Please remove automatic deletion of craft when part(s) are missing

[NeoMorph]

Seriously... I had ONE part on my big space station that was part of a mod pack and when I removed said pack it deleted the whole damned space station.

Perhaps you could have the game warn you that it is going to remove the whole craft due to missing part and give you the option of returning to the save screen so you can fix the problem instead of having it automatically wipe out several hours of flight time due to a single mistake.

In fact the game currently warns you AFTER it has deleted the craft. Talk about wrong way around.

[Legendary Emu]

I totally support this. I set up a Apollo type of Mun landing and I must have deleted deadly reentry and came back and it said my command ship was deleted.

[astropapi1]

Or at least let us delete them selectively.

[NeoMorph]

Exactly... You can set up a whole space empire and you decide you want XYZ mod but run out of memory and you remove a mod you don't think you are using and suddenly half your missions get removed because a tiny part from the deleted mod has been used on a 500 part space station and the whole thing goes POOF!.

If the warning happened BEFORE it did the delete it would be fine because then you could crash the game before it does the delete and then put the missing files back.

I know it's an alpha but there are several procedure steps that are the wrong way around... this being one of them. Another is when you are editing a space ship and you accidentally hit the "New Ship" button and suddenly... no ship. We should get the warnings before data is irreversibly deleted.

What WOULD be good is if the game used a grandfather, father, son method of save games. That way any changes can be reversed if you load up an older save.

[Alex_Leonardo]

If I were you, right now I would get a test save and have one rocket ready with modded parts in the test save.

Then, before you open the real save, go to the test save.

Just wait until they fix it.

[DMagic]

Another suggestion might be to automatically create a backup persistence savefile whenever the "part not found" error is triggered. That way you would at least always have a kind of "last stable save" file that you could go back to.

[Amaroq]

Hell, I'd like that in general, DMagic. Periodic rolling save, maybe "on load"?

Not to remove the risk of failure, but to remove the risk of "Oh, my toddler just hit space bar, busting up the staging of my Jool mission and leaving it on a fly-by with no chance of making a stable orbit ..."

Just last night I lost a perfectly-lined up intercept by touching the "Shift" key when I thought I'd established my mouse and cursor in a different window.

[Javster]

Or just make the part vanish, but not destroy the craft.

[Andon]

I would like to see this as well, and also I'd rather NOT have a popup for EVERY SINGLE CRAFT when you have a ton. Clicking through them is old, especially because you don't have a choice about if it's deleted or not.

Or just make the part vanish, but not destroy the craft.

Depending on the part and the craft, this would have consequences that are way out of league with the difficulty of coding it. What if it's a NovaPunch Fuel tank htat's in the middle of the craft? How would the game differentiate between that and, say, a B9 radial RCS port? Deleting one would have no real issues. Deleting the other would cause the craft to become... not a craft.

[Javster]

I would like to see this as well, and also I'd rather NOT have a popup for EVERY SINGLE CRAFT when you have a ton. Clicking through them is old, especially because you don't have a choice about if it's deleted or not.

Depending on the part and the craft, this would have consequences that are way out of league with the difficulty of coding it. What if it's a NovaPunch Fuel tank htat's in the middle of the craft? How would the game differentiate between that and, say, a B9 radial RCS port? Deleting one would have no real issues. Deleting the other would cause the craft to become... not a craft.

Maybe it calculates how large the part is and if anything is radially attached to it.

[Andon]

It's not impossible, but the amount of extra coding for something that is, realistically speaking, entirely trivial and mostly irrelevant. I've had craft removals happen... five times?

[LawnDartLeo]

I stopped relying on KSP to safeguard my work long ago. It's just become habit to go to the particular save folder and make backups.

[Sirrobert]

What did you EXPECT to happen?

Your station to break up because of a sudden hole in it? The entire station is no longer valid, because a part of the tree is broken.

A part is invalid, and thus the entire tree becomes invalid. You can't just pull out a part and staple the 2 halves back tougether

[DMagic]

Another suggestion might be to automatically create a backup persistence savefile whenever the "part not found" error is triggered. That way you would at least always have a kind of "last stable save" file that you could go back to.

That's right, I'm replying to my own post...

And hey, this might do just what I was saying: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/71624-Plugin-Auto-Create-Persistence-File-Backup-Prevent-File-Loss-From-Missing-Parts

I haven't tested it much, but it's supposed to create a backup whenever you first load a save file. It's a bit of a WIP though, so I wouldn't rely on it too much.

[coolitic]

I agree, there should at least be warning.

Maybe the craft would go into a "ghost" mode?

[Dunbaratu]

What did you EXPECT to happen?

Your station to break up because of a sudden hole in it? The entire station is no longer valid, because a part of the tree is broken.

A part is invalid, and thus the entire tree becomes invalid. You can't just pull out a part and staple the 2 halves back tougether

No, what the OP expected is to be warned before it's too late and the damage is already done.

[frizzank]

Force closing KSP when you get the warning (And not clicking on the warning) prevents KSP from saving the persistence file. It is a workaround to saving your stuff....

[Dunbaratu]

Force closing KSP when you get the warning (And not clicking on the warning) prevents KSP from saving the persistence file. It is a workaround to saving your stuff....

True, but the point is that any time the ONLY form of "user input" to tell the program not to continue in a situation where continuing will ruin the saved game is to externally kill the program, that means the program needs a confirmation dialog there.

[LawnDartLeo]

What did you EXPECT to happen?

Your station to break up because of a sudden hole in it? The entire station is no longer valid, because a part of the tree is broken.

A part is invalid, and thus the entire tree becomes invalid. You can't just pull out a part and staple the 2 halves back tougether

A simple unable to load would suffice. I seem to recall that KSP used to prompt for cleanup. Is that no longer the case? I do agree tho that wanting the ship file to load sans a necessary part is not a good idea. If parts are missing, just DON'T LOAD.

Edited March 8, 2014 by LawnDartLeo

[Dunbaratu]

A simple unable to load would suffice. I seem to recall that KSP used to prompt for cleanup. Is that no longer the case? I do agree tho that wanting the ship file to load sans a necessary part is not a good idea. If parts are missing, just DON'T LOAD.

You could be in a situation where the mod in question for the part cannot be loaded because it hasn't been updated to the newest KSP. You don't want to ruin the entire save game making it impossible to load just because one of the vessels in the game is impossible to load.

It's just simple to ask the user:

"If you continue loading this saved game all the following vessels will have to be deleted from the saved game because they contain parts that are not defined:

vessel A

vessel B

vessel C

.. etc..

Do you want to continue and delete them? (Y/N)?"

[RocketPilot573]

I agree, it can simply warn you BEFORE it loads the save and deletes everything, just so you know what's about to happen.