Kerbal Attachment System (KAS) 0.4.7 - Pipes as fuel lines and even fewer explosions!

[BLUESHADOW125]

Its a shame the licence is so restrictive... kinda tempting to reinvent the wheel under a permissive licence....

ikr, not a single word from majir in a month and jefferson here is saving this mod from dying out like planet factory, if it wasnt for him this mod WOULD be abandoned by now

EDIT: this post decided to post twice

[Death Engineering]

Hello.. is there some sort of guide how this mod works? Particularly in regards to resource transferring..

I've tried on the Launchpad with a pipe and a separate command pod. The kerbal can get the 'green' pipe but not sure how to connect to the other pod? The menu says "Press Echap or enter to cancel". My "Echap" key must be where my "Any" key is, cuz I can't find it.

Thanks in advance!

[Schmonzo]

Hello.. is there some sort of guide how this mod works? Particularly in regards to resource transferring..

I've tried on the Launchpad with a pipe and a separate command pod. The kerbal can get the 'green' pipe but not sure how to connect to the other pod? The menu says "Press Echap or enter to cancel". My "Echap" key must be where my "Any" key is, cuz I can't find it.

Thanks in advance!

you need a pipe end point on both ships and then pull the 'green pipe' from one onto the other... also in the opening post there is a link to the ksp wiki aswell as to the keyboard shortcuts. So shame on you for being lazy and making me post this

[NathanKell]

ikr, not a single word from majir in a month and jefferson here is saving this mod from dying out like planet factory, if it wasnt for him this mod WOULD be abandoned by now

I wouldn't call having changed version of the archives that are in compliance with the new rules, *despite* desperately job hunting and being otherwise busy in RL as "not a single word."

Please try to contain your impatience, and your dislike for the guy who is taking a slight break from giving you things for free.

[Joachim]

I wouldn't call having changed version of the archives that are in compliance with the new rules, *despite* desperately job hunting and being otherwise busy in RL as "not a single word."

Please try to contain your impatience, and your dislike for the guy who is taking a slight break from giving you things for free.

Too true, we should all be worshipping at Majir's feet for all the enjoyment he brought to KSP with his mods, not throwing pathetic hissy fits.

[taniwha]

jefferson, i think you technically own this mod now. your the one who runs it, your the one who has fixed it, and your the one who has solved many (or all) the problems. majir should give you a license to add new parts to this mod.

Utterly impossible. Yes, JeffersonFlight (and a few others) have kept KAS working in 0.24.2, but that does not give them ownership. In fact, even Majiir does not own KAS: KospY does. Majiir was merely (?) deputized with keeping KAS going while KospY is away.

[NathanKell]

Well, maybe not the worshipping bit. Modders are all human too (don't we know it). But a little patience, when someone's having a busy time in RL (*and* just got tons of abuse heaped on him re: ModStats) would be in order.

[CDK]

Majiir: Can you make a update for KSP .24.2?

[NathanKell]

CDK: Read the last couple pages

(in particular, this)

[AetherGoddess]

i apologize if this has been posted before, but i can't seem to locate it. i'm having a bit of trouble with explode-y parts. any grabable part, while on or dropped from a kerbonaut's back, seems very prone to crashing into minimus explosively, even at LT 1 m/s. I've gone through three missions to deliver a packrat to Minimus base #1, only to blow up some critical part during assembly. once, a front bumper part exploded because it was attached to a ground pylon, and i grabbed the pylon, letting the part loose LT 1 m above the surface, and it explosively collided, and then the pylon exploded right off Gerrim Kerman's back.

this doesn't seem to happen on kerbin, since i was able to assemble a test rover on the launchpad and set it out to monitor impacts before launching my support missions to Mini Base 1. I'm using JeffersonFlight's patches in KSP 0.24.2 x86, with a large boat of other mods (available upon request). any help in increasing the durability of these parts would be greatly appreciated.

[BLUESHADOW125]

Utterly impossible. Yes, JeffersonFlight (and a few others) have kept KAS working in 0.24.2, but that does not give them ownership. In fact, even Majiir does not own KAS: KospY does. Majiir was merely (?) deputized with keeping KAS going while KospY is away.

wait a minute i thought this is his mod, its in his name isnt it? wheres kospY then cuz ive never heard of him

[WololoW]

CDK: Read the last couple pages

(in particular, this)

I for one am glad that this has been brought about. Thank you Majiir, Taniwha, Nathankell and JeffersonFlight. Very great collaboration to keep this great mod going through the thick and the thin!

