Modding, Mission Design, and Coding > FS2 Open Tools

"Knossos -- how does it work?": A Narrative

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Kestrellius:
Okay. I'm...I'm going to try to be as nice as I can, here. I'm...all I'm trying to do is work with Mantle, which I already had all set up and working with the old launcher, so I can get an update out. It worked fine with the old launcher, but now all the new releases are going to be dependent on Knossos, I guess, so I'm trying to switch over to that.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how or why Knossos is doing any of the things it's doing, and the things I do know how to do don't appear to work. Furthermore, I can find absolutely no explanation of any of this whatsoever anywhere. I don't know how this thing is supposed to work.

So. I open it up and Mantle -- which is in my FS2 folder along with a billion other mods -- is nowhere to be found except as a tile in the "explore" category. Installing that would presumably just download the old version that I released last year, which I don't want to do because it would be pointless and I don't want to test because downloading things with Knossos doesn't work. The only mods that are installed are a couple that I think I installed last time I tried to use this thing, before I gave up and deleted some of the Knossos files so I could actually use a functioning launcher again.

Speaking of launchers, I don't know how to use this one. I can run one of the specific installed mods -- assuming it decides to work -- but that's about it.

Now there's also this other Freespace Open folder alongside my FS2 directory, which IIRC was also created during my first Knossos install. It has folders for the few mods Knossos registers as installed, which I think contain all of the necessary files for those mods. However, it doesn't contain any FS2 executables, FRED instances, or anything that looks like it might be a dedicated launcher. I have no clue as to the purpose of this second folder, beyond the misdirection of hapless modders. Well, okay. I have a vague notion as to what it does -- it's some sort of specialized mod folder for Knossos. I do not understand why it's necessary.

So at this point I don't even know where I should be looking. Most of the features of the launcher I'm used to seem to appear in the options menu, except there's no way to, y'know, actually launch it -- except by selecting a mod from the list. I think the way it works is that you can enter the flags in the command line, like before, and then you launch the game by picking a mod, and the flags are then applied. But that means you can set the flags to run, say, Vassago's Dirge, and then you select Transcend and hit play, and the game gives you Vassago's Dirge instead. But that's --

Wait, no, I just tested it. The mod you select overrides the flags. Okay. So I guess you have to pick retail, then? That makes...slightly more sense.

Anyway. So I tried moving Mantle and its dependents into the Freespace Open folder, hoping that Knossos would register them as installed. (This appears to have made Mantle vanish from the list of installable mods, which is weird as hell -- presumably some name-uniqueness thing? That or it was removed since I last saw it and I'm just not remembering correctly.) It didn't make Knossos register them, but it did let me run Mantle with the command-line flags. Unfortunately the game shat itself and closed as soon as I loaded a mission. Apparently it couldn't find any of my custom assets, despite they and their tables all being right there in the folder that I moved.

(Something similar happened when I tried to run FRED from my FS2 folder -- opening a mission from Mantle resulted in a bunch of errors and half the ships getting turned into Ulysses because somehow it couldn't find my models.)

So I moved Mantle's folder and its dependents back, saw that other thread on using the "development" tab to create a mod for this purpose, and tried that. I managed to make a mod pointing to Mantle's ini. It yelled at me when I tried to put bpcomplete and mediavps_2014 as dependents. I was hoping that wouldn't amount to anything; I was incorrect.

(I didn't realize until just now that I had to put in the FSO settings for the new mod independently, so it wouldn't launch at all at first. But I figured that out, so.)

But that doesn't help anyway because once I put in the settings and launched it, it just gave me retail FS2. Presumably it can't find bpcomplete or the mediavps. Aaaand that's where I am now, having finally gotten sufficiently annoyed about this to go on the internet and rant about it.

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So. Here's what I think is happening:

When Knossos installs a mod, it installs it into the new Freespace Open folder. This installation contains unique architecture which can't be replicated by simply moving a preexisting folder from the old system into the new directory. Therefore the way to link an old mod to Knossos -- other than building said architecture from scratch, which I have no idea how to do -- is to use the "development" tab to create a shell mod, containing the necessary architecture, which points to the old one.

But, presumably, Knossos doesn't know what to do with further dependencies if they rely on mods it doesn't recognize. So if I wanted to run Mantle, I would need to create a Knossos mod pointing to mediavps_2014, then create a Knossos mod pointing to bpcomplete and dependent upon mediavps_2014, and then do what I did before -- create a Knossos mod pointing to Mantle and dependent upon both of them.

