Better Than Starting Manned (Flower's WIP KSP mod )

[icynewyear]

Considering a stream at 4pm est tomorrow. 12/17/2013 You available?

[FlowerChild]

Considering a stream at 4pm est tomorrow. 12/17/2013 You available?

Yup, sounds good to me man, I'll be there :)

[Zhil]

I found the following tutorial for KSP really helpful:
http://tinyurl.com/ksptutorial

[kjbrona]

.23 Preview
Scott Manley shows .23 changes

[Stormweaver]

So...0.23 has goo canisters and material bays set up as one-use only, return for full science. This is a change I find myself immediately comfortable with for some reason.

[Sarudak]

The real question though is when do we finally get multiplayer?

[Nexus Trimean]

So...0.23 has goo canisters and material bays set up as one-use only, return for full science. This is a change I find myself immediately comfortable with for some reason.

You can refill them with a science bay, its a nice improvement to the system, but still feels kinda clunky.

[FlowerChild]

Oh man, I really hope Icy set his game to not autoupdate. Otherwise his BTSM stream in 30 minutes will be rather short lived :)

[FlowerChild]

Hmmmmm...lots of nice bug fixes, many pertaining to BTSM. Of particular interest to me:

- The logic for all-vessel resource flow (such as Electric Charge and MonoPropellant) has been re-done.

Hopefully that will take care of command modules running out of juice and killing the Kerbals inside when you still have plenty of electricity in the rest of the ship.

- Fixed a big issue with docking operations through physicsless parts in the hierarchy between the port and the original vessel root.

I think that might be related to the docking problems with vessels flying apart that logorouge was first talking about and which many of us experienced since.

- Fixed an issue that could lead to loss of GUI responsiveness after leaving flight during reentry or supersonic flight.

That one should be obvious :)

Also, this one makes me happy:

- Kerbals on EVA can now collect the data from experiment modules and store them on crew-carrying modules.

As it will likely allow me to make surface samples return only.

A few things that will take some work on my part, like needing to rebalance to take into account Minmus having biomes now, but I'm really pleased with what this update should do for BTSM overall, so it definitely feels "worth it" :)

[Sarudak]

Hm... How do you do that on steam? And is there a way to do that without opening steam and the auto-update starting? I guess I could disconnect my router :P

[FlowerChild]

Hm... How do you do that on steam? And is there a way to do that without opening steam and the auto-update starting? I guess I could disconnect my router :P

Yeah, it's a bit of an issue. As far as I know, you have to have steam open in order to turn off autoupdates for a game, and if you open steam, it will autoupdate before you can change the setting :)

One possible work around is to go to your actual game directory before opening steam, back it up, and run BTSM directly from the KSP.exe in there instead of going through Steam. That way, the update will be applied to the original directory, not your backup of it.

That's what I'm doing anyways :)

[Ethazeriel]

If you do accidentally update your game, you can always go to the beta panel in the properties window and select the previous stable release. I believe they give us that option specifically for mod compatibility.

[Gormador]

One possible work around is to go to your actual game directory before opening steam, back it up, and run BTSM directly from the KSP.exe in there instead of going through Steam. That way, the update will be applied to the original directory, not your backup of it.

That's what I'm doing anyways :)

Oh man! Thanks for that tip!
I turned off auto update this weekend before leaving for the week (still student, I don't play anything but a bit of BTW during the week) but this will be a good thing to know if it so happens that I want to experience a new update but don't want to lose the possibility to play with an "outdated" mod.

Thanks again!

Oh and while I'm here, watching Icy's stream from Sunday: loving the delayed comments :p

[Taleric]

The archive tab at R&D was well done. Good to have a scope of your progress especially if you are away for a few weeks.

[FlowerChild]

Actually, Icy is streaming again right now, and I'm in voice chat with him if any of you wish to check it out :)

[FlowerChild]

Wow. I'll post this here rather on the KSP forums as I don't want to cause trouble over there, but christ, is the vanilla career ever terrible.

I haven't played it since .22 came out. I just started up a new vanilla career to test out the changes in .23 before trying to adapt to them (always wise ;) ), and yikes...it's just frigging horrible.

