving Mars (great game incidentally, though certainly less technical than KSP), which are hosted via the Steam Workshop.  Nice graphical interface (unlike CKAN, which while functional is truly awful in terms of aesthetics), a few clicks, and all the desired mods are automatically downloaded, installed, and kept up to date without any more fuss from the user.

I would also advocate for a bunch of the top modders (e.g. Linux Guru Gamer, RoverDude, etc. — those two just spring to mind, but there are certainly others) work out some kind of deal with the devs to have at least some of the really common and "completely broken on a minor update" mods (e.g. Kerbal Engineer Redux, EVE, Distant Objects, MechJeb, etc.) incorporated into in the base game as stock so the mods don't really need to exist and risk being broken in every release.  A quick look at the top of the forum page does state they are looking for devs...

Side note on MechJeb...  Is there a simple mod that will do just the burn startup and shutdown out there?  I like planning my maneuver and transfer planning manually, as well as taking care of the SAS settings (Prograde, Retrograde, Node, etc.), but allowing it to automatically fire the engines (for the active ship only, not in the background) would be great.  I know that kOS should be able to do it, but that's far more horsepower than I need, as is MechJeb.

Other side note, directed at the devs:  Minor updates should NEVER be significant enough to break a mod.  1.4.3 to 1.4.4 is a bug fix, not an "update".  Mod makers should be (and many are) able to write things for version 1.4.0 and have then fully functional until version 1.5.0.

Edited July 9, 2018 by Leo_G.

[4x4cheesecake]

50 minutes ago, Leo_G. said:

Look, even I don't use the Steam version of KSP, but a lot of people do.

I do and I don't like the workshop. Tried it once with some mods for skyrim and it didn't work at all but downloading and installing the mods from a well known mod hosting website works like a charm. Also, I've already explained the problem with auto-updates through steam and there are not just minor updates, which are unlikly to break mods but the major updates will.

50 minutes ago, Leo_G. said:

People that use Steam might not the most technically oriented

Copy&Paste a folder is not very technical and I don't know any mod that requires anything else to install.

50 minutes ago, Leo_G. said:

Compare this to the mods for Surviving Mars (great game incidentally, though certainly less technical than KSP), which are hosted via the Steam Workshop.  Nice graphical interface (unlike CKAN, which while functional is truly awful in terms of aesthetics), a few clicks, and all the desired mods are automatically downloaded, installed, and kept up to date without any more fuss from the user.

I get your point of having a good looking, handy UI, auto updates etc. but my experience is just different and I don't know the game, so I cannot compare the mod situation to KSP.
But let me pick up your example of 'Mini Airbrakes' to show another problem of mods in the steam workshop: dependencies! Mini Airbreakes requires Module Manager to run but what will happen if Module Manager is not available in the steam workshop? AFAIK, the licence of MM does allow to redistribute the mod and it can be bundled with any other mod but this will not apply to every single mod. So, how do deal with dependencies if a mod creator refuses to host his mod at steam and the licence does not allow any redistribution?

50 minutes ago, Leo_G. said:

I would also advocate for a bunch of the top modders (e.g. Linux Guru Gamer, RoverDude, etc. — those two just spring to mind, but there are certainly others) work out some kind of deal with the devs to have at least some of the really common and "completely broken on a minor update" mods (e.g. Kerbal Engineer Redux, EVE, Distant Objects, MechJeb, etc.) incorporated into in the base game as stock so the mods don't really need to exist and risk being broken in every release. 

The 'Mod in Stock' discussion will probably never die and there are some good arguments for both sides...I like it the way it is. You can discuss about mods, suggest features, help fixing issues and get support within days/hours or even minutes. 'Modding' is more like a culture than just adding features to a game and even if you don't take part in this culture and just want to use the results, it would be a shame to loose this part of modding (just to clarify: I'm not a mod creator in KSP but I would consider myself as a member of this culture and I've created mods for other games).

 

Edited July 9, 2018 by 4x4cheesecake

[linuxgurugamer]

6 hours ago, Leo_G. said:

Seconded.  I could not find any reply to this question, but it really should be addressed. The Steam Workshop should be hosting all the mods so everyone can enjoy them with easy installs.

 It's up to the mod authors as to whether they put The Mods up on steam or not. Once it's available then I'm sure some authors well use it to. But speaking for myself, I dont want to deal with yet another method of distribution 

[DunnoAnyThing]

1 hour ago, Leo_G. said:

Minor updates should NEVER be significant enough to break a mod.  1.4.3 to 1.4.4 is a bug fix, not an "update".  Mod makers should be (and many are) able to write things for version 1.4.0 and have then fully functional until version 1.5.0.

