[0.23.5] TreeLoader - Custom Career Tech-tree Loader 1.1.5

[regex]

I can't speak for other trees, but my tree has all the same nodes named as the original tree. You may see some parts appear out of place due to nodes shifting around, but they should all be present if set to appear on a stock node.

Have the costs to unlock nodes changed? I have yet to try the stock tree, been playing yours.

[smunisto]

I kind of don't understand the point of making new tech trees when most of the mod authors will tie their parts to the stock tree...won't a custom tech tree screw up your mods?

That being said I am wondering if it won't be better to fully open the whole tech tree first, and THEN to install mods?

Edited October 18, 2013 by smunisto

[White Owl]

Depends which mods. I'm planning on unlocking Procedural Wings whenever the first rigid wing piece of any shape shows up, since it would be so utterly stupid to think my kerbals only figured out how to make one specific wing component and just stack them on top of each other. Absolutely idiotic!

Similarly, if you have any 1.25m fuel tank unlocked then you should also get that specific size of Procedural Fuel Tank. The mind boggles at why anybody ever thought it would make sense to gradually unlock multiple tanks of the same base diameter... As soon as you have one tank, any tank, you can make the other sizes by stacking, so why not cut to the chase and allow any fuel tank of that radius? It just barely makes sense to limit the other diameters.

On the other hand, something huge, complex and game changing with new technologies - say Kethane or KAS, for example - that might make more sense to unlock at the end of the tree.

[Gaius]

The mind boggles at why anybody ever thought it would make sense to gradually unlock multiple tanks of the same base diameter...

It makes perfect sense in context -- understanding that the main purpose of the tech tree is to prevent new players being overwhelmed by a huge list of parts at once. It's an excuse to spoon-feed players a few parts at a time, as well as provide an objective for doing missions.

Granted, it makes no sense outside of gameplay purposes... [EDIT: Or perhaps it does... thanks B787_300.]

Edited October 18, 2013 by Gaius

[B787_300]

Hey White and Giaus, it is actually really hard to make arbitrarily large fuel tanks. As the fuel tank increases you have to really start worrying about Fuel Slosh, which means Highly engineered baffles also you have to carry more of an inert gas (normally helium) to fill the tank after it has started to be drained, otherwise the pumps cant pull fuel out of the tanks against the vacuum that they have created.

TLDR it is a TON easier to make smaller tanks than larger tanks

PS i am in school to be an Aerospace Engineer, and I have to know all this stuff

[White Owl]

Hey White and Giaus, it is actually really hard to make arbitrarily large fuel tanks...

In any other context than KSP, this would make perfect sense. But KSP lets you stack as many tiny fuel tanks as you like.

Although this does open up the concept of voluntarily choosing not to stack one fuel tank on top of another, for exactly the reasons you mention. Hmm... It honestly never occurred to me that stacking fuel tanks could be considered unrealistic and an exploit of game mechanics, just like air hogging a dozen intakes. This could actually be inspiring!

[enneract]

In any other context than KSP, this would make perfect sense. But KSP lets you stack as many tiny fuel tanks as you like.

Although this does open up the concept of voluntarily choosing not to stack one fuel tank on top of another, for exactly the reasons you mention. Hmm... It honestly never occurred to me that stacking fuel tanks could be considered unrealistic and an exploit of game mechanics, just like air hogging a dozen intakes. This could actually be inspiring!

In that context, it would make sense for procedural tanks to be at the end of the tree, heh.

[Gaius]

In that context, it would make sense for procedural tanks to be at the end of the tree, heh.

Yay! We are men. We can rationalize anything.

[KhaosCorp]

Similarly, if you have any 1.25m fuel tank unlocked then you should also get that specific size of Procedural Fuel Tank. The mind boggles at why anybody ever thought it would make sense to gradually unlock multiple tanks of the same base diameter... As soon as you have one tank, any tank, you can make the other sizes by stacking, so why not cut to the chase and allow any fuel tank of that radius? It just barely makes sense to limit the other diameters.

Can tell you have never done much metal working....

