KerbalX.com - Craft & Mission Sharing

[Nowater]

Yep, site not found 404

Its the bottom link, the top link i didnt saw at first works.

[katateochi]

Yep, site not found 404

Its the bottom link, the top link i didnt saw at first works.

you're right, those larger links where broken, fixed now.

Just deployed an update that fixes a few bugs and I've added some help for the markup text editing.

[luizopiloto]

I can't replicate this. Either way works fine for me, in a couple different browsers. What browser are you using?

I'm using Firefox.

[TranceaddicT]

comment deleted for stupidity

[fathed]

Can you increase the max craft file size to 5mb?

This ship is 4.7mb.

Edited September 13, 2014 by fathed

[colmo]

Excellent idea - as someone fond of building veritable fleets of aircraft, but recognise the difficulty in sharing the craft files (hard to remember every last mod part used), I'll be checking this one out. I'd encourage verbose notes by authors, as some craft may require very specific instructions.

[katateochi]

Can you increase the max craft file size to 5mb?

This ship is 4.7mb.

lol! Yes! Limits are now at 5mb. Let me know how long it takes to upload, not the upload part so much, there is a delay as the little bar gets to the end which is when the craft file gets read for part info etc. Interested to know if you're made to wait a long time with such a large craft.

Excellent idea - as someone fond of building veritable fleets of aircraft, but recognise the difficulty in sharing the craft files (hard to remember every last mod part used), I'll be checking this one out. I'd encourage verbose notes by authors, as some craft may require very specific instructions.

I'm sure some people will go to the detail of explaining all their crafts querks. I wondered about having a specific section for "flight instructions" but I think that's more limiting really.

More updates have gone up, mostly making things faster, but one new feature worth mentioning;

- craft that have a B9 info drive will now fill in their own action group data when they're uploaded.

[tetryds]

I tried to upload a craft, after placing the pics and tags the site crashed and won't load again:

"Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details."

I guess the site is down, or something went very wrong.

[katateochi]

I tried to upload a craft, after placing the pics and tags the site crashed and won't load again:

"Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details."

I guess the site is down, or something went very wrong.

hmmm, not sure what happened there. It's auto-recovered itself and is back up. I not at my dev machine so I can't see my logs right now.

I see you've got one craft uploaded (nice plane btw), did it fail when trying to upload a second one?

Can you try it again and see if you get the same crash and if so could you post me the craft file so I can see what's going on.

This is exactly the kinda teething problems I need you guys to find!

I'm really pleased with how things have gone so far, in just a few days you guys have uploaded part-maps that have have increased the knowledge based over 7 times. It knows about 142 mods now and nearly 4k parts, so that's really pleasing to see that part working well. Still plenty of issues to sort around the actual site, a lot of which are interface related.

How do are people finding the speed of the site? I know it can be extremely slow to load initially if the site has been inactive for a while, but aside from that initial load do craft pages load quickly and most important, is the search responsive?

[tetryds]

hmmm, not sure what happened there. It's auto-recovered itself and is back up. I not at my dev machine so I can't see my logs right now.

I see you've got one craft uploaded (nice plane btw), did it fail when trying to upload a second one?

Can you try it again and see if you get the same crash and if so could you post me the craft file so I can see what's going on.

This is exactly the kinda teething problems I need you guys to find!

I'm really pleased with how things have gone so far, in just a few days you guys have uploaded part-maps that have have increased the knowledge based over 7 times. It knows about 142 mods now and nearly 4k parts, so that's really pleasing to see that part working well. Still plenty of issues to sort around the actual site, a lot of which are interface related.

How do are people finding the speed of the site? I know it can be extremely slow to load initially if the site has been inactive for a while, but aside from that initial load do craft pages load quickly and most important, is the search responsive?

Ok, sorry for my poor report.

First I registered, then I dragged that aircraft and uploaded it.

Then I noticed I needed pics, so I opened KSP and took some shots.

Uploaded them to imgur.com, and went back and pasted them there.

Then I put some tags and hit Next.

When I did that, the site took a lot of time loading, then it showed the error message.

I was not trying to upload another craft no.

I suggest that you make it so we can add mods manually.

For instance FAR doesn't add any parts, so I was not using the plugin that would probably set the aircraft as using FAR.

The craft works with both FAR and NEAR.

But that is fine, I have never seen one that flies with FAR and doesn't fly with NEAR.

Edited September 14, 2014 by tetryds

[luizopiloto]

I uploaded 2 more planes. Everything worked fine, action groups settings and upload speed...

They are the most advanced planes I have...

[fathed]

lol! Yes! Limits are now at 5mb.

