KerbalX.com - Craft & Mission Sharing

[katateochi]

Hi guys, I made A unifficial login for people to post crafts even if they don't have an account. Is that ok?

I'm not 100% sure about having an open account like that, but carry on and lets see how it goes. My concern is that 1 user of that account could come in a mess up any of the other craft in that account (delete, write spam, replace craft with wrong craft, etc) and there will be no way of knowing who was the culprit. It also means that if someone using that account does start posting spam then it makes blocking that user a problem. If you just give the login to a known group of players who you personally invite and are then responsible for (in a sorta moderator capacity) that would be fine.

Also having an open account like that kinda makes it seem like there might be a cost implied in signing up for an account for themselves (which of course there isn't). Ideally, I'd really rather each user signs up with their own account. But as I said, we'll see how it goes, if it causes the site a problem then we'll revisit it.

Is it possible to modify the image of a craft after upload? I have a few vessels on kerbalx with the default image and would love to upload the "real" image as I got around to make screenshots by now

Yes v possible. View your craft that you want to edit and in the middle of the header bar there will be edit and delete links. Go to edit and then you can click on the current image and it will change to show you the text that holds the url for an image. Delete the text and replace it with either [noparse] or [img:http://i.imgur.com/msil77y.jpg][/noparse] (the first syntax is the same BBcode style that we use here, alternatively you can write it in the 2nd slightly less brackety style). The url for the image needs to be a url that ends in the image extension. When you've changed the text click outside of it and it should update to show the new image. You can add multiple images, I recommend adding each image to its own "container" so you can resize/move each image individually. The first image on the page will be used as the thumbnail image for the craft. Ideally host your images on imgur (cos I can dynamically select different resolutions from imgur which I can't (don't know how to) with other image hosts). But if you already use another image host that's fine.

(When you click on a container to edit it a little tab will appear to one side with some help links, The first will bring up a cheat sheet for how to add text style using either BBcode, github-style markdown or my own KerbDown syntax. The second link is a helper to add the [noparse][/noparse] tags for you so you can just paste an image url into that and it will add the tags for you.)

Let me know if you have any probs!

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

Hey katateochi, I just caught sight of a bug. I had two KerbalX tabs open, and received a notification in one (that I had another download on one of my craft). I opened it, dismissed it, and closed the tab. The other tab still showed that I had a notification, but when I tried to open that notification, I got a 500 error. When I hit "backspace" to go back, there were no notifications anymore, but the arrow by my username still flashed as if I did. Refreshing that page caused that behavior to stop. Not a big deal, but there's still something a bit funky in the notification system. Thanks!

[katateochi]

Hey katateochi, I just caught sight of a bug. I had two KerbalX tabs open, and received a notification in one (that I had another download on one of my craft). I opened it, dismissed it, and closed the tab. The other tab still showed that I had a notification, but when I tried to open that notification, I got a 500 error. When I hit "backspace" to go back, there were no notifications anymore, but the arrow by my username still flashed as if I did. Refreshing that page caused that behavior to stop. Not a big deal, but there's still something a bit funky in the notification system. Thanks!

well spotted! I shall try and fix that this weekend.

[katateochi]

Hey katateochi, I just caught sight of a bug. I had two KerbalX tabs open, and received a notification in one (that I had another download on one of my craft). I opened it, dismissed it, and closed the tab. The other tab still showed that I had a notification, but when I tried to open that notification, I got a 500 error. When I hit "backspace" to go back, there were no notifications anymore, but the arrow by my username still flashed as if I did. Refreshing that page caused that behavior to stop. Not a big deal, but there's still something a bit funky in the notification system. Thanks!

OK that should be fixed now. Few other minor fixes too, like the sort by name was considering case in the sort, it's now a case insensitive sort.

I would have deployed those fixes yesterday but we had a record number of users on the site so I didn't want to cause the site to hang while it updated. I don't know what happened but over the space of ~20 mins (around 5am Pacific Time) the site suddenly went from serving around 40ppm (pages per minute) to serving around 400ppm and the number of unique users for yesterday spiked at just under 3000! (on average it's ~400 unique users per day). So someone must have mentioned the site somewhere where lots of people saw it, I don't know who that was but I'd really like to thank them for the PR! So thank you kind person who ever you are!

