[1.0.5] Snacks! Kerbal simplified life support v0.3.5

[passinglurker]

18 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Maybe it is something to revisit if @tgruetzm doesn't come back. I do like the brilliant simplicity of it, but also recognize that others might like extra parts and functionality. But for now, I'll leave it as is. If we don't hear from him in about a month then I'll assume he's not coming back, and create a Snacks Plus that would both keep the original functionality but also provide options for storage and recycling.

On storage options part of snacks elegant simplicity is the use of crew cabins for storage meaning no extra parts and your living space grew with your voyage. Some rebalance may be in order adding more snacks to a cabin for practicality sake (or a difficulty slider or config file effecting consumption rate), but I don't think this aspect of snacks should ever change its what makes snacks unique compared to something like usi-LS.

As for recycling since snacks are massless it could essentially mean the absence of snacks means the presence of waste (can't just throw those wrappers out the window at interplanetary velocity after all :p) but just being able to generate snacks could arguably negate the purpose of the mod and reduce it to just a "take this much extra mass with you super challenge!" So maybe what should be tried first is functionality that can reduce snack consumption but not negate it representing that snacks are being recycled just not as fast as they are being consumed.

[mitko]

Thank you for bringing this mod into the 1.1 era. I'd like to add my voice for keeping this mod partless. It keeps it light and makes adding and removing it from installs easy and painless. Together with the simplicity of managing a single recourse, this makes Snacks a perfect entry level Life Support mod, As for recycling there is a way to simulate open cycle recycling by introducing a part that reduces the rate at which the kerbals consume snacks. Since snacks represent all kebal need we can say that this part is equipped with device that fully recyclers water and oxygen so that you need to bring just enough food for the long journey. A good candidate for a part like this is the PPD-12 Cupola Module (the MPL-LG-2 is already used to produce snacks from ore).

[Wolf Baginski]

I have now made a check on Whyren's Snackhouse models, the greenhouses in his pack, and they do work, but I am seeing some odd behaviour.

Full sun exposure, and maximum snack production, happens when the sun is aligned with the vertical axis of the part (vertical in VAB). The greenhouse doors open OK, revealing the windows on the side. and the solar panels I fitted to my test craft correctly track the sun (and gave me a visual check on sun direction). I've shied away from using the ToolsByWhyren.dll which could be what fixes it, but these .dll files are just the thing which I'd expect not to work in v1.1  I shall have to give it a try.

Edited to add: There was no change at all with the .dll included, no failure and no change to behaviour. It's a while yet before it would make any difference, I tend not to transfer games between KSP versions, but this does seem to need attention. Did it happen with 1.05? I never noticed. You sort of assume that things that obvious get checked before a mod gets out in the wild.

Further Edit Report: I am not 100% sure on this, but I suspect the oddly-aligned sun angle happens in v1.05 If there is a way this can be re-done it needs it. As the solar panel angles changed and the sun got closer to the axis, ther Snackhouse seemed to be working faster. Then I overcooked the manouever and the station broke up.

But, at the moment, there's a workaround, awkward though it is to align the station differently. And if there is a way to work the sun angle properly...

Edited April 27, 2016 by Wolf Baginski
Final Test result added

[Angelo Kerman]

Snacks 1.1.3 is now available for download.

- Fixes versioning name and KSP version requirements
- Recompiled for KSP 1.1.1

Once again I'm going to give it a month to see if @tgruetzm comes back and if not then I'll continue developing the mod. Based upon the comments it sounds like most like the small footprint of the mod, but it needs some tweaks. Maybe something like doubling the snacks you get with non-command parts from 100 per crew to 200. That would make long distance trips a little easier but still account for the need for additional crew space. That would be the simplest solution to recycling versus more storage parts.

[Angelo Kerman]

Ok, I just noticed that the OP lists 200 snacks per crew while the current versionhands out 100 Snacks per crew. I'll fix that tonight.

[Badsector]

11 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Ok, I just noticed that the OP lists 200 snacks per crew while the current versionhands out 100 Snacks per crew. I'll fix that tonight.

