Alarm Clock Usage Discussion

[panarchist]

On 7/17/2021 at 1:33 PM, Feiwuzei said:

For rocket science, this game seems to depend more on timing like the bus schedule, which I just checked after writing the above. You will get there when you get there!

That's true for any reasonable amount of ΔV - once you start using the truly insane propulsion types, like NSWR or Orion, then you can burn a little longer to go wherever you want whenever you want.

[LordFerret]

I went and grabbed the latest update (v1.12.1), and I'm finding the alarms for a number of things are being skipped as well as some strange behaviors.

The strange behaviors are related to time warping. When warping to the next alarm, not the active vessel, I find the warp advancing, and then suddenly I'm back at the start. The behavior is inconsistent. In one instance, not believing my eyes, I clicked on warp three times and was returned to the start all three times.

If using the active vessel, warping to next alarm (with default 1 minute advance before the 'target' time, and no other alarms set) I find myself coming in about 10 seconds late.

I'm also having alarms being skipped, again, even with the 'add burn time to' deactivated... several maneuver nodes, and a number of SOI changes. I've now got little green guys'n'gals hopping mad, adrift with no way home, wanting answers... I've directed them to you.

I've also had alarms go off where I click on the 'jump to ship' (and then close and delete the alarm window), and I'm still at the current vessel - no 'jump to' was performed. My exact words were: "HUH?!?"

What I don't have, at the moment, is time to try and track down actions that might be contributing to these things. Sorry guys, but this is still quite broken.

[Matt77]

Is there a way to completely disable the stock alarm clock?  I much prefer KAC as it doesn't use screen space, toolbar space etc unless I tell it to, and it usually guesses what I want when I add a new alarm.

[jlcarneiro]

57 minutes ago, Matt77 said:

Is there a way to completely disable the stock alarm clock?  I much prefer KAC as it doesn't use screen space, toolbar space etc unless I tell it to, and it usually guesses what I want when I add a new alarm.

I second that.

It ALSO automatically creates an alarm when we create a maneuver.

Edited August 13, 2021 by jlcarneiro

[archiebald]

On 8/14/2021 at 7:32 AM, jlcarneiro said:

I second that.

It ALSO automatically creates an alarm when we create a maneuver.

I third that - I have now totally given up on the stock alarm clock and have reverted to using KAC mod.

[Lathari]

On 7/17/2021 at 11:33 PM, Feiwuzei said:

For rocket science, this game seems to depend more on timing like the bus schedule, which I just checked after writing the above. You will get there when you get there!

Tide and Transfer Window wait for no kerbonaut.  

But yes, the SAC and STWP seem suffer from teething problems. In my JNSQ career I'm missing the option to select non-optimal munar and minmus(ian?) transfers and tend to rely on KER's transfer info. Also it seems the Kronometer and SAC don't like to play nicely. Raw alarm few days into the future might be only couple of hours and I missed two asteroid captures because of wonky alarms. 

[linuxgurugamer]

21 minutes ago, Lathari said:

Tide and Transfer Window wait for no kerbonaut.  

But yes, the SAC and STWP seem suffer from teething problems. In my JNSQ career I'm missing the option to select non-optimal munar and minmus(ian?) transfers and tend to rely on KER's transfer info. Also it seems the Kronometer and SAC don't like to play nicely. Raw alarm few days into the future might be only couple of hours and I missed two asteroid captures because of wonky alarms. 

What version of KSP?

[Lathari]

3 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

What version of KSP?

It might have been 1.12.1 at the time of incidents, I was still quite early in my career and decided to rage-quit™ and start a new career, haven't used alarm clock apart from transfer windows in 1.12.2.

[linuxgurugamer]

2 minutes ago, Lathari said:

It might have been 1.12.1 at the time of incidents, I was still quite early in my career and decided to rage-quit™ and start a new career, haven't used alarm clock apart from transfer windows in 1.12.2.

1.12.1 had issues, they have fixed them in 1.12.2

[jlcarneiro]

On 8/17/2021 at 6:24 AM, archiebald said:

I third that - I have now totally given up on the stock alarm clock and have reverted to using KAC mod.