At the start they were using alot of steel. If you take 16gauge steel sheet metal, weld a can that 2.5meter diameter and 1meter tall, fill it with water, and it will hold. Take the same design and make it 8meters tall and it will buckle out from the weight.

Fixing that takes more advanced metal working tech like beading sheets of metal of added rigidity, or making an exterior support system. All fine and well for the example water tank...no so good weight wise for firing off into space....

So even more advanced metal working is needed, now to the point we need some metalurgy. To make aluminuim thats strong, titanium in a workable form....and so on.

Based on that the unlocking tanks of same size in different nodes makes sense.....and thats not even going into the more complex slosh management, redundencies, and venting systems a bigger tank needs.

[Awaras]

In any other context than KSP, this would make perfect sense. But KSP lets you stack as many tiny fuel tanks as you like.

Although this does open up the concept of voluntarily choosing not to stack one fuel tank on top of another, for exactly the reasons you mention. Hmm... It honestly never occurred to me that stacking fuel tanks could be considered unrealistic and an exploit of game mechanics, just like air hogging a dozen intakes. This could actually be inspiring!

This SHOULD be offset by making several smaller tanks mass more proportionately to the amount of fuel they carry than a single larger fuel tank that holds the same amount of fuel.

[smunisto]

So....as far as I see things now...each mod is tied to it's own tech tree. KW rocketry has one, NPunch another, various other mods will sprout with their own...I know these "tech trees" are actually merely mod parts linked to the stock tech tree nodes... But has anyone tested multiple mods which already have their implementation within the tech tree? Do they merge seemlessly?

Or if we use a reordered stock tech tree...like the one from Yargnit? What then? Will all mod parts still link to the correct nodes? Or are the node links in the part cfgs tied to a location in the tree, not the actual node name?

Edited October 18, 2013 by smunisto

[Gaius]

Parts link by the name of the node, not the location, so if you reorder the tree, the parts from mods reorder accordingly. They stay tied to the named node, no matter where it is moved in the tree...

[dlrk]

Any info on the locking at loading issue?

[Yargnit]

Mod parts are tied to a node by it's node ID name. which is different than the displayed name. You can, as i have, change the displayed name of the nodes while leaving the ID name the same. This will allow any mods that hooked to a stock tree node to continue to hook to a node in a new tree.

Every stock node ID continues to show up in my tree. Therefore all mod parts should slot them self into the tree. Worst case would be if I moved a node from one section of the tree to another to re-purpose it (I started the tree before R4m0n added the ability to create nodes) then the mod may not appear in the tree where it ideally should. I don't believe there are any nodes that are majorly off, but a couple might seem a little out of place. Over the weekend i can go back and more the node ID's around to make sure that if mod parts were being added to a certain point in the stock tree, they'd appear in the closest alternative in my tree, but even now it shouldn't be that bad.

As far as the question above on costs, my tree is more expensive than the stock tree to unlock. The stock tree varied between a low of 8,100 Science, and a high of 16,800 Science to unlock during previews, before settling on roughly 10,750 point in it's live form. My tree is currently at 17,450 Science to unlock, so just slightly higher than the highest tested form. (All of this doesn't count the experimental end nodes not used but left in for mods) The main difference is you can't unlock the entire end of my tree with just a single mission to the Jool system easily, like you can with the stock tree later on. Mine is designed to actually need to plan multiple trips to the outer or inner planets to finish off the tree. But it's not so hard as to be un-fun either. For instance I made sure docking was available early enough that you can use it to land on and return from other planets by the time you've moved on past Mun/Minmus, unlike stock that puts it higher up.

dlrk, I've chatter with R4m0n about if he knows whats causing it, and he's looking into it. I'd suggest trying a fresh install until then.

[LuciferNZ]

Not sure about how you are re-creating the part nodes to the tree nodes (Probably just by that parts.cfg), so this may not even be feasible.

My question then is it possible for your editor to have parts listed, by part 'name' to link to a tree node?

Basically for mod support that would allow a tree creator, to cater for mods on a case by case basis, or leave them out if they are not there?

