[rambo919]

Not sure where this is best put, a moderator is welcome to move it if need be.

Having gotten interested in Space Combat games again after long time of not touching them I looked into what is going on with FSO.

I am running MX linux which is debian based and Ubuntu PPA's CAN work but often does damage if you try to use them so I cannot install from the PPA provided. The build instructions for the old version of Knossos seem out of date and I saw somewhere someone finding it impossible to build against Debian. The new Knossos is still in alpha and similarly a no-go because of instability. This left Wine.... and it runs, it downloads but you cannot run anything because it seems unable to save settings... I am guessing this means it cannot save the ini files because I cannot find any anywhere.

Regarding the chosen methods of downloading.... it's pretty much a no-go for me personally at this point because I don't have fast internet (nor really the luxury of expecting the internet to always be there) and the power regularly goes out so I cannot just download massive amounts of data (I saw someone referring to his mods taking up almost 60GB of space) and hope for the best. ATM I am downloading everything I THINK I will need in the future due to my uncertain future, it's better to have and not need than need and not have. The main problem with the current strategy is there is no way of running small updates it seems like nor can you piecemeal download the 7z's and then just download what's missing later... nor can you store these mods in compressed form unless a specific mod team has made provision for it.

Also in Knossos itself (old version obviously) there is no mention of how complete any particular campaign is nor any kind of sorting beyond alphabetical. It's a common problem with niche modding communities I have noticed where the assumption is that all players are willing beta test subjects and that there are not some that not having the time would only want to play complete projects.

As a personal gripe, I require quicksave or manual saves mid mission because of attention problems.... and not always having the most amount of time at my disposal. Not having those in flight games is a strange almost tradition of HARDCORE that I never really understood or cared for.... which is a main reason I left flight games alone for so long. It would be nice if such a feature could be implemented globally at some point.

I saw mention somewhere that the new Knossos will have changes regarding how downloaded mods are saved or archived... but no real details and looking at the rate of progress I highly doubt it's going to be close to stable soon.

Now given my personal challenges I have to leave delving into the mods of this particular game till some undefined point in the future. I am disappointed but glad that someone is still actually actively developing the port for this game, which I have if nothing else a lot of nostalgia for from my youth having partially played both games in the past.

[Goober5000]

As I understand it, the main difficulty with building old Knossos is that it uses so many different technologies.  This will be improved in new-Knossos, but as you noticed it won't be ready any time soon - it depends on ngld who has not been available recently.  A couple of other people are working on their own mod managers, but again these are in the very early stages of development.  There is also the old FSO Installer, which still works and is still maintained, but most mod makers do not deploy updates for that platform.

Regarding the mods on Knossos - as far as I can see, most of the mod descriptions do a pretty good job of indicating whether the mod is finished or not, and if any future releases are planned.  And very few publicly available mods are actively undergoing beta testing.  This doesn't mean they are free of bugs, though.  Are there any in particular you noticed?

Mid-mission saves was covered fairly well in the other thread - essentially, this is up to the mission designer; there is no mid-mission save built into the engine.  However, as mentioned, most missions are short enough to mitigate this problem.  Be glad you aren't playing the infamous 40-minute missions from X-Wing, TIE Fighter, or Wing Commander.

[BengalTiger]

This guide can help if you don't want Knossos:
https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Manually_Installing_FreeSpace_2_Open

[rambo919]

Regarding the mods on Knossos - as far as I can see, most of the mod descriptions do a pretty good job of indicating whether the mod is finished or not, and if any future releases are planned.  And very few publicly available mods are actively undergoing beta testing.  This doesn't mean they are free of bugs, though.  Are there any in particular you noticed?

My first step in my investigations as you might call them was to go through the hosted projects section and then external sites where I noticed a number of unfinished projects... are these pages perhaps merely out of date then?

Mid-mission saves was covered fairly well in the other thread - essentially, this is up to the mission designer; there is no mid-mission save built into the engine.  However, as mentioned, most missions are short enough to mitigate this problem.  Be glad you aren't playing the infamous 40-minute missions from X-Wing, TIE Fighter, or Wing Commander.

Yeah you have to take what you can get I suppose.... there is no way in hell I am playing THOSE kind of missions without saving so thanks for the warning. This is why I love playing games in emulators even if they have PC versions.... save states.

[rambo919]

OK given that I unexpectedly got upgraded to a fibre line (was forced to because the copper is being discontinued from out under me) and having double line speed temporarily due to a promo I decided to run a bit of an experiment today and downloaded the upgrade project and FS port and mods starting with A and B the result being about 130GB.

A lot of this is due to multiple versions of MVPS with there being no incremental releases and mods mostly not being updated to the newest versions.... this seems highly inefficient for serverload nvm distribution. But this leads me to a question.... what happens to unused and outdated MVPS packages are they deleted or just left to rot?

[rambo919]

This guide can help if you don't want Knossos:
https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Manually_Installing_FreeSpace_2_Open

There is one flaw in this page, it does not cover ini file generation which is something I constantly see is needed for manual downloads.... and that alone obviously scares people off from manual installs.

Speaking of which if I DO have manual install packages, can I just extract them to the library/FS2 folder and then install through knossos where it will automatically pick up the already present files?

[Goober5000]

My first step in my investigations as you might call them was to go through the hosted projects section and then external sites where I noticed a number of unfinished projects... are these pages perhaps merely out of date then?

Yep.  The hosted websites are not really updated these days, with rare exceptions (Scroll, FSPort).  There is a project to link the front page with the Knossos mod pages but that is on hold for the time being.

OK given that I unexpectedly got upgraded to a fibre line (was forced to because the copper is being discontinued from out under me) and having double line speed temporarily due to a promo I decided to run a bit of an experiment today and downloaded the upgrade project and FS port and mods starting with A and B the result being about 130GB.

A lot of this is due to multiple versions of MVPS with there being no incremental releases and mods mostly not being updated to the newest versions.... this seems highly inefficient for serverload nvm distribution. But this leads me to a question.... what happens to unused and outdated MVPS packages are they deleted or just left to rot?

Glad your situation improved.   Unused and outdated versions are not deleted, just left alone.  There is a complex situation here where some mods require newer MediaVPs and some aren't compatible with newer MediaVPs.  And some people want the latest features while some people are running older hardware and need less intensive features.  It's hard to strike a balance.

This guide can help if you don't want Knossos:
https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Manually_Installing_FreeSpace_2_Open

There is one flaw in this page, it does not cover ini file generation which is something I constantly see is needed for manual downloads.... and that alone obviously scares people off from manual installs.

Speaking of which if I DO have manual install packages, can I just extract them to the library/FS2 folder and then install through knossos where it will automatically pick up the already present files?

A mod.ini should be the responsibility of the mod developer, but you can find documentation on it here.

Theoretically Knossos supports importing mods from mod.ini files, but I've never tried it.  Yes, if you do everything right Knossos should pick it up, but there are a lot of things that need to be formatted a certain way.  I think the better approach is to act as if you're creating a new mod using Knossos, then copy the files into the folder structure Knossos creates.