[0.23] [Released] ScienceAlert 1.3: Experiment availability feedback (updated Apr 7)

[xEvilReeperx]

Note: ScienceAlert has been officially released! You can find the release thread here! Future versions will be posted there, but feel free to use either thread for comments, suggestions or bug reports

Thanks to everyone who took a chance and tried it out in its in-development state. Your help is much appreciated!

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One of those small annoyances I have with KSP is the lack of feedback the game provides when it comes to science. How do you know when your Kerbals have spotted something interesting? When should you hop out and have a look around in EVA? Did you forget to run an experiment? If you're tired of mashing "crew report", doing Chinese fire drill-style EVA outings or repeatedly resetting an experiment to see if you've gone from a high orbit to low yet, this plugin is for you.

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Here's the mod in a nutshell:

What it does:

Monitors the vessel's situation and available onboard experiments. When you encounter a situation in which one applies, a short sound is played and the toolbar button lights up and animates. Clicking on the toolbar button will list all experiments that are available and match your assigned filter. You can deploy that experiment immediately (or in the case of eva, send a randomly selected crew member outside) using its associated button.

Features:

• Audio and visual cue when science is available
  
• Option to temporarily store maneuver nodes when hopping between craft, as long as you stay in the flight scene. No worries about screwing up that carefully planned transfer when you hop out on eva!
  
• Configurable science filters for experiments
  
• Configurable option to stop warp when an experiment becomes available
  

Known Bugs:

• Critical: experiment data multipliers aren't calculated correctly, sometimes resulting in incorrect alerts Fixed in 1.3
  
• Critical: stopping warp on experiment discovery could sometimes affect orbit parameters Fixed in 1.2
  
• if you transmit science report(s) using a transmitter's action menu, the reports queued for it won't be taken into account until transmission is complete
  
• positioning of experiment buttons isn't consistent when there's room both above and below the button's location
  
• There is some kind of problem with EVA reports not registering. Looking into it. Update: couldn't confirm it. If you can reproduce it, let me know
  

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Installation:

Changelog:

1.3 (April 7)

• Critical: Fixed an issue that caused ScienceAlert to incorrectly determine science point values which could result in incorrect alerts
  
• Added a global warp option
  
• Added a global sound alert option
  
• Log spam on vessel modification reduced
  
• Experiments with biomeMask and situationMask set to zero will now be excluded from ScienceAlert options
  

1.2 (April 4)

• Critical: Fixed an issue that could cause the active vessel's orbital parameters to be changed when stopping warp using the "stop on discovery" option
  
• Improved biome detection again. There shouldn't be any more false alerts, even at low altitudes
  

1.1 (April 1)

• Added EVA condition warning
  
• Fixed issue where base function of ModuleScienceExperiment was called instead of the correct one
  
• Fixed issue where ScienceAlert would detect the wrong biome and flash the icon at the incorrect time
  
• Stock experiments no longer have "Assume onboard" option display by default (to reduce clutter)
  
• Temporarily added a debug menu, accessable by middle-mouse clicking the toolbar button
  
• Available experiment menu polished a little; will now appear in the same location consistently
  

1.0 (March 28)

Initial public release

Other:

This plugin is licensed under GPLv3. Source is available

Edited June 20, 2014 by xEvilReeperx

[Amaroq]

Excellent! I like this idea a lot -- downloaded & will play with it a bit over the weekend.

[Superfluous J]

Very nice balance between "WHERE THE HECK ARE THE BADLANDS" and an in-game map that just tells you everything. You still have to search around but far less clicking.

I will very likely be using this in my new YouTube series I'll be starting when 0.24 comes out, and I'll install it now just to see what I've missed in my current, tech-tree-maxxed run.

[acc]

great idea

[SorensonPA]

Oh wow, that is frickin' useful, especially given the short window of opprotunity to conduct certain biome-based experiments (damn you, Munar Canyons!). Any way to do auto-execution, picking a random free component that matches with the experiment type and having it sock away the data for return or transmission later? Maybe even combine that with a cross-reference with the science database to see how much science you've gotten out of a specific experiment, automatically ignoring those with a certain threshhold of retrieved science (like 99% or something, since the whole diminishing returns thing makes it impossible to actually 100% an experiment anyway).

[xEvilReeperx]

Oh wow, that is frickin' useful, especially given the short window of opprotunity to conduct certain biome-based experiments (damn you, Munar Canyons!). Any way to do auto-execution, picking a random free component that matches with the experiment type and having it sock away the data for return or transmission later?

I thought about this, but I didn't want to outright automate science collection. There's a certain satisfaction in having the window pop up and seeing how much science you've gathered and what the description is. If there's enough call for it, I can add it later as an option though.

