Duke Leto's question.

[Duke Leto]

Hey, I'm actually NOT using KEI, I'm deliberately tediously driving around KSC collecting experiments...  But what I'm experiencing is so goddamned weird I dunno what to make of it, and if anyone knows what's going on under the hood with the KSC biomes, it's you.

I was playing a nice modded game in 1.2, but Steam gave me a mandatory upgrade to 1.3 sometime in the spring, and I decided to take a break while the modders caught up so I wouldn't break my save.  The modders never caught up, but I eventually decided all of them being up to date with 1.4 was good enough.

I made the grand drive around KSC in my Sci Rover much earlier in my career in the 1.2 content, using MechJeb's Surface Info window configured to display what biome I am in for the purposes of pressing an action button to run all the experiments, and then have a bored Bob get out an collect the data and clean the ones that needed cleaning.  It used to be that touching a building meant that you were "in" that building's biome for the purposes of science, and as long as Bob was standing on the parked rover to get the surface sample and EVA report, so was he.

That is no longer true now that I've loaded up my save in 1.4.

I long since maxxed out my science tree and am now 100% committed with patent licensing, and I'm repeating the Sci Rover drive with the intention of putting all the experimental results into a rocket at the launchpad, and shooting them up to my LKO Station and its Sci Lab, where they can be processed for a few thousand funds a day for a good long time.  

What I'm seeing is as follows.

Most straightforwardly, the Mk1 Monument has been renamed, and this new name is a new biome with no completed experiments.  The island airstrip is now a unique biome with its own experimental results, but that was easy to take care of.  There are also some Launchpad outbuilding biomes that I don't think were there before, but they all seem to be the same biome for the purpose of gathering science.  (Park on the Launchpad Flagpole and take a surface sample, it just says that it's the Laucnhpad in the game interface, but it counts as science separate from that which you gathered from the real Launchpad, but do the same on the Laundpad Water Tank and it's a duplicate experiment, despite MechJeb thinking it's a new biome.)

Most troublingly, some new biomes for each major area have appeared: "Vehicle Assembly Building", "Spaceplane Hanger", "Tracking Station" and "Research and Development".  These are also completely new from the standpoint of experiments.  At first it looked like these were replacements for the Main Building biomes for each area.  They aren't.  When I drive up to a building in one of these areas, the surface biome flips between the "grounds" biome for the area, the new biome, and the building specific biome.  There doesn't seem to be a readily apparent logic as to which biome the craft is in based on its position relative to the building.  You just have to scrape against the damned thing until you find yourself in the building specific biome after you park.  (This can have fun effects if the building is a tank.)

I'm using several mods, obviously (not including KEI), but none of them should be screwing with the biome map.  I can give you a list if needed.

In any case, if the game has changed the behavior of the KSC biomes, than KEI may have to change as well, since the total amount of science seems to have changed.  If the way the game deals with building specific biomes has changed in this incomprehensible way, then KEI may get more popular going forward.

I hope all that makes some sort of sense.

[JH4C]

23 minutes ago, Duke Leto said:

Hey, I'm actually NOT using KEI, <snip>

KEI works just fine with the redrawn biome map, in fact it works better than fine because it's triggered successful experiments for me in substructure biomes I've had great difficulty locating manually. As this isn't about KEI, then it should really be posted elsewhere, maybe Gameplay Questions?

Edited August 5, 2018 by JH4C
<snip>

[Duke Leto]

1 minute ago, JH4C said:

KEI works just fine with the redrawn biome map, in fact it works better than fine because it's triggered successful experiments for me in substructure biomes I've had great difficulty locating manually. As this isn't about KEI, then it should really be posted elsewhere, maybe Gameplay Questions?

I just came from KSP Discussions.

They told me to go here.

[Vanamonde]

There was some confusion, Duke Leto, but your question is now in the right place.

Good luck with your issue. 

[JH4C]

I never played in 1.2 or 1.3 but I do know that between 1.4.2 and 1.4.4 it's become trickier to pin down some of the individual building biomes; that's nothing to do with any mod, it's part of the basic gameplay and presumably because Squad made minor adjustments to some part of the system that led to this (un)intentional(?) consequence.

From what I can tell in your earlier thread, you were directed to the KEI thread because that person thought you'd benefit from using the add-on, not because they thought it was a better place to ask the question. Hopefully now it'll get more useful answers 

[Harry Rhodan]

6 hours ago, Duke Leto said:

I was playing a nice modded game in 1.2, but Steam gave me a mandatory upgrade to 1.3 sometime in the spring, and I decided to take a break while the modders caught up so I wouldn't break my save.  The modders never caught up, but I eventually decided all of them being up to date with 1.4 was good enough.

