[0.90.0] Fine Print vSTOCK'D - BETA RELEASE!!! (December 15)

[Arsonide]

So, given that the stockified Fine Print​ is now in experimentals, what's next for Arsonide? Got another nifty mod in the works?

The cool thing about contracts is that there are always new ideas. I have no intentions of ceasing my expansion of those possibilities with the release of the next patch.

[FlowerChild]

The cool thing about contracts is that there are always new ideas. I have no intentions of ceasing my expansion of those possibilities with the release of the next patch.

Hehe...just wanted to chime in to say that's an awesome attitude man

Fine Print integration is probably the one thing I am most anticipating in 0.9.

[colin_in_space]

I installed fine print a while back. Worked fine. Then a little while after I installed and played it all my contracts were whiped out. Active, completed, failed, all of them dissapeared from the game.

I had finished the duna contract but the eve/gilly contracts were pending.

I have now noticed I am getting lots of duna contracts but none for eve or Gilly. I suspect because the game has not set a prerequisite of having been to eve already.

Any thoughts on how I can fix this? I don't mind editing my save if sonecan can direct me to the flag for having completed the eve base contract.

[SplitJugular]

are there any plans to add missions that spawn in a space station/planetary base that you have to resupply with crew/rcs/fuel/electric and even life support for tac life?

[mckamx]

I have a contract to do an areal survey around the south pole of Jool. My plan was/is to use an airship to do the survey. The difficulty is how to terminate the mission, since KSP is not happy about transferring focus away from a vessel that is in the atmosphere, and not landed. Landing on Jool is not possible. My plan was to do the survey with an un-Kerbaled airship, then descend to crush depth to terminate the mission. Unfortunately, when I get to crush depth, instead of a "vessel destroyed" notification, I get an apparently unterminating series of explosions.

Does any one have an idea for a strategy for terminating a mission in the Jool atmosphere once the contract requirements have been met?

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

Maybe you could put the core on a decoupler (disable staging!). Then, at the end of mission, rise to maximum altitude, trigger the decoupler, fall away from the airship (letting KSP clean it up once it passes out of physics range in atmosphere), and then have only one piece left to be crushed, and hopefully less chance of weirdness.

Alternatively, use KAS and bring a winch and a grappling hook. I've used them to anchor airships to Kerbin (even with really long cables achieved by patching).

[Wanderfound]

The cool thing about contracts is that there are always new ideas. I have no intentions of ceasing my expansion of those possibilities with the release of the next patch.

There's probably an audience for themed contract packs. I.e. "this pack gives a series of contracts to closely replicate the Apollo program", "this pack gives contracts to add some Thunderbirds-style flavour to the game", etc.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I'd be up for some contracts based on UFO (the TV show) or XCOM. As a first cut, "intercept" contracts (delivered by some Kerbin defense agency) could appear which spawn vessels to be intercepted and destroyed (or captured). If the target is observed but allowed to land, the contract is partially succeeded and spawns a ground-strike contract, with the requirement that the landed vessel be destroyed or secured and recovered. Can contracts have conditional or branching rewards? Maybe the vessels can have high costs or large amounts of science on board, encouraging capture and recovery (though BD Armory could be leveraged, if it's present, to give the vessels a little more bite and make capture more challenging -- and to give your interceptors a little more bite themselves, for that matter).

A variant budgeting system like my periodic budget proposal and/or kegereneku's budget cap proposal might also work well with this kind of "mission pack". Complete missions and you get a nice budget to build out detection and interception systems; let too many aliens through, and the people lose confidence in you (and you lose funding).

(I was going to write in lots more detail about how KSP could implement X-COM-like features, but then I realized I could just play a game in the X-COM family...although being able to build my own vehicles instead of clicking the "build" button in the engineering screen would be kind of nice.)

[mckamx]

Maybe you could put the core on a decoupler (disable staging!). Then, at the end of mission, rise to maximum altitude, trigger the decoupler, fall away from the airship (letting KSP clean it up once it passes out of physics range in atmosphere), and then have only one piece left to be crushed, and hopefully less chance of weirdness.

Alternatively, use KAS and bring a winch and a grappling hook. I've used them to anchor airships to Kerbin (even with really long cables achieved by patching).

Good suggestions, Thanks!

I finally killed the KSP session, restarted, loaded the last quicksave, and re-played the end of the mission. This time, KSP terminated the mission at crush depth instead of doing the endless explosion thing, so I was probably battling KSP memory management.

Goodbye, cruel Jool...

[NBZ]

Arsonide,

I really love your work, and has been using it since it came out. I am mainly into rockets, and generally avoid the surveillance's un favor of bases and satellites.

Here are some suggestions for things that can be added to bases' requirements to spice things up:

1. Add orbital parameters, but with larger margins. Especially important for solar bases which are trivially fulfilled by bases en-route to planetary destinations.
   
