[1.4] Routine Mission Manager [v032]

[goldstarstickergiver]

Excellent mod! Thanks for adding the ability to change home planets. This should really help with time consuming station resupply missions. 

[zeineizoku]

^{I will be honest I was lazy and I did not read through the 11+ pages to see if this question has been asked, I tried a General Topic Search and I found 0 results...so with that said I will proceed to my question.}

I love the Idea of this mod, I downloaded it and I have yet to use it because I have yet to get a space-station in my stream series, but I honestly downloaded it to record missions that would Satisfy Contract Parameters. Those contracts were specifically, 'Tourism' contracts. However, it seems I cannot do what I was hopping I could do, either I cannot or user error means I am too dumb to find a solution. Hence why I have come here to the community and to @PrivateFlip to seek guidance or a simple 'Nope it will never do that' so I know to not hold out on hope haha.

 

See for me, I hate to do Tourism missions on stream and I am a little to busy with editing and life to try and accomplish them off stream, but when you make a vessel and name it the 'SkyBus' and you can ferry 1 Pilot and 19 Tourists, to a Mun Orbit and back safely... it nets a small fortune. _{(about a 1.8M Kerbucks for those interested.)} so it is hard to say no to it. However, when I watched the mod in action with Thrimm Aerospace, I became elated and jumped for joy... until I came to realize that I can not either, use it for what I want, or I am just too incompetent to discover a way to make it work. Outside of putting a Space Station in Orbit around the Mun and using it as a Proxy Location... 

 

Has anyone else attempted this and succeeded. Great Master Flip have you thought about this before or ever considered it? Any insight or some direction will help immensely I thank you all for your time.

-Necro

[Aelfhe1m]

@zeineizoku RMM works by recording a mission from launch to docking (and then back to surface) using minimum crew and cargo load. Once a mission is recorded you can click on a docking port at the destination to call for a repeat with a full crew/cargo load-out. After a certain time has elapsed your new vessel will be spawned docked at the target.

So repeat tourist trips to Mun orbit would need a munar space station as a destination. It can be a very minimal space station but must have a control source and unoccupied docking port.

One way I handled routine tourist trips to Mun and Minmus in a past save (my current save is about colonisation and I'm using rare resource mining as the money spinner) was to make a deep space bus that was designed to go from Kerbin orbit to orbit of one of the moons and back. I then flew up a template crew launch mission to dock with the bus in low Kerbin orbit. And then recorded the return trip of the crew launcher to Kerbin surface. Then whenever I had enough tourist contracts I'd summon a launcher to the bus in LKO. Transfer the tourists and send the CLV home. I'd then fly the bus to the moon and back then summon a new CLV to recover the tourists.

I'd also either include spare fuel on the CLV to refuel the bus or have a separate fuel tanker template.

Edited August 17, 2017 by Aelfhe1m
forgot to mention fuel

[TeraByte_Gaming]

I am currently using this mod and am very pleased with it, however I have one small question. Does the mod work with Flight Manager for Reusable Stages?

[PrivateFlip]

No

18 hours ago, TeraByte_Gaming said:

I am currently using this mod and am very pleased with it, however I have one small question. Does the mod work with Flight Manager for Reusable Stages?

No it does not, but I'm working on support for that right now. I am combining this with much needed restructuring the mod, to allow future enhancements to be applied more easily, but for now this means it will take some time before this will be done.

On 8/17/2017 at 8:45 PM, zeineizoku said:

^{I will be honest I was lazy and I did not read through the 11+ pages to see if this question has been asked, I tried a General Topic Search and I found 0 results...so with that said I will proceed to my question.}

I love the Idea of this mod, I downloaded it and I have yet to use it because I have yet to get a space-station in my stream series, but I honestly downloaded it to record missions that would Satisfy Contract Parameters. Those contracts were specifically, 'Tourism' contracts. However, it seems I cannot do what I was hopping I could do, either I cannot or user error means I am too dumb to find a solution. Hence why I have come here to the community and to @PrivateFlip to seek guidance or a simple 'Nope it will never do that' so I know to not hold out on hope haha.

