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The Comprehensive Kerbal Archive Network: Call for mod participation

pjf

By pjf
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Justin Kerbice

Justin Kerbice

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The top-post of this thread *tries* to be that, but I'm well aware that we need a better quick-start guide. There's the start of one on the wiki, but it's not great, either.

I would love you to write one for me.

As someone who's given up sleep, employment, and social life to work on the CKAN full-time for the last six weeks, it's *very* hard for me to see things with new-user eyes.

That's a very common creator issue IMHO.

Maybe you could:

-"hire" someone to play the new user of your stuff, and his/her mission would be to just follow instruction without filling the blanks,

-take a break from CKAN stuff, goes back, create a dummy mod or take one without ckan file, follow your own instructions and be angry on yourself for writing such bad doc :) and fill the blanks yourself.

It's a good practice when you wrote some install/usage instructions or a tutorial to follow them blindly, without doing the "non written cause so so obvious (to you) stuff", and if you can't get to the expected result, the doc need some improvements. Summary: "play the dumb computer without brain".

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Ippo

Ippo

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-"hire" someone to play the new user of your stuff, and his/her mission would be to just follow instruction without filling the blanks

Oh hai, I see you were talking about me :P

Having created a ton of work for pjf had some experience with CKAN, and agreeing with Justin that the quick start was a little barren, I tried to make some improvements to it.

Could you please take a look at it and tell me if it's better now? Also, if a native english speaker could give it a quick grammar-check I'd be happier :)

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pjf

pjf

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Hey all,

This is a very quick post because I'm crazy busy with work, but v0.28 Stromatolite has just gone up on the CKAN. This contains a ton of bug fixes as we ramp up towards our 1.0 release.

Just a reminder that if you're using an older client then you almost certainly want to upgrade, as we've made a few slight changes to the metadata format.

~ Paul

P.S. Ippo, you are awesome. <3

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Justin Kerbice

Justin Kerbice

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@Ippo: sure I'll will ;) thanks.

@pjf: regarding this:

Your identifier must be the same name as the directory you wish to copy to GameData.

is there any tiny little chance to get a less strict rule by any chance ?

It's far far far too restrictive and "just a rule made to simplify dev's job" :P (but annoy many other people)

At least, this is a simple and easy/not too hard (I hope) change:

add: modid (indentified below, name kept) and dirname => directory below

so we could have something like:

{
    "spec_version" : 1,
    "identifier"   : "myAwesomeMod",
    "directory"  : "VeryAwesomeMod",
    "$kref"        : "#/ckan/kerbalstuff/1234"
}

This, and only this, if ckan tools really needs it (I'm not sure about that).

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pjf

pjf

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Your identifier must be the same name as the directory you wish to copy to GameData

...if you wish to use the defaults and omit the install section entirely.

If you do provide an install section, then it will override the defaults. This is already the case for the AMEG .netkan file:


{
    "spec_version"    : 1,
    "identifier"      : "AMEG",
    "author"          : "Justin Kerbice",
    "$kref"           : "#/ckan/kerbalstuff/279",
    "license"         : "restricted",
    "release_status"  : "stable",
    "ksp_version_min" : "0.23",
    "install" : [
        {
            "file"       : "GameData/Kerbice Group",
            "install_to" : "GameData"
        }
    ]
}

Hope this helps!

~ Paul

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Justin Kerbice

Justin Kerbice

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...if you wish to use the defaults and omit the install section entirely.


{

    "install" : [
        {
            "file"       : "GameData/Kerbice Group",
            "install_to" : "GameData"
        }
    ]

Hope this helps!

~ Paul

ok thanks.

but... I have a huge doubt, what thes two line actually do ? Does AMEG files will be put into 'GameData/Kerbice Group' (so if archive contains Gamedata/Kerbice Group/etc it will lead to 'GameData/Kerbice Group/GameData/Kerbice Group/etc' or 'GameData/Parts/...' or something else ?

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Ippo

Ippo

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ok thanks.

but... I have a huge doubt, what thes two line actually do ? Does AMEG files will be put into 'GameData/Kerbice Group' (so if archive contains Gamedata/Kerbice Group/etc it will lead to 'GameData/Kerbice Group/GameData/Kerbice Group/etc' or 'GameData/Parts/...' or something else ?

I think that it takes the folder "<zipfile>/GameData/Kerbice Group" and just places it (and all its contents) into GameData.

The end result should therefore be <KSP>/GameData/Kerbice Group/AMEG .