Maybe even combine that with a cross-reference with the science database to see how much science you've gotten out of a specific experiment, automatically ignoring those with a certain threshhold of retrieved science (like 99% or something, since the whole diminishing returns thing makes it impossible to actually 100% an experiment anyway).

This is already in, sort of. You can filter alerts with four filters: Unresearched (zero science), <50%, <90% and a flat "not maxed" if you want every drop of science. Configurable per individual experiment. The plugin considers all "known" (transmitted) science, plus science onboard the active vessel.

[rottielover]

LOVE IT! this is a great idea! and exactly what my SCANsat maps were praying for

[Mecripp]

When does the toolbar icon come up ?

[JeffreyCor]

Great idea! So far liking it a lot! Though, for consideration, allowing an overall selection for things like notification sound rather than having to select each individually would be helpful.

[xEvilReeperx]

Great idea! So far liking it a lot! Though, for consideration, allowing an overall selection for things like notification sound rather than having to select each individually would be helpful.

Noted, will add. There are a few additional config options you can specify by editing settings.cfg by hand; for instance, you can disable the clicks or bubbles there

When does the toolbar icon come up ?

It's always available. Did you configure Blizzy's toolbar to show the button during flight? You will need to do this. Find the toolbar, left-click on the arrow next to it, select "Configure Visible Buttons" or similar and make sure "Science Alert" is checked

[curiousepic]

Great idea - is it compatible with Better than Starting Manned and Realistic Progression Lite experiments?

[sidfu]

had a issue with the probe sceince report it gave indication and everything but couldnt send could onloy keep report and even after i keep it couldnt send report ill see if something is messing with it maybe. i have rt2 so might be something causing problem. i had connection but even manual collection i couldnt send. ill see after this if its this mod

Edited March 29, 2014 by sidfu

[SorensonPA]

Out of curiosity, does this do anything to the way KSP handles experiment storage? I decided to start a new career game with this and some other stuff and I've noticed I can no longer stockpile experiments (crew report when landed, in flight, upper atmosphere, in space near Kerbin, etc) and can only have the one unless I transmit. This is kinda' a big turn-off, especially since my SOP is to establish a polar orbit and do complete biome surveys to get it out of the way before doing individual landings.

EDIT: No, I'm just being an idiot and blurring memories. Sorry.

Edited March 30, 2014 by SorensonPA

[xEvilReeperx]

Out of curiosity, does this do anything to the way KSP handles experiment storage? I decided to start a new career game with this and some other stuff and I've noticed I can no longer stockpile experiments (crew report when landed, in flight, upper atmosphere, in space near Kerbin, etc) and can only have the one unless I transmit.

No, it doesn't affect storage at all. A single crew report at a time is stock behavior. You'll need multiple command pods to store multiple crew reports.

had a issue with the probe sceince report it gave indication and everything but couldnt send could onloy keep report and even after i keep it couldnt send report ill see if something is messing with it maybe. i have rt2 so might be something causing problem. i had connection but even manual collection i couldnt send. ill see after this if its this mod

Let me know if you manage to nail this down to my mod. It's possible RT2 does something strange with transmitters that causes an issue.

Great idea - is it compatible with Better than Starting Manned and Realistic Progression Lite experiments?

If they implement ScienceExperiment at all then it should work. You may need to mess with the "assume onboard" setting to get the experiment to show up for now. I'm working on a better solution in the meantime

[rottielover]

Not sure but reading the last couple of posts sounds like a couple of known issues.

1) you can have multiple crew reports, samples, etc stored in a pod BUT a) they must be from different biomes and for crew reports: you have to remove the report (take data while a kerbal is on EVA) and then re-store them before you can take another crew report

2) There's a bug where sometimes when you click the blue transmit button on the sci report "the data will transfer to the antenna, but will not actually be transmitted" To fix that you can either right click the antenna and click on "transmit data" or you can try clicking the blue transmit button on another science report and they will both get transmitted.

EDIT: Clarification, known issues with STOCK KSP, NOT this mod!

I hope that helps out.

BTW, Just want to say that I've tried this mod using KDEX (Kerbal dust exp) along with DMagic Orbital Science, both work great with the mod. Understandably, this mod will not alert you to transmit your completed SCANsat maps to get sci points, nor will it remind you about the WIP mod "Rover Science" BUT that is because those two mods are doing the sci points in a different way.

Overall I am extremely pleased with this mod, 2 thumbs up for me. This is going into my nice to have's list!

[rottielover]

I do have 1 suggestion:

For EVA report, is it possible to get a check box for "disable in atmosphere" or similar? I had to manually disable EVA report when I was flying around kerbin because I accidentally clicked it and it ejected my kerbal (who wasn unable to hold on to the ladder).