 

See for me, I hate to do Tourism missions on stream and I am a little to busy with editing and life to try and accomplish them off stream, but when you make a vessel and name it the 'SkyBus' and you can ferry 1 Pilot and 19 Tourists, to a Mun Orbit and back safely... it nets a small fortune. _{(about a 1.8M Kerbucks for those interested.)} so it is hard to say no to it. However, when I watched the mod in action with Thrimm Aerospace, I became elated and jumped for joy... until I came to realize that I can not either, use it for what I want, or I am just too incompetent to discover a way to make it work. Outside of putting a Space Station in Orbit around the Mun and using it as a Proxy Location... 

 

Has anyone else attempted this and succeeded. Great Master Flip have you thought about this before or ever considered it? Any insight or some direction will help immensely I thank you all for your time.

-Necro

At this point using a station in orbit as a proxy location is the only option. Note that "station" here, can be a cubesat with a docking port as far as the mod is concerned.

[TheCiroth]

If I use a planet mod, does this mod work or does it have to be around Kerban? Also is there an issue with CKAN installs? I am attempting to use this with GPP and after I complete a mission, I cannot seem to start up a new mission

Edited August 29, 2017 by TheCiroth

[TeraByte_Gaming]

Thanks @PrivateFlip, if you update this mod to work with FMRS, that would be my sole reason to update to 1.3. Thank you so much for this wonderfully useful mod. Happy Modding! 

Edited August 30, 2017 by TeraByte_Gaming
Typo.

[DStaal]

On 7/12/2017 at 1:02 PM, PrivateFlip said:

It can not handle FMRS landings. The mods can no doubt work side by side but this mod will not take into account the savings of reusable parts returned by FMRS. It would be awesome for FMRS to have a mod like this. I imagine designs making use of FMRS like booster return or air launch setups can be very efficient but also quite tedious in their execution. To implement it, this mod would have to keep track of those other stages and deduct them from the mission cost. I carefully would deem it both doable and more important somewhat within the time I'm willing to spend on new development of this mod. No promises.

If USI LS supplies are resources which are transferable, and from the mod's thread there is nothing which states otherwise, you should be able to resupply stations with the relevant supplies in orbit with repeat mission using this mod.

Just looking over this mod, and wondered if a more StageRecovery type return might be better than FMRS-style.  (Or if it might even be possible to integrate the main code of StageRecovery in.)

Main difference is that FMRS aims to let you take control of each piece of the ship as you decouple, manually doing each part's recovery 'simultaneously'.  StageRecovery estimates the recovered value of stages that meet certain criteria (have parachutes; have fuel+control, etc.) in the background.

[PrivateFlip]

On 8/29/2017 at 6:39 PM, TheCiroth said:

If I use a planet mod, does this mod work or does it have to be around Kerban? Also is there an issue with CKAN installs? I am attempting to use this with GPP and after I complete a mission, I cannot seem to start up a new mission

When using a planet mod you should amend the AllowedBodies.txt and HomeBodies.txt file when using other planets.

GPP can give issues, it comes with Kopernicus which comes with ModularFlightIntegrator. Thrimm reported an issue with where ordered flights would not complete. You could take a look at his posts on the previous pages of this thread and see if it matches the issue you are facing. He eventually went mod by mod an figured out this was caused by ModularFlightIntegrator. I was unable to reproduce it with the last version of ModularFlightIntegrator, but an older versions gave me the exact same issues Thrimm reported on an otherwise unmodded version of ksp. Since the last ModularFlightIntegrator version did not give these issues, apparently Sarbian has already fixed it. 

[PrivateFlip]

On 8/30/2017 at 8:20 PM, DStaal said:

Just looking over this mod, and wondered if a more StageRecovery type return might be better than FMRS-style.  (Or if it might even be possible to integrate the main code of StageRecovery in.)