[hakan]

Your site was mentioned on Facebook, that's what has happened

[MK3424]

OK that should be fixed now. Few other minor fixes too, like the sort by name was considering case in the sort, it's now a case insensitive sort.

I would have deployed those fixes yesterday but we had a record number of users on the site so I didn't want to cause the site to hang while it updated. I don't know what happened but over the space of ~20 mins (around 5am Pacific Time) the site suddenly went from serving around 40ppm (pages per minute) to serving around 400ppm and the number of unique users for yesterday spiked at just under 3000! (on average it's ~400 unique users per day). So someone must have mentioned the site somewhere where lots of people saw it, I don't know who that was but I'd really like to thank them for the PR! So thank you kind person who ever you are!

Kerbal Space Program devs themselves showcased it on Facebook and Twitter.

[katateochi]

Your site was mentioned on Facebook, that's what has happened

Kerbal Space Program devs themselves showcased it on Facebook and Twitter.

Holy WOW! That's Awesome! (man, I'm so bad at keeping up with things!)

Thanks guys!

[Majorjim!]

Holy WOW! That's Awesome! (man, I'm so bad at keeping up with things!)

Thanks guys!

Very well deserved! I must finally get around to adding my craft..

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I've got another "bug" for you. At the bottom of the "[user]'s comments" page (e.g. http://kerbalx.com/users/165/comments), there's a link to that user's profile. The link ends with "users.[number]" (leads to blank page) when I think it should be "users/[number]" (leads to the profile page). Thanks!

[katateochi]

I've got another "bug" for you. At the bottom of the "[user]'s comments" page (e.g. http://kerbalx.com/users/165/comments), there's a link to that user's profile. The link ends with "users.[number]" (leads to blank page) when I think it should be "users/[number]" (leads to the profile page). Thanks!

Thanks! well spotted. added to tracker.

I'm sorry development has been really slow recently. Work has been a pain these last few weeks so I've not had much time for KX dev. Hangers are also proving to be a little trickier than I anticipated but they're coming along. server side stuff is pretty much done, just user interface stuff to do now.

[katateochi]

Hey guys, I've just added Hangars to the site. Hangars are just another way of having "Favourites" and tracking which craft you've downloaded. You have two hangars (favourites and downloads) by default and they are private hangars. You can make them public if you want so other users can see and you can also create other hangars if you want (other hangars are public by default but you can change their settings).

The main point of them is to have tracking of downloaded craft and favourites, but with other custom hangars you can create groups of craft as you like ie if you've got a craft that has subassembles that go with it, why not put them all in one hangar and then link that hangar on the main craft's page. (I will be adding more in to automatically bring hangar and associated craft info into each craft page).

You can also set a hangar to be "Open", although this is still a work in progress. The idea of an open hangar is that other users can add their craft into your open hangar, but only their craft (they can also remove just their craft from it). The idea is for users who run challenges to create an open hangar and then other users can submit their craft to the challenge hangar.

Still got some rough edges to smooth out with this and some more Hangar related features to add (like notifications when craft in your hangar are updated, or when someone adds a craft you open hangars etc). Seems to have taken me a while to add this feature in so sorry about that. Work has been a 'mare recently and I'm kinda suffering a bout of coders block which doesn't help!!

anyways, let me know if you have any issues or spot any bugs (a few bugs also got cleared up in this update) and thanks everyone for your continued support! We've now got over 500 users and yesterday we hit the 800th craft uploaded. Will we hit 1000 craft before the next KSP version comes out? (the race is on!).

EDIT

realised I'd introduced a bug in this update that was preventing non-logged in users from downloading craft. That should be fixed now.

Edited March 10, 2015 by katateochi

[katateochi]

Few minor versions have been deployed this week, fixed a couple of bugs and really improved the speed of the Mods, Parts and Users pages (http://Kerbalx.com/mods, http://Kerbalx.com/parts, http://Kerbalx.com/users).

I'm now starting to work on getting some integration with CKAN. This will just enable the site to check if the mod is available via CKAN and if so include it in a metapackage file that will be able to tell ckan what mods the craft needs so it can get them for you.

[Prowler_x1]

Few minor versions have been deployed this week, fixed a couple of bugs and really improved the speed of the Mods, Parts and Users pages (http://Kerbalx.com/mods, http://Kerbalx.com/parts, http://Kerbalx.com/users).