Is it possible to "stimulate" (a.k.a. to force) SAC to automatically create alerts when we create Maneuver Nodes? Using a "mini-mod" maybe?

Edited August 18, 2021 by jlcarneiro

[severedsolo]

1 hour ago, jlcarneiro said:

Is it possible to "stimulate" (a.k.a. to force) SAC to automatically create alerts when we create Maneuver Nodes? Using a "mini-mod" maybe?

Yes. Yes it is.

 

 

Edited August 18, 2021 by severedsolo

[jlcarneiro]

19 minutes ago, severedsolo said:

Yes. Yes it is.

 

 

WOW! THANKS!

[noname_hero]

Regarding KAC...

 

I kinda dislike the new stock alarms compared to KAC, so I'm still using KAC even on 1.12.2.  CKAN installs it just fine, despite thinking it isn't compatible with 1.12.

[The Flying Kerbal]

13 hours ago, noname_hero said:

Regarding KAC...

 

I kinda dislike the new stock alarms compared to KAC, so I'm still using KAC even on 1.12.2.  CKAN installs it just fine, despite thinking it isn't compatible with 1.12.

Yeah, KAC totally outperforms what was added to the game as stock in 1.12.  I have no idea what the developers were thinking when they decided to add SAC, but to have the original developer of KAC downgrade his mod and give us this... it has to be a joke!

 

I have really tried to get used to SAC, but I've now given up on it, and am more than happy to use the KAC we all know and love so well.

Edited August 22, 2021 by The Flying Kerbal

[Cosmonaut15]

Is it only me, or the SAC has a very weird transfer windows calculation? 

I'm playing 1.12.2 with a brand new career mode. I created a transfer window for Eve from Kerbin using SAC and noticed that it's not correct at all. Checking with KAC, it's like 200 days earlier than the KAC (which always correct). In this case, I considered 

Even worse, I found that after one or two months, when I created another transfer window from Kerbin to Eve (just to check whether the first one is bugged or not) it gave another date, which is 100 days further than the first one, and not even close to KAC (which reliably gave the same result as the first one). 

Why the SAC does not gives the same result since the first alarm date still not even reach yet.

Few more moths, the 3rd SAC gave another result, which was yet incorrect.

Is there something I should know about when using SAC? If it's really this buggy, I'd rather stick with KAC forever!

Edited August 26, 2021 by Cosmonaut15

[francoisbresson]

Hello,

So, is there a way to disable the stock alarm clock ? This is useless : I use Kerbal Alarm Clock since I started to play this game

Honestly dev's It's a bit late to add this feature

[Matt77]

I think the decision is so late because the original devs didn't want time to be a factor, which seems very odd to me especially since they gave us the ability to run multiple missions at once.  I've got about 20 up at the moment and my main station is starting to look like the City of a Thousand Planets :-)

I wonder if SAC uses the same calcs as the stock delta V readouts, which disagree with Engineer by quite a margin.  I've noticed you can prevent SAC from adding alarms automatically so it becomes much easier to ignore it.

I'm very happy that the new owners are bringing mod-makers or their ideas on board, but I would like the stock toolbar to be editable to remove unnecessary icons.

 

[francoisbresson]

2 hours ago, Matt77 said:

but I would like the stock toolbar to be editable to remove unnecessary icons.

Me too !

[SciMan]

I'm honestly not having many issues with SAC, then again I don't use it to set alarms for transfer windows or let the game plan transfer windows on its own in any case. For that, I use MechJeb to create a maneuver using the "Advanced transfer to target" section of Maneuver planner, which gives me a nice porkchop plot that I find quite easy to use (just click where on the plot you want the maneuver to happen, then click "create maneuver").

Previous versions of KAC and TWP that I used in previous versions of KSP had the same issues as SAC has, where the windows it chooses for you are vastly different from what's actually happening according to MechJeb (and having tried to use both, MechJeb is the clear winner with the "trim" after the maneuver is complete only being a few 10s of m/s off because it usually starts the burn a tiny bit late, as opposed to potentially hundreds of m/s off when trying to use maneuver nodes generated by TWP, despite the maneuver "looking" good enough when you plan it out via TWP).