Main difference is that FMRS aims to let you take control of each piece of the ship as you decouple, manually doing each part's recovery 'simultaneously'.  StageRecovery estimates the recovered value of stages that meet certain criteria (have parachutes; have fuel+control, etc.) in the background.

They both have pros and cons. StageRecovery is easier to use but does make assumptions on what is recoverable and not and thereby also limits what is recoverable. FMRS is more labour intensive, because it requires the player to actually fly the stage down, but this does allow it to take into account the recovery of every possible stage which can be recovered.

I'm aiming for what FMRS is doing. Especially since this mod will allow the player to reorder the complex mission in the background this will actually mitigate on of the downsides of FMRS compared to StageRecovery. This mod's "support for FMRS" only aims to support the principle what FMRS is doing and would not actually depend on FMRS in any way. The player would be able to track a complex mission with returned stages without FMRS installed at all by manually making a savegame like FMRS does and loading it to fly back the reusable stages. Not using FMRS would however result in the stages not being counted as recovered while tracking the actual mission even though the ordered repeat missions would take into account the savings amongst other things. 

[DStaal]

Fair enough.  I just wanted to bring it up as a possible better technical fit.  I do understand the pros and cons and even run both myself, I just thought it might be simpler - especially if you didn't want to maintain what I assume could be a complicated codebase for this one feature.

[The_Blazer]

Are there any plans to support ship-to-ship or surface-to-ship missions ? Minmus/Mun refineries or supply tankers that deliver mined fuel to other ships would be very handy to automate.

[Duke Leto]

I'm seeing an odd bug with RMM, although it has been, in general, all I can hope for.

I have a SS at 250 km, 0 inclination over Kerbin. and I'm using medium sized 2.5 m rockets to ferry fuel supplies up to it in bulk while my Minmus refinery is still under construction.  Usually, a recorded mission takes 1d,2h give or take a bit.  But on two occasions I have had to re-record because one of the missions has, after I procure a re-run, had its ETA jump up enormously.  First it was 7d, now it's 22d.  This also changes the value of the ETA for all future procurements of that mission, hence the need to re-record.

[PrivateFlip]

On 10/6/2017 at 5:29 AM, Duke Leto said:

I'm seeing an odd bug with RMM, although it has been, in general, all I can hope for.

I have a SS at 250 km, 0 inclination over Kerbin. and I'm using medium sized 2.5 m rockets to ferry fuel supplies up to it in bulk while my Minmus refinery is still under construction.  Usually, a recorded mission takes 1d,2h give or take a bit.  But on two occasions I have had to re-record because one of the missions has, after I procure a re-run, had its ETA jump up enormously.  First it was 7d, now it's 22d.  This also changes the value of the ETA for all future procurements of that mission, hence the need to re-record.

I have reviewed the code based on your report and although I'm not able to reproduce such a scenario, I did see a way for the scenario to happen. I've released a new version (027) with a small fix.

Thank you so much for reporting this!

 

===================

In other news I'm still working on a new version which aims to implement support for FMRS. Progress is slow but steady, last couple of week I'm was able to spend at least a few hours on it each week.

Tracking logic and basic UI is in place and tested for tracking missions with reusable stages returning to kerbin. "Arrival" and "return" missions will likely be handled recorded independently, instead of the situation right now where the latter can only exist as a consequence of the former, although still some testing needs to be done for this. Currently working on the UI for the routine part, of which the largest parts of underlying logic will be reused from the current implementation. The overall architecture as far as there was one has been improved and the amount spaghetti code has been reduced. This will allows for easier expansion of functionality in the future and will also make it more feasible for other modders to take over and advance the project if so desired.

 

[Barcel]

Any idea if this works on 1.3.1? If not, is an update planned?

[Starfire70]

On 10/19/2017 at 9:28 AM, Barcel said:

Any idea if this works on 1.3.1? If not, is an update planned?

