[1.8.1-1] [PLEASE FORK ME] Kopernicus & KittopiaTech

[Galileo]

Well, good thing this isn’t your mod. No amount of tantrum throwing will result in the checker being removed.

 

It’s pretty common knowledge to move your KSP install outside of Steam’s reach. And if you have expectations that most users wouldn’t expect support, then I expect that most users move their copy outside of the default steam folder to avoid getting auto updated. Not doing so is not a mod developers problem.

Alas, both are unrealistic expectations.  

[Sigma88]

On 5/26/2016 at 7:52 PM, Thomas P. said:

Like my mods?
Please consider supporting me and my mods on Paypal! I would greatly appreaciate it, since I don't get much money anyways.
However note, that this doesn't grant you anything special, but it will help to keep my motivation up. Therefor it's just an extremly nice way to say "thanks".

for anyone who has enjoyed kopernicus and looks forward to new updates I would like to remind that this is completely free content you are getting,

so maybe rather than say I want try to say thank you ... also, be patient, and grateful

[Shalfar]

36 minutes ago, Galileo said:

Well, good thing this isn’t your mod. No amount of tantrum throwing will result in the checker being removed.

 

It’s pretty common knowledge to move your KSP install outside of Steam’s reach. And if you have expectations that most users wouldn’t expect support, then I expect that most users move their copy outside of the default steam folder to avoid getting auto updated. Not doing so is not a mod developers problem.

Alas, both are unrealistic expectations.  

Another option, for people who didn't move their install, is to just start a new game so it isn't dependent on Kopernicus and other mods that have disabled themselves.  When the mods get updated, go back to your old save.  You get the opportunity to try out the game updates and (and the "Oh Crap!" point updates) while you wait PATIENTLY. Now let the people who write these wonderful mods in their spare time do their thing.

[nsgallup]

The annoying thing about all this whining that happens every update is you cant actually tell if the mod is updated or not because the thread is flooded with rage.

[OhioBob]

10 minutes ago, nsgallup said:

The annoying thing about all this whining that happens every update is you cant actually tell if the mod is updated or not because the thread is flooded with rage.

Just check the thread title to see if the version number has changed.

[panarchist]

2 hours ago, Thomas P. said:

TL;DR:

• I don't have fun creating release updates for Kopernicus. But I understand why people want it so badly that my mailbox regulary explodes and moves every mail from the forum to the spam folder.
• I don't have much time to do release upgrades. But I will take the time as soon as I notice an update has been released.
• I don't notice release updates instantly. They either release at night when I sleep or at midday when I am at school / university. So give me some time to realize that Kopernicus needs an update
• I don't know that Squad doesn't allow you to downgrade to 1.5.0, therefore I don't know that an updated Kopernicus is probably even more urgent to you.
• So just show some patience and give me 2 or 3 days to update my build stuff, test Kopernicus a bit if I think it might fail, and then publish the release (or rather the 4 releases if you count both backports and Kittopia (which is btw. the perfect example of me leaving a mod in limbo and letting it decay until nothing works anymore))

And by most if not all of us, that's REALLY appreciated - thanks!

The real issue is that Squad doesn't provide any way to revert a persistence file load immediately after loading it into the game. Nor back it up automatically on load. The 1.4.x releases broke very few mods compared with 1.3.x "minor" changes - Squad at least seems to be taking modder concerns seriously now. I hope that someday you'll be able to have the version checker ignore minor version changes, but unfortunately the pattern so far has been that 1-3 minor changes go really well, and then a supposedly-minor change blows up every mod using some obscure (or sometimes not so obscure) method or function. So, I'm perfectly fine waiting and playing another save game in the interim. (or on another copy - I bought both Steam and non-Steam versions of KSP prior a long while back. (0.17 for non-Steam) I can understand everyone's  frustration, but they need to understand that you and the other modders of popular mods have lives that don't revolve around 24/7 KSP.

Anyway, thanks again - Kopernicus has made my gaming experience a lot richer, and I'm happy to wait, and thankful that we don't have 4 forks of the mod competing with each other, or it being abandoned with no developer. Cheers.

[maallaard]

Waahh! Waahh! I want my patch now! Waahh!

Not the best impression, but I’m bored right now

 

[Gordon Dry]

12 minutes ago, RedBee92 said:

Not the best impression, but I’m bored right now

Understandable - the reason for the 1.5.1 hotfix was a game breaking bug ... So 1.5.0 is a no go.

[Snark]

Just to be clear:  in the following statement, I'm speaking simply as a mod author and as an enthusiastic Kopernicus user, not as a moderator.  So anyone who disagrees with me is free to ignore any exhortations I may make in this post-- I'm just wearing my "civilian" hat at the moment.

 

4 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

For the record, it's an easy fix for anyone capable of recompiling the plugin from source.

Sure, it's possible, just like it's possible to publish how-to instructions for doing various other anti-social things.  Doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea.

4 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

This should kill this brain-damaged checker for good.

It is, of course, up to you how you choose to treat the community, and how you choose to treat the people who have devoted so much work for so long to give you these shiny toys for free.