Though it is true in that many mods break after an update(or, well, a bugfix or a patch)-Kopernicus for example-, IIRC (former or current) SQUAD members like TriggerAu, RoverDude and JPLRepo are also modders, so at least they check that quite a lot of mods will work or are provided with alternative ways. Yes, I do agree that it would be wonderful if all mods work automagically after an update(or whatever someone might call a version change), but this should not be something that devs must follow; it is us, the community members who are to help modders.(well, technically, devs are indeed community members, but you know what I mean.)

16 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

But speaking for myself, I dont want to deal with yet another method of distribution 

Yes, and I think that this is the main reason for the mods that aren't on, or outdated on CurseForge. Pretty reasonable.(though still many support CKAN for the ease of installing)

[Tyko]

10 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

 It's up to the mod authors as to whether they put The Mods up on steam or not. Once it's available then I'm sure some authors well use it to. But speaking for myself, I dont want to deal with yet another method of distribution 

Mod authors already devote their spare time to supporting the community. Place additional burden of working on yet another distribution system on them will accelerate burn-out. I think mods on Steam is an awful idea...I can just see all the mod forums "when are you putting this on Steam?", "will it be on Steam soon?"...etc etc...

And...not to put too fine a point on it, but  a huge chunk of popular mods are all run by @linuxgurugamer, so the devs should really be asking him what he wants. If he's not going to support Steam, then it's a moot point in my book.

Edited July 9, 2018 by Tyko

[DunnoAnyThing]

10 hours ago, Tyko said:

Mod authors already devote their spare time to supporting the community. Place additional burden of working on yet another distribution system on them will accelerate burn-out. I think mods on Steam is an awful idea...I can just see all the mod forums "when are you putting this on Steam?", "will it be on Steam soon?"...etc etc...

But recently I noticed a different reason for KSP players wanting mods to be on Steam.
Looking at KerbalX, there are 14634 Stock crafts(well, some might have tweakscaled parts, but this probably doesn't invalidate what I want to say) and 11455 Modded crafts. This indicates that quite a large portion of shared (awesome) crafts require mods.
However, steam(currently)workshop does not support mods, so modded crafts are not allowed(IIRC, or, at least discouraged) to be uploaded.
So maybe some of the people who require 'putting mods on steam' are thinking, 'If this mod is on steam, maybe this/that craft would also be shared.'.

[Tyko]

3 hours ago, DunnoAnyThing said:

But recently I noticed a different reason for KSP players wanting mods to be on Steam.
Looking at KerbalX, there are 14634 Stock crafts(well, some might have tweakscaled parts, but this probably doesn't invalidate what I want to say) and 11455 Modded crafts. This indicates that quite a large portion of shared (awesome) crafts require mods.
However, steam(currently)workshop does not support mods, so modded crafts are not allowed(IIRC, or, at least discouraged) to be uploaded.
So maybe some of the people who require 'putting mods on steam' are thinking, 'If this mod is on steam, maybe this/that craft would also be shared.'.

If the goal was just to allow modded craft to be shared it would be a lot easier to just use some sort of tool to recognize that a craft has mods and flag it as such. This is what KerbalX does. KerbalX doesnt need all the mods to be hosting on it's site. 

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, DunnoAnyThing said:

But recently I noticed a different reason for KSP players wanting mods to be on Steam.
[snip]
So maybe some of the people who require 'putting mods on steam' are thinking, 'If this mod is on steam, maybe this/that craft would also be shared.'.

Problem is…. Steam just doesn't allow you to block updates anymore. You just can't do it without some kludges that, frankly, makes the idea of maintaining  manually a separated modded installment a walk in the park.

Until further measures can be taken to prevent an automatic update to play havoc on the user's game, mods simply should not be allowed on Workshop. It's a receipt for disaster.

 

14 hours ago, Tyko said:

Mod authors already devote their spare time to supporting the community. Place additional burden of working on yet another distribution system on them will accelerate burn-out. 

You are right. It's not up to the mod developer to publish (and answer for) on WorkShop. Steam Workshop is Squad's "sacred land", it's up to them to guarantee everything works there. It's their name in the game.

The only model I can think that can work is something like Debian do: there're the software developers, and they develop the programs without caring about distribution. And there're packagers, and these guys are the ones responsible for making things work fine once one "apt-get install" something.

I don't see any other model working here.