Why don't add @Whyren snacks containers to the package (without greenhouses) ?

I think a lot of snack users use them and now is no more updated.

If you interested i have already updated them in attack nodes and capacity (1snack x l)

[passinglurker]

2 minutes ago, Badsector said:

Why don't add @Whyren snacks containers to the package (without greenhouses) ?

I think a lot of snack users use them and now is no more updated.

If you interested i have already updated them in attack nodes and capacity (1snack x l)

Its a divisive matter a lot of users (myself included) are opposed to adding any parts to the mod because we want this to remain light weight. worse a compact storage part ruins the mods elegantly simple balance or even worse eliminates the whole point in running a life support mod because packing enough snacks becomes too easy. No matter what some degree of bulk is an absolute necessity.

[Badsector]

I agree but in some situations containers are need like very long missions or spacestations refuel, but probably you are correct and is better left this choice to the player.

[passinglurker]

55 minutes ago, Badsector said:

I agree but in some situations containers are need like very long missions or spacestations refuel, but probably you are correct and is better left this choice to the player.

No extra containers aren't really needed at all. If you believe that you are missing the whole point of this mod(repeat after me "crew cabins are my containers"). What is needed is though is as angel-125 said the snack capacity of crew cabins needs to be rebalanced in order to fill those situations where you otherwise feel the need for denser storage. 

 

[Angelo Kerman]

Ok here is Snacks 1.1.4

Changes:

- Fixed an issue where snacks weren't provided to non-command crewed parts.
- Rebalananced Snack amounts for non-command modules to 400 per crewmember.
NOTE: This will only apply to new vessels. For existing vessles, temporarily rename patch.cfg to patch.txt,
and rename rebalance.txt to rebalance.cfg. Start your game, load your vessels, and then exit the game and rename
the files back to rebalance.txt and patch.cfg.

Also, the snack allotment needs some playtesting to find the sweet spot. 400 snacks per crewmember (1600 for Hitchhiker) might be a bit much, but the OP said it should be 200 snacks per, giving you 800. I'm thinking more like 300, but depends upon what people find during testing.

[Angelo Kerman]

... And KSP 1.1.2 is out, heh! Once I get a new MM dll I'll update Snacks again.

[Angelo Kerman]

Annnd here's the KSP 1.1.2 update

[Thraken]

On 4/30/2016 at 11:14 AM, Angel-125 said:

Also, the snack allotment needs some playtesting to find the sweet spot. 400 snacks per crewmember (1600 for Hitchhiker) might be a bit much, but the OP said it should be 200 snacks per, giving you 800. I'm thinking more like 300, but depends upon what people find during testing.

Thanks for keeping this mod up to date.  I just recently started using this, as I wanted to dabble in LS, but not spend too much time focusing on it.  I would think that the "sweet spot" would be that crew pods have enough snacks for a trip to the Mun and a direct accent landing and return.  But that would be far less than 50 snacks per crew.  I have no trouble putting tons of snacks in non-command pods, because other than the Lab, the only point of non-command pods is to make the Kerbals more comfortable.  (IMHO)  I guess you could stick a probe core on a hitchhicker and use it as a non-atmospheric lander, but it still isn't a command pod at that point.

If you want to avoid extra parts, then you can try adding snacks! as a resource for the fuel switcher, and just use empty fuel tanks to lug extra snacks around.  

I'm not opposed to extra parts and I really like the idea of the green houses, but I think they should consume sunlight (or artificial light in the form of EC) and ore to make more snacks!.  Being able to directly convert EC to snacks! seems a bit like by-passing the need for the mod in the first place.  (I mean you could effectively just write an mod that disables all Kerbals on a ship if it leaves Kerbin's SOI without a greenhouse or a metric ton of empty crew space.)