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Justin Kerbice

Justin Kerbice

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@Ippo and pjf: I've got an idea, for the documentation, keep things simple and just be straight, I mean kindda:


{
            "file"       : "dirA/moddir",
            "install_to" : "dirB"
        }

do:

copy all files under dirA/moddir in/from the archive to dirB

so from:

archive/dirA/moddir/dirC/file1

archive/dirA/moddir/dirC/file2

archive/dirA/moddir/dirD/file1

archive/dirA/license

archive/readme

archive/something

you'll get:

KSP/GameData/dirB/dirA/moddir/dirC/file1

KSP/GameData/dirB/dirA/moddir/dirC/file2

KSP/GameData/dirB/dirA/moddir/dirD/file1

KSP/GameData/dirB/dirA/license

(note: leaving license file here is useless and disk space consuming, "license" could also be named "misplaced file", "IputthisrubbishtherecauseIdontcareaboutusers" or anything like that)

error cases (what ckan do in such cases):

dirB already exists

dirA doesn't exists

etc

so, 0% guess, 0% doubt, 100% efficiency, and every one are happy :)

Free feature idea: add a source dir, so plug-ins authors/people interested know the source code matching the installed mod is somewhere (= <KSP_mod_source_dir>/modA/version1/...)

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pjf

pjf

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Hey everyone! We're getting very close, and so I'm glad to have just built:

CKAN stable release candidate v1.0.0-RC1

Note that stable releases focus on bugfixes and predictable behaviour, and thus have experimental features disabled, including the GUI and 'upgrade' command.

I've also posted the unstable release candidate v1.1.0-RC1, which is exactly the same, but with experimental features enabled.

Both these clients have lots of bugfixes from our work in the last few days. However you should note that while they will work with data from past clients fine, going back to a v0.xx release after using these is almost certainly going to cause you headaches, due to a change in how we store paths in the registry files.

Please *do* test these. If you find bugs, please tell us, but we're *most* interested in any bugs you find in the stable release candidate.

Also, an enormous thank-you to Ippo, who's been working hard at improving our wiki. There's lots of good information there, and you're encouraged to be bold and edit and improve it as you see fit.

Unless we find any show-stoppers, then in the next couple of days we'll be doing an official release. When that happens I'll be linking to it from this thread.

Thank you all again for your support and help!

~ Paul

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Ippo

Ippo

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I've seen that the stable pre-release is called First Light: if I may, I'd like to suggest "Contact Light" as the name of the first release, since those are the first words ever spoken on the moon :)

Thanks pjf, I think I've said it before but you this might be the single most important project ever for KSP. It is as far as I'm concerned anyway :)

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madlemur

madlemur

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I just tried the RC, and I keep getting errors about files already being owned by ''.

In order to get around the error, I had to go in and delete the mod, then I could update/add the mod. This is trying to get CKAN working with a fully modded install. It auto-detected about 2/3 of my mods (seems to miss parts only mods). And most of the mods it auto-detected offered updates (despite being the latest version).

Overall, great idea, but I don't have the time to fight with it.

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Ippo

Ippo

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I just tried the RC, and I keep getting errors about files already being owned by ''.

The client will refuse to overwrite any file that it hasn't installed itself - ever. This is an added safety (so you can't screw up your pre-existing mods using CKAN), but I agree that the error is confusing.

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madlemur

madlemur

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The client will refuse to overwrite any file that it hasn't installed itself - ever. This is an added safety (so you can't screw up your pre-existing mods using CKAN), but I agree that the error is confusing.

How do I "force" the client to recognize that I have a pre-existing mod installed that it didn't install? And when it does recognize them, it usually lights up the upgrade checkbox, which is useless, since it "fails" the upgrade because it won't overwrite the files. I found the only way for CKAN to manage my mods was to uninstall them, and let CKAN install them from the cache. Which would imply that if an unmanaged mod I use becomes available via CKAN, I'd have to uninstall it and let CKAN re-install it. This same issue bleeds over to dependencies. If you see I have Firespitter already installed, don't try to install it again...

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pjf

pjf

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I just tried the RC, and I keep getting errors about files already being owned by ''.

Oh my! That's not a very informative message, is it? I've fixed it, and it will be part of the new release. Thank you for the bug report!

How do I "force" the client to recognize that I have a pre-existing mod installed that it didn't install? And when it does recognize them, it usually lights up the upgrade checkbox, which is useless, since it "fails" the upgrade because it won't overwrite the files. I found the only way for CKAN to manage my mods was to uninstall them, and let CKAN install them from the cache. Which would imply that if an unmanaged mod I use becomes available via CKAN, I'd have to uninstall it and let CKAN re-install it. This same issue bleeds over to dependencies. If you see I have Firespitter already installed, don't try to install it again...

If the client didn't install it, then it won't touch it. Without having installed a mod itself, there's no real way the CKAN can make sensible decisions without risk of damaging your GameData directory, and it will never try to do that. The CKAN is very cautious with its decisions, it would rather not install a mod than risk things being in an inconsistent state.

The current clients do make some attempts to discover existing mods, but it's very simple, they can only be used to satisfy dependencies, and we may remove the functionality in a future release. As you've pointed out, detecting parts packs and other mods reliably is extremely hard.

The GUI thinking that you can upgrade a non-CKAN installed mod is *definitely* a bug, I've opened an issue to track it.

Many thanks again for helping test!

~ Paul

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