[niffiwan]

Sorry, I haven't seen that error before. I just copied all the retail VPs over from an installation I had ages ago, possibly off the retail CD ISOs, but I can't remember for sure as it was too long ago.

How are you trying to install retail? Do you have the GoG installer? Or something else?

[woutersmits]

i did from gog
site installer

[Lukeskywalkie]

Not sure if this is the right place, but just wanted to say thank you for this huge revision to the way FS2 SCP is released and enjoyed.  I think I understand where a lot of people's reservations are coming from - especially those of us who've grown accustomed to handling every part of the install by hand.  It feels like a loss of control - where once I knew what every file was doing in its folder, and spent hours combining my preferred mods via .ini, now it's all going to just drop into place with a click?  Yuck!

Then I tried it.  It took a moment, because I hit the warning 'don't use an existing fs2 folder!' or whatever, and tried to do a complete reinstall from disk, but your program outsmarted me and installed in my SCP folder anyway.  Once I realized how it worked - creating a new directory and 'harvesting' needed files from the old one, I got all excited to try all the new campaigns and mods people have made since my last tour of duty (mid 2017).  I'm not spending 2/3rds of my freespace time sorting or extracting or testing settings or figuring which nightly will probably work...I'm just booting up knossos and actually playing the damned game.   I didn't want to like it, but I do, and I think it's essential to the long-term health of the SCP et all that this system succeeds. 

Thank you for all your hard work, and for dragging us into a new era of FS2...again.  I can't believe how long I've been playing because of you guys and gals (and NEVER GETTING BETTER AT IT sorry ignore that I'm fine), and now I think my future kid just might get a chance to do so as well.  That's wild.

Cheers.

[HLD_Prophecy]

Hi all,

I have a pre-existing mod folder with mod.ini, not a .vp! Trying to plug it right in as a Knossos mod and can't remember how to do it right. Tried creating a new mod and dropping the 'data' folder contents in: it wouldn't launch, couldn't find the executable until I manually led it to my old FS2 directory, then launched as a blank mod.

[Mito [PL]]

I think you need to create a mod.json that lets Knossos know of the most important mod data, like used packages and FSO requirements.

[wookieejedi]

There is an import ini option, have you checked out the manual?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oHq1YRc1eXbCgW-NqqKo1-6N_myfZzoBdwZuP16XImA/edit?pli=1#

[Nightmare]

Is the manual included to the Knossos download? Elseway it could be put somewhere more prominent.

[wookieejedi]

Hmm not sure, though I know it is pinned on the Discord channel.

[Nightmare]

It's not in the OP or the first page; don't know how many look on Discord. It's part of the (very short) wiki entry about Knossos though.

[HLD_Prophecy]

I've tried importing the mod.ini, I get the screen 'you can't edit this mod since it doesn't have any packages yet'.

EDIT: Sorry for asking to be baby-stepped through this, I've lieterally done this exact thing before and I can't remember a thing about how it works, plus I'm doing this in short spurts between work/school and I can't think beyond the moment... 

[wookieejedi]

No worries! I would recommend making an entirely new mod following the instructions in the guide, that way you can see every step and what each step does. If you do get that error message again, simply just go to the Dev tab, click your mod, click modify, and then click add package. Hope that helps!

[HLD_Prophecy]

No worries! I would recommend making an entirely new mod following the instructions in the guide, that way you can see every step and what each step does. If you do get that error message again, simply just go to the Dev tab, click your mod, click modify, and then click add package. Hope that helps!

Thanks a bunch for the support!

So: Create new mod, then when do I add my old data folder in? When I use the Add Package feature? (to make it clear, all my missions/assets were already done, 'way back when' with wxLauncher. I'm porting to Knossos for touch-up, bugfixing and release)   

[wookieejedi]

Yeah, after you create a mod add a package, then manually put your mod files in that package. For example, I make a package called main then in that folder I manually make a data folder and sub folders like tables, missions etc, and put my content in those folders. There are screenshots on the guide too 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oHq1YRc1eXbCgW-NqqKo1-6N_myfZzoBdwZuP16XImA/edit?pli=1#

[HLD_Prophecy]

Thanks, that worked great! Seems like the guide screenshots are a bit outdated as per the most recent Knossos version, but regardless I was able to get all my old work up and running!

Now to get things spun up for release... 

[wookieejedi]

Great, glad to hear you got it all working!

[ngld]

Oh, look... I'm not dead! This release was long overdue...

A bunch of PRs from jg18 have been merged which bring us the following improvements:

• Mod sorting!
• Faster mod listing (searching and tab switching should be much smoother now)
• A bunch of improvements for the develop tab
• Network settings
• FSO (and other builds) is hidden by default now but can be re-enabled in the settings
• A better welcome wizard
• FS2 mods are hidden by default if retail is not installed but can be enabled through settings
• A better post-setup retail install prompt
• You now get an actually helpful popup when you click the help button!

... I think that's everything. Huge thanks to jg18 for his work!