[Angelo Kerman]

Looking at the original post, a couple of planned features were more interesting penalties for hungry kerbals and contracts to deliver snacks to vessels running low.  I think next month those might be good to add as options if @tgruetzm doesn't return. You'd have to opt-in to enable those features. So a higher difficulty setting would be to lose rep when you run out of snacks but if you go without for too long, the kerbal goes MIA or dies depending on the game setting. You could optionally turn off random snacking. By default both features would be turned off to preserve existing behavior. These are just ideas, definitely want to keep Snacks lightweight and maintenance easy.

A handy VAB/SPH calculator would be handy as well. Type in the typical number of flight crew and the calculator estimates how long your snacks will last (assuming no resupply).

Edited May 5, 2016 by Angel-125

[Ursu Mare]

Hi! Any chance of getting the updates to CKAN?

I really like the simplicity of this mod. In my theory, Kerbals have evolved from something like Euglenas. They feed mainly through photosynthesis but they also need simple food as supplement: snacks!

They also need water, but they get it easily as a by-product of Fuel Cells.

Edited May 11, 2016 by Ursu Mare
forgot the water

[IronCretin]

If you want extra snack storage parts, perhaps you could use mystery goo containers? They seem to fit.

[DrCeph]

On 05/05/2016 at 6:02 AM, Angel-125 said:

Looking at the original post, a couple of planned features were more interesting penalties for hungry kerbals and contracts to deliver snacks to vessels running low.  I think next month those might be good to add as options if @tgruetzm doesn't return. You'd have to opt-in to enable those features. So a higher difficulty setting would be to lose rep when you run out of snacks but if you go without for too long, the kerbal goes MIA or dies depending on the game setting.

A neat idea from the USI-LS system is the idea of hungry Kerbals turning into tourists (and hence uncontrollable) until fed again. This is the behaviour of USI-LS that I think is great, but I otherwise much prefer the simplicity and partless nature of the Snacks! LS implementation. 

Thinking more on it, this idea essentially makes Snacks! behave like a fuel resource for Kerbals - they only run if they have their fueltype available, which I think would bring the Snacks LS module to being the most stockalike LS module out there.

[Angelo Kerman]

On 5/11/2016 at 1:10 AM, Ursu Mare said:

Hi! Any chance of getting the updates to CKAN?

I really like the simplicity of this mod. In my theory, Kerbals have evolved from something like Euglenas. They feed mainly through photosynthesis but they also need simple food as supplement: snacks!

They also need water, but they get it easily as a by-product of Fuel Cells.

CKAN is totally out of my hands, and besides, I have lots of trouble with it with my other mods. Your best bet is to watch the MiniAVC and get the latest from GitHub.

On 5/16/2016 at 5:26 PM, IronCretin said:

If you want extra snack storage parts, perhaps you could use mystery goo containers? They seem to fit.

Well, for that matter the radial RCS tanks could also be used. It would just take a config file.

28 minutes ago, DrCeph said:

A neat idea from the USI-LS system is the idea of hungry Kerbals turning into tourists (and hence uncontrollable) until fed again. This is the behaviour of USI-LS that I think is great, but I otherwise much prefer the simplicity and partless nature of the Snacks! LS implementation. 

Thinking more on it, this idea essentially makes Snacks! behave like a fuel resource for Kerbals - they only run if they have their fueltype available, which I think would bring the Snacks LS module to being the most stockalike LS module out there.

It's an interesting concept, but what happens when you uninstall Snacks and your kerbals are tourists? Do they remain tourists? If so, that's a problem. Hungry kerbals could do other things, like randomly dump science data, ElectricCharge, or some other resource as they fat finger the controls. Or maybe they accidentally trigger a staging event, or shut off the engines at an inopportune time. Maybe they set the fuel mixture ratio wrong and an engine blows up. Even better, you could specify from a list of options just what kerbals will do if they go hungry. These are all things that could happen and if Snacks is uninstalled, won't affect the kerbals themselves.

Edited May 17, 2016 by Angel-125

[JPLRepo]

So @Angel-125 are you going to take over support and dev for this mod? Or still waiting for original author?
I see a lot of updates from you and talk about waiting for the original author to come back... Just curious and I have a request for DeepFreeze compatability that has been outstanding for over 6 months.
 