I think I lost sight of just how many things BTSM changes, and how much more sense it winds up making in terms of gameplay as a result. I just can't see much reasoning whatsoever in the way the vanilla tree is organized and I'm not even certain what I'm supposed to be accomplishing with a lot of my node purchases as I already have way more parts than I need. Meanwhile I'm doing nonsense like getting poor Jeb to hop in and out of his perfectly good capsule in low orbit to collect EVA reports over different biomes and it has me screaming "for the love of god! WHY!!!!?" at my monitor. Now I suddenly understand why it took me a month and a half to put BTSM together ;)

Anyways, I'm finding it rather gratifying despite not having much fun playing the vanilla tree, as I think it's only through this contrast that I'm really starting to feel like I achieved something of significance here.

[PatriotBob]

Words

Quit yer braggin'. We all know your mods be awesome.

All the complements on icy's stream must have gone to yer head...

:P

[FlowerChild]

Quit yer braggin'. We all know your mods be awesome.

All the complements on icy's stream must have gone to yer head...

:P

Hehe...no, wasn't bragging. More along the lines of I was previously thinking "fuck me...how did I spend a month and a half on this?", and when I played the vanilla tech tree it all suddenly made sense again.

When you're working on something like that incrementally, it's easy to lose track of the big picture. I really didn't have a good sense of how different things had become from vanilla given I saw it evolve into what it is now one small change at a time.

So yeah, not bragging so much as genuine relief and satisfaction that I seem to have actually done something worthwhile there :)

[FlowerChild]

BTW: Anyone have any idea what they were possibly thinking with this "the main menu saves its state so that when you exit it to it, it's in the same place you left it" change?

As far as I can tell, it's just a nuisance, in that when you quit to the menu, you have to back out a couple of layers before you can actually quit. I really can't figure out what motivated that.

[FlowerChild]

New version of BTSM updated to 0.23 is available over on the KSP Forums :)

[Gormador]

New version of BTSM updated to 0.23 is available over on the KSP Forums :)

Wait. What? Already?

I'm impressed man.

[FlowerChild]

New version of BTSM updated to 0.23 is available over on the KSP Forums :)

Wait. What? Already?

I'm impressed man.

Thank you...thank you...

Smaller the mod, the easier the update. Compared to a behemoth like BTW, BTSM is positively nimble in that regard :)

Also, no weird wonkery due to updates of MCP and random variable renamings and such, so at least on that front, this should be quite a bit easier to maintain.

[Katalliaan]

As far as I can tell, it's just a nuisance, in that when you quit to the menu, you have to back out a couple of layers before you can actually quit. I really can't figure out what motivated that.

Wish I knew. Unless they add the ability to access your full settings page from any of the game scenes, it means you have many more menus to go through when testing different settings. As far as I'm aware, the only advantage that change offers is that you can swap between saves faster.

[kregoth]

BTW: Anyone have any idea what they were possibly thinking with this "the main menu saves its state so that when you exit it to it, it's in the same place you left it" change?

As far as I can tell, it's just a nuisance, in that when you quit to the menu, you have to back out a couple of layers before you can actually quit. I really can't figure out what motivated that.

I believe they are referring to the different backgrounds when in the main menu (the Kerbals floating in space). Currently when entering the Main menu it always plays the same one, now it will continue to change because it saved wherever it was last at. At least that's my theory, because IIRC there are quite a few different background animation for the main menu, we just never see them because it always restarts.

[FlowerChild]

I believe they are referring to the different backgrounds when in the main menu (the Kerbals floating in space). Currently when entering the Main menu it always plays the same one, now it will continue to change because it saved wherever it was last at. At least that's my theory, because IIRC there are quite a few different background animation for the main menu, we just never see them because it always restarts.

Nah man, I definitely know what it does:

Basically, what happens is that say you load a game from the main menu. When you quit back to the main menu from within the game, instead of returning you to the root of the menu, it will return you to the load saved game screen.

It's frankly really annoying as it means you then have to back out an extra layer or two to actually quit out of the game from there.

My question is more as to why on earth anyone would consider making such a change :)