Edited July 10, 2018 by Lisias
hit "save" too soon.

[DunnoAnyThing]

3 minutes ago, Tyko said:

If the goal was just to allow modded craft to be shared it would be a lot easier to just use some sort of tool to recognize that a craft has mods and flag it as such. This is what KerbalX does. KerbalX doesnt need all the mods to be hosting on it's site.

That's why I upload onto KerbalX and download from it, too.

2 minutes ago, Lisias said:

I don't see any other model working here.

Speaking of which, I've seen several games out on Steam which has mods on the Steam Workshop page, such as Stellaris or Cities:Skyline.
What are their model? Would looking at them help?
(Yet I do support the idea that mods should be left as is currently.)

[Lisias]

11 minutes ago, DunnoAnyThing said:

Speaking of which, I've seen several games out on Steam which has mods on the Steam Workshop page, such as Stellaris or Cities:Skyline.
What are their model? Would looking at them help?
(Yet I do support the idea that mods should be left as is currently.)

It worths to look on it - what I can't help, as I only use Steam to play KSP, Tomb Rider series, Elite and Rodina. Other than that, my gaming is on PSN.

But I don't think this would help too much. The problem here is the KSP's "Bazar" development, while games in general go for the "Cathedral" model of development. KSP break thinks on every release, and there're almost a release every 6 to 10 weeks. It's just too risky (almost suicidal, IMHO) to allow mods being distributed on Steam and then, once a new release is made, facing the backslash of hundreds of save games corrupted because some mods got broken suddenly. Keep in mind that Steam can update your game silently - most gamers just realized there was an update when something break.

[DunnoAnyThing]

3 minutes ago, Lisias said:

But I don't think this would help too much. The problem here is the KSP's "Bazar" development, while games in general go for the "Cathedral" model of development. KSP break thinks on every release, and there're almost a release every 6 to 10 weeks. It's just too risky (almost suicidal, IMHO) to allow mods being distributed on Steam and then, once a new release is made, facing the backslash of hundreds of save games corrupted because some mods got broken suddenly. Keep in mind that Steam can update your game silently - most gamers just realized there was an update when something break.

Agreed.

[Kerbinchaser]

On 6/21/2018 at 10:29 PM, The_Cat_In_Space said:

SoonTM

soon.exe

[Dafni]

2 hours ago, Lo Var Lachland said:

soon.exe

has stopped working

[DMagic]

17 hours ago, DunnoAnyThing said:

Speaking of which, I've seen several games out on Steam which has mods on the Steam Workshop page, such as Stellaris or Cities:Skyline.
What are their model? Would looking at them help?

I think they generally work about as you would expect: most of the time it's fine, until something changes and it isn't fine anymore.

For Cities: Skyline I think the mods work in a way that's broadly similar to KSP, you have building mods, which are just new models and don't generally have problems with updates (though Cities bizarrely treats every single building as a separate mod, which can make managing and finding them a pain), and then there are plugin mods (Cities is also built on Unity, so I think the mod platform is somewhat similar to how KSP mods interact with the game), which go haywire when a new update is released.

The major difference is that Cities has an in-game mod manager that allows you to disable certain mods, making mod-breaking updates somewhat less of a concern (some mods can't really be disabled or removed without breaking a saved city).

The other major difference is that Cities has supported Steam Workshop right from the start, so the modding scene is centered around that, not like the fractured mess that is KSP modding.

Edited July 10, 2018 by DMagic

[Lisias]

11 hours ago, DMagic said:

The other major difference is that Cities has supported Steam Workshop right from the start, so the modding scene is centered around that, not like the fractured mess that is KSP modding.

I respectfully but strongly disagree with your view.

KSP modding is not a fractured mess. This is how we do things on real world - the alternative is confining yourself on a "Walled Garden". Walled Garden has some advantages, but it has also serious drawbacks, anyone with an MacOS on the last year can testify.

The KSP launching cycle is messed - we know things break on every release, but everybody is acting as this never happens.

[Superfluous J]

25 minutes ago, Lisias said:

KSP modding is not a fractured mess. This is how we do things on real world

I see no reason why it can't be both. 

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, 5thHorseman said:

I see no reason why it can't be both. 

Because open source people, the main workforce on KSP modding, doesn't cope very well to Walled Gardens.

Giving a real world example, the only reason I'm using MacOS is due MacPorts (or Brew). Even Windows nowadays have the Linux subsystem (running Ubuntu, OpenSUSE), and before that we were using Cygwin and DJGPP (yeah, I'm from that days).

