The Comprehensive Kerbal Archive Network (CKAN) Package Manager; v1.18.0 [19 June 2016]

[Dazpoet]

I actually got it to finally work, I tried to state that in a edit in my OP.

After terminal did its thing which did take forever the following happens

1. a screen opens up asking to activate ckan. Easily done

2. after activation, ckan opens up using mono as a wrapper ( I persume anyway)

3. my new issue is getting ckan to recognize I have mods installed in my ksp files

UPDATE , I decide to try to refresh ckan and now I have a list of alot more mods than I have installed. How does it work from here?

If it takes a long time to start up try using 'LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" && mono ckan.exe' to start rather than just mono. It changes your locale to en_US which CKAN likes.

CKAN does _not_ like handling mods you've installed manually prior to installing CKAN. It might autodetect some of them (hopefully more than some) but won't touch nor upgrade them in any way. I recommend https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN-support/wiki/User-guide for learning how to use CKAN and https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN-support/wiki/Basic-troubleshooting for basic questions and answers.

[pjf]

First of all, a huge thank you to Daz for continuing to be friggin *amazing* at fielding support queries.

Secondly, I've written my monthly report for all things CKAN, including development we've done over April, plans for May, stats on how many mods have been indexed, and more.

Many thanks!

~ pjf

[johnsonwax]

I'd like to put in an early request for some feedback on whether the new .Net frameworks for OS X and Linux that came out today are useless/better/worse options than mono. Anything with an interface is pretty marginal under mono on OS X (IMO) so I'm hopeful that running under official distribution will be better. I'll probably take a crack at getting it installed this weekend, but the devs might want to take a look as well.

[pjf]

I'd like to put in an early request for some feedback on whether the new .Net frameworks for OS X and Linux that came out today are useless/better/worse options than mono. Anything with an interface is pretty marginal under mono on OS X (IMO) so I'm hopeful that running under official distribution will be better. I'll probably take a crack at getting it installed this weekend, but the devs might want to take a look as well.

I didn't know they were out yet. You're quite right that anything with a GUI involves extra care under mono, and we're already seeing reports that the CKAN GUI hits issues under mono 4.0.If you're

If you're installing the .NET frameworks this weekend, then *please do* keep us posted on how they go. One of the reasons for using C# is the ability to write once and run anywhere, and it would be great if that were actually the case. In particular, both the GUI and the core need to work around a number of mono bugs, and not having to do this any more would allow us to drop a lot of complexity and obtuse ways to doing things.

~ pjf

[pjf]

v1.6.12 aka Tupan Patera released

• [bugfix] Fewer GUI crashes when unselecting mods (thanks Richard Lake)
  
• [bugfix] Fewer GUI crashes when navigating to the relationship tab (thanks Richard Lake)
  
• [Feature] Mods can now be searched by author in the GUI (thanks Richard Lake)
  
• [Feature] Space will now toggle the currently selected mod in the GUI (thanks mgsdk)
  

[NBZ]

v1.6.12 aka Tupan Patera released

• [bugfix] Fewer GUI crashes when unselecting mods (thanks Richard Lake)
  
• [bugfix] Fewer GUI crashes when navigating to the relationship tab (thanks Richard Lake)
  
• [Feature] Mods can now be searched by author in the GUI (thanks Richard Lake)
  
• [Feature] Space will now toggle the currently selected mod in the GUI (thanks mgsdk)
  

Seems broken to me (Win7-64). Only the taskbar thumbnail shows, but not the windows itself.

[sralica]

that might be wrong coordinates of the window

try finding file: "GUIConfig.xml"

in there look for:

<WindowLoc>

<X>130</X>

<Y>361</Y>

</WindowLoc>

If you have negative coordinates, then fix them to look like above.

[NBZ]

Yeah, that fixed it. Why did this happen after an auto-upgrade? Why doesn't the program detect -32000,-32000 to be a little... ehm... "off"?

[k2221931839]

Could you add a new function, to show the mod's which the version for KSP? I think it's very helpful for us. Just take a look, and thanks.

[Dazpoet]

Yeah, that fixed it. Why did this happen after an auto-upgrade? Why doesn't the program detect -32000,-32000 to be a little... ehm... "off"?

We don't have a way of reproducing this bug which makes it neigh impossible to fix at the moment. If you or anybody else has a means of reproducing the issue please post at https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN/issues/794

Could you add a new function, to show the mod's which the version for KSP? I think it's very helpful for us. Just take a look, and thanks.