So, I think this might have been just as close to a direct translation into stock of the TWP and KAC mods as possible, which brought all their bugs that we might not have seen or talked about or reported "along for the ride" so to speak.

One feature I do dearly miss from KAC was the ability to set an alarm based on when a science lab would be full or almost full of science and ready to be transmitted. I use science labs a lot when I play, as it's the only stock mechanic in the game that gives space stations a reason to have crew and be more than just a dumb fuel tank with some reaction wheels, a few docking ports and maybe an engine or RCS.

[jlcarneiro]

On 8/28/2021 at 2:02 PM, francoisbresson said:

Me too !

Same here!

[MilkSage]

(on 1.12.2 PC-Steam)

And did anyone notice that many (not all?) of the alarms of SAC have their associated vessels mixed up?  i.e. if you click the "Switch To" button, it brings you to a wrong ship.

Very disappointed... I am mid-way in migrating from KAC to SAC... but it seems like I now have to go back to KAC.

KAC does what it's supposed to do, the main problem I have with it is mouseover/click bugs that KAC causes on invisible regions surrounding the KAC window when it is open.  I would need to live with this, since SAC doesn't even do the basics properly.

[BekfastDerp13]

Well, I can't use it, because Enhanced Edition is still waiting for 1.11.

[SciMan]

Stock alarm clock works just fine for me. As with almost every time I start playing KSP again, I started a COMPLETELY new save game, and didn't carry over any of my previous craft files either.

In other words, I have a Totally fresh install, plus mods. If you're having problems, you might have one of 3 things going on:

1. You might have a mod conflict you don't know about.
I had a few I had to chase out of my game that were making MechJeb behave weirdly, but it turned out to be that I didn't have a few critical dependencies of other mods installed.

2. You could be using a save-game from an older version of KSP, which will almost certainly have issues due to the save file now having to save alarms.
If you carried over ANY of your previously designed craft files, or you carried over your entire save game, you should try a completely new save with no mods and no craft files carried over. Using the same craft over and over gets boring anyways, doesn't it?

3. It could be a bug in stock KSP that playing in "Career" instead of "Science" or "Sandbox" has issues.
I wouldn't know about those issues, I play on Science mode because career contracts are repetitive and boring to the point of my eyes glazing over (well, the ones that pay good are anyways). Plus I like to build big (expensive) rockets, and use mods that have high tech (expensive) parts and resources in them, so Career is just right out of the running if I want to actually USE the parts I spent the hard-drive space on installing.

You should really really try to eliminate causes 1 and 2 before jumping to blaming 3.

EDIT: Literally the only problem I have with SAC as it is right now is that it doesn't have the ability for me to automatically set up an alarm for when a science lab is full of science ready to transmit, which KAC did and I used that feature a lot. I posted about that in the thread for the mod that adds some more functionality to SAC, and they seemed receptive to the idea of adding in that functionality to that mod, so if that happens I'll no longer have anything against SAC.

Edited September 8, 2021 by SciMan

[AtomicTech]

I'm going to keep using KAC because it pairs easily with KER, but who knows, maybe one day I'll convert to the Stock KAC!

[Michel Bartolone]

I'm thinking about going back to KAC as well...I just found a new _huge_ issue with the stock clock...

I have several alarms set. The next one is an SOI change for an asteroid I am going to try to capture. I have the ship I am going to attempt the capture with, on orbit...nice stable orbit AP 150.6KM, PE 150.4KM. The alarm for the SOI change is roughly 2hrs53minutes in the future. I click "Warp To Next", and it starts the warp, but then stopped pretty quickly (like after about 10-20 minutes on the game clock). I check and find that my PE is now at roughly 60KM. I stop, reload (most recent save is about 20 minutes of game time in the past) the game, go back to my asteroid tug, Tell the built in alarm clock to warp to next, and again it starts the warp, but after a few seconds (10-20 minutes of game time) it is out of warp again and this time my PE is -75KM.    Look at the clock and the Ap and Pe heights and the timing between these two images.

I don't see how that could be related to any mods in any way...