---

Edit**

wait a minute i thought this is his mod, its in his name isnt it? wheres kospY then cuz ive never heard of him

Then you literally just said you haven't read the entire OP. (which is quite short)

[NathanKell]

BLUESHADOW125: Try here.

NINJA'D: or, yeah, Read the OP.

[fathed]

This is pretty crazy imo.

Personally copyrighting a mod, just blows my mind. You wouldn't have even made it if not for someone else's copyright, and no one can use it without that other a license to both. Why be so .... with the second license? To protect your intellectual property that you can't make money from? Just doesn't make sense to me. (Be aware, this is just my opinion, there are others, they are hopefully different, we wouldn't have 1500 license variations otherwise)

Eventually either the license needs to change, or someone will be forced to make a competing mod, which while competition is good, each mod that others want mods to support increases the difficulty in releasing new mods. Even better imo, is Squad forcing the mods to use an open license.

Too many mods start and die. I think part of the issue with that is burnout. Another part is some people are just better at starting things than continuing them for extended periods of time, where other people suck at starting something from scratch, but can take something someone else has started and make it better/work correctly.

In some regards, I find releasing a mod and not maintaining it, with a restrictive license, to be extremely selfish (ironic, wait, is that the right word?). Releasing means you've gone beyond just playing with yourself, and now you want people to a) have the fun you're having want to show off your skills c) just think it'll help others. Then the internet happens, people say change this, can you make it do this, etc, more so than people just say thanks, that's awesome. (even I'm guilty of this) That can easily discourage further work, which in turn means damage has been done. Anyone who was now using your is boned, either now, or later. There's more of them than you, so it's easily potentially more man hours wasted. Meanwhile, all this is just frustrating to all parties. All due to a license choice, that ultimately, you didn't care about anyway, or like in this case, would be enforcing instead of allowing the patches to stay online.

No one needs to take them down, cause until you're told you're infringing, you can't know, all we know is all rights are reserved.

From a mod consumer stand point, let's just look at this mod for example:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90909-0-24-2-Not-Enough-Struts-v1-0/

a) do I need it

will it continue

c) will it break in .25, .26, etc

d) will it be updated (license clearly matters here)

That's just a simple part example, something like KAS/Kethane is a lot more to just throw out of expected future gameplay.

But then again, people who actually make mods have said the same, but a short month later means nothing has changed. (with kas, he's clearly been busy fixing his kethane license issue...)

Hmm, apparently can't quote a closed thread...

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/81764-ModStatistics-1-0-3-Anonymous-mod-usage-statistics-Now-for-public-distribution!/page26

I'll give this a week, but if in the end we're still at a place where the opting out is not either defaulted, or a button on load so easy even my grandmother can do it, then I will explicitly be pulling both support and integration for all of my mods for anything that implements ModStatistics in their default installation package. And yes, I realize that means pulling Kethane and KAS support from MKS, but so be it. That's the beauty of a free and open community, we get to vote with our feet.

I'm going to sit back without some popcorn and enjoy the show.

Edited August 29, 2014 by fathed

[Schmonzo]

First of all thanks to everyone involved for making this mod.

Second @ fathed: If a modmaker is frustrated with how squad treats moddevs, then I think it is their right to stop developing their mod (or any other reason that makes the dev stop developing). Yes, that means that someone else will have to start from scratch or the idea behind the mod will never be seen again. See what happend to ISAmapsat. We got a way better mod with Scansat now, why should this not be the case with KAS? It is the moddevs intellectual property whether you like it or not and only the modcreator can decide what happens to their mod. The strong reaction to this mod having an update hiatus only shows how awesome it is and that squad should incorporate something like this in the vanilla game or start giving real credit to modcreators.

[Schmonzo]

I'm using Jefferson's KAS fix for 64bit and I've got a bug. Everything worked well enough on the ground, but in orbit around the Mun, when a Kerbal grabs a Pipe End Point off the ship (only part tested) that Kerbal's relative velocity immediately becomes zero. The ship disappears over the horizon, carrying on its orbit, leaving Jeb (and later Bill) to die horribly; slowly falling straight down (more or less) at the surface of the Mun.

Am I alone with this bug? My next test is to put them on ladders and see if that makes a difference. We've got to save these Kerbals!

Update: Tested in 32bit. Working fine.

