SOLUTION: Lander Legs Defaulting to UP when loading older saves < .22

[iBeej]

UPDATE 01/24/2014 - SOLVED! Solution is a few posts down.

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Kerbin KSC has dispatched a critical signal to all spacecraft in the solar system, warning of a virus taking control of lander leg modules and spontaneously raising them to cause pain and devastation. Be on the lookout.

Ok but seriously, I finally got around to loading my sandbox after playing career mode non-stop since .22. I have approximately 30 landers sitting on nearly every celestial body in the solar system, since version .18. So, feeling a little nostalgic, I decided to visit some of them....

Well it appears every single one of them loads with the landing gear UP. I have landers tipping over left and right, Kerbal sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

Thanks for that SQUAD. I have a boot and I'm about to place it somewhere.

Edited January 24, 2014 by iBeej
SOLVED

[Kasuha]

As far as I know this is problem with 0.22 ships only, ships you landed in 0.23 should be fine. Or aren't they?

[Taki117]

This is in fact a bug when loading craft with deployed landing legs. The fix is to go into the persistance (Or quicksave) files and change the state of all the landing legs to deployed.

[iBeej]

The fix is to go into the persistance (Or quicksave) files and change the state of all the landing legs to deployed.

Any idea what the variable name is? Otherwise I'm going to use a DIFF tool to find it. I have a hundred flights in progress so it's a rather large persistent file.

[iBeej]

As far as I know this is problem with 0.22 ships only, ships you landed in 0.23 should be fine. Or aren't they?

No. I haven't had issues with them in career mode. Like I said, I have been playing career mode since 0.22 day 1, so i'm assuming this problem occurs for any craft already landed when patching to .22 or .23. I have a ton of stuff sitting on landing legs, everywhere. And they aren't small either. Each lander is approximately 120 parts. The persistent file is around 15Mb.

If anybody knows off the top of their head what the module name, variable and value type is... please feel free to post. Otherwise, I will DIFF the file against a backup, since I manually fixed one of my Ike and Laythe landers.

[iBeej]

For any of you experiencing this problem, I took the liberty of digging in to this to find out where and what went wrong. Anybody with a lander with landing legs prior to version .22 will suddenly discover their lander legs in the up position. This particular problem isn't exactly pretty.

So here is what is going on. In the 'persistent.sfs' file, you will first need to locate one of your landers by locating something like

		VESSEL
		{
			pid = 560473b08166426382fe29f6b625dfad
			name = KOSMOS Lander 1 @ Ike
			type = Lander
			sit = LANDED

Then you will need to go to EACH Landing Leg Part which looks like

			PART
			{
				name = landingLeg1-2
				uid = 2341964657
				mid = 3764243702

But here is where things get ugly. SQUAD added an entire new section which was never there before. The section is added when you load the lander for the first time, and it immediately creates this entire MODULE section under PART:

				MODULE
				{
					name = ModuleLandingLeg
					isEnabled = True
					StartDeployed = False
					savedAnimationTime = 1
					savedAnimationSpeed = 0.3260869
					[U][B]savedLegState = 0[/B][/U]
					savedLocalPosition = (2.176186E-05, -1.754067E-05, 0.5388514)
					suspensionLocked = False
					StartDeployed_UIFlight
					{
						controlEnabled = True
					}
					EVENTS
					{
						LowerLeg
						{
							[B][U]active = True[/U][/B]
							guiActive = True
							guiIcon = Lower Legs
							guiName = Lower Legs
							category = Lower Legs
							guiActiveUnfocused = True
							unfocusedRange = 4
							externalToEVAOnly = True
						}
						RaiseLeg
						{
							[B][U]active = False[/U][/B]
							guiActive = True
							guiIcon = Raise Legs
							guiName = Raise Legs
							category = Raise Legs
							guiActiveUnfocused = True
							unfocusedRange = 4
							externalToEVAOnly = True
						}
						RepairLeg
						{
							active = False
							guiActive = False
							guiIcon = Repair Leg
							guiName = Repair Leg
							category = Repair Leg
							guiActiveUnfocused = True
							unfocusedRange = 4
							externalToEVAOnly = True
						}
						LockSuspension
						{
							active = True
							guiActive = True
							guiActiveEditor = True
							guiIcon = Lock Suspension
							guiName = Lock Suspension
							category = Lock Suspension
							guiActiveUnfocused = True
							unfocusedRange = 4
							externalToEVAOnly = True
						}
						UnLockSuspension
						{
							active = False
							guiActive = True
							guiActiveEditor = True
							guiIcon = UnLock Suspension
							guiName = UnLock Suspension
							category = UnLock Suspension
							guiActiveUnfocused = True
							unfocusedRange = 4
							externalToEVAOnly = True
						}
					}
					ACTIONS
					{
						OnAction
						{
							actionGroup = Gear
						}
						ToggleSuspensionLockAction
						{
							actionGroup = None
						}
						RaiseAction
						{
							actionGroup = None
						}
						LowerAction
						{
							actionGroup = None
						}
					}
				}

The line that I bolded and underlined "savedLegState" is the problem. Because once SQUAD creates this new MODULE entry, they default savedLegState to 0. (Which is Lander Legs in the up position) If you wanted the Lander Legs to be in the down position you would change it to:

savedLegState = 3

The other issue you may have noticed, was where I also bolded and underlined under the "LowerLeg" and "RaiseLeg" section under EVENTS. Depending on the current position of the lander legs these two variables flip back and forth between True and False. So there are a whole mess of things going on. And this is going on for EVERY single Lander Leg Part.