Awesome mode: The plugin somehow knows the conditions are ripe for the kerbal to fall off the craft and warns "are you sure you want to EVA right now?"

[xEvilReeperx]

For EVA report, is it possible to get a check box for "disable in atmosphere" or similar? I had to manually disable EVA report when I was flying around kerbin because I accidentally clicked it and it ejected my kerbal (who wasn unable to hold on to the ladder).

Sure, I can add that. To the second one: probably a good idea. It could be a simple matter of checking air pressure and speed. I'll look into it

[rottielover]

Sure, I can add that. To the second one: probably a good idea. It could be a simple matter of checking air pressure and speed. I'll look into it

Lemme just say, you sir, ROCK! Keep up the good work!

[sidfu]

not sure what it was that aused my issue to not be able to send. think it had a error then when i restarted it fixed itself. working fine now so far since the problem. next time it happens ill see if i can find something in the log. cause just couldnt transmit but could take the report so im thinking something between rt2 and it was in conflict for a min there. now that i think about it its possible the rt2 flight computer could have caused a error. well if ti happens again ill scan the log to see what i find.

[technogeeky]

I do have 1 suggestion:

For EVA report, is it possible to get a check box for "disable in atmosphere" or similar? I had to manually disable EVA report when I was flying around kerbin because I accidentally clicked it and it ejected my kerbal (who wasn unable to hold on to the ladder).

Awesome mode: The plugin somehow knows the conditions are ripe for the kerbal to fall off the craft and warns "are you sure you want to EVA right now?"

I too have begun using this plugin with no problems so far, other than this problem. I was stupid enough to do it twice. I lost two whole ships packed with science.

That said, I just had a thought: An alternate (but perhaps not great) solution to this problem is to simply handle EVA reports differently than all other science because it's a two step process. Clicking the EVA Report button in your add-on should require that you initiate the EVA first. Or perhaps just have a box that asks if you really want to do it? I'm not sure. Either way, I think this speaks to the success of your module. I very quickly got used to being able to respond quickly to science opportunties, and I got lulled into a false sense of safety by your excellent work.

[Amaroq]

Played around with this all weekend, very nice work indeed - I can see it quickly hitting my "must have" list.

Suggestion:

Default the settings to something like the "<90%" setting; I certainly got surprised the first time I sent a Kerbal to a spot that I knew I had science to do, and the beaker didn't animate.

Suggestion:

The beep is very similar to the Chatterer beep, enough so that I have trouble telling them apart and am so tuning it out a bit.

Bug:

The "pick a spot" logic picks different spots for button #1 on my setup depending on whether there is one or two items. Setup is: Mac OSX, 0.23, several mods. Toolbar plugin is positioned directly below the altimeter, top and center. I think the issue is, with only one item, there is room for the button "above" toolbar, when there are two or more it needs to put them "below". In general, maybe you want to go "below" when possible, and kick to "above" only if it isn't? Or set that up as an option from cfg?

Bug:

EVA Report remains "lit" even after my Kerbal comes back inside, thus storing the EVA Report in the vessel. I'm not sure what that is, but its pretty reproducible for me.

Could not reproduce:

I also use RT2 and have not had any issues transmitting reports back home with this mod - if my probe shows as "connected" underneath the mission elapsed time, I have been able to transmit data.

[DMagic]

BTW, Just want to say that I've tried this mod using KDEX (Kerbal dust exp) along with DMagic Orbital Science, both work great with the mod. Understandably, this mod will not alert you to transmit your completed SCANsat maps to get sci points, nor will it remind you about the WIP mod "Rover Science" BUT that is because those two mods are doing the sci points in a different way.

Well, it sort of works with my parts. Some of my modules inherit from ModuleScienceExperiment, so it picks up on those, but it's calling the base.DeployExperiment method, that makes it skips any animations of other effects used by my DeployExperiment method. I wonder if there's a way to determine whether or not a part is using only ModuleScienceExperiment or if there is another module inheriting from that, or that might be too much trouble.

In my latest build I switched the anomaly scanner over to ModuleScienceExperiment too, but I fixed it so that this mod will ignore it. Using the current release Sciencealert shouldn't see shouldn't see this part though (or the drill).

Overall it's very cool though, I didn't notice any problems. There is one issue that might be a problem, though I never saw it, biome maps have fuzzy edges, and the transition from one biome to the next can sometimes cause the wrong biome to show up. For example, the thin strip between the "shores" biome and the "grasslands" biome (drive about 2 or 3 km west of the KSC to see this) will show up as "tundra" because of the way the colors bleed together in the biome map. So I'm thinking that while in orbit you might pass over these little strips and see the button flash for a half a second or so. How often does the mod update? Maybe there's a way to hold off on adding the button if it only shows up for less than a second or so. Something similar happens with rovers because they are always transitioning between landed and flying/in space when the bounce off the ground a little.

