Contracts appear/blink for less than a second.

[paul23]

Well a lot of contracts from several contract pacts (I have 5 installed) are just quickly "blink in and out" of available. For example from the bases contract pack the only available contract: "build a base around kerbin" constantly shows as available. But before I can click the "activate" button it blinks out again. And then less than a second later it comes back in.

 

Can this be due to having 5+ contract packs installed?

[HansAcker]

Could be. Do you have any logs from the time the contract appears/vanishes?

[paul23]

5 hours ago, HansAcker said:

Could be. Do you have any logs from the time the contract appears/vanishes?

how would I get those? - Which logs and where to look? It kind of happens constantly, so it's not hard to find. Worse is that even for accepted contracts they "blink", so selecting one means it is unselected moments later. (hard to find the exact requirements).

 

EDIT: when I *mouse over*/*click on* the contracts the following appears:

 

Edited November 6, 2019 by paul23

[HansAcker]

Sorry, I'm not really familiar with SSTU.

To me it looks as if a SSTUTools Rescue Contract tries to use a nonexistent agency. Might be some MM patches gone wrong? SSTU isn't officially updated to support KSP 1.8, yet.

[paul23]

I'm using 1.7.3.. And I manually changed the contracts to have the agencies set.. The same thing still happens.

[Gargamel]

On 11/6/2019 at 12:06 PM, paul23 said:

how would I get those? - Which logs and where to look?

 

[paul23]

35 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

 

Yeah, well those stay empty, apart from the "agent is null" (and lots and lots of debug lines from the scrapyard mod)- which I fixed already but that didn't solve the problem.

 

 

[linuxgurugamer]

1 minute ago, paul23 said:

Yeah, well those stay empty, apart from the "agent is null" (and lots and lots of debug lines from the scrapyard mod)- which I fixed already but that didn't solve the problem.

You should know better.  There is obviously something wrong.  The fact that you don't see it in the log doesn't mean that its useless.  

Post a link to the log files, otherwise no one will be able to help you

[scottadges]

Related the to the "Agent is Null" logspam issue, take a look over here. This might/could/hopefully will help you.

I'm running KSP 1.7.3 using ContractConfigurator and several contract packs. I was getting a ton of the "Null Agent" logspam and the issue has to do with a change made back several KSP versions ago where everything needs an 'Agency' name, but the code for most of these contract packs doesn't always match that need.

From the thread:

On 6/16/2019 at 3:18 PM, phoenix2004uk said:

I just returned to the game having not played since 1.5 and noticed the same exception spam

According to some info from the Contract Configurator git hub issues (https://github.com/jrossignol/ContractConfigurator/issues/672) it is caused by some AGENT definitions not having a title attribute which was introduced in KSP 1.2 for localization.

I fixed the exception spamming in my game with these 2 steps:
1) Manually editing and fixing the persistant.sfs save file for all current and completed contracts
2) Adding a small ModuleManager config to fix the AGENT definitions that cause the exceptions

The Details
1) Find all instance in the save file with a null agent string. Using an editor like Notepad++ I searched for "agent = [\r\n]" as a regular expression, this will find all instances of the null agent within all the CONTRACT nodes. You should find there is an agentName attribute that is set correctly, so I copied the agentName value as the agent value.
Basically changing this:

			seed = 1927166245
			state = Offered
			viewed = Seen
			agent = 
			agentName = Field Research Team
			deadlineType = None

Into this:

			seed = 1927166245
			state = Offered
			viewed = Seen
			agent = Field Research Team
			agentName = Field Research Team
			deadlineType = None

For every found instance. Might be a good idea to backup your save file before doing this, just to be safe. If you are far into a career game, you might have lots of entries to fix.

2) Save the following ModuleManager config in your GameData folder somewhere, and it will fix all the AGENT definitions that are missing the title attribute

@AGENT:HAS[~title[]]:FINAL
{
	title = #$name$
}

Short and simple, find all AGENT nodes that have no title, add a title and set it's value the same as the AGENT name.

 

Reload your newly edited save file, and the exception spam should be gone. At least, it was in my case.

 

The suggestion above provides a quick MM patch (the @AGENT: part) that you can create and add to your GameData that should/may/hopefully will address this. You can also open the 'persistent.sfs' (which is your default save file for a specific game) and just add the names of the contracts to fix this manually, then the patch should/probably/most likely will catch any future contracts that would generate logspam.

Not sure about the blinking (per OP) but it *might* have something to do with the way contracts assess certain conditions. So, if you have those conditions met, then the contract appears. But if something changes while you're looking at the contract, it can disappear. I've had that happen to me. Again... not sure this is exactly your issue, but I've seen something similar.

Anyway, hope this helps with at least one of your issues!

 

Edited November 10, 2019 by scottadges

[scottadges]

On 11/7/2019 at 4:12 PM, paul23 said:

I'm using 1.7.3.. And I manually changed the contracts to have the agencies set.. The same thing still happens.

Ah, sorry... I just saw you made this comment (missed it in my first read of this post). But hopefully the patch will still help. It might be causing problems for any new contracts that you've created after you fixed the other ones manually.

[paul23]

56 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

You should know better.  There is obviously something wrong.  The fact that you don't see it in the log doesn't mean that its useless.  

Post a link to the log files, otherwise no one will be able to help you

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fow1tnKXNegHa6emGuj3WKy3cDoznmpF

 

This is an older save, where it was happening. (I notice it only happened to bases and stations -after some time-, and also stopped after I got to minmus).

[linuxgurugamer]

28 minutes ago, paul23 said:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fow1tnKXNegHa6emGuj3WKy3cDoznmpF

 

This is an older save, where it was happening. (I notice it only happened to bases and stations -after some time-, and also stopped after I got to minmus).

I'm not going to belabor the point, but the file still has the error about the agent field.

On 11/5/2019 at 8:43 PM, paul23 said:

Well a lot of contracts from several contract pacts (I have 5 installed) are just quickly "blink in and out" of available. For example from the bases contract pack the only available contract: "build a base around kerbin" constantly shows as available. But before I can click the "activate" button it blinks out again. And then less than a second later it comes back in.

 

Can this be due to having 5+ contract packs installed?

Shouldn't be due to 5+ contract packs.

I assume you weren't timewarping?

Misc errors I see are EvaFuel not loaded, probably due to dependencies

Is it still happening after installing the patch above in @scottadges post?

 

[Gargamel]

Moving to tech support, modded.