[0.25/0.90] TechManager Version 1.5

[Starstrider42]

You do NOT need to declare parts in the tree.cfg file. You can though, and if you do, it will take priority. But if a part's TechRequired field is set, TechManager will assign that part to that tech if no tech in the tree.cfg file claims it.

Cool. Just to be 100% clear, does that work even for new tech nodes?

[anonish]

Cool. Just to be 100% clear, does that work even for new tech nodes?

Yes.

In fact, *every* node in TechManager is a new node. The ones that look like old nodes are just new nodes that are configured to have the same properties as the stock nodes. All of the stock nodes are deactivated, then the new nodes are created. Its why the tree.cfg file has to have *every* tech in it, not just 'new' ones.

[ShootMe002]

You sir have made a fantastic mod. Managed to get Interstellar and Near Future Technology tech trees working.

[Atrius129]

Worked perfectly!

Javascript is disabled. View full album

All I had to do was install the mod like any other. I still had the old Treeloader tree config file in the save and apparently that was enough. Fantastic job anonish!

EDIT: Tried to embed an Imgur pic, don't know why it isn't working.

http://imgur.com/yG5iRsT

Edited October 28, 2014 by Atrius129

[CaptainKipard]

Here's how.

[RoverDude]

What would be lovely is if those of us with mods that wish to extend the tech tree (since this just defines the nodes and not the parts) could agree on a community-standardized advanced tech tech-tree that we can all share (i.e. the USI Constellation, KSPI, NFT, etc.)

[Leonon]

Worked perfectly!

http://imgur.com/a/http://imgur.com/yG5iRsT

All I had to do was install the mod like any other. I still had the old Treeloader tree config file in the save and apparently that was enough. Fantastic job anonish!

EDIT: Tried to embed an Imgur pic, don't know why it isn't working.

http://imgur.com/yG5iRsT

You have it as

[ img]http://imgur.com/a/http://imgur.com/yG5iRsT[/img]

When it should be

[ img]http://imgur.com/yG5iRsT.jpg[/img]

If you want to post the full picture here

or

 [ url=http://imgur.com/yG5iRsT.jpg][ img]http://imgur.com/yG5iRsTs.jpg[/img][/url]

If you want to post a thumbnail here that links to the larger picture.

Please note that the "[ img]" and "[ url="should not have the space in them when you post, they're just there so it doesn't just post a picture on this post.

[CaptainKipard]

What would be lovely is if those of us with mods that wish to extend the tech tree (since this just defines the nodes and not the parts) could agree on a community-standardized advanced tech tech-tree that we can all share (i.e. the USI Constellation, KSPI, NFT, etc.)

Excellent idea. Someone start a thread for discussing this.

[anonish]

I would like something like a general api. Similar to how Toolbar works. Each mod can then add its own tech nodes, and ModuleManager can update the parts to point to the correct techs. However, I don't know how to resolve the case where each mod puts their tech 'in the way' of the other techs. We could algorithmically determine the location of all nodes after they are created.. if someone wants to solve that problem.

[anonish]

Let me do some digging as well. I've been mucking with some parts, and I THOUGHT I un-did everything I messed with, but I shall dig around. I uninstalled and reinstalled KSPi (without TreeLoader). I'll edit this post if I find something.

TechManager 1.1 has been updated to log the case where more than one part has the same name. Should help narrow down the problem and avoid future hangs for everyone.

[Kalloran]

TechManager 1.1 has been updated to log the case where more than one part has the same name. Should help narrow down the problem and avoid future hangs for everyone.

Thanks alot!! After an eternity of narrowing down folders, I found it:

In the UmbraSpaceIndustries/MKS folder is a folder named "LEGACY." This folder has the same configs as those in the Karbonite LEGACY_PARTS folder. That's what was causing the conflict. I deleted the LEGACY_PARTS folder that came with Karbonite and it works fine. I'm assuming I could delete the KA_*.cfg files in the MKS folder instead......