I'm now starting to work on getting some integration with CKAN. This will just enable the site to check if the mod is available via CKAN and if so include it in a metapackage file that will be able to tell ckan what mods the craft needs so it can get them for you.

Awesome stuff... Life simplified. Les time tinkering, more time playing.

[MooseCannon]

I have two small requests:

First, could we get a Downloads per View Stat? Yes I know that it's simple both for us to do in our heads and for you to add, but it's the number I care most about.

Second, I believe you're now past 900 craft, which sounds cooler than 800. Update dat original post through?

[katateochi]

I have two small requests:

First, could we get a Downloads per View Stat? Yes I know that it's simple both for us to do in our heads and for you to add, but it's the number I care most about.

Second, I believe you're now past 900 craft, which sounds cooler than 800. Update dat original post through?

Done and done!

Downloads per view is now shown on the crafts stats page (http://kerbalx.com/stats), I've not added it to the notifications you get about activity on your craft. Need to squash things together a bit more for that, but I could do it if that's really wanted. There may be some odd values in some older craft, tracking the number of downloads came before tracking the number of views, so I have a couple of craft that have more downloads than views. That might also happen if people post direct download links to their craft and don't encourage users to actually visit the crafts page.

(I will add more stats in the future and with nicer formatting, some graphs, etc, both for your own craft and for the site overall. But this was a quick and easy addition)

Indeed we are now at 900 craft, infact you posted the 900th craft! So Ive updated the OP to show 900+ craft!!

I'm actually quite surprised by the spilt in mod and stock craft, it remains at nearly 50/50 mod/stock. Right now there's 464 mod craft and 452 stock craft. A few days ago it was smack on 50/50 with 444 each. I was expecting mod craft to massively out number stock craft, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Various minor fixes deployed today. Most important of which was a fix in the craft votes system, craft where getting votes, but the sort by votes in the search wasn't correct. That's now fixed, if you sort craft by points it now has the highest scoring craft first.

The user menu had some odd issues which I think I've ironed out now (wouldn't always register you clicking on it).

Quite a lot of little style changes.

I'm still working on the much larger update that will bring in CKAN integration. I think I've got a working system now, hopefully this weekend I'll be able to test it on the staging site.

[MooseCannon]

Downloads per view is now shown on the crafts stats page (http://kerbalx.com/stats),

You're a scholar and a gentlekerb.

And, as I suspected, this new feature revealed an interested trend among my craft! Their downloads are highly correlated with the mechanical complexity of the vessel. My guess is that this means that balancing planes for articulation (swinging wings and VTOL) is hard, and everyone knows it.

Edited March 28, 2015 by MooseCannon

[katateochi]

You're a scholar and a gentlekerb.

And, as I suspected, this new feature revealed an interested trend among my craft! Their downloads are highly correlated with the mechanical complexity of the vessel. My guess is that this means that balancing planes for articulation (swinging wings and VTOL) is hard, and everyone knows it.

No worries! That was a simple addition. Is it that complex craft are more downloaded or less?

I want to add more stats for each user's craft and also stats for all craft together (*1), but I'm not sure what stats would be useful or interesting. I also really want to make use of this awesome graphing library which can be used to make some really nice interactive presentations. https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery Have a look at the examples and give me some suggestions.

Unfortunately the site doesn't track the date-time of downloads so I don't have the data to show a crafts downloads over time, but maybe I could start tracking that.

*1 - I might also change the url for craft stats from /stats to /craft-stats and then use /stats for the overall site info. Would that be annoying?

[MooseCannon]

No worries! That was a simple addition. Is it that complex craft are more downloaded or less?

Of my craft, ones with moving parts tend to get downloaded more. Obviously, I have a tiny data set so it might be meaningless. I mean, my next plane is an A-10 that works in FAR so take it all for what it's worth.

I want to add more stats for each user's craft and also stats for all craft together (*1), but I'm not sure what stats would be useful or interesting.

Have a few site-wide stats, like global downloads over time, mods vs. stock, and VAB vs SPH. Those are all fun. Also think about which stats might inform how people upload. Are tags important? Descriptions? Are pictures helpful? How many is optimal? If you're not sure whether a question is good, think about whether its answer could change user behavior (should I tag?) or whether users will be generally interested in it (SPH > VAB ). If you don't have enough questions, go through the list of things users do and ask what the best way to do them is.