Woot, uploaded, didn't take too long really.

http://kerbalx.com/crafts/45

It didn't understand the pod parts, they come from this mod.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/75074-24-x-Taurus-HCV-3-75-m-Crew-Pod-and-other-parts-v1-2-1-July-22-2014

And the seadragon parts are from v1 of that mod, which was here... ( decoupler13.75, Tank3, Mjolnir, Tank20m, Mastodon)

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/84810-Official-release-of-my-SeaDragon-mod%21

Ohh, looks like I should use that partmapper thing, I'll give it a shot later.

Edited September 14, 2014 by fathed

[katateochi]

Ok, sorry for my poor report.

First I registered, then ....snip

Thats Ok, thanks for the update. I'm still not sure what caused the crash, it seems it was while it was preparing the page after the craft uploaded. I shall try some tests with your craft in my test environment and see. darn intermittent, hard-to-repeat bugs!

I suggest that you make it so we can add mods manually.

...snip

I want to avoid allowing manual setting of mods as much as possible, but your right, FAR/NEAR are going to need a bit of special treatment (and other pure plugin mods like KerbPaint). I don't use FAR or NEAR myself; if you have a plane with stock parts but that uses FAR, will it work without FAR? I take it the craft will be able to load, but will it be totally unflyable?

I uploaded 2 more planes. Everything worked fine, action groups settings and upload speed...

They are the most advanced planes I have...

Nice! You've currently got the most craft uploaded.

Woot, uploaded, didn't take too long really.

http://kerbalx.com/crafts/45

**snip**

Ohh, looks like I should use that partmapper thing, I'll give it a shot later.

Excellent!

Yes indeedy, the PartMapper is what you need to use. After you've run it and uploaded your part map go to the crafts page and click edit, then at the bottom of the page click the link to re-scan the craft (below the note about missing parts) and then it will have all parts detected.

Noticed you don't have a pic for that craft. This is something that I need to do something about, currently if you don't put at least one pic then you get a picture of a rocket or plane exploding! (need something nicer). But tbh tis best to put a pic as i'm sure that's 90% of what will make someone download a craft.

[fathed]

Noticed you don't have a pic for that craft.

It added a picture when I uploaded it, but that picture had nothing to do with the craft. I'll add a picture a bit later as well. But that upload is more to test with, being that the v1 of the seadragon mod isn't available anymore, and the newer versions aren't the same parts, it'd be pointless for anyone to try it out without already having those mods. The seadragon mod is also a restricted license, so I can't just host it/reupload it for people wanting to look at the craft.

I'll remove it eventually.

Question, I assume there's no way to detect tweakscale? That craft would be broken without it, but it's not on the list of mods either. I'm not sure if it actually writes anything to the craft file other than the scale of the parts not being the same as the default parts.

Edited September 14, 2014 by fathed

[tetryds]

I want to avoid allowing manual setting of mods as much as possible, but your right, FAR/NEAR are going to need a bit of special treatment (and other pure plugin mods like KerbPaint). I don't use FAR or NEAR myself; if you have a plane with stock parts but that uses FAR, will it work without FAR? I take it the craft will be able to load, but will it be totally unflyable?

It will load normally on the SPH/VAB, but it may break control surfaces settings if you pick that file and load on FAR again.

Some more simple designs can fly on stock too, but most of them will fly very badly with stock aer... thing.

IIRC FAR and NEAR are interchangeable, so loading one craft on the other will work normally (I guess there was an issue with deflection limits, but I think it was fixed).

About requiring a pic, I agree, and think that it shouldn't have a placeholder pic, that can be misleading.

Not having any pic could be an option, but then don't show it on the lists?

About lists, it would be really nice to make custom lists with my aircraft, vote and have favorites as you mentioned.

Off-topic: did anyone manage to easily export ships to that 3d model viewer thing for browsers?

If yes, link me please.

Support to that would be really cool.

Edit: I don't think it's super important, but I see cases where one craft can have more than one version to be downloaded, do you plan to support that?

Edited September 14, 2014 by tetryds

[Justin Kerbice]

Sorry for the late reply.

The upload of multiple craft should work. The first one to complete should display its dialog, but the other should carry on uploading, even if you change page. It will then appear in your header, it should say something like "1 new upload", clicking that should take you to the next craft that uploaded.

ok. Not very obvious I guess.

I noticed that your craft (Fuel Station base +ms6) didn't have all its parts detected. And then you uploaded a part-map (nice 1 btw, thanks). But it was still showing the craft as missing parts.