I'm confused, are you saying you want to see which version of KSP a mod is for? CKAN does that automagically, you won't see mods not marked as compatible with your version of the game. There are some examples of mods incorrectly marked as compatible but we're constantly working on lowering that number.

[Tase]

So some mods that are tagged as 1.0 compatible require other mods which are not updated to 1.0, but are included in the updated mod.

I.e USI Kolonization Systems requires Firespitter Core and Toolbar. Both of these updated versions are in the .rar on their download page. But if you install it via CKAN, it will download the old Firespitter Core and Toolbar, instead of using the ones in the package.

There's probably no "right" solution to this. I'm just noticing this, which is kind of misleading. Some mods are updated but their dependencies aren't.

Maybe for a mod to be shown as compatible with the installed version, all of it's dependencies must also be ?

[Broax]

I'm trying to add a mod (Final Frontier) to CKAN but I'm getting an error no mater what I try...

I made a file called FinalFrontier.netkan containing:

{
    "spec_version" : 1,
    "identifier"   : "Final Frontier",
    "$kref"        : "#/ckan/kerbalstuff/428",
    "x_netkan_license_ok": true
}

I followed the 30sec tutorial for mods hosted on kerbalstuff and this is the output I got:

It mentions a problem loading 'libcurl' but I'm not sure what that's all about. I thought it could've been some issue regarding permissions (or lack) of the program files folder so I moved everything to the disk root but I got the same error.

Here's the debug output (it looks the same to me):

Sometimes some games (like Civ V or GTA V) can't handle my user folder as my name contains special characters (ã) making me wait for an update to fix it. Since netkan is using my AppData folder for cache it might be related but I don't know how I can change the cache folder to test it.

Anyway... Can anyone help me with this?

EDIT: I checked and have both .NET4.0 and Mono installed.

Edited April 30, 2015 by Broax

[Dazpoet]

So some mods that are tagged as 1.0 compatible require other mods which are not updated to 1.0, but are included in the updated mod.

I.e USI Kolonization Systems requires Firespitter Core and Toolbar. Both of these updated versions are in the .rar on their download page. But if you install it via CKAN, it will download the old Firespitter Core and Toolbar, instead of using the ones in the package.

There's probably no "right" solution to this. I'm just noticing this, which is kind of misleading. Some mods are updated but their dependencies aren't.

Maybe for a mod to be shown as compatible with the installed version, all of it's dependencies must also be ?

When you say old do you mean non-working or AVC reports them as old? CKAN depends on stuff being broken into parts and will in, nearly, all cases install modules rather than grabbing everything from a package, the latter would break compatibility with a lot of other mods. If there are new distributed .zips (CKAN can't handle e.g. the new downloadable firespitter.dll linked in the firespitter thread) for firespittercore or toolbar and we've somehow missed them, which is far from impossible, please link me to them and they'll be updated asap.

Right now for a mod to be shown all of its dependencies must also be updated, see e.g USI-Exploration which is updated but not showing since ModuleRCSFX isn't updated. Some metadata use ksp_version_min or specify ksp_version as "any" though and we don't want to break those without good reasons since an author obviously wanted it that way at some point. As for the toolbar I've seen people reporting as both working and non-working. Either way people have already downloaded it through CKAN making the removal of it from 1.0 a tad bit iffy.

Basically we have a lot of contributors and that's why some of these things slip through the cracks. If something is distinctly not working, report it and I'll have another look at it.

I'm trying to add a mod (Final Frontier) to CKAN but I'm getting an error no mater what I try...

I made a file called FinalFrontier.netkan containing:

{
    "spec_version" : 1,
    "identifier"   : "Final Frontier",
    "$kref"        : "#/ckan/kerbalstuff/428",
    "x_netkan_license_ok": true
}

I followed the 30sec tutorial for mods hosted on kerbalstuff and this is the output I got:

http://i.imgur.com/jLwAAlt.png

It mentions a problem loading 'libcurl' but I'm not sure what that's all about. I thought it could've been some issue regarding permissions (or lack) of the program files folder so I moved everything to the disk root but I got the same error.