However... please do bear in mind just what an enormous amount of thankless work @Thomas P. and his fellow Kopernicus maintainers have put into producing and maintaining this mod.  They've put in huge amounts of work in the past, and continue to do so on an ongoing basis to keep Kopernicus as an ongoing concern.  They do this for free, purely out of community spirit and the goodness of their hearts, so that we can all have shiny toys for free.  They routinely put up with a lot of technical crap on an ongoing basis, for our sakes.  These are the good guys, folks.

So maybe it would be a bit more tactful not to refer to them as "brain-damaged"?  Perhaps show a little appreciation for the lovely gifts that they've given you and keep giving you?  For free?

If you didn't produce Kopernicus yourself-- and you aren't involved in keeping it up and running all the time, across KSP updates-- and you haven't had to deal with the huge community of people who are bombarding them with requests all the time-- then you're not really in a position to understand what their time sinks are, what gives them grief, what helps them, etc.

They put that version-lock in there for very good reasons, which can be best summarized as "because their life became a living hell without it".  And that trumps everything.  Because if their workload and their "development life" becomes unworkable and unsustainable, to the point where they have to ask themselves "why do I keep doing this?", then there's the risk that they could burn out and abandon the project and then everyone loses.

Yes, it's not fun, as a mod user, to have Kopernicus go radio-silent for a while after every KSP update.  But it does that in order to keep the developers sane enough to keep maintaining it, which means it's necessary.

It is better to have a little Kopernicus outage once in a while, than for Kopernicus to go dead forever.

So, two things:

• Calling this version-lock "brain-damaged" is calling the Kopernicus team brain-damaged.  Which seems like a poor way to show appreciation for them, given what a huge gift they're giving us, for free, all the time.
• Publicly posting "here's how you defeat their defense mechanism" and inviting people to do it, is basically trying to make their lives hell.  And since we depend on them to keep working hard to give us this shiny stuff for free, it seems like maybe not such a great idea for us to go out of our way to make their lives more difficult than they need to be.

For anyone who's considering doing what's advised above, i.e. defeating the version lock:  Please understand that you're essentially "voiding the warranty" by doing so.  If you want to do that for yourself on your own private machine and don't involve anyone else, then it's no skin off anyone's nose, of course.  But if you do... please, please don't report any bugs or complain about any problems, to any mod author of Kopernicus or any planet pack, for as long as you're running the hacked version.

And please don't encourage other people to turn off the lock, either.  Because even if you have enough self-discipline not to report any problems when you're using the jury-rigged thing... other people don't have so much restraint.  There are thousands and thousands of people out there, and it's simply impossible for them to show that kind of restraint in the aggregate.

[Nittany Tiger]

7 hours ago, LameLefty said:

So far as I can tell from Steam (which I’ve been using since 2004 btw) the Betas tab only allows rolling back to whatever the game developers have set up Steam to allow. And in my case at least, I can roll back to several point releases (1.2.whatever, 1.3.whatever, etc) but I have no option to go back to the original 1.5.0 release. *shrug*

In any case, it’s not a major deal if you’ve backed up your installation folder (which I used to do in the days when KSP crashed routinely) but I didn’t do it this time myself. Perhaps a useful reminder to do so in the future again.  

 

Same, but you could just roll back to 1.4.5 or 1.3.1 and use a backport install until the mod is properly updated.

Not sure why you can't go back to 1.5.0.  Maybe that option will be present soon.

Still, it's not the modder's fault that Squad decided to release a hotfix so suddenly.  Plus, he can't act instantly.  Gotta be patient.

[linuxgurugamer]

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

For the record, this is a canned routine copied off the forum (if you look at the aforementioned file, there's an URL to the thread), not a bespoke, integral job. During the 64bit debacle batch utilities were written to more or less do the same thing a bit lower in the code. Removing this check should not affect anything else, aside from allowing it to load on a version that's actually incompatible, which goes without saying. Also, anyone capable of compiling from source should know that such hack jobs won't get any support

Maybe you think that, but speaking from experience, people will ask for support no matter where they got the code or dll from.

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

And how exactly is it better than MiniAVC at doing this? This routine doesn't actually prevent neither KSP nor specific saves from loading, so if the message is ignored (and it isn't any harder than dismissing one from MiniAVC), trouble is going to ensue anyway. It does only one thing MiniAVC doesn't, and that thing seems to be mostly good for generating angry messages on the forum

So far, yours seems to be the only "angry messages" I've seen.

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Now, if it checked compatibility, then it would be good. It doesn't. It compares version numbers and barfs if there's a mismatch, without any regard for actual compatibility or lack thereof. This is a problem for every mod ever that had this crock slapped into it. 

Oh please, oh wise one, tell me how it can tell compatibility other than checking numbers?

Wait!  I have an Idea!  Why don't YOU write a mod, release it, and then support it.  All for free!  All in your spare time!  All while getting flack from angry users like yourself when it doesn't work for some reason?