You know that you can always downgrade to the last few major versions (even all minor versions with a bit of effort) or just copy your game somewhere else so it won't be updated automatically every time?

[Superfluous J]

I am not sure what you are asking but I think it's "Were more new mini-biomes added in recent versions?"

If so, then "Yes" is the correct answer.

Edited August 5, 2018 by 5thHorseman

[Duke Leto]

I'm trying to understand what the change was, and what in the world could have been the rationale behind it.

But if the other thread got moved I can stop bugging people here.  Or in the other thread...

Edited August 6, 2018 by Duke Leto

[Duke Leto]

OK, let's try this again:

1. What is the system whereby the game decides which biome a craft is in around KSC's buildings?
2. Is this change documented in the Version History, and does someone need to update the KSP wiki to reflect it?
3. WHY?!!?!  What purpose does making people who want to collect experiments from KSC have to try and shoot for centimeter wide biomes serve?

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Hi , so you have a save for KSP 1.2 which lasted less than a month  before it turned to 1.2.1 and a host of bug fixes , and now you are running that same save in KSP1.4.x ?    A zipped and linked  copy of your KSP.log could shed some light on your problems  , given the amount of game changes since 1.2 it may indicate greater issues than just confused biomes .
 

[Superfluous J]

12 hours ago, Duke Leto said:

OK, let's try this again:

1. What is the system whereby the game decides which biome a craft is in around KSC's buildings?
2. Is this change documented in the Version History, and does someone need to update the KSP wiki to reflect it?
3. WHY?!!?!  What purpose does making people who want to collect experiments from KSC have to try and shoot for centimeter wide biomes serve?

This is my personal experience. I have no insights into the code and have access to the same release notes/version history as you.

1. It's hard coded (or at least not part of the biome map). From what I can tell, the game determines your biome by checking these 3 things, in order, and stopping as soon as one is found:
   1. Is your craft touching a special building that we've defined as a biome?
   2. Is your craft in a special area that we've defined as a biome?
   3. Use the biome map.
2. Like I said no clue. I doubt it, because I've never seen it and you haven't either. I have no opinion on the Wiki because I don't edit it, and feel that unless someone is willing to edit it they can't really complain.
3. Something like 90+ percent of players have never left Kerbin. Squad knows this and has said it publicly. I suspect a good portion of those players have never left the immediate area of the KSC. This is for them. I am unaware of any centimeter-wide biomes though. The building ones are of 0 width, and are a binary "are you touching the building or not" thing. The other area-specific biomes are much larger than a centimeter. Note: I don't really agree that it's necessary, and only collect it myself when doing challenges like the Caveman challenge, because let's face it it's easier than going to Minmus without patched conics.

Edited August 7, 2018 by 5thHorseman

[Duke Leto]

18 minutes ago, SpannerMonkey(smce) said:

Hi , so you have a save for KSP 1.2 which lasted less than a month  before it turned to 1.2.1 and a host of bug fixes , and now you are running that same save in KSP1.4.x ?    A zipped and linked  copy of your KSP.log could shed some light on your problems  , given the amount of game changes since 1.2 it may indicate greater issues than just confused biomes .
 

Since I've done what I intended to do after much frustration, my ability to give a flying expletive about the issue is rapidly ebbing away.

But if you want to screw around with my log file and saves, go nuts.

KSP Log:
http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=62383821149886876775

Old save:

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=62383821149886876775

Current save:

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=77222892403599355512

Mod list, in the order CKAN thinks it needs to be in:

DockingPortAlignmentIndicator
CommunityCategoryKit
KerbalAlarmClock
AT-Utils
ColorCodedCans
Impact!
TriggerAu-Flags
WaypointManager
Toolbar
ConfigurableContainers-Core
ContractParser
ContractConfigurator
KAS
ModularRocketSystem
SCANsat
IndicatorLights
MechJeb2
ConfigurableContainers
KerbalEngineerRedux
ProgressParser
ModuleManager
[x] Science
MechJebForAll
InterstellarFuelSwitch-Core
FuelTanksPlus
SpaceY-Lifters
SpaceY-Expanded
RoutineMissionManager
GSOSpeedPump
KIS

To clarify, the old save was made under 1.2.2, NOT 1.2, and the wait was between the advent of 1.3 and present. 

The amount of hardware floating around the Kerbin system in both saves ought to make it clear why I respond to the suggestion that I should just cheerfully restart my career from scratch every damned time Squad decides to destroy "patch" the game with the instruction that the suggester perform an anatomically impossible act.