2. Add science part requirements, just like satellites.
   
3. Add specific size to docking port requirement.
   
4. Add splashed down on Eve or Laythe (or any future sea) as an additional type.
   
5. Require a certain number of Kerbonauts to be present (maybe even by specialty). Especially interesting after 0.90 when one will have to balance the (temporary) reduction of (valuable) crew.
   
6. Require a certain amount of one or more resources.
   

Is it possible to have the orbital precision be scalable as a setting in the initial difficulty panel?

I don't know if you have any influence on the stock missions, or if you are able to mod them. In case you are, there are certain aspects of engine/SRB testing that bothers me:

• Some do not have the [Run Test] option, and need to be staged. It is always possible to use them first by clicking [Activate Engine], and to artificially stage later, so why not just add [Run Test] to all engines/SRBs (not to decouplers, their need for actual action makes them more of a challenge)?
  
• They do not need fuel. SRB may be emptied before launch, and the Ion engine doesn't need electricity or Xenon to test. Many contracts are trivial like this.
  

I suggest requiring additional parameters:

• engine active
  
• fuel>0 for 10 seconds
  
• throttle>0 for 10 seconds
  

When all conditions are met, the player can click [Run Test]

(This requires multiple parts to become experimental when asked to test the Ion Engine, or alternatively, to withhold the mission until the node has been researched.)

Actual test rigs for "landed" and "splashed down" would be so much more fun than a Mk1 pod with an engine!

[TABLE=width: 500]

[TR]

[TD=align: center][/TD]

[TD=align: center]Actual Rocket Test Rigs

[/TD]

[TD=align: center][/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD=align: center]Liquid Fuel Engine[/TD]

[TD=align: center]Solid Rocket Booster[/TD]

[TD=align: center]Ion Engine[/TD]

[/TR]

[/TABLE]

Edited December 15, 2014 by NBZ
Wrong assumptions

[bdito]

Arsonide,

I really love your work, and has been using it since it came out. I am mainly into rockets, and generally avoid the atmospheric parts tests, in favor of landed/splashed down, suborbital, and orbital ones.

However, certain aspects of engine/SRB testing bothers me:

• Some do not have the [Run Test] option, and need to be staged. It is always possible to use them first by clicking [Activate Engine], and to artificially stage later, so why not just add [Run Test] to all engines/SRBs (not to decouplers, their need for actual action makes them more of a challenge)?
  
• They do not need fuel. SRB may be emptied before launch, and the Ion engine doesn't need electricity or Xenon to test. Many contracts are trivial like this.
  

I suggest requiring additional parameters:

• engine active
  
• fuel>0 for 10 seconds
  
• throttle>0 for 10 seconds
  

When all conditions are met, the player can click [Run Test]

Just make sure that all (or at least one of the) Xenon tanks become available as experimental parts when asking to test the Ion Engine, alternatively, withhold the mission until the node has been researched.

This way, it will become necessary to build actual test rigs for "landed" and "splashed down", and account for added momentum when not. Even more fun!

[TABLE=width: 500]

[TR]

[TD=align: center][/TD]

[TD=align: center]Actual Rocket Test Rigs

[/TD]

[TD=align: center][/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD=align: center]Liquid Fuel Enginehttp://i.imgur.com/jHdZtTs.jpg[/TD]

[TD=align: center]Solid Rocket Boosterhttp://i.imgur.com/fMv8Esa.jpg[/TD]

[TD=align: center]Ion Enginehttp://i.imgur.com/fsgeXqQ.jpg[/TD]

[/TR]

[/TABLE]

Arsonide can confirm this, but I don't think he has anything to do with the part testing missions. Those are stock missions not Fine Print missions.

[NBZ]

Arsonide can confirm this, but I don't think he has anything to do with the part testing missions. Those are stock missions not Fine Print missions.

Yeah, now I think about it, you are probably right. I am just so used to Fine Print that I don't think of the missions as coming from a different source.

However, now that Arsonide is working for Squad, it is likely that he has been put in charge of the other mission types as-well. Maybe there is hope.

EDIT: I rewrote my post. Thank you for sparing me further embarrassment. Have some rep.

Edited December 15, 2014 by NBZ

[Arsonide]

Hey guys, just want to let you guys know what a fantastic group of players you have been! Your feedback has helped to shape Fine Print into what it is now, and I definitely appreciate that. Now that Fine Print is stock, and beta has been released, you can go see the extensive polishing that I have been quietly up to these past few months!

I will be releasing a full change log tomorrow that details every little change that went in to Fine Print from mod to stock, but I'd like to give people a day to experience them for themselves. I will also be pulling the mod off of KerbalStuff and Curse to ease confusion. I want to keep track of release feedback, so I will be keeping this thread open temporarily, but since most reports should be going to the actual support forums now, I will be shutting this thread down in about a week.

