Updated documentation?

[stubbles]

Hey all, I've been out of the addon biz since November, but I've recently come back to finish up my first release. I've run into a bunch of issues with parts not working, due to a great many changes in the game.

Trying to find out what has changed and what needs to be done has become increasingly frustrating. The wiki is horribly out of date, with a lot of sections as old as early 2012. Every time I try to search for topics, I get led (via a terrible forum search) to a 40+ page thread, in which ONE of those pages has what I searched for. Alternatively, I get told to "look at other configs" to see how things work. Again, this is a pretty bad solution. Looking at a config tells me nothing of specifics or how/why it works. I'd be relegated to copying/pasting and then testing over and over again to see what does what. It's a HUGE time waste for someone with limited free time.

Things I'm personally finding little info on are part types (why are some fairings listed as module "DecouplerGUI", "Decoupler" and others just "Part", for example), or what the heck part modules are that are nestled in the MODULE{} parts of configs.

All I know is, my addons worked prior to December and now they're kaput. I've slowly been getting them working again, but it's taking way longer than it should and there are sooo many new problems that I can't find information on. I don't mean to sound bitchy, I'm just frustrated. I've spent several weeks trying to get my stuff working again and it's in nowhere near proper working order.

If anybody has the time, please, update the wiki documentation. I'm going crazy over here. :sticktongue:

Thanks!

[OrbitusII]

The wiki is definitely out of date, I haven't gone to it for reliable info for a while. I know I saw someone else's documentation (mostly for the KSP API though), so I'll work on getting you that link.

I'm not sure how much part.cfg documentation the pages will have, but it's a lot better than the pitiful thing we call "documentation" on the wiki.

[Greys]

I can't really help with the documentation, my experience is limited and I'm really bad at writing explanations to stand the test of more than two sets of eyes, but I can shed some light on your specific issue.

Way back in the annals of time the way you attached functionality to a part was with it's module (module = part, module = AdvSAS, module = yourmom, etc), so for a part to be a decoupler it had to be configured very specifically to be a decoupler model wise, and then it had to be module = decoupler; with decouplerGUI giving you the rightclick option to decouple. This wasn't a very good system because it didn't allow you to have per part configuration of those functionalities and you absolutely could not have multiple functionalities tied to one part. So they came up with MODULE{ name = ___ }, you can have as many as you want, you can contain variables inside it to define behavior, and now you have certain amounts of leeway in the structure of your models. That eventually lead into PART{}, which is the same thing only up a tier, now you can have any number of parts in your file.

module = settings are largely depreciated except for a few things like command modules, ASAS and SAS, but other than those key things everything you make should be using MODULE{}s.

[EndlessWaves]

0.18 did transfer a lot of the stock parts over to new stock modules, and all of the forum information about that was lost in the forum crash in April so that's most of the cause of your difficulties.

As you're not familiar with the PartModule system it sounds like you're troubleshooting GameObjects and config files (as it was common in plugins long before November) so answers will tend to be fairly simple if you go ahead and ask the questions here.

I don't know the difference between Decoupler and DecouplerGUI, both are legacy part-derived classes. ModuleJettison is used for the stock fairings.