Appears to work fine for me, but I've only repeated a tourism mission (which is based on Contract Configurator and Tourism Plus, so my tourists are returned but not considered 'recovered'). I love this mod, and I'm sure it will come in handy for resupply missions...just wish it would work for crew rotation/resupply/tourism missions from the contract packs.

 

[Starfire70]

13 minutes ago, Starfire70 said:

Appears to work fine for me, but I've only repeated a tourism mission (which is based on Contract Configurator and Tourism Plus, so my tourists are returned but not considered 'recovered'). I love this mod, and I'm sure it will come in handy for resupply missions...just wish it would work for crew rotation/resupply/tourism missions from the contract packs.

 

Actually, I figured out a workaround. I had thought that since the mission parameters are marked as complete when the RMM mission ends, I could just deploy the pilot and tourists to a simple capsule/module combination on the launch pad and then recover them and that should mark the tourism mission itself as complete.

...AND THAT WORKS.

Easy peasy (certainly easier than doing the entire tourism mission manually).

Edited November 29, 2017 by Starfire70

[Starfire70]

On a replay mission like a tourist flyby of the Mun, do you have to manually initiate the return of the vehicle from the Muna orbit station?

Or is there a way for the vehicle to automatically return? I didn't see that behavior but maybe I'm missing something.

 

Edited November 29, 2017 by Starfire70

[PrivateFlip]

On 11/29/2017 at 6:09 AM, Starfire70 said:

Appears to work fine for me, but I've only repeated a tourism mission (which is based on Contract Configurator and Tourism Plus, so my tourists are returned but not considered 'recovered'). I love this mod, and I'm sure it will come in handy for resupply missions...just wish it would work for crew rotation/resupply/tourism missions from the contract packs.

 

My main intention for making this mod, was to make ksp more enjoyable for a longer duration by automating some of the grind of repetitive missions. This is something I encountered when for example fueling an interplanetary tug in orbit or moving fresh kerbals up to my space station. An essential part for me of something contributing to a grind is that it's essential to do, in order to do something else. 

For tourism mission this isn't the case, bacause these mission aren't essential to do something else. An alternative would be to skip these contracts. The player would of course miss out on some money, but unless there was nothing which could be done to earn money in a more fun way, like difficulty settings or mods, this isn't helping the player enjoying the game more.

Make no mistake, I can certainly see how being able to automate some of these tourism missions, might allow you to complete these mission and make allot of money more easily. If you take a step back, I suspect, you can see the fact you're not so interested in flying these missions, can be turned around into saying something about what these contract mods add in entertaining gameplay for you.

From this perspective I,  in hindsight, probably wouldn't have even added the support for vanilla tourism missions. To make some sense of this it might be important to note there is a significant time investment on my part to add a feature. I've since come to think I should be preferring features which allow players to spend more time playing the interesting part of the game and thereby hopefully experiencing more of the game vs features which automate certain parts of the game but which do not themselves open up more of the game to the player.

On 11/29/2017 at 6:22 AM, Starfire70 said:

Actually, I figured out a workaround. I had thought that since the mission parameters are marked as complete when the RMM mission ends, I could just deploy the pilot and tourists to a simple capsule/module combination on the launch pad and then recover them and that should mark the tourism mission itself as complete.

...AND THAT WORKS.

Easy peasy (certainly easier than doing the entire tourism mission manually).

Good to hear you found a workaround anyhow.

On 11/29/2017 at 9:03 PM, Starfire70 said:

On a replay mission like a tourist flyby of the Mun, do you have to manually initiate the return of the vehicle from the Muna orbit station?

Or is there a way for the vehicle to automatically return? I didn't see that behavior but maybe I'm missing something.

 

Yes, returns are always manually initiated, no automation option is present.

 

===================

Some update on the new version I'm still working on, talked about more extensively a few posts back, I'm now at a point where the basic functionality is almost working. Some more bug fixing and testing is still required. 