[skeevy]

What would be lovely is if those of us with mods that wish to extend the tech tree (since this just defines the nodes and not the parts) could agree on a community-standardized advanced tech tech-tree that we can all share (i.e. the USI Constellation, KSPI, NFT, etc.)

That seems like it would be the best way to do it so nobody would have to choose between mods or wait for tech tree patches to make mods compatible. Personally, I'd like the first node to be Basic Atmospheric Flight, the second node to be Basic Landing which branches off into Advanced Atmospheric Flight, Basic Rocketry, Advanced Landing, and Basic Survivability......you know, the more I think about it, and especially once mods are taken into account, the community-standardized tech tree would have a lot of odd nodes for Basic Boating, Advanced Vehicle Assembly, Robotic Hinges and Gizmos, I don't even know what to name the node with Soccer Balls and Pumpkins...it would suck having to unlock a node that you don't have any parts in because the next node down requires you to have it.

This idea really needs its own thread.

[RoverDude]

That seems like it would be the best way to do it so nobody would have to choose between mods or wait for tech tree patches to make mods compatible.

<snip>

This idea really needs its own thread.

The rub unfortunately as always will be getting folks to agree or even acknowledge the existence of a shared playground (hence why I was finally forced to fork ORS because it was that, or forever have Karbonite and KSPI incompatible). I would REALLY hate to see the same thing happen here, where users are forced to choose KSPI, or NFT/USI/etc. but ultimately that's not really up to me.

I'm more than willing to start up a shared tree that keeps KSPI in it's current form and merges in NFT, etc. and start a thread - but it's going to be pretty much worthless unless everyone agrees to distribute it, and would be a waste of my time if it's just going to get stomped on by a KSPI install.

So if someone other than me can convince Fractal of the value of playing on this particular shared playground, I'll start a thread. Otherwise, I'll just have to wait till this can be configured in a way that precludes aggressive over-stomping by other mods.

[Starstrider42]

What would be lovely is if those of us with mods that wish to extend the tech tree (since this just defines the nodes and not the parts) could agree on a community-standardized advanced tech tech-tree that we can all share (i.e. the USI Constellation, KSPI, NFT, etc.)

Sorry to be the voice of pessimism again, but I don't see it happening and I don't think it should happen (with one very challenging caveat, see end of post). Looking at the proliferation of tech trees and tech tree mods, it seems most players have sharply different ideas about what a "good" tech tree would be. And I mean structural ideas, not just placement of individual parts.

To take an extreme example, there was a recent mod (that I can't find now) that proposed a very stringy tech tree, where you have e.g. a liquid engine branch, an SRB branch, a solar panel branch, a battery branch, etc., and you could choose to unlock more powerful technology of each type arbitrarily. Like most tech tree mods, it used words like "realistic" and "believable" to describe itself. I, personally, wouldn't want to play on that tree, because I find it both gameplay-unfriendly (it encourages specialization, with no incentive to invest in more than a handful of branches) and blatantly unrealistic -- who would try to develop an ultra-heavy engine, for example, unless they already had a reason to launch heavy payloads? Were I to make a "realistic" tech tree of my own, it would have far more interconnections, on the grounds that no invention occurs in a vacuum -- and I'm sure I'd come under fire from people who complained about "silly" tech dependencies, and would prefer the stringy version as much more realistic.

The only ways I can see to make everyone happy are:

1. Keep to the status quo of a variety of separate trees. This would, of course, hurt mod interoperability.
   
2. Create multiple "standard" tech trees, which share a common set of tech names but connect them in different ways. Players can then choose whichever tree they like, and modders would use the standardized tech names to support them all simultaneously. I'm no mathematician, however, so I can neither prove nor disprove that it is even possible to create multiple mutually consistent trees like this.
   

[Dal]

My suggestion for modular trees supporting many nodes: remove any defined coordinates and instead sort nodes only by what they connect from and to, placing them algorithmically by the program. This would provide a truly universal tree for any number of mods and allow on-the-fly changes for MM-like behavior.