Here's the debug output (it looks the same to me):

http://i.imgur.com/IyTzR0s.png

Sometimes some games (like Civ V or GTA V) can't handle my user folder as my name contains special characters (ã) making me wait for an update to fix it. Since netkan is using my AppData folder for cache it might be related but I don't know how I can change the cache folder to test it.

Anyway... Can anyone help me with this?

Final Frontier is already in CKAN, see https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/NetKAN/blob/master/NetKAN/FinalFrontier.netkan and https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN-meta/blob/master/FinalFrontier/FinalFrontier-0.7.4-870.ckan

The error you're recieving is due to you being on windows I'm afraid. Us windowsusers are banished to using a much earlier version of netkan, iirc it's something like 126, for now. Netkan.exe has a rather large amount of tech debt but rumors are it might get a look in a not to faraway future.

[Tase]

When you say old do you mean non-working or AVC reports them as old? [...]

I don't have AVC installed (clean install, only a handful of mods), it's a popup right when the game starts loading saying "Incompatible Mods Detected", "Some installed mods may be incompatible with this version [...] These mods are incompatible with KSP 1.0.0: Firespitter".

If you're saying all the dependencies are updated to 1.0 for Karbonite (since it shows up in the 'All' category), then that means the Firespitter Core is also updated. But the game is saying it isn't.

I don't know what the game does when it detects an incompatible mod, if it doesn't load it then that means it needs to be fixed, even if it's just changing a version number in the metadata of the DLL.

EDIT: Also, looks like CKAN has a problem with Active Texture Manager: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/59005-1-0-Release-5-0-April-28-2015-Active-Texture-Management-Save-RAM%21?p=1886053&viewfull=1#post1886053

Edited April 30, 2015 by Tase

[Dazpoet]

I don't have AVC installed (clean install, only a handful of mods), it's a popup right when the game starts loading saying "Incompatible Mods Detected", "Some installed mods may be incompatible with this version [...] These mods are incompatible with KSP 1.0.0: Firespitter".

If you're saying all the dependencies are updated to 1.0 for Karbonite (since it shows up in the 'All' category), then that means the Firespitter Core is also updated. But the game is saying it isn't.

I don't know what the game does when it detects an incompatible mod, if it doesn't load it then that means it needs to be fixed, even if it's just changing a version number in the metadata of the DLL.

FirespitterCore had an older version in our metadata repository that had ksp_version "any" in it. This was found out to late to pull it, looking around on forums it seemed that firespitter.dll was working and as such the newer version we had indexed was pushed to 1.0 aswell.

I've asked in the Firespitter thread for a package we can use in CKAN for 1.0 so I'm hoping we'll get a new version soon. Until then I can't really do anything since removing an already installed mod in CKAN has negative effects on the users. Having an incorrect version available ofcourse also have negative effects so we're kind of stuck between a rock and hard place until we have a new firespitter.dll to index I'm afraid.

[Tase]

FirespitterCore had an older version in our metadata repository that had ksp_version "any" in it. This was found out to late to pull it, looking around on forums it seemed that firespitter.dll was working and as such the newer version we had indexed was pushed to 1.0 aswell.

I've asked in the Firespitter thread for a package we can use in CKAN for 1.0 so I'm hoping we'll get a new version soon. Until then I can't really do anything since removing an already installed mod in CKAN has negative effects on the users. Having an incorrect version available ofcourse also have negative effects so we're kind of stuck between a rock and hard place until we have a new firespitter.dll to index I'm afraid.

No worries, talking about removing mods, I noticed KW Rocketry is gone

Edited April 30, 2015 by Tase

[Dazpoet]

No worries, taking about removing mods, I noticed KW Rocketry is gone

Yes... some mods are removed when proven to be totally screwed over. KW was such a case seeing as their thread is currently users hacking together MM patches to be able to use the parts. Based on this discussion FirespitterCore might be such a case aswell and I'm monitoring toolbar and some more partpacks aswell. But every time we remove something, esspecially something like FirespitterCore, users tend to rage a lot more than they do when the mod just doesn't work.

In a perfect world we get access to a redistributable .zip of a recompiled FirespitterCore asap and this will all be resolved.

[Bizz Keryear]

Our indexing bot is having a lot to do and it seems to have killed it for a while, awaiting a dev to give it a whack. The reason CKAN doesn't handle manually installed mods is because it cannot guarantee consistency without knowing what it installed, I don't forsee this changing.

As for copying to clipboard I recommend you open an issue and do a feature request on github.