Unfortunately the site doesn't track the date-time of downloads so I don't have the data to show a crafts downloads over time, but maybe I could start tracking that.

Yes please.

*1 - I might also change the url for craft stats from /stats to /craft-stats and then use /stats for the overall site info. Would that be annoying?

A little. Whatever the right thing is for the website's design, do it. It'll be even harder to change it in the future.

[MooseCannon]

@katateochi

I've noticed that Part Mapper doesn't recognize the B-9 Procedural Wing pack:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/104966-0-90-B9-Aerospace-Procedural-Parts-0-33-Updated-07-02-15

As separate from the B-9 Mod as a whole. This could be confusing to lots of people! Anything we can do about it?

Moose

[katateochi]

@katateochi

I've noticed that Part Mapper doesn't recognize the B-9 Procedural Wing pack:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/104966-0-90-B9-Aerospace-Procedural-Parts-0-33-Updated-07-02-15

As separate from the B-9 Mod as a whole. This could be confusing to lots of people! Anything we can do about it?

Moose

Yeah there are some real limitations with the PartMapper and infact that B9 procedural mod is the perfect example case. The problem is that the PartMapper can only work of what is present in the GameData folder and there are several styles that modders use for what I call "sub mods". In some cases you have the root folder in GameData and then inside that you have each sub mod in a discrete sub folders. I could work with that, but it's not the standard. Some have .version files which could help, but lots don't. Really it's a mess and that B9 procedural mod is the hardest case. Infact it is completely impossible to distinguish it from B9 because it just unpacks right into the B9 parts folder, once its unpacked there is no way to tell it apart.

There was even less of a standard when I wrote the PartMapper so it does the safest thing it can, and assumes that the mod folder in the root of GameData is the mod name and all parts contained within it belong to that mod. This works for most mods, but it is too simplistic. The other mod that this approach really fails on is Karbonite and all the other sub-mods that unpack into UmbraSpaceIndustries.

it's just a bit complicated and requires a pretty big overhaul to the current mod database structure. The idea is to use CKAN as it seems to be the largest single knowledge base of mod information, and it has a very nice structure from a coding point of view. But CKAN doesn't track specific details about what parts mods have, only what they are called and where they are. It also doesn't know about every single mod, but it does know a fair few and at least all the "core" mods. That means I can't move to total CKAN dependency and will have to keep the PartMapper in play too (which complicates things somewhat).

The idea is to use ckan to tell me where to fetch a mod, download it, unpack just it's cfg files and parse them for part-names. By doing this mod-by-mod I know exactly which mod a part comes from and I also gain more info about the mod than the PartMapper ever could. I get the mods url, it's "human" name, it's ckan "Identifier" name and it's "root-GameData-folder name" (which is the name KX will know it as). This is enough into to be able to distinguish between things like B9 and B9 procedural but it's still going require a change to the mod database on KX because the root-GameData-folder name which up till now has been a unique attribute will now have to be non-unique and the ckan identifier will have to take it's place. But with the PartMapper still in play that isn't straight forward, but I think I have a way forward now.

So what I've built so far is the tool that interrogates the ckan repository, downloads the current version of the mods, unpacks them, parses cfg files and produces a json file containing an accurate mapping of part-names to mods (and a load of additional info about each mod) for every single mod on ckan. The problem is this tool can't actually run on the site itself as it has to download each mod and some of them are huge. Just one of the really big ones will exceed my hosting space limits. So I have to run it locally for now. So yes, I have now downloaded every single mod known to ckan (only took my crummy internet connection about 4 hours!). But now I've downloaded and parsed them all, from now on I just need to download new mods and existing mods that have updated (I can also exclude some of the really massive ones like the astronomers pack which just provide game textures and no parts).

Anywho, so that part is build and working pretty well. I'll either try to find a free host I can set that up on with enough space for it to function, or I'll dedicate an old machine to running it once a day somewhere in the corner of my office.