[Atrius129]

You have it as

[ img]http://imgur.com/a/http://imgur.com/yG5iRsT[/img]

When it should be

[ img]http://imgur.com/yG5iRsT.jpg[/img]

If you want to post the full picture here

or

 [ url=http://imgur.com/yG5iRsT.jpg][ img]http://imgur.com/yG5iRsTs.jpg[/img][/url]

If you want to post a thumbnail here that links to the larger picture.

Please note that the "[ img]" and "[ url="should not have the space in them when you post, they're just there so it doesn't just post a picture on this post.

Thank you, I was using the [ imgur][ /imgur] tags as per: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/36010-Introducing-the-Ability-to-Embed-Imgur-Albums!

Maybe it didn't work because it wasn't actually an album.

[Nertea]

This is pretty sweet. What are the chances of being able to add new node images in in the future? That would really make my day (well, even more).

[RoverDude]

Sorry to be the voice of pessimism again, but I don't see it happening and I don't think it should happen (with one very challenging caveat, see end of post).

Probably not nearly as bad as all of that. If you look at what, say, NFT and KSPI do (and where I would have had USI except we kinda lost treeloader)... we all tend to add new sub-branches, not monkey around with the current tree. KSPI adds a few nodes, NFT adds some, and I was planning on adding a Colonization branch. I daresay between those three (KSPI, Nert's constellation, and mine) you've pretty much covered all of the advanced tech mods. Not placement IN those nodes (go nuts), but the node relationships themselves.

Others I am aware of (say, LLL, etc.) just use the existing expermental nodes).

So right now we have three choices - given that (as of now) we have to wipe the whole tree:

1. Only allow one mod to use this (boo!)

2. Force players to choose which mod to use (double boo!)

3. Put on the big boy pants, toss the tree nodes together, and agree not to be jerky-jerks stomping over eachother until such time as we can use this without stomping the tree.

3 should not be that hard. Fractal's stuff is on far-end tech tree progression. Mine is on colonization and construction. Nert has his own sub-trees that are more.. um.. 'near future' than KSPI. Lack uses the existing nodes.

So if you take 'random tree rearrangements' out of the equation for a bit, and do a little triage, the right (effective, etc.) thing to do would be to use a shared tree so we don't break eachother. Otherwise you will have stomping again, and everyone loses.

Again, once we can merge different sub-trees on a mod by mod basis, we're pretty golden because then we just do our own sub-sections and be done with it. But that has some thorny problems of it's own (duplicate nodes, positioning, deletion of stock nodes, etc.) that get a little weird. So much better for everyone to cooperate.

[Streetwind]

What would be lovely is if those of us with mods that wish to extend the tech tree (since this just defines the nodes and not the parts) could agree on a community-standardized advanced tech tech-tree that we can all share (i.e. the USI Constellation, KSPI, NFT, etc.)

Regarding the suggestion of a standard tree, I'm on the same page as Starstrider42 here: I don't think it would ever work. In addition to the excellent points he already listed, there is a vast number of additional arguments as to why it just isn't practical. I'm going to be brief, because listing them all in detail would probably break the forum post character limit, but here's a short selection of reasons:

- Part order concept. In addition to the shape/style argument presented by Starstrider, you can also have conceptually different tech tree approaches. Stock KSP for instance orders its parts according to what it thinks is a good way for new players to learn the game. Another tech tree may order them according to the power level they have. Yet another might order the according to the order in which perceived RL equivalents were developed historically. You can continue this pretty much arbitrarily, and you'll never get even half the forum on the same page about this.

- Part scaling concept. Stock KSP comes from a sandbox heritage and has a large number of parts that are roughly equal but serve individual niches. There's hardly any vertical power progression at all; even when the tech tree is fully unlocked, the LV-T30 is still going to be an excellent engine and just as useful as it was when starting a fresh save. That is why it can get away with ordering the parts almost arbitrarily. And some mods may share that approach, especially the stockalike mods; while others, especially the high tech mods like KSPI and Near Future, aim to introduce a power progression scaling. Both approaches are equally valid, and it is sort of possible to bolt a vertical power progression onto the end of the horizontal stock tree without disrupting it too much. But once you start adding mod after mod, you're just begging for the various approaches to clash violently.