Other changes in this release are:

• Resumable downloads: If a download is interrupted, Knossos will no longer re-download the whole file but instead resume where it was interrupted saving a lot of time and bandwidth!
• Resumable uploads: If your mod upload is interrupted, Knossos will automatically retry the upload and resume it as well. For each interruption at most 10 MiB need to be re-uploaded no

matter how big your mod is.
  This change hopefully resolves a lot of painful upload issues.

• Almost all Nebula requests will be automatically retried. This should make Knossos more reliable when you're on a bad connection. Let me know if this helps!
• The Nebula settings section has been improved. It should be more obvious now whether you're logged in or not.
• You can enable Knossos' debug log in the settings now as well as open or upload it. This should make future troubleshooting easier.
• The critical error window now contains links to Discord, HLP and GitHub which hopefully encourages people to report bugs and make it easier for us to help them.
• You can now force Knossos to close even if there are tasks running in the background.
• A bunch of annoying bugs have been fixed.

Since there were so many changes, I'm fairly certain that I've introduced new bugs and hope to find them during the RC phase. As such, this release won't show up in Knossos' auto-update and has to be installed manually. Just download and run this updater. If you're on macOS, here's the DMG.

Sorry, no Linux releases this time. I don't want people to automatically update into an RC and making a new package just for RCs is a pain. Building from source shouldn't be too hard though.... :X


Let me know if you find any bugs / crashes / etc.

@woutersmits: Make sure you're using the Freespace2 installer and not the GoG Galaxy installer.
@Lukeskywalkie: Thanks for the feedback! Always appreciated.
I like fiddling a lot with stuff myself so I've tried to give as much control as possible to the user while still automating everyhting the user doesn't care about.

I've added the mod creation guide to the OP... I feel like it's getting bigger with each release.

[Cyborg17]

The Future Freespace pilots of the world salute you! 

[Nightmare]

I've added the mod creation guide to the OP... I feel like it's getting bigger with each release.

And if people would start reading it now, you might have less questions to awnser. If.

[ngld]

@Cygorg17: Thanks! 

@Nightmare: I probably should make a new thread which is going to only contain release announcements and an FAQ for stuff like this. That way release posts won't be drowned out by troubleshooting and bug reports.


Someone PM'd me about the tile images (the mod images on the Home and Explore tab) and proposed a bigger size and removing the title below the image.

The top image is the current size and the bottom image is the size other launchers (like Uplay or Origin) use.

I personally like the size we have right now. If we make the tiles bigger, less mods will fit on the screen (even if we remove the title bar). Another issue is that all the existing images will have to be updated for the new size (or just upscale them but that's... meh).
That person offered to take care of updating the images but I'm not sure if the people who uploaded the mods in the first place would be okay with that.
I don't feel too strongly about the whole thing so I'd like to hear more opinions on this.


Since the last Knossos release I've been tracking download speeds since I was curious how well the servers are working for everyone (slow downloads are a pet peeve of mine):

Code: [Select]

                fsnebula.org    3.265 MiB/s
             cf.fsnebula.org    9.156 MiB/s
 porphyrion.feralhosting.com   11.064 MiB/s
Which is a very interesting result since fsnebula.org and cf.fsnebula.org are actually the same server, they're just routed differently (hurray for ISPs  ).

This has given me the motivation to finally implement a speed test and preferred mirror setting. Once you've set that, Knossos will always try to download from that server first (instead of a random one). If the download fails, it'll still fall back to the other servers. This approach hopefully gets you faster (and consistently faster) downloads without causing any new issues.

Here's an example from one mod install:

Code: [Select]

         server          speed  download time
   fsnebula.org    0.507 MiB/s  190 s
cf.fsnebula.org   11.871 MiB/s   10 s
   fsnebula.org    0.946 MiB/s  248 s
cf.fsnebula.org    4.029 MiB/s   34 s
Each line represents a single download. If that user would have downloaded everything over cf.fsnebula.org and not only half of the files, the whole mod install would have been faster by several minutes!


Finally, I wanted to mention another issue: The first launch after installation and after each update, Knossos is running as administrator. AFAIK the only issue this has caused is that some people chose a special folder as their library path which means that they always have to run Knossos as admin or it won't work since it can't write to the library folder without admin permissions.
The cause is that once an application has admin permissions in Windows, it can't drop them. Even new processes it launches inherit the permissions. The installer (and updater) run with admin permissions to make sure they can write to C:\Program Files. When they launch Knossos, it inherits those permissions and can't drop them (= run as normal user).
To the best of my knowledge, the only way around this is to modify the installer and updater to launch two processes: The first process runs as a normal user process and launches a second process with admin permissions. The first process remains hidden while the second process acts as usual. Once the installer finishes, the second process tells the first to launch Knossos which can then run without admin permissions since the first process never had those. IMO this is way too complicated for a fairly minor issue.


So, yeah that's all for now. Feel free to discuss the above topics while I'll get back to fixing Knossos bugs.

[PIe]

I definitely would not like the mod title removed, since that would force people who want their mod's name visible to put it in the tile image somewhere.  I also see no reason to resize the images since mods will take up more visual space and the images will take longer to download (when they're not cached).  I don't know of any real benefit so it would just be unnecessary work.