It also works if you use Jeffersonflights 24.3 patch for 64 bit (at least it did for me)

[LostOblivion]

I believe the reason behind all rights reserved is mostly because modders want to have some control over the distribution of their work, and it probably has to do with ego yes. However, the problem is that once you go AWOL, nobody can freely decide to continue work on it without permission, and contacting someone abaent might be difficult when they're not in the right channels anymore. I think that this fright is folly though, because if you keep maintaining and support your mod, there is little chance that somebody will just fork your work and try to compete with it in some way. I support the public domain for my mod because I want my parts to continue to live on even if I go absent one day.

[Guest]

I think that restricting the community's rights to take over an abandoned mod is selfish and stupid. Just look at Kethane. The moment Karbonite appeared with a better license, it quickly became quite popular and had multiple sets of parts made for it. ISAMapSat got replaced by ScanSat. If one wants a mod to live beyond the creator, or be used across versions, the license has to be permissive and allow forking. KAS is really useful and a lot of things depend on it (including parts of the Soviet Pack, which I maintain). It's annoying that not only it's unusable, noone but Majir can "officially" fix it due to the stupid license.

I think that licenses should not be neither required nor needed. Asking for permission is common courtesy, but if a mod is dead and the author is gone (or said the mod won't be developed any more), there should be no artificial, legal restrictions on picking up where he left off. KSP's is the only community I'm part of that bothers with mod licensing, and I find this downright silly. Even ArmA, which has a somewhat stuck-up community, doesn't do that. It uses a two licenses (plus one for DayZ), which more or less amount to "Do whatever you please as long as you don't want to use it in another game or make money off it" (the difference is that one is share-alike and the other is not). And this works quite well, with none of the "licensing drama" I've sometimes seen occur here.

[taniwha]

fathed (and anybody else with the temerity to complain about any mod's license): Copyrighting a mod (or anything else, for that matter) is automatic as per international copyright agreements. Also, according to said agreements, the default "license" is All rights reserved meaning that without the creator's explicit permission, you may not do anything whatsoever with that creation. And that permission usually comes at a cost (ie, money).

Considering the license permits to not only modify the source code for your own use, but even distribute those changes (but only in source form: the dll and artwork are tightly held), I'd say the license is pretty darn generous, especially considering it's for free.

And just to add a little perspective, the stuff I release (not just KSP stuff) is generally GPL or LGPL (a little bit of public domain), when I have the choice (if the base is someone else's code, then I must abide by and stick to that license).

[fathed]

I understand how licenses work, and yes, I'm aware that by default, things are copywritten by their creator. Hence the entire reason I said Squad should force any mods to use an open license, which they can do so through the EULA. I'm actually a sys admin for a software dev company that shall rename nameless, I am .... about ensuring licensing compliance at our office, I ensure even that software that's free for personal use, but not corporate use, is either not used, or paid for.

My experiences lead to my opinion that a mod for a game should never be under a closed license. (Although, now I wonder, people make mods for the software the company I work for makes, I wonder how we handle that.. time to find out, let's just say, it's extremely similar to this situation.)

I agree with LostOblivion, I think the community wouldn't stand by someone taking someone's work at least without credit. We can't force people to actually work together, but with open licenses, it doesn't really matter. Dev A can continue his version, and get core improvements from Dev B's forked version.

I can continue to go on about what I see are the benefits to open licenses, but those arguments have been hashed out on the internet all over the place. If the mod devs could profit, then that would change my opinion on the issue, but as long as you cannot sell mods, I can only see ego, lack of experience, or desire for control of features as reasons for restrictive licenses.

And just to reiterate, this is just my opinion, it may not be the best, but it's not written in stone either.

Edit: Next up, restrictive licensing on craft files (it's actually there by default...) can you make videos with other peoples ships just cause they posted them online.. copyright is a pain in the kranium.

Edited August 29, 2014 by fathed

[Guest]

A license only defaults to ARR if, say, forum rules don't say otherwise. Bohemia Interactive, for example, got that covered with their own licenses. By the modding community standards, KAS license is restrictive to the point of stupidity. Oh, and you're always free to modify stuff you own for your own use, except when dealing with physical items where it's very dangerous to do so. Any attempts to forbid this are unenforceable (even tampering with dangerous stuff like the house's electrical system is usually discovered when it blows up or sets something on fire). That you can release those changes as source is little consolation. Compiling a .dll is something most people can't do, and as such, any released source is of limited usefulness. This restrictive license will kill the mod off if a suitable, more open replacement appears.

[JeffersonFlight]

Its been a pleasure to get KAS working in the extent that it is. I will still help when ever needed and be as active as possible to assist with any issues. Thanks to everyone who assisted in getting it is far, without this awesome community I don't believe it would be working right now. I know it will be very interesting to see where Taniwha takes it.