[Angelo Kerman]

3 minutes ago, JPLRepo said:

So @Angel-125 are you going to take over support and dev for this mod? Or still waiting for original author?
I see a lot of updates from you and talk about waiting for the original author to come back... Just curious and I have a request for DeepFreeze compatability that has been outstanding for over 6 months.
 

I'm waiting until next month to see if @tgruetzm comes back. If not then I'll keep updating and supporting Snacks, at least until someone wants to run with it. I like Snacks and don't want to see it fade away, but also want to keep it light and easy to maintain. What's up with the DeepFreeze compatibility? What's needed?

[JPLRepo]

19 minutes ago, Angel-125 said:

I'm waiting until next month to see if @tgruetzm comes back. If not then I'll keep updating and supporting Snacks, at least until someone wants to run with it. I like Snacks and don't want to see it fade away, but also want to keep it light and easy to maintain. What's up with the DeepFreeze compatibility? What's needed?

@Angel-125 ok cool. Don't know if this is still relevant as I saw a post a page ago about you removing MM for adding snacks?
https://github.com/tgruetzm/Snacks/issues/8

[Angelo Kerman]

10 minutes ago, JPLRepo said:

@Angel-125 ok cool. Don't know if this is still relevant as I saw a post a page ago about you removing MM for adding snacks?
https://github.com/tgruetzm/Snacks/issues/8

It might still be relevant, this is the latest from the MM patch (just one example)

@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleCommand],#CrewCapacity[*],!RESOURCE[Snacks]]
{
    RESOURCE
    {
        name = Snacks
        amount = 50
        maxAmount = 50
        @amount *= #$../CrewCapacity$
        @maxAmount *= #$../CrewCapacity$
    }
}

 

[JPLRepo]

3 minutes ago, Angel-125 said:

It might still be relevant, this is the latest from the MM patch (just one example)

@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleCommand],#CrewCapacity[*],!RESOURCE[Snacks]]
{
    RESOURCE
    {
        name = Snacks
        amount = 50
        maxAmount = 50
        @amount *= #$../CrewCapacity$
        @maxAmount *= #$../CrewCapacity$
    }
}

 

Hmm... the issue is it isn't using a :FOR[xxx] statement.
So I can't add my own MM override to DeepFreeze.
This works for most parts.. But one of my parts has a crew capacity of 10 so it ended up adding 5000 snacks before. I guess with above that would now be 500 snacks.
Which is probably more reasonable. Be worth adding a :FOR statement next update anyway, then others can tweak the amounts with their own MM patches.

[Angelo Kerman]

9 hours ago, JPLRepo said:

Hmm... the issue is it isn't using a :FOR[xxx] statement.
So I can't add my own MM override to DeepFreeze.
This works for most parts.. But one of my parts has a crew capacity of 10 so it ended up adding 5000 snacks before. I guess with above that would now be 500 snacks.
Which is probably more reasonable. Be worth adding a :FOR statement next update anyway, then others can tweak the amounts with their own MM patches.

Ok, here is the latest. 1.1.6. I've added a :FOR[Snacks] to the end of the patch statements. Tested in KSP with no issues that I saw. Also, the patch is already set up so that if you manually specify the Snacks resource in your part, the MM patch won't touch it. I do this for Pathfinder, for instance, to keep Snacks from adding Snacks to deflated modules. Their Snacks amount is set to 0, and the MM patch passes on by.

[DrCeph]

On 17/05/2016 at 4:07 PM, Angel-125 said:

It's an interesting concept, but what happens when you uninstall Snacks and your kerbals are tourists? Do they remain tourists? If so, that's a problem.

Yeah that's a really fair point to make. I was looking through the USI-LS thread and it seems that the method hasn't been without its implementation problems. The MIA/KIA option is also something that would be great for advanced games.

I'd also like to give my personal thanks to you for updating this mod to 1.1.2!