What you didn't know, (cos there is nothing to indicate to you to do this) is you need to tell KerbalX to re-scan the craft. Go to the crafts edit page and at the bottom of the page there is a link to re-scan the craft (only on craft with "missing parts")

I've done it for you as I was poking around the he DB at the time and its not showing as missing any parts now.

Doesn't looks like now there still missing parts left .

The part scan it still quite intrusive and rough, it takes everything, including my test and/or secret parts !

[luizopiloto]

something made to fly with FAR/NEAR will fly in stock... but will drastically change atmospheric performance capabilities... specially for space planes... with FAR/NEAR needs less fuel to reach space basically.

[tetryds]

something made to fly with FAR/NEAR will fly in stock... but will drastically change atmospheric performance capabilities... specially for space planes... with FAR/NEAR needs less fuel to reach space basically.

The difference in aerodynamics is FAR bigger than that.

But it would be interesting to have the FAR tag in there, E36 is not that impressive when flying in oil/stock.

[fathed]

Excellent!

Yes indeedy, the PartMapper is what you need to use. After you've run it and uploaded your part map go to the crafts page and click edit, then at the bottom of the page click the link to re-scan the craft (below the note about missing parts) and then it will have all parts detected.

That worked great, it detects all those parts now.

For tweakscale, I'd suggest just making it a checkbox the uploader needs to check. Same with Hangar Extender, as you can't edit 300m tall rockets without it

Mods:

New Mod 'Alcor drop module tank' added!!!

New Mod 'R&SCapsuledyne' added!!!

New Mod 'BfS' added!!!

New Mod 'ChargeMeter' added!!!

New Mod 'Compact Adapter Kit' added!!!

New Mod 'CxAerospace' added!!!

New Mod 'Engineer' added!!!

New Mod 'GilB9Shuttle_Wings' added!!!

New Mod 'GingerCorp' added!!!

New Mod 'HoloTape' added!!!

New Mod 'Hyomoto' added!!!

New Mod 'KerbalStockLauncherOverhaul' added!!!

New Mod 'kOS' added!!!

New Mod 'NMB' added!!!

New Mod 'OblivionAerospace' added!!!

New Mod 'RoverScience' added!!!

New Mod 'Seadragon' added!!!

New Mod 'XanderTek' added!!!

New Mod 'z_thing' added!!!

Parts:

1 new parts added to Alcor drop module tank

5 new parts added to R&SCapsuledyne

1 new parts added to BfS

1 new parts added to BoxSat alpha

1 new parts added to ChargeMeter

13 new parts added to CxAerospace

1 new parts added to Engineer

6 new parts added to GilB9Shuttle_Wings

3 new parts added to GingerCorp

1 new parts added to HoloTape

1 new parts added to Hyomoto

2 new parts added to KerbalStockLauncherOverhaul

2 new parts added to kOS

2 new parts added to NMB

3 new parts added to OblivionAerospace

1 new parts added to RoverScience

6 new parts added to Seadragon

3 new parts added to XanderTek

3 new parts added to z_thing

40 new parts added to KSO

1 new parts added to Kerbal Foundries

23 new parts added to MagicSmokeIndustries

6 new parts added to ModsByTal

8 new parts added to Romfarer

[Padishar]

Yes I was thinking I'd have to look at how those two do it. Hopefully I can get some help from their developers cos that sounds like eye-watering kinda maths!

There's nothing particularly complex about the maths, it's just the "Tsiolkovsky rocket equation" (though it uses velocity vectors if you want to account for angled thrust). The tricky bit comes in working out which engines burn fuel from which tanks, in which order and correctly handling all the fuel flow rules and edge cases (e.g. when some of the engines in a stage stop burning before others) and in working out when to activate the next stage. The code in KER builds its own data structures from the core game objects (Part, ModuleEngine[sFx], AttachNode) so that it can run the actual calculations safely in a background thread. You could probably convert the VesselSimulator code to build the XXXSim objects directly from a craft file instead of the core game objects and leave most of the actual calculation code alone. See the Simulation.PrepareSimulation() function for the current setup code.

Feel free to drop me a PM if you have any questions about it...

[fathed]

http://kerbalx.com/crafts/64

So, in addition to tweakscale (which does write to the craft file), this ship has Action Groups Extended and Modular Fuel Tanks, without MFT I was getting lots of errors, same for AGEX. I actually think the AGEX data might be bad, causing the ship to fail to load (was testing from clean just to check it out), I edited the craft file on my machine to remove all the agex data and was able to get it to load.

Edit: Deleted the original, uploaded the one without the AGEX data, it dropped the file from 4.7mb to 2.2mb. Is there a way to actually update them yet?