[NathanKell]

First, for clarification: KAS was originated by kospY and kospY is still the ultimate authortiy for the license. It is not within Majiir's rights to change the license; he was merely maintaining it during kospY's absence, something he has deputized taniwha (with some excellent help from JeffersonFlight!) to do for a bit.

Kethane, also, for the record, is in a bit of a bind regarding open licenses because while *most* of the code is Majiir's, the original Kethane also is not, *and* the assets are from others with their own licenses.

As to the danger of closed-license mods being abandoned, while I definitely think that even mods that do not allow derivatives are well-advised to have abandonement clauses (ECLSS is a great example, although no one has taken asmi up on it...), I think the worry is a bit overblown. Why?

Well, let's look at this very thread. It's really something that people are complaining about the horrible dangers of KAS's license meaning it's abandoned and unfixable...despite it being neither abandoned (Majiir's away for a bit and deputized taniwha) nor unfixed (when Majiir first knew he didn't have time to fix he opened it up to all, and JeffersonFlight ably stepped in).

Finally, I find it a bit rich that people are complaining about mod author selfishness. The author is so selfish, they released their work to me for free but not in the way I wanted them to!.

And if you want to encourage mod authors to release their works under more open licenses, the best way to do is *not* to berate them for being insufficiently generous with the work they're already letting you have for free, and are volunteering to support, too. Nor should you get up in arms if there's a bit of a delay in keeping the mod working, due to the author having a crappy time in real life (and also, it must be said, on these forums, where Majiir was called a spyware author, evil, and the worst of the worst. Because that's a sure way to get him to want to keep contributing...)

My own position on licenses: Like taniwha, however, I want to point out that all my own work is open licensed (CC-BY-SA and the like, usually), and I am happy to argue in favor of open licenses, but I fully respect, and will not besmirch, those who choose other licenses, especially those who in practice are willing to help others with their code and let others use snippets of their code when needed.

[technicalfool]

There is a reason this version of rule 4 does not exist any more.

Partly because it's totally unenforceable. What are Squad going to do, "your mod must be FOSS or you can't use our forums"? It costs pennies to set up virtual servers capable of serving forum pages and files to a wide audience. If Squad were to insist on rules like that, they may well find their official forums becoming increasingly irrelevant as the mod authors go elsewhere. It's really not hard to make an alternative.

As much as I like FOSS stuff and abandonment clauses, dictating what authors are allowed to do with their own software will harbour resentment. It's just not good if you want a large modding community, or at least want to stay as the official source of mods for your own game.

[fathed]

Finally, I find it a bit rich that people are complaining about mod author selfishness. The author is so selfish, they released their work to me for free but not in the way I wanted them to!.

It's the nature of the word selfish, you cannot call someone selfish without being selfish yourself.

I hope you can see the issue from both sides, consumers spend time on product x, product x breaks, product x breaking causes y to stop, y stopping means that time investment is wasted. People value their time, therefore when it's wasted because someone decided to not be a part of the community anymore is not going to make a happy community. At a certain point, Squad needs to protect their community.

Partly because it's totally unenforceable. What are Squad going to do, "your mod must be FOSS or you can't use our forums"? It costs pennies to set up virtual servers capable of serving forum pages and files to a wide audience.

And this is where it gets silly, the forums aren't the issue, and clause 3 of the EULA makes it a non-issue, as they can just remove your license to the product, and if you continue from there, they could implement an api key system and just remove the keys of any "offending" mods. This isn't about people wanting to do the wrong thing, it's about people wanting to help out the community, but later with no malicious intent, can cause harm to the community.

(Although, now I wonder, people make mods for the software the company I work for makes, I wonder how we handle that.. time to find out, let's just say, it's extremely similar to this situation.)

And to reply to myself, my work's situation is the same wild west, the second most popular mod our software is "all rights reserved", the most popular is MIT. We do not specify any licensing guidelines. Started this same conversation internally, so it'll be interesting to see what the corporation I work for decides to do about this same issue.

Edit:

And for the record, I'm not suggesting people who choose restrictive licenses are doing so with any intent to cause harm, or anything like that. I'm all for ensuring proper credits of work. Which also ties into this, as people release patches to things, and the developers accept those patches, do the patch submitters lose their license and now it's owned by the original dev under all rights reserved? There's so many issues with using closed licenses in community based development. Sure people will do the above, cause they all have the same goal, benefiting themselves and others. Just overlooking or otherwise restricting a license in my opinion is going to continue to be a point of pain for the overall community.

Edited August 30, 2014 by fathed