TweakScale :: Roadmap

Fellow Kerbonauts,

The TweakScale 2.4.3.x series is, finally, near the EoL. I think it will be [one two] three (!) :P more build release to fix any small bug or add some minor improvement, and unless something else happens, that will be it for this troublesome 2.4.3.x. I want to thank every one of you that helped me to diagnose all that glitches, bugs and misbehaviours in which TweakScale was, directly or indirectly, involved. Every bug report, every complain, every log, helped me to detect, diagnose and fix a huge amount of bugs and misconfigurations on the whole eco system, what ends up being good for everybody.

I'm pretty happy with the ending results besides the trouble, we have a way more stable gaming installment nowadays. As nothing good cames cheap, we have a somewhat whiny game setup too. :P

Oh well. :)

What I want to share with you now is what to expect from the next two minor TweakScale versions, 2.4.x and the yet somewhat far 2.5.x .

2.4.4.x : Unbreaking Ground Parts

The whole 2.4.4.x releases will be focused on properly supporting what's now unsupported from Stock, DLCs and some heavily used Add'Ons, as Firespitter (and probably some others, as you suggest and it's feasible). Deprecated and or redundant patches will be removed from the distribution, so no more stomping the fellow Add'On Author's toes [done on 2.4.3.5 due the potential toe stomping fest]. Patches to Add'Ons under my control will migrate to them - I intend to declutter TweakScale and minimize the Exposure Surface. And as my Add'Ons gets updated, it will avoid the need to update TweakScale too - hardly a bad thing.

The sole purpose of the 2.4 series is to zero the Warnings and Alerts (as it was the 2.4.3.x to zero the FATALities), both on screen as in the KSP.log. At least for the Add'Os being maintained - there're not too much I can do for stalled ones besides applying Overules and Hotfixes, and these will not need necessarily a dedicated release - not to mention that they will still be lingering on the future TweakScale versions. :)

2.4.5.x : Old parts, New tricks

Renewed support for currently (partially) supported parts will be updated - in special, I want to make Wheels correctly scalable again. This, as usual, will not be free - by correctly scaling up the Wheels, we end up correctly scaling down them too - and so things can break on games with tiny little wheels that now are too strong for they sizes and will became weaker as they should.

So there's a chance to postpone these features or to make it optional, as I made with the Input resource of the ModuleGenerator.

Let's see what happens...

While one or another mistake will probably bite our SAS, I expect a very smooth transition for the whole series.

2.5.x : "My Kraken…. It's full of ":FOR"s….

This one can be troublesome again. My apologies.

The root cause of some of the worse problems that plagued parts using TweakScale in the last years (yeah… years) is rogue patches. However, TweakScale also didn't did its part of the bargain to help the fellow Add'Ons Authors - currently, it's not possible to use :BEFORE and :AFTER on TweakScale, as it's still on the "Legacy" patching support.

A lot of mishaps would had been prevented by using that two directives. However, they :NEEDS need TweakScale using :FOR on its patches, what would remove the TweakScale from the Legacy patching - and this is where things start to go through the tubes.

Almost every Third Party Add'On on the wild, now, relies on TweakScale being in the Legacy with the Add'Ons ending up, after some blood, sweat and tears, reaching a fragile equilibrium on the patching - as an airplane flying in its absolute ceiling. A Kerbal farts somewhere in the plane, the thing stalls. This aphorism describes pretty well the current status quo, by the way. :P

There's no easy way out of this mess:

But, as already is usual, no savegame will be left behind.

The (current) schedule is here.