And remember, the MODULE section doesn't exist on the older persistent save file. So there isn't a simple flip of the switch or variable change that fixes this problem. The only thing I can think of doing is attempting to manually add the MODULE section to all the Landing Leg parts with just the savedLegState variable and see what happens. Not only would that be a LOT of manual work, i'm not even sure if it will work or corrupt the save file.

Maybe I should just suck it up and deal with it. I haven't decided yet.

[iBeej]

QUICK UPDATE - SOLUTION!

Okay so I found a solution. It will take some work, but it's doable. I have tested it on one of my landers and it loaded up with the legs down and all was well!

DO NOT DO ANY OF THIS UNTIL YOU MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR PERSISTENT.SFS FILE!

See my previous post about finding the PART section. Under the PART section, add this above the ACTIONS section:

				MODULE
				{
					name = ModuleLandingLeg
					isEnabled = True
					savedLegState = 3
				}

Repeat this process for EVERY LandingLeg part in the persistent.sfs file. Here is a snippet of how it should look and I marked the entry in BOLD and Underlined it:

		VESSEL
		{
			pid = 560473b08166426382fe29f6b625dfad
			name = KOSMOS Lander 1 @ Ike
			type = Lander
			sit = LANDED
			landed = True
			landedAt = 
			splashed = False
			met = 16751797.019391
			lct = 365263743.929064
			root = 0
			lat = -38.2483616954948
			lon = 234.447055886582
			alt = 5033.39937250005
			hgt = 1.834257
			nrm = 0.00472896,-0.9999849,0.00278542
			rot = -0.1560384,0.657515,0.4448432,-0.5877419
			CoM = -0.003074482,-3.733253,0.0003579338
			stg = 3
			prst = False
			ref = 1807943788
			cPch = 
			cHdg = 
			cMod = 0
			ORBIT
			{
				SMA = 0
				ECC = 1
				INC = NaN
				LPE = 107.153246713876
				LAN = 3.64366355764491
				MNA = -8.40714670366796
				EPH = 382176818.70738
				REF = 7
				OBJ = 1
			}
			PART
			{
				name = landingLeg1-2
				uid = 2341964657
				mid = 3764243702
				parent = 34
				position = -1.99799919128418,-0.644870758056641,1.31492114067078
				rotation = -0.4999988,-1.060647E-06,0.8660263,-5.479314E-07
				mirror = 1,1,1
				istg = 2
				dstg = 2
				sqor = -1
				sidx = -1
				attm = 1
				sym = 38
				sym = 41
				sym = 44
				srfN = srfAttach, 34
				mass = 0.1
				temp = -83.87865
				expt = 0.5
				state = 0
				connected = True
				attached = True
				flag = Squad/Flags/default
				rTrf = landingLeg1-2
				lgSt = 2, INT
				nTime = 0, FLOAT
				aSpeed = 0, FLOAT
				EVENTS
				{
					ToggleAction
					{
						actionGroup = None
					}
					RaiseAction
					{
						actionGroup = None
					}
					LowerAction
					{
						actionGroup = None
					}
				}
				[B][U]MODULE[/U]
				[U]{[/U]
					[U]name = ModuleLandingLeg[/U]
					[U]isEnabled = True[/U]
					[U]savedLegState = 3[/U]
				[U]}[/U][/B]
				ACTIONS
				{
					ToggleAction
					{
						actionGroup = None
					}
					RaiseAction
					{
						actionGroup = None
					}
					LowerAction
					{
						actionGroup = None
					}
				}
			}

When I did this for all 4 LandingLeg parts for my Lander on Ike, it loaded up properly with all the legs in the down position! Now I just need to spend some time doing this for 30 landers with 4 legs each. So that's only 120 manual entries I have to make.

Edited January 24, 2014 by iBeej

[Taki117]

SNIP

When I did this for all 4 LandingLeg parts for my Lander on Ike, it loaded up properly with all the legs in the down position! Now I just need to spend some time doing this for 30 landers with 4 legs each. So that's only 120 manual entries I have to make.

The good news is you can use the search funcion (ctrl+f) to find only that part.

[XOIIO]

Use notepad++ And you can find and replace every savedlegstate line with a click.

[iBeej]

Use notepad++ And you can find and replace every savedlegstate line with a click.

I think you missed the part where I said, "savedLegstate" doesn't exist yet. It's not written to the file until you load the craft. And by that time, the damage is done.

Any craft CREATED since .22 has it all coded from the beginning. But since all my landers were prior to .22 the new MODULE code simply does not exist. It has to be manually inserted like I described above, and there is no way I can think of to make a "search & replace" work at all without writing a proper parser script.

Edited January 24, 2014 by iBeej
quoting

[iBeej]

The good news is you can use the search funcion (ctrl+f) to find only that part.

Precisely. The ONE thing going for me is, I can search for every instance of "landingLeg1-2" and begin inserting that small MODULE block with the savedLegState variable.

I'm just about done with it. I will be glad when all of this is over. lol