It depends on ModuleRCSFX which doesn't seem to be out for 1.0 yet, at least not on CKAN.

Well to be fair, there is a lot going on right now ... maybe too much.

It works fairly well ... well I have to put on hands in the very last steps of modding it ... (it plays save and doesn't allow me to some legit combinations).

Well, it is a modding program made for beginners anyway (while I use it to reduce the work)

I do have a feature request. or more than one actually.

1. That I mark mods even if they are incompatible ... so that they will be installed as soon as they are availble
   
2. When uninstalling a mod the option not to delete it but to move it to a backup location. (great for finding bugs, aka. "Damm, what has crashed my KSP now?")
   

edit: Active Texture Management 4-3 is (what I have experinced) broken in KSP 1.0 but there is version 5-0 which works (but not shown in CKAN)

Edited May 1, 2015 by Bizz Keryear

[Dazpoet]

Well to be fair, there is a lot going on right now ... maybe too much.

It works fairly well ... well I have to put on hands in the very last steps of modding it ... (it plays save and doesn't allow me to some legit combinations).

Well, it is a modding program made for beginners anyway (while I use it to reduce the work)

I do have a feature request. or more than one actually.

1. That I mark mods even if they are incompatible ... so that they will be installed as soon as they are availble
   
2. When uninstalling a mod the option not to delete it but to move it to a backup location. (great for finding bugs, aka. "Damm, what has crashed my KSP now?")
   

Yes it is near impossible to keep up right now. There's a few of us doing what we can to index and work through the data but there's only so much we can do.

I recommend you send in 1 as a request on github, I'm pretty sure there's at least one like it somewhere already.

As for 2 uninstalling the mod will indeed delete it from GameData but the download will still be cached so there's no additional downloading as long as you're re-installing the same version.

[Dunbaratu]

I wish there was a way to have a column for which KSP version it's made for, in the main list. Then when browsing for mods I could sort the list by "KSP version" to see what is and is not updated to KSP 1.0. It's very slow going having to click on each mod one at a time to bring up that field to look.

[Dazpoet]

I wish there was a way to have a column for which KSP version it's made for, in the main list. Then when browsing for mods I could sort the list by "KSP version" to see what is and is not updated to KSP 1.0. It's very slow going having to click on each mod one at a time to bring up that field to look.

CKAN checks your install to see which version you're running. Then it checks our metadata in the mod repository which mods to offer you based on your version. Everything you see after a refresh is marked in our metadata as compatible with your version of KSP.

[ElimGarak]

I'm confused, are you saying you want to see which version of KSP a mod is for? CKAN does that automagically, you won't see mods not marked as compatible with your version of the game. There are some examples of mods incorrectly marked as compatible but we're constantly working on lowering that number.

Hmm... It may be better to display incompatible mods as grayed out, by default. And add a checkbox for hiding incompatible mods. Because otherwise there will be confusion on why some mods are not showing up. I was about to send you a question about one of the mods for example, and even checked the metadata file and NetKAN folder.

[hab136]

FYI downloads from Curse are ridiculously slow.. like 90-100 kBytes/second. However, I get the same speeds from a browser, so it's not CKAN's fault.

This makes downloading the 380 MB Astronomer's Visual Pack take over an hour. Ugh.

By comparison I'm seeing normal speeds from other sites (KerbalStuff, Github).

[Dazpoet]

Hmm... It may be better to display incompatible mods as grayed out, by default. And add a checkbox for hiding incompatible mods. Because otherwise there will be confusion on why some mods are not showing up. I was about to send you a question about one of the mods for example, and even checked the metadata file and NetKAN folder.

In GUI you can choose to display incompatible mods. However mods that are compatible but lack dependencies are not in either list right now.

FYI downloads from Curse are ridiculously slow.. like 90-100 kBytes/second. However, I get the same speeds from a browser, so it's not CKAN's fault.

This makes downloading the 380 MB Astronomer's Visual Pack take over an hour. Ugh.

By comparison I'm seeing normal speeds from other sites (KerbalStuff, Github).

Sounds like a curse problem indeed.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Is there a possibility to export ond import a current mod setup, so that I can share it via xml or back it up for later?

Currently I am encountering the problem, that the game doesn't finish loading. If I kill it, loading finishes afterwards, but it keeps telling me, that some parts used by some vessels are missing. Therefore I'd like to perform a clean setup.