- Part balance concept. While we're on the topic of things clashing violently: scaling paradigms. This is the main thing that makes sure that (just to name a really popular example) you can never have Near Future Propulsion, Near Future Electrical and KSP Interstellar in the same tree and have it play well. It's not just that one part is like fifty percent stronger or weaker than another, oh no... here we have parts that deal in numbers different by a factor of one thousand and more times. It's going to work for sandbox where you build things for aesthetics only, sure, but in career? Not going to happen. And in sandbox you don't need a tech tree.

- Rebalance projects. So maybe a user doesn't like it when things don't fit together like that, and he writes a MM config to change things. Maybe that MM config starts to become bigger and bigger, and he tells his friends about it, and eventually it becomes its own mod like the Stock Rebalance Project by stupid_chris. How's your standard tree going to account for a mod like this? It cannot. And therefore a standard tree cannot exist in the first place.

- Part bloat, meet empty nodes. A tech tree with a high number of mods integrated is going to have both of the following, at the same time: 1.) random empty nodes because nobody will ever install all supported mods at once; 2.) nodes that randomly contain 40 parts and more because a dozen mods all add variations of the same thing. It looks bad, and it potentially plays bad. For examples of this, I can point you to some existing attempts to integrate large numbers of mods.

- Management nightmare. Good luck keeping up with changes to 50+ popular mods! You have the choice between publishing large, rare updates for stable versioning at the expense of being permanently out of date for at least some of the mods, and pushing minor, but quick updates all the time at the expense of extreme version fragmentation.

I could go on like this for hours, probably

All in all, in my opinion this isn't something you can standardize. A tech tree is far too specific to each player's tastes and each mod combination's needs. At best, a standardized tech tree would need to come with its own MM config tweaks for various parts and prescribe how players are to play the game - this specific mod selection, this specific part progression. The uptake would probably be limited.

EDIT: I suppose it can work for a very small selection of mods, but you'll still have issues with scaling paradigms clashing.

My suggestion for modular trees supporting many nodes: remove any defined coordinates and instead sort nodes only by what they connect from and to, placing them algorithmically by the program. This would provide a truly universal tree for any number of mods and allow on-the-fly changes for MM-like behavior.

This, on the other hand, would be brilliant. I don't understand the effort in making something like this work (it does sound substantial), but it would offer true modularity and avoid a large number of the issues with a fixed layout listed above. This comes, of course, with the caveat that only tree extensions can be modularized in this way, and not tree restructures. You'd have to accept the stock tree as it is, and be content with bolting on extra nodes.

Edited October 28, 2014 by Streetwind

[FreeThinker]

Question, how does TechManager interact with parts introduced by other Mods? Will it simply move them to the note which replaces them?

[KaiserSoze]

What would be lovely is if those of us with mods that wish to extend the tech tree (since this just defines the nodes and not the parts) could agree on a community-standardized advanced tech tech-tree that we can all share (i.e. the USI Constellation, KSPI, NFT, etc.)

Back in 24.2 I made a personal techtree wich was basically a fusion of KSPI and NFT. I did not change science values, I just put both trees together and move a few icons so they do not overlap (meaning I did not check that science cost were similar, or that they part from KSPI and NFt should share some nodes). It worked pretty fine, but then .25 came and I became useless.

If this mod work with the same tree I will give it a look and try to have both trees working at the same time.

I also started to think about writing some kind of script to check the icon position (using some tier parameter and dependency so they are). But my programing abilities are a little rusty and It decided to do it manually since it was easy (that time)

[RoverDude]

Regarding the suggestion of a standard tree, I'm on the same page as Starstrider42 here: I don't think it would ever work.

I think you're dead wrong, mostly because you're confusing node setup with part placement. For context, there are very very few mods that actually *add* to the tech tree from a node standpoint - KSPI, and NFT. I expect BTSM does something as well, but that one was never meant to play in any playground other than it's own, so a moot point. For additional context, folks told me a second mod for a mineable fuel would never work either

The idea of algorithmic placement and other goodness is awesome, but does not exist yet (I assume you're coding that right now?). So we have three choices - do nothing, play together, stomp on eachother. Two of those choices punish players - I'll let you figure out which

RE your points - most of them are simply invalid.