Edited September 15, 2014 by fathed

[Wanderfound]

Just started uploading the Kerbodyne SSTO Division range to this. Has the potential to be very nifty.

A few thoughts:

* Add "Spaceplane" as a possible class? A spaceplane isn't an aircraft, strictly speaking, and mixing them in with the "ships" is probably not ideal.

* "Vertical SSTO" is probably a worthwhile category as well.

* Auto-detecting the action group assignments would be a major bonus. Entering them manually is tedious enough that I'm very unlikely to do it.

* At the moment, it appears to be counting stock parts as a mod (named "Squad").

* As mentioned above, you absolutely need a way to differentiate FAR and stock aero designs. Auto-detect if you can, but a user toggle if you can't. Very few spaceplanes function adequately in both.

[luizopiloto]

autodetect actiongroups will make things confuse... imagine... the actiongroup to close the airintakes of a big ssto. 20 airintakes listed at the actiongroup...

I also found a small bug. At the profile screen, the 4 most downloaded crafts part don't show the 4 most downloaded...I think it shows the less downloaded ones exept that ones with 0 downloads...

[katateochi]

Hi Guys, sorry for slow responses!

*snip

Question, I assume there's no way to detect tweakscale? That craft would be broken without it, but it's not on the list of mods either. I'm not sure if it actually writes anything to the craft file other than the scale of the parts not being the same as the default parts.

I need to understand the exact changes that tweakscale makes and then I can probably detect it.

*snip

About requiring a pic, I agree, and think that it shouldn't have a placeholder pic, that can be misleading.

Not having any pic could be an option, but then don't show it on the lists?

About lists, it would be really nice to make custom lists with my aircraft, vote and have favorites as you mentioned.

snip*

I was thinking that the placeholder pic would be some nice(ish) brushed metal icon with an embossed craft on it (rocket for VAB, plane for SPH). It would be very clear that it's not the pic of the craft, but would still show clearly which building type it belonged to. I could exclude craft without pics from the list, but that basically says "either put a pic or no-one will ever see it".

Re custom lists; yes in the plan (which is mostly in my head still, some rough scribbles @ http://kerbalx.com/planned_features)

I was thinking that users could define custom "hangars" which they could put a selection of their craft and other users craft too if they wanted. So you can have a hangar for a set of your own craft and you could also create one for other peoples craft that you like. Other people can then browse the craft in your hangars. Craft pages will also say which hangars they are in, so when browsing for craft people will be led on to find similar craft.

(and naturally, these hangars are trans-dimentional hangars; 1 craft can be in several hangars at the same time ).

Being able to update a craft is also something I plan to add. If you know Jebretary you'll see this is a logical step for me to add (Jebretary maintains ALL versions of a craft as you develop it), but it will be rather different to how Jebretary functions and there will be a limit to how many versions of each craft can be stored. Initially that limit will be pretty low, like 2 or 3. As I can afford to put more database power behind then I will bring that limit up.

*snip

Doesn't looks like now there still missing parts left .

The part scan it still quite intrusive and rough, it takes everything, including my test and/or secret parts !

Yes, it touches every .cfg file it can find in the GameData folder. I'd considered it from the KerbalX end of things; does it matter if random test mods and totally user specific stuff ends up in the knowledge base? No, its intended to deal with clutter, it either won't have any effect or if your custom data clobbers another mods part info it still won't matter because that mod will have stronger associations to its parts (having been reported by more users). also mods that are only reported by one user will not show up in the mod search interface (they do currently because mod things still have only been reported by one user).

But from the users side of things I can see that you'd want it to ignore certain mods. Two ways I can think to deal with this, either you need to create a file inside each mod you want to ignore called ".dont_scan" or something like that which will tell PartMapper to ignore that folder and sub folders, OR (which is probably better) you create a ignore manifest file that you put next to PartMapper which simply lists the mods by name that you want to ignore.

Actually the latter way will be easier to implement too, so I will probably add that in the next release of PartMapper, unless you have a different way that you'd like to see.

There's nothing particularly complex about the maths, it's just the "Tsiolkovsky rocket equation" (though it uses velocity vectors if you want to account for angled thrust). The tricky bit comes in working out which engines burn fuel from which tanks, in which order and correctly handling all the fuel flow rules and edge cases (e.g. when some of the engines in a stage stop burning before others) and in working out when to activate the next stage. The code in KER builds its own data structures from the core game objects (Part, ModuleEngine[sFx], AttachNode) so that it can run the actual calculations safely in a background thread. You could probably convert the VesselSimulator code to build the XXXSim objects directly from a craft file instead of the core game objects and leave most of the actual calculation code alone. See the Simulation.PrepareSimulation() function for the current setup code.