[DoctorDavinci]

4 minutes ago, Duke Leto said:

every damned time Squad decides to destroy "patch" the game with the instruction that the suggester perform an anatomically impossible act.

Perhaps if you ran your game outside of Steam you wouldn't have this problem .. or an even better idea would be to set Steam to not automatically update KSP perhaps?

It is Steam who is responsible for updating your game, not Squad, so please place the blame for your situation on the company responsible for your issue

[Duke Leto]

1 minute ago, DoctorDavinci said:

Perhaps if you ran your game outside of Steam you wouldn't have this problem .. or an even better idea would be to set Steam to not automatically update KSP perhaps?

It is Steam who is responsible for updating your game, not Squad, so please place the blame for your situation on the company responsible for your issue

It may well be that I'll decide that's what I have to do.

I appear to be in the minority in that I want to use KSP to make an extensive attempt to explore the in-game solar system and establish permanent bases on all the planets moons, and perform and process all of the available science. 

That effort requires an enormous investment in play time, and a large selection of mods to manage the in game infrastructure.  With other game titles that are continuously evolving over long periods, like the Paradox suite or the Total War series, there are practical limits to how much playtime you can invest in any given save, so the periodic scythe of updates cuts less accumulated effort away.  With other titles in Steam that are more conventional in their development life cycle, the concern that you will have to restart your game from scratch because of a new update is non-existent, so I frankly have not bothered to give any thought to Steam's update settings up to now.

I get that Squad has different business priorities to serve to bring in new players and sell DLC, so unintentionally washing away the grand sandcastles of an insanely obsessive few is something they feel they need to do.  I get that my resentment is irrational and is probably on some level sublimated disgust at myself for liquiding away time on KSP.

Doesn't make any less angry.

[DoctorDavinci]

5 minutes ago, Duke Leto said:

It may well be that I'll decide that's what I have to do.

I appear to be in the minority in that I want to use KSP to make an extensive attempt to explore the in-game solar system and establish permanent bases on all the planets moons, and perform and process all of the available science. 

That effort requires an enormous investment in play time, and a large selection of mods to manage the in game infrastructure.  With other game titles that are continuously evolving over long periods, like the Paradox suite or the Total War series, there are practical limits to how much playtime you can invest in any given save, so the periodic scythe of updates cuts less accumulated effort away.  With other titles in Steam that are more conventional in their development life cycle, the concern that you will have to restart your game from scratch because of a new update is non-existent, so I frankly have not bothered to give any thought to Steam's update settings up to now.

I get that Squad has different business priorities to serve to bring in new players and sell DLC, so unintentionally washing away the grand sandcastles of an insanely obsessive few is something they feel they need to do.  I get that my resentment is irrational and is probably on some level sublimated disgust at myself for liquiding away time on KSP.

Doesn't make any less angry.

So you clearly realize that it is Steam and their user selectable automatic updating that you didn't turn off which is what caused your problem yet you are still blaming Squad?

Edited August 7, 2018 by DoctorDavinci

[Duke Leto]

49 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

This is my personal experience. I have no insights into the code and have access to the same release notes/version history as you.

1. It's hard coded (or at least not part of the biome map). From what I can tell, the game determines your biome by checking these 3 things, in order, and stopping as soon as one is found:
   1. Is your craft touching a special building that we've defined as a biome?
   2. Is your craft in a special area that we've defined as a biome?
   3. Use the biome map.
2. Like I said no clue. I doubt it, because I've never seen it and you haven't either. I have no opinion on the Wiki because I don't edit it, and feel that unless someone is willing to edit it they can't really complain.
3. Something like 90+ percent of players have never left Kerbin. Squad knows this and has said it publicly. I suspect a good portion of those players have never left the immediate area of the KSC. This is for them. I am unaware of any centimeter-wide biomes though. The building ones are of 0 width, and are a binary "are you touching the building or not" thing. The other area-specific biomes are much larger than a centimeter. Note: I don't really agree that it's necessary, and only collect it myself when doing challenges like the Caveman challenge, because let's face it it's easier than going to Minmus without patched conics.

Have I mentioned that the behavior you're describing on biome determination is not what is happening in my game?  It isn't.  That describes what my experience used to be.  Not any more.

Touching a building sometimes places you in a building specific biome, sometimes it places you in a general biome for the area, which is NOT the same biome as the one you get for simply parking on the area around the buildings in each KSC section.  If there's a pattern to how it decides which, I can't discern it.

I was implicitly volunteering to edit the wiki, FYI.

2 minutes ago, DoctorDavinci said:

So you clearly realize that it is Steam and their user selectable automatic updating that you didn't turn off which is what caused your problem yet you are still blaming Squad?