What's working right now is almost all the functionality of the previous version and in addition:

• "FMRS support",
• the ability to track and order return missions completely separate from launch missions.
• improved user interface: more intuitive navigation, more feedback to the player. When for example ordering a return mission, the ordering screen will show the player if the docked vessel has sufficient resources are on board and enough crew is present, all well before the mission is ordered and attempting to order a return mission which does not meet requirements will result in the player getting feedback on exactly what grounds the order is not allowed.

 

Some todos before releasing a first version:

• make a screen where the player can monitor all ordered missions
• add a screen where the player can inspect tracked missions. Especially for FMRS missions it's important for the player to get a sense on what parts of the mission have been tracked.
• an in game manual.
• a lot of testing.

 

[Starfire70]

Regarding tourism missions, good point. They don't lead to any game progression.

I also tried to automate missions from the surface of Kerbin to the surface of the Mun, the landing vehicle with wheels so that I can dock to the side of the base itself. However after docking, I get a message that mission tracking is ended...but I get no option for a return mission on the docking port. I tried searching the topic but didn't find any reference to this.

 

Edited December 3, 2017 by Starfire70

[PrivateFlip]

On 12/3/2017 at 2:34 AM, Starfire70 said:

Regarding tourism missions, good point. They don't lead to any game progression.

I also tried to automate missions from the surface of Kerbin to the surface of the Mun, the landing vehicle with wheels so that I can dock to the side of the base itself. However after docking, I get a message that mission tracking is ended...but I get no option for a return mission on the docking port. I tried searching the topic but didn't find any reference to this.

 

The text "mission tracking ended" is shown when tracking is aborted, this could a clearer message. (When doing a normal docking port arrival, in orbit, you would see "mission tracking-ARRIVAL").

Docking on a planet is unfortunately not supported. 

 

[PrivateFlip]

This post is the temporary release post for a revised version of Routine Mission Manager. This version will not be compatible with missions from earlier version of routine mission manager. 

The intention is to give those with a special interest in the mod a chance to make use of some new features, while not bordering more casual users with a sudden mod breaking update. Once KSP has its next major update this revised version of the mod will become the main version on Kerbal Space Dock and Kerbal CurseForge.

This mod has an ingame manual, accessible from the mods main window

warning currently some bugs reported with this new version, no details yet but concerning enough to warrant some caution. Making a savegame before installing would be a good precaution until more information is gathered.

versions:

20-01-2018: v031 dropbox link

01-01-2018: v030 dropbox link 

Edited January 20, 2018 by PrivateFlip
new version

[The_Joe]

New version is not letting me register docking ports... I open the menu, select "Register Docking Ports" then right click on the port, I can type into the field but I cannot click "Register".

 

Of course this makes the mod not work at all...

 

EDIT: Re-downloaded and everything is working fine now.  Im a dork!  

Edited January 6, 2018 by The_Joe

[PrivateFlip]

3 hours ago, The_Joe said:

New version is not letting me register docking ports... I open the menu, select "Register Docking Ports" then right click on the port, I can type into the field but I cannot click "Register".

 

Of course this makes the mod not work at all...

I understand. Just tried did myself, using 64 bit version KSP 1.3.1 on windows, for me it works without issue.  

What system and game version are you on. Can you give some information on why you are not able to click register; is the button not visible, enabled or does in not respond to mouse input.

[The_Joe]

20 hours ago, PrivateFlip said:

I understand. Just tried did myself, using 64 bit version KSP 1.3.1 on windows, for me it works without issue.  

What system and game version are you on. Can you give some information on why you are not able to click register; is the button not visible, enabled or does in not respond to mouse input.

64 bit, 1.3.1 on Windows. 

 

After inputting the dock number, I'm not able to click ”ok”. I'll check into it more tomorrow when I'm back at my PC. It's probably just me being a dork.

 

Edit: doesn't respond to mouse clicks.

Edited January 5, 2018 by The_Joe