But even if that would not be true, Walled Gardens costs money. Are you willing to pay a monthly "tax" in order to fund a Walled Garden for KSP? Or perhaps paying 1 or 2USD for each mod, Google Market Play style? 

Because the money must come from somewhere.

Edited July 11, 2018 by Lisias
yeah. typos. =/

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

Because open source people, the main workforce on KSP modding, doesn't cope very well to Walled Gardens. 

Sorry. I meant both a fractured mess and how it's done in the real world.

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

But even if that would not be true, Walled Gardens costs money. Are you willing to pay a monthly "tax" in order to fund a Walled Garden for KSP? Or perhaps paying 1 or 2USD for each mod, Google Market Play style?

And I've never paid Steam a penny other than for the few games they produce that I've bought. They know full well that if they charge for Workshop they'll lose more than they make.

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

Sorry. I meant both a fractured mess and how it's done in the real world.

Uh. Sorry the confusion. My apologies.

 

3 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

And I've never paid Steam a penny other than for the few games they produce that I've bought. They know full well that if they charge for Workshop they'll lose more than they make.

Now that I understood correctly what you mean, I'm inclined to agree with you. Yes, it's possible. See the model used by OpenSUSE, for example: they sold OpenSUSE Enterprise, which is supported, but also allow the download for a 'free version', without support.

People use the free version, and the bugs they find are fixed - what end up being beneficial for everybody. People in need of immediate support, pay for it.

There're some legal implications, however. People licensing their work under GPL will be ok with that model, but the mods licensed under a CC-SA-NC will probably object it.

Edited July 11, 2018 by Lisias
a usual expression on my native tongue was transliterated to english (false cognate), and… It could sound a way it was not intended. So I choose to rephrase it.

[KSK]

19 hours ago, Dafni said:

has stopped working

Abort/Retry/Fail

[Tyko]

The only way I see this working is if Squad comes up with a way to link up to SpaceDock in the same way CKAN does so that mod makers only have to post once. AND (big AND) takes on all troubleshooting related to Workshop installs. If this happened, then adding it wouldn't impact mod makers.

Let's consider for a second what happens if  @linuxgurugamer or @Galileo or @Beale or @CobaltWolf or any of the other amazing mod contributors says "F it!" and just quits posting mods because Squad flubs it and buries modders in more work. Galileo has already said his team is getting burned out. LGG wasn't supportive of Steam.

IMHO our VIP players are the modders. They play and support the game for others. I'd suggest that Squad should be much more interested in keeping them happy than a few players who can't be bothered to learn how to drag and drop a folder into the GameData directory.

Edited July 11, 2018 by Tyko

[CobaltWolf]

Well, since I was tagged, I'll weigh in and say I don't have that much of an interest in hosting my mods on Steam. I have a system through Github that works fairly well, with uploads to Spacedock to make things easier for people that would prefer getting mods through that service. I haven't ever heard of someone actually using Curse so I never even looked into uploading there. From my POV, what I stand to gain from uploading my mods to steam is a lot of, to use a term, 'lowest common denominator' players *possibly* seeing my mod. I say possibly since in my experience the Steam Workshops are generally a mess and a lot of low quality / poorly supported mods float to the top. Players that I stand to gain from steam, as I said, likely would be people who aren't engaged in the community which entails a fair bit (less likely to generate good bug reports, just lower quality interactions as a whole) as people that are engaged and looking for a good discussion are likely already on the forums.

Now, this is also probably because (as a player, and then now as a modder) I don't really look for mods on Spacedock. I usually just skim the thread titles of the first couple pages of the Add On boards at least once a day or so, and check in on any that interest me. This has a side affect of the aforementioned low quality or poorly supported mods generally not hanging around for very long (especially with the moderation team's habit of locking necro'd threads which don't have anything productive happening in them) since those threads die pretty quick.

With all of that said, I happily use the Steam workshop for mods for other games (AoE2HD, Cities) so I get where the playerbase is coming from, especially regarding the ease of subscribing to mods (which is very much a double edged sword from a modder's POV - easy for people to just click a button without actually reading the description). I also choose *not* to use the Steam workshop for things like Bethesda games, partially because the communities for those games lie on other sites, and also because I know I need to use utility software and some manual tweaks to get things to work right, similar to a lot of people's KSP installs.

Anyways, this was just a quick train-of-thought post on my lunch break so sorry if it's a bit rambling/unclear.

Edited July 11, 2018 by CobaltWolf