Part order concept. Irrelevant. We're talking nodes not parts - go nuts plunking your parts around with MM.

Part scaling concept. Irrelevant given Nert's proposal which is more in line with what we already had with TreeLoader (and what worked).

Part balance concept Covered, since provisions are being made for nodes beyond the NF* scale to cover KSPI-ish stuff (and where I'll probably toss my EL parts).

Rebalance projects Irrelevant, you're still confusing placement in a tree with new nodes. I'll circle back to just how few popular mods use custom trees and how few nodes use them, vs wholesale tree rewrites, which by their nature will be incompatible. Me, I care about large mods playing nice together.

Part bloat, meet empty nodes Largely irrelevant, because we're looking at a few nodes that we'd have anyway with stand-alone tech trees, and we're not looking to resolve the current behavior of people tossing 80 parts in a node (which they would do with or without an alternate tree). If anything, having a few spare nodes will help mitigate the issue.

Management nightmare Irrelevant. Scope is new nodes, not to manage every mod.

I think what you're doing is making something pretty simple into something incredibly complex. I would agree that to manage all of the tech down to part placement for 50+ mods would be silly. Good thing that's not what we're proposing Merely taking the handful (and that's being liberal) of the mods that extend the tree and bringing those together to avoid having to give the players bad choices.

All in all, in my opinion this isn't something you can standardize. A tech tree is far too specific to each player's tastes and each mod combination's needs. At best, a standardized tech tree would need to come with its own MM config tweaks for various parts and prescribe how players are to play the game - this specific mod selection, this specific part progression. The uptake would probably be limited.

Darn good thing that we're not proposing that then! See points above. Standardized nodes, leave placement up to the mods. RE any enhancements, I look forward to seeing the code you're writing to solve that. In the interim, I'd just as soon like to make sure that this project does not result in players being screwed over and forced to pick between mods. Or, if they are forced to pick, make sure that anyone unwilling to play nice nice suddenly finds themselves a very unsavory choice because it will shut down a variety of other mods who *do* want to play nice.

[Your_Uncle]

Hugely excited to see tech tree modifications become possible again. Even more excited to see RoverDude in on-board.

In relation to many of the comments raising potential issues, I think RoverDude covered it perfectly;

Standardized nodes, leave placement up to the mods.

The challenge is getting the creators of the key late-game tech (KSPI, NFT, MKS.OKS etc) to agree on the later game nodes.

Following the existing tree progression in terms of the amount of science required for each successive tech level shouldn't break the balance too much either.

If multipurpose modes such as 'High Efficiency Propulsion I" which progress into "High Efficiency Propulsion II" (or Higherer Efficency Propulsion if it fits the canon better) are chosen, then mod makers can choose where to put things such as ion and electric propulsion, thermal rockets etc. As per the old KSPI structure, seriously game changeling tech (looking at you warp drives) can be tucked away behind a node that is difficult to unlock, but balanced to that it still feels rewarding.

Similar categories could be used for main technology branches- power generation, solar, construction and life support.

I'm thinking that a bit of collaboration now between main mod makers to flesh out a node structure, and appropriate unlock costs will get everyone on the same page and be a benefit to the modding and player community. Its a bit of short term pain for a lot of long term gain/stability.

Keep up the excellent work all,

looking forward to seeing some new nodes in the tech tree!

Uncle

[RoverDude]

The challenge is getting the creators of the key late-game tech (KSPI, NFT, MKS.OKS etc) to agree on the later game nodes.

You already have all of those other than KSPI So ball is in Fractal's court. I'll move forward using Nertea's community tech tree project regardless.

[gh7531]

You already have all of those other than KSPI So ball is in Fractal's court. I'll move forward using Nertea's community tech tree project regardless.

Also WaveFunctionP with his KSPI-Lite could be an option if Fractal don't want to play with the rest of the team (what I don't hope this sounds like a realy awesome project).