Again, thank you for all of the feedback these past six months - I really do appreciate it - and be sure to read the fine print.

[sp1989]

Hey guys, just want to let you guys know what a fantastic group of players you have been! Your feedback has helped to shape Fine Print into what it is now, and I definitely appreciate that. Now that Fine Print is stock, and beta has been released, you can go see the extensive polishing that I have been quietly up to these past few months!

I will be releasing a full change log tomorrow that details every little change that went in to Fine Print from mod to stock, but I'd like to give people a day to experience them for themselves. I will also be pulling the mod off of KerbalStuff and Curse to ease confusion. I want to keep track of release feedback, so I will be keeping this thread open temporarily, but since most reports should be going to the actual support forums now, I will be shutting this thread down in about a week.

Again, thank you for all of the feedback these past six months - I really do appreciate it - and be sure to read the fine print.

I think I speak for everyone when I say...whats next?!

[biohazard15]

beta has been released

wooooohooooo!!!

[Fyrem]

WOOT.. ..

very well done, Arsonide!

[bdito]

Hey guys, just want to let you guys know what a fantastic group of players you have been! Your feedback has helped to shape Fine Print into what it is now, and I definitely appreciate that. Now that Fine Print is stock, and beta has been released, you can go see the extensive polishing that I have been quietly up to these past few months!

I will be releasing a full change log tomorrow that details every little change that went in to Fine Print from mod to stock, but I'd like to give people a day to experience them for themselves. I will also be pulling the mod off of KerbalStuff and Curse to ease confusion. I want to keep track of release feedback, so I will be keeping this thread open temporarily, but since most reports should be going to the actual support forums now, I will be shutting this thread down in about a week.

Again, thank you for all of the feedback these past six months - I really do appreciate it - and be sure to read the fine print.

No Arsonide, THANK YOU !!!!

[goldenpsp]

I think I speak for everyone when I say...whats next?!

This.

First congratulations on your mod being sucked into stock KSP. Do you have plans to extend it for other mods. I know the Fineprint mod had support for resource missions with karbonite/kethane etc. I personally would love to see some sort of way of configuring fine print stock to still support these kinds of missions.

[scerion]

Congrats Arsonide!

[Arsonide]

This.

First congratulations on your mod being sucked into stock KSP. Do you have plans to extend it for other mods. I know the Fineprint mod had support for resource missions with karbonite/kethane etc. I personally would love to see some sort of way of configuring fine print stock to still support these kinds of missions.

You're in luck, it still does! Just have to enable it in the configuration file as before. There are a lot of new options in the configuration file! Even some options for the stock contracts I worked in. They will all be in the change log tomorrow, but for now you can poke around in GameData\Squad\Contracts\Contracts.cfg

As for my plans - I can acknowledge that I have some.

[goldenpsp]

You're in luck, it still does! Just have to enable it in the configuration file as before. There are a lot of new options in the configuration file! Even some options for the stock contracts I worked in. They will all be in the change log tomorrow, but for now you can poke around in GameData\Squad\Contracts\Contracts.cfg

As for my plans - I can acknowledge that I have some.

Even better.

[malkuth]

Hey arsonide, just a quick question have they implimented your waypoint system to all contracts or still just yours? And is the waypoint system Mod accessible for other contract addons? Before I have to dig to deep..

[Arsonide]

Hey arsonide, just a quick question have they implimented your waypoint system to all contracts or still just yours? And is the waypoint system Mod accessible for other contract addons? Before I have to dig to deep..

Look at my SURVEY_DEFINITIONS in the configuration file malkuth. I spent a good amount of time getting that working specifically for modders to have access to the waypoint system. It even allows you to specify your own waypoint icon. As of now, the waypoints are implemented in surveys and satellite contracts. I thought about using them in base/station contracts, but giving a specific orbit objective to a station essentially makes it a satellite contract with a larger payload, and I wanted all the contracts to feel unique when played, so I left stations with the ability to freely orbit, but gave them wackier side objectives.

[malkuth]

Look at my SURVEY_DEFINITIONS in the configuration file malkuth. I spent a good amount of time getting that working specifically for modders to have access to the waypoint system. It even allows you to specify your own waypoint icon. As of now, the waypoints are implemented in surveys and satellite contracts. I thought about using them in base/station contracts, but giving a specific orbit objective to a station essentially makes it a satellite contract with a larger payload, and I wanted all the contracts to feel unique when played, so I left stations with the ability to freely orbit, but gave them wackier side objectives.

Dam Arsonide that was pretty awsome of you to set up that way. Thanks a bunch. Thumbs up man.

[enneract]

Any chance of getting releases for older versions of KSP, or was pulling them part of getting it into stock?