In essence, a backwards link from tree -> part, rather than the other way around.

If this ISNT possible, then as a suggestion, having some sort of 'editor' part for your program that can scan the part.cfg files, and 'insert' the tree nodes (again, on a case by case basis I guess)

And with that, a sort of index file list could be distributed with a mod, or a tree (or both) that allows insertion into the career mode.

I am a indie games developer, so if this side of the app is wanted and you arent able to (time wise or whatever) - Im sure I co

[thorfinn]

Downloaded before 0.22

And I will also get TreeEdit as soon as you make it public. Thank you.

[Ogamaga]

Hi, with the Yargnit tree, I only get non-stock parts that are set to the start node.

My KSP log

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rpf22b795eqp2kh/KSP2.log

Let me know if you need more info.

Edit: Stock parts work fine, only having trouble getting non stock

Edited October 18, 2013 by Ogamaga
clarify

[MaliciousMuffin]

Hi, with the Yargnit tree, I only get non-stock parts that are set to the start node.

My KSP log

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rpf22b795eqp2kh/KSP2.log

Let me know if you need more info.

Edit: Stock parts work fine, only having trouble getting non stock

Have you started a new game?

When I installed the new Kerbal Engineer version it also did not show up on the tech tree for me, but worked fine on a new game.

Adding the parts to the right node in saves\[save name]\tree.cfg fixed it for me.

[apoch1999]

so i get right past the parts loading screen where it starts to go to the resume game/new game/etc. menu and i get stuck on this loading message with a blank screen when i have this mod installed. i started it up last night and went to bed it was like this the next morning when i woke up so i cant "wait it out". any ideas? i take it out and game loads up

[Creat]

I love the fact that we got custom trees so quickly! Thank you for the effort you've surely had to put into this.

I have a suggestion (or two) for how you might go about allowing people to change trees. I'd very much love the feature, but understand that it's far from critical and there's certainly no need for hurry.

A simple and bug-avoiding way would be to simply refund all science points if someone changes tree, and therefore require that there are no active flights (except flags, which I think annoyingly count as flights). At least for those wanting to go around trying a few things this would certainly work just fine. It would have the side effect of allowing people to do a research reset, if they want to, which some might also appreciate.

Allowing changing trees with flights in progress would just try to research everything used in active flights, and leave just the remaining points open. So only used things are researched and whatever the new tree requires to get to them, so it's obviously dependent on which (target-) tree is selected.

The second part is obviously much more work to implement (and more stuff can go wrong), maybe save it for much later (if it even sounds like a good idea to you). The first part might be reasonably easy but again, surely the editor has much higher priority!

Then again, you might already have a plan on how to handle it, in that case: nevermind

[Cryocore]

For the person who requested it, I posted a link to my output log at the bottom of page 5. I'll be gone for the weekend so I wont have any news on testing this with mods and whatnot. The only way I'll get notified of a reply here is from Private Message, so I'll get some reports when I return.

[Firenexus13]

An In-Game Editor Would be awesome for this... like, a button in the bottom-left of the start menu that opens a fake tech tree where you edit your tech tree.

[rifter]

Unfortunately, mod parts are still tied to the nodes(but not visible within the nodes themselves at R&D), and as such show up in the VAB when the corresponding node is activated, but all of them are grayed out with the message "Part model requires an Entry Purchase in R&D". Since they don't show up in the R&D nodes that activated them, there is no way to add them without adding them manually to the tree.cfg.

Edited October 18, 2013 by rifter

[r4m0n]

For the person who requested it, I posted a link to my output log at the bottom of page 5. I'll be gone for the weekend so I wont have any news on testing this with mods and whatnot. The only way I'll get notified of a reply here is from Private Message, so I'll get some reports when I return.

Your problem was with duplicate parts, you probably have some extra copies of some part somewhere. I've added a workaround and updated TreeLoader for it, but you should check the log with the new version and clean up your part list.

[Sinner2784]

you need a internet connection for this mod? will there be offline trees in the future?