Now I have to make some quite significant changes to the structure of the mod DB on KX so it can deal with both the more accurate CKAN data and still cope with PartMapper data. I think I have a good solution, but I'm taking my time over it because I really don't want to break current functionality on the site. When I'm happy with it in dev mode I'll trial it against my staging server and then I'll probably have to take KX offline for a couple hours while I push up the changes. And like Squad I'm making no promises as to when this will happen (soon I hope!).

This solution does bring a load of extra nice things with it as well as better resolution on the mods. For one all the mods indexed by CKAN will now have their correct download urls present on KX and it also means that those mods will know their ckan Identifier name. This will enable the site to produce ckan-meta files that can be used with the CKAN mod manager tool to automatically fetch the mods that a craft uses (at least for the mods it has which are tracked by CKAN).

Also thanks for your earlier reply, hadn't got round to answering that yet. I'm putting stats on the back burner for a bit and focusing on interface refinements and the CKAN update.

[tg626]

I just accidentally added a few mods with part mapper which are actually repositories a custom parts I made solely for myself using parts from other mods. It would be nice if I could remove that info as it had nothing rto do with the craft I uploaded, and I'm concerned about "polluting" your database.

Too late I realize that I could hasvr excluded them. Perhaps this should be added to the instructions page on the site...

That aside, pastmapper choked on some very long custom mechjeb cfg filenames in the plugindata folder, this has nothing to do with custom parts of course, it is just mecvhjebs way of storing per craft settings. I got around that by temporarily deleting those files, but it would be good if partmapper didn't crash on such things. :-)

Edited April 10, 2015 by tg626

[katateochi]

So a significant thing just happened, we just hit

1000 craft uploaded!

I'm really pleased! Thanks EVERYONE for your support of this project, it's been a joy building it.

Lots more to do to improve existing features and I've got plans for several new features, one of which I hope will be quite fun (even if it's not that useful ), it will use the parts search ability and let you "build" a craft; you don't actually build the craft, but as you drag parts in it will narrow down the search results of craft that are on the site. That's still just a plan in my head though! In the mean while I've been fixing up a lot of little nagging issues and continuing work on the CKAN integration.

I've just fixed a really annoying issue with using the back button and returning to search results (still running tests on it), currently all the different browsers behave differently with only firefox doing the right thing. As it is when you hit the back button you get dumped somewhere fairly randomly in the list of craft. When I next update that will be fixed and you'll return to the exact point in the craft list you where before. Search pages will also cache so going back will be super fast, should make browsing the craft a much nicer experience.

- - - Updated - - -

I just accidentally added a few mods with part mapper which are actually repositories a custom parts I made solely for myself using parts from other mods. It would be nice if I could remove that info as it had nothing rto do with the craft I uploaded, and I'm concerned about "polluting" your database.

Too late I realize that I could hasvr excluded them. Perhaps this should be added to the instructions page on the site...

That aside, pastmapper choked on some very long custom mechjeb cfg filenames in the plugindata folder, this has nothing to do with custom parts of course, it is just mecvhjebs way of storing per craft settings. I got around that by temporarily deleting those files, but it would be good if partmapper didn't crash on such things. :-)

Not to worry about "polluting" the database, it's designed to take odd things! Even if part names conflict with other mods the voting system means you plus 4 others would have to upload the same info before it affected existing mods. But if you want me to remove the mod from the system just let me know. It's one of these ones right? ["AB_Launchers", "FederalProductions", "ALaCarteParts", "oldtantparts", "RKE_Kanadarm", "TacSelfDestruct"]

Yeah you're right, more instructions needed! I need to add a bunch of help docs to the site and that's certainly one area that needs it.

Ah interesting that it got stuck on the mechjeb cfgs, it should ignore all cfgs that have "mechjeb_settings" in their name. did the ones it choked on have a different format? If you can tell me the names (or just a couple examples) of the files it got stuck on I shall add a rule about them too. Thanks!!

[smurphy34]

Trying to archive my craft before 1.0 hits and I've hit a 20 craft limit,

Any chance I could get an increase?

[katateochi]

Trying to archive my craft before 1.0 hits and I've hit a 20 craft limit,

Any chance I could get an increase?

done!

[inigma]

KerbalX site has crashed. Please confirm.

logged in users getting 500 error

http://kerbalx.com/error/500

at least I am.

guests can apparently still access the site.

fails for me in FF and IE.