RT vs stock comms

[raidernick]

I know this has been discussed once before about 2 years ago and nothing came of it but I really think we would benefit from getting rid of remote tech and moving to the stock comm system. RT is a major source of overhead for the game and I would LOVE to get rid of unnecessary required/recommended RO mods. I see no real benefit to still using RT with the amount of performance issues it causes in game. Is this something we can look into doing? This is not my area of expertise so I'd need someone willing to either do it or at least help with it.

@PhineasFreak @Theysen @pap1723

[MikeOnTea]

I'm already working on this (see #1969), though i should maybe give an update. Currently i'm trying to get mass data of early comm systems, explorer satellites/pioneer probes etc, to get a balance idea for those. Apart from that, i think concerning RO, commnet already mostly works, except vessel to vessel range which is too low.

[raidernick]

the thing is I want to separate out all of the RT configs from all other configs. I don't want them mixed together any longer and they should be in a separate folder labeled for RT only. If it were only up to me I'd just totally discontinue RT support altogether and remove the configs permanently but that might upset some people.

[pap1723]

Detaching RT support is a good idea. It also allows us to drastically lower the amount of RT antennas. There can be different groups and depending on the need of the antenna, it can get the RT antenna attached instead of a custom one for each antenna like it is now.

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On Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 2:37 PM raidernick ***@***.*** wrote: the thing is I want to separate out all of the RT configs from all other configs. I don't want them mixed together any longer and they should be in a separate folder labeled for RT only. If it were only up to me I'd just totally discontinue RT support altogether and remove the configs permanently but that might upset some people. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1992 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ASjbf8pS5gujAhiWSXZCL9uX9pQ7bYQ7ks5vOb1_gaJpZM4a_w69> .

[Bornholio]

I cheer for all that. #1969

[raidernick]

I would like to get this fix into the RO release for ksp 1.6 if possible. I can remove all the RT references from my mods and KK mods(and put them in a separate file for now) since I maintain those but the rest someone else is going to have to do. I don't want to mess with the stock parts or other mod parts.

[PhineasFreak]

If it were only up to me I'd just totally discontinue RT support altogether and remove the configs permanently

I think that's how it is going to be. I mean, does it make a lot of sense to keep a mod dependency that has been (almost) deprecated by a stock feature? We will lose the "antenna targeting" feature for directional antennae but i do not think that this is a major thing anyway (maybe mods like CommNet Constellation could take care of this - the developer is part of the RT group).

[kurgut]

What about the RT computer? Pretty useful and used when not connected, or is there an equivalent out there I don't know about maybe?

[PhineasFreak]

@kurgut I think that the CommNet approach will allow the user to control the active vessel (either in full or limited mode) but you will not be able to transmit science back. We can assume that the player is the onboard computer instead of mission control and that all actions have been preloaded into the computer memory to be executed.

[Capkirk123]

Real Antennas has for the most part superseded RT, and is based off the stock CommNet. Could this be considered resolved?

[DRVeyl]

I'll take a minute to poke this, I guess, just from the position of doing maintenance on the GH Issues.

Nobody currently playing RP-1 [maybe for the past year+] is using RT, because RP-1 deps RealAntennas and it conflicts RT.

However, RO has not removed support for RT, there's just no patch maintenance at all being done for it at least since I've been a part of the community. Nor is there patching for stock CommNet, ie nothing is setting range values for ModuleDataTransmitters for anything except maybe the stock antenna parts.

All RT patches should currently be guarded with a :NEEDS block, same for RA.
RT saw commits through 2021, so it's not like it isn't being maintained. I'm just not sure how well its user base overlaps with RO's anymore.

The RT patches are currently still interspersed in the existing part configs. Is it worth the effort to pull them out into a separate folder? Or should this issue just be closed and the state of RT support is "whatever it was the last time we committed, there's nothing new unless some new contributor becomes heavily motivated to update missing RT patches, but currently nobody in the community fits that description." and it's not worth the effort to do the patch maintenance on what might just be NOP patches currently.

(The same is somewhat true for RA patches: they'll be in the part configs that have antennas... although while I had hoped for RO to be the repository for part configs for RA, most of the compat patches are in RA's repo. Since RA cares about the part physical size, there would not be any difference between "stock" and "RO" configs for an antenna part so it doesn't matter where the patch lives except from a maintenance perspective.)

[DRVeyl]

All RT patches should currently be guarded with a :NEEDS block, same for RA.

Well, that was certainly incorrect. On anything recently maintained, it would have been added. However, as I'm going through various probably-outdated configs poking at things like reaction wheels, I'm finding several mods that blanket add the RT PMs without a NEEDS guard.