Feel free to drop me a PM if you have any questions about it...

Thanks for the info Padishar! I will definitely be sending you a PM about this!

*snip

Edit: Deleted the original, uploaded the one without the AGEX data, it dropped the file from 4.7mb to 2.2mb. Is there a way to actually update them yet?

Yes tweekscale and other "plugin only" mods are being thought about. I can't say I have an exact plan as how I'm going to deal with them so that it works fluidly with the search, but plans are gradually forming!

In some cases there will be auto detect possibilities, in other cases I will allow users to select a mod and say that it is also required. In order to do that (so that search is uneffected) I think it will add a non-existent part to the crafts part associations, that will make it behave like any other mod as far as searching and it won't effect the "part count" as that is not based of the part associations (as they are unique).

Re being able to update a craft, You can't do that currently, but you will be able to. I'm thinking about enabling having several versions of a craft, but that may be pretty limited as each version essentially describes a whole new set of craft-part associations which I'd either need to store separately or generate on the fly, not sure yet. depends a bit on the rock of DB size limitations vs the hard-place of app performance.

Just started uploading the Kerbodyne SSTO Division range to this. Has the potential to be very nifty.

A few thoughts:

* Add "Spaceplane" as a possible class? A spaceplane isn't an aircraft, strictly speaking, and mixing them in with the "ships" is probably not ideal.

* "Vertical SSTO" is probably a worthwhile category as well.

* Auto-detecting the action group assignments would be a major bonus. Entering them manually is tedious enough that I'm very unlikely to do it.

* At the moment, it appears to be counting stock parts as a mod (named "Squad").

* As mentioned above, you absolutely need a way to differentiate FAR and stock aero designs. Auto-detect if you can, but a user toggle if you can't. Very few spaceplanes function adequately in both.

While the list of possible classes is something that needs improving I don't want to end up having lots of sub-classes (that one called "Moonbus" was just there as a test case and I keep forgetting to remove it). Oddly enough it seems that the more categories there are the more ambiguous they become and people seem worse at picking the right one.

I think its better to have broader classes and then add further definition buy using #tags. So a winged SSTO VTOL would get filed under aircraft (along with all winged things) but would then have the #tags SSTO and VTOL. That will make it get returned in more searches but still only in relevant searches.

If you did a search by typing "SSTO VTOL" into the search field, it will find all craft that have SSTO and VTOL in the name and also craft that have both SSTO and VTOL hash tags.

I need to make more of a thing about the hash tags, they are kinda understated currently (although most pep are adding them). It needs to be clearer that hash tags are searched in when you type something in and I also want to have a page that shows a hash-tag "word cloud" as another way of interacting with #tags.

I'd really like auto detection of action groups too. It is theoretically possible, as in I can read which parts have action group assignments, but creating meaningful messages from it is much harder (kinda impossible). For each group I could just list all the parts for each action type (activate, toggle etc) , but it would be a clunky assembly of words that wouldn't really help, and I think would invoke a TL;DR response in most people.

BUT what I can do is read information from craft that have B9 info-drive part. That is now implemented (as of a couple days ago), so if you put action group info in there (or a poem or whatever) it will automatically populate the action groups when you upload (and just for the hackers who might be wondering; don't waste time trying to encode html and scripts into craft data or part/mod info, it won't work!).

Yes, to KerbalX everything is a mod and Squad and NASAmission are actually two completely separate mods. The only thing is that these two mods are known to the system as being special cases. This does a couple things, a) by treating them all as equal means there doesn't need to be any special case event when Squad adds more stock parts, the system will get updated by whoever first uploads a part-map after a new KSP release.

As squad and NASAmission are separate you can be more specific in craft searches and exclude craft that use NASAmission or return stock craft that use it and not just all the stock craft.

Yes the ability to say that craft need FAR/NEAR or any of the other mods that don't add parts seems to be what you guys are calling for most, so that is in the pipe.

[Wanderfound]

I understand your point about wanting to avoid too many categories, although I do think "spaceplane" is a large and distinct enough group to have a stronger claim to a separate identity than many other things (satellite and station and base? And what's an LV if it isn't a lander?). There are a large proportion of KSPers who build and fly spaceplanes exclusively, and someone looking for a spaceplane usually isn't interested in finding a rocket and vice-versa.

If you do want spaceplanes to go under "aircraft", you'll need to make that clear. Perhaps change "aircraft" to "winged" or "planes". A lot of spaceplane designers are going to see "aircraft" and go "no, this is a spacecraft...".

Edited September 15, 2014 by Wanderfound