This...just... It makes me think this is a system specifically designed to generate cruft, and I have no idea why. I can only guess that the intent is to create a cleaner mod installation system, but in this case, at least, it's done the opposite.

Of course, rather than creating a new Knossos mod for BP, I could try to install it via Knossos. But I'm not eager to try downloading something with Knossos again, because:

The new MediaVPs won't download. They got stuck at 95% after like three hours*, and then when I tried to cancel (because it doesn't let you close the program while there are processes running) it stopped responding. Gah. At least it doesn't keep running in the background after I close the window; those are the worst.

*I have a fairly bad internet connection at the moment, so that might just be how long it takes. Still, I'm not sure.

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So...I'm genuinely not sure what I'm supposed to be doing here. Is there a big link to a guide somewhere in one of the release threads, and I'm just an idiot and I missed it? Am I just an idiot in general?

Like -- I don't think this would be as bad if I were just trying to play. Then I could just mess with **** until it worked, and it'd be fine. But, in my case -- I need some idea of what's going on under the hood, because I have to make sure my mod isn't broken. And...this whole new system is making that process a giant pain in the ass.

Anyway. I hope this wasn't too unreadably disorganized, or too vitriolic. I'm a lot less angry now than I was when I started this post, so that's good.

Hopefully someday I'll figure out how to use this thing without it making me want to break something.

Admiral Nelson:
Let me try and explain a bit here -- I would suggest you join the HLP discord, where there are many people waiting to help you with these things....  Knossos is meant to be a fresh ecosystem so that interdependencies amongst all the various mods floating around can be managed systemically.  You therefore want to separate it from your old legacy installs -- it is more than a launcher substitute, for instance, as it doesn't use mod.inis.

The way to port your legacy mod to Knossos is to first go into the development tab and create a new mod.  That new mod will have both packages and dependencies. Here is an example taken from the upcoming Sol A History rerelease:


You can see from the bunch of tabs there that S:AH has multiple packages (becuase it is a big mod with large files).  You may only need one package if you aren't redistributing tons of big files. A package is just a folder structure - here is the Core package structure for S:AH:


So to make a Knossos Mantle you would create the new mod using Knossos and  then create a package.  Then you paste your mod's folders and files (including the data folder) into the folder that package creates.  You don't have to make vps, just place the 'raw' files and folders in there as checking the "build vp files" box will do it for you.

Then finally, you add dependencies which you see in the first screenshot -- these would be to FSO, mediavps and blue planet, or so it sounds from your description.  These dependencies replace the old mod.ini concept.  They exist so that you do not have to tell people what they need to download, or what those mods have to be named -- Knossos will automatically download any dependencies your mod might have.  This is the real benefit of Knossos -- it worries about messy dependencies, and then you can create fresh versions of your mod with a couple of clicks.

mjn.mixael:
To clarify; Knossos downloads dependencies for players when they choose to install your mod. If a player only has retail and they click to install Mantle, then Knossos will install Mantle, BP, and MediaVPs.

However, when you are creating a mod in the development tab, you cannot tell Knossos to use BP as a dependency if you don't have it installed from Knossos.

Knossos is blissfully unaware of your old fs2 folder with it's billions of mods. Knossos does all the heavy lifting for you while you were still trying to do it yourself which caused most of your problems. The resistance to downloading anything via Knossos caused the rest of your issues.

Knossos is a fresh start, unconcerned with doing things like a launcher designed 10+ years ago. This is a core principle of it that is single handedly responsible for how easy it is for new players to get straight into gameplay as quickly as possible. Sure, things are a little different for mod developers... But we learned all the things necessary to make a mod including FRED, and who knows what other tools... We can figure this out, too.

HLD_Prophecy:
So my beloved wxLauncher is outclassed?  :sigh:

Man, I felt the same thing when I moved from the default launcher.

Realy though, I can't/shouldn't be using wxlauncher anymore?

mjn.mixael:
You can use whatever launcher you like. The mods I work on will only be uploaded to Knossos (which does provide single file downloads if that's your thing), though. Knossos as a distribution platform, file host, and versioning system is unparalleled and I see no reason to try and match that (duplicate my effort) for other types of installs.

I was 45 minutes into packing up MediaVPs 3.8 (creating VPs, zipping them up, gathering checksums, etc) when I realized Knossos does all of this and even offers individual downloads... and it does it faster.

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