Oh, you don't know how to write a mod?  or you have no interest in writing a mod?  You obviously have a little bit of technical knowledge, since you were able to look at and understand the code.  

Until you do write and support a big mod, why don't you just be quiet for a while and let the mod authors get around to the updates when they can.  There is life outside of KSP, you know, go take a walk in the part, swim in the ocean, see a movie, or something else until everyone else has had a chance to catch up to your point in time

[maallaard]

Well said @linuxgurugamer, well said.

[LameLefty]

1 hour ago, Nittany Tiger said:

Still, it's not the modder's fault that Squad decided to release a hotfix so suddenly.  Plus, he can't act instantly.  Gotta be patient.

I've posted three times in this thread since 1.5.0 was released. Never once have I even intimated that the incompatibility with 1.5.1 is Thomas P.'s fault.

Please, for the love of Jebus Kerman, read what I wrote rather than what you believe I have written. 

[Vanamonde]

Tempers are running pretty hot in this thread. Please take a moment to calm down. 

[AVaughan]

9 hours ago, panarchist said:

The real issue is that Squad doesn't provide any way to revert a persistence file load immediately after loading it into the game. Nor back it up automatically on load.

Well since I don't expect Squad to change that, you could move/copy KSP outside steam, so that Steam can't update your copy of KSP unexpectedly.  (That is always good practice for modded installs.  In my opinion anyone who plays a modded career should always do that).  You could also get in the habit of making a manual named save occasionally, so you can revert that way.  Next option is to open the saves directory, where you will find a directory named backup, that has several older copies of persistence.sfs.  Lastly for such a minor version update, you can probably manually edit the version field in the save, so that KSP could load the save after you have told steam to rollback to an earlier version.  (That last is not really not applicable in this case, because steam 1.5.0 isn't available in the Steam betas tab). 

[x2BruceWillis4x]

Dangit you guys! This was supposed to be an easy post, just to post logs and details for the mod author! Not a stupid argue fest...

 I just wanted to re-post after I tried something else. I had KSP installed on another 1TB hard drive in my pc. I uninstalled completely using steam . Then reinstalled onto my local SSD.  Opened up KSP, ran  then closed. Opened up ckan for the first time in this install. Installed latest Astronomer's Visual Pack and all of the corresponding  mods that are are required by avp. It worked. So either a fresh install  worked or you guys updated this in that short time of reinstalling. lol Either way it works for me now!  Thanks again for all the posters who can respond with some decency. 

 

Thanks to the the author as well for for your hard work and taking time to come here and respond to us!

[Elkram]

I just wanted to say thanks to Thomas, the rest of the kopernicus team and all of the others mod authors "THANKS" for all your work wich i use and enjoy for free. Thanks a lot.

[linuxgurugamer]

I wonder if it would make sense to add a check to see if the game is running in the Steam directory, and if so to put up an alert suggesting that the game be moved to a new directory.  The alert could even link to a thread on the forum set up for that, with instructions and a place to discuss moving Steam installs.

That might help, at least it would let people know it is an option.

[darwinpatrick]

That could be a good idea. I don't see a downside.

[4x4cheesecake]

16 hours ago, Nittany Tiger said:

Not sure why you can't go back to 1.5.0.  Maybe that option will be present soon.

Well, you can still use the steam console to load the 1.5.0 release. Read this post on steam if you are interested in any details or just do the following:

- Open this link in your browser: steam://nav/console (this will bring up a dialog to use steam instead of your browser)
- to download the base game, type into the console: download_depot 220200 220204  273237182289337659
- to download the MH expansion, type into the console: download_depot 283740 283740 1989315203466233178
- the download takes some time (very low rate compared to a regular steam download), no progressbar!
- files will be saved in '.../Steam/steamapps/content'
- the download contains just the english localization, if you need a different one, it can be downloaded separately

[maallaard]

They just patched Kopernicus for 1.5.1 on Github if anyone is still curious

Edited October 20, 2018 by RedBee92

[LameLefty]

16 minutes ago, RedBee92 said:

They just patched Kopernicus for 1.5.1 on Github if anyone is still curious

Well, there's been a commit to patch compatibility but as yet no release. Unless you have the toolchain to compile it yourself, you've still gotta wait for an official release.

(I have the toolchain and know-how but not the inclination - watching college football today and no real time for KSP anyway for a few days).

[nismobg]

There seems to be a problem with :

    useOnDemand =True
    useManualMemoryManagement = True

It lags loading from Tracking Center or switching in flight to Map View with any planet pack, small or big.

If you set to False, problem disappears and it transitions scenes instantaneously, if you can suck up the big Mem hog for loading the planets permanently.

[Alanthesupernatural]

Apparently, my KSP must hate the plugin. Because when I try to load the KSP, it won't load to the start menu. It will just keep loading until the end of time.

[Autolyzed Yeast Extract]

4 hours ago, RedBee92 said:

They just patched Kopernicus for 1.5.1 on Github if anyone is still curious

 

wrong, that's just the source code, can't use it

Edited October 21, 2018 by Autolyzed Yeast Extract