(Deep breath... there's no reason to be angry at this poster's bemusement...)

Yes.  Yes, I am. 

You're seriously laying the blame on Steam for a policy that is wholly beneficial for 99.9% of its titles and me for not knowing that treating KSP as a normal Steam game was wantonly courting disaster?

I am blaming Squad because they have made a game with the following features:

1. An enormous game world with a huge amount to see and do.
2. An ongoing development cycle with updates that break pre-existing saves.
3. Insufficient time between these updates to make a meaningful dent in exploring that game world within the constraints of Career mode.  (At least in the past year.)

Why should a player have to choose between a space program robust enough to send dozens of tourists to Duna and Jool and using the "Making History" features?

Why should a player need to worry about the default features of an installation periodically breaking their saves?

Why should a player have known in advance not to start an ambitious career campaign without re-configuring Steam to disable automatic updates?

None of these things are normal industry practices.  Granted, the very things that make KSP special are causing the problems I'm having.

At least I can't complain about the value for money that I paid for the game relative to the content, since Paradox would have charged 10-20 times for the same set of feature upgrades over time.

[DoctorDavinci]

1 hour ago, Duke Leto said:

(Deep breath... there's no reason to be angry at this poster's bemusement...)

It's not bemusement ... it's amusement at the mental gymnastics required to equate one company's policy and system to being the fault of another company that has no control over anything that is done by the aforementioned first company

Squad has no control over Steam and what they decide to do or how they set up their system ... I find the irony of the concept that Squad is somehow to fault for the business decisions of Steam quite amusing, please do carry on

[Duke Leto]

32 minutes ago, DoctorDavinci said:

It's not bemusement ... it's amusement at the mental gymnastics required to equate one company's policy and system to being the fault of another company that has no control over anything that is done by the aforementioned first company

Squad has no control over Steam and what they decide to do or how they set up their system ... I find the irony of the concept that Squad is somehow to fault for the business decisions of Steam quite amusing, please do carry on

So, Squad also has absolutely no knowledge of how their primary vendor does business and what effect Squad's issuance of updates is liable to have on people who have purchased their game through Steam?

That's an interesting perspective.

I'd derive amusement from seeing a web development company whose page doesn't render in Firefox because they only tested it in Chrome trying to flog that line of argumentation to their end users.

Does this sidebar discussion help either of us?  If not, why don't you find amusement elsewhere.

[DoctorDavinci]

1 hour ago, Duke Leto said:

So, Squad also has absolutely no knowledge of how their primary vendor does business and what effect Squad's issuance of updates is liable to have on people who have purchased their game through Steam?

You do realize that KSP was released a couple years before being on Steam, yes?

Also it isn't Squads responsibility to inform you of how to use another company's software ... It also is not Squads responsibility to tell you to read the direction manual that Steam has where it clearly points out that one of the conveniences of using Steam is the auto update feature for your games

Actually Steam totes that as a selling point of their service so if you didn't know about it then I assume it was a TL;DR thing since everything I've seen in regards to Steam mentions the auto update feature, can't miss it

As for finding amusement elsewhere, why would I do that when I'm getting such a chuckle out of this thread ... I get great amusement out of the irony of a logical fallacy and the logic here (in regards to Squad being responsible for your game being updated by steam due to you not turning off auto update) falls right into that category

So please, tell me more about how it is Squads fault

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, Duke Leto said:

Have I mentioned that the behavior you're describing on biome determination is not what is happening in my game?  It isn't.  That describes what my experience used to be.  Not any more.

Yes, but all I can say is I've never seen the problem and I've done this as recently as 1.4.3. I'm basically just adding a data point. I have no idea why our experiences are different.

 

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, Duke Leto said:

Why should a player need to worry about the default features of an installation periodically breaking their saves?

I am not aware of any update of KSP ever that just flat out broke a save. The closest I can recall is 1.0 which totally changed the atmosphere so all your ships stopped working correctly. But the saves still loaded.

Updates of course continually cause MODDED saves to not load, but that's basically expected. And not just in KSP.

[Duke Leto]

6 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

I am not aware of any update of KSP ever that just flat out broke a save. The closest I can recall is 1.0 which totally changed the atmosphere so all your ships stopped working correctly. But the saves still loaded.

Updates of course continually cause MODDED saves to not load, but that's basically expected. And not just in KSP.

Heh, you're correct, of course.  And the save itself isn't broken, per se.

Hard to say what might be causing the experienced behavior, and it isn't affecting my current game any more, so perhaps the log and save data will enable someone to determine if there's a mod conflict that's generating the strange behavior, and fix the mod.  Otherwise, best just to move on from my tantrum.