[xEvilReeperx]

Suggestion:

Default the settings to something like the "<90%" setting; I certainly got surprised the first time I sent a Kerbal to a spot that I knew I had science to do, and the beaker didn't animate.

You must have gathered science there before. The idea behind the "zero" default was that people could add this seamlessly to their existing games and I wouldn't want to spam them too often for "scienced but not finished" reports around Kerbin as they launch.

Suggestion:

The beep is very similar to the Chatterer beep, enough so that I have trouble telling them apart and am so tuning it out a bit.

The sound clip is actually some bubbles, with clicks for UI events. I had chatterer on in my demo video; perhaps that's what you're referring to? You can simply replace the wavs in the mod directory if you'd prefer a different sound.

Bug:

The "pick a spot" logic picks different spots for button #1 on my setup depending on whether there is one or two items. Setup is: Mac OSX, 0.23, several mods. Toolbar plugin is positioned directly below the altimeter, top and center. I think the issue is, with only one item, there is room for the button "above" toolbar, when there are two or more it needs to put them "below".

Got it, I can see how that would be annoying. Exact positioning logic is deferred to Blizzy's toolbar. I can at least make it consistent.

Bug:

EVA Report remains "lit" even after my Kerbal comes back inside, thus storing the EVA Report in the vessel. I'm not sure what that is, but its pretty reproducible for me.

The more detail on this the better. Specifically: how many kerbals onboard? How many command pods? Were you transmitting anything at the time?

Well, it sort of works with my parts. Some of my modules inherit from ModuleScienceExperiment, so it picks up on those, but it's calling the base.DeployExperiment method, that makes it skips any animations of other effects used by my DeployExperiment method. I wonder if there's a way to determine whether or not a part is using only ModuleScienceExperiment or if there is another module inheriting from that, or that might be too much trouble.

I'm working on a better solution than the "assume onboard" hack I've got right now. Basically, there will be a config file that will specify a module name and a deployment function name. ScienceAlert will prefer these over the standard ModuleScienceExperiment and DeployFunction, so as long as the relevant settings are in there somewhere it should be possible to be compatible with most mod experiments without breaking anything like your animations.

Overall it's very cool though, I didn't notice any problems. There is one issue that might be a problem, though I never saw it, biome maps have fuzzy edges, and the transition from one biome to the next can sometimes cause the wrong biome to show up. For example, the thin strip between the "shores" biome and the "grasslands" biome (drive about 2 or 3 km west of the KSC to see this) will show up as "tundra" because of the way the colors bleed together in the biome map.

I have seen this. I attributed it to short hops over biome edges. I'll look into it. I already have some code that cleans up the fuzzy edges that'll fix the issue quite nicely, if that's what it is. Thanks for the advice

Edited March 31, 2014 by xEvilReeperx

[Amaroq]

You must have gathered science there before. The idea behind the "zero" default was that people could add this seamlessly to their existing games and I wouldn't want to spam them too often for "scienced but not finished" reports around Kerbin as they launch.

Yes, I had. Your logic makes very good sense, and with that explanation I wouldn't change it. My experience was "on a fresh game", as I tend to start fresh when testing any new mod; I hadn't considered the mid-game consequences.

The sound clip is actually some bubbles, with clicks for UI events.

Ahh, I hear it now; it was just subtle enough that I was missing it with the volume on low, chatterer, and engines. The graphical display and "stop warping" should be sufficient.

The more detail on this the better. Specifically: how many kerbals onboard? How many command pods? Were you transmitting anything at the time?

Single kerbal, single Mk1 command pod, no transmission. I didn't even have an attached probe part for controlling another stage; it was very early in the tech tree.

Repro steps (confirmed again this morning): launch a "first stable manned orbiter" craft. When Science Alert alerts about EVA for a common terrain (grasslands, water, shores), EVA out, right click on the Kerbal, "EVA Report", then return to the craft. Begin warp. As its in orbit, eventually the craft will leave that biome .. and since its common, eventually it will re-enter it. Re-entering the biome triggers the "EVA Report" Science Alert again, even though the report for that biome is already onboard.

If I EVA, right click, "EVA Report", and return to the craft, I am told that the craft can't store the experiment data and I'll have to dump it.

Its a tough case, because a.) I want it to Alert when I get to a biome that is not on the craft, as I can collect multiple EVA Reports, and b.) its really annoying when its the "Shores" biome, as it jumps you out of warp about 16 times per equitorial orbit.

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Keep up the great work!

[ManaaniWanderer]

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! Just started another game and not knowing when I've already run an expiriment or when one is available is a pain.