Squadcast Summary 2015/07/03

[Superfluous J]

With OWK still out, I had some time so watched the archived Squadcast stream.

Regular text is my paraphrasing what Maxmaps said.

"things in quotes were said verbatum. I use... ellipsis when I skip part of the quote. I also skip ums and ahs."

These are my asides, mostly about how he's playing the game.

I put 10:00 interval breaks so if you have questions you can get a better idea of where to jump in the video to see.

0:00

He's on 1.0.4

backs Reddit mods. squad has an opinion but no acutal say

Unity 5 work is continuing.

it's been a massive amount of work.

surprising with cool things and optimizations, but it's a "nontrivial" amount of work.

lots of stuff just being redone, to make them work the way they did before.

3 ui systems in use now, because Unity 4 did not do what they needed.

Unity 5 ui system allows them to do all the things, but that means they have to redo them all.

"Not from scratch, but pretty close to from scratch."

Max isn't throttling his *7* *engines* up from 50%. It's driving me nuts.

Finally he does, and then lets his rocket flip

q: New screenshots of new shaders? a: When they are presentable.

10:00

They can't say that as soon as they've got U5 done, they'll have 64 bit. However, that's the goal. They will do "everything we can"

64 bit is relevant to those who don't use mods.

What's in 1.1? "Wouldn't you love to know."

Max comes in for a direct landing on Mun. He seems a bit low on fuel.

One of the great things about U5, is a 64 bit editor.

Their project is large.

Compiling takes a long time, and crushes the non-64 bit editor.

Max realizes during deceleration to land that he doesn't have the fuel to get home.

The slope looks bad and he's using a tall lander...

He lands, it's about a 20 degree slope. THe lander falls over. The lack of fuel to get home turns out to be immaterial

Max is discussing why 64 bit works for some people but not others. Feel free to jump to about 16:00 or so and listen yourself.

He tries to take off even though he's sideways, and blows up all the ship except the command pod.

20:00

Most of this is Max converting his rocket to land on Minmus. Which the rocket was fully capable of before, even considering poor flying

He puts 6 unidirectional RCS thrusters around the craft. I'm going to call that a unique way to put them on.

He launches with Bob at the controls, and the rocket predictably flips uncontrollably.

30:00

He gets to orbit anyway, but is down to just his lander's fuel. He presses on regardless.

He wastes a ton of fuel fixing his AN/DN in LKO.

q: will the gimbal be nerfed? it's way too fast moving also the sas always overshoots the nodes

a: "we might go back into sas and gimbal speed in the future. it's not in the short term plans but is part of the gameplay polishes we have taken a peek at.

right now they can react too quickly... more than the sas wanted them to move and then has to compensate an it's not hyper-efficient. It's not top priority but it's definitely something we can look into"

40:00

He opts to flyby and get science to return to Kerbin.

q: have you thought to add KER to the game?

a: "we're not adding kerbal engineer entirely as it is but there definitely is a plan."

Based on Kerbal skills.

If everything works out we can have it in 1.1

Played around with it for 1.0 but it didn't come out right, no matter how much they tried.

He has a heat shield at least, but he has no PE marker meaning his PE is underground. From Minmus.

He realizes his re-entry is too steep hen he's maybe 500km above the ground. He burns to fix it.

He runs out of fuel with the PE right under ground. Less than 100km.

He transmits all his data, separaetes the spent stage, and comes down on his possibly aerodynamically stable return vehicle.

52km, fire.

44km, his spent stage explodes off camera.

31km, he gets below 3km/s, heat gauges start popping up on the ship.

20km, he's giong 2km/s, talking about how RCS is actually saving the day. I suspect it may be pod torque.

15km, he's going 1km/s. I think he'll actually make it.

...and he does. Nothing exploded on the main ship!

...then he hits the chute going 400m/s and it breaks.

"I forgot that I'm a dumbass."

130m/s splashdown, everything dies.

50:00

q: ksp for android and ios?

a: no. it'd have to be a totally new game. try Simple Rockets.

U5 is not ready to show.

q: physics on multiple cores?

a: U5 allows you to break up calculations over multiplecores. He doesn't know how it does it or specifics. All they know is it works on multiple cores.

q: Holo Lens?

a: That'd be cool. he saw the minecraft demo and his mind went pop.

He launches the same ship he launched the first 2 times, this time with a pilot and a couple more fins.

It flips anyway. The rocket is inherently unstable because of all the (unneeded) mass at the back as fuel drains.

He goes for a powered landing back on land...

Working on U5 is fantastic, but it's a lot of work.

Steering system for wheels is good enough to be in a "proper car game" now.

1:00:00

He gives up on trying powered landing, but does hit the chute under 250m/s.

Landing is successful.

Edited July 4, 2015 by 5thHorseman

[mythbusters844]

Thanks for the summary!

q: New screenshots of new shaders? a: When they are presentable.

Ooo

[Yukon0009]

Ah thanks Horsemann.

[Robotengineer]

"I forgot that I'm a dumbass."

Thank you for giving me a signature worthy quote. Note: Maxmaps said that, not 5thHorseman.

Edited July 4, 2015 by Robotengineer

[CalculusWarrior]

I quite like the ten minute sections you did; it breaks it up to sort of get a sense of how long Max spent talking about one thing (or building/crashing rockets ). Thanks for doing this!

[Lord Aurelius]

My main takeaway from the transcript (thanks 5thHorseman!) is that Max still needs to learn to play KSP, maybe watching a few of Scott Manley's videos would help.

Other than that, doesn't sound like we got anything really interesting out of this Squadcast, just some basic "we're still working on Unity 5". Kind of disappointed that fixing SAS is such a low priority for them, it seems like a low hanging fruit QoL improvement that would really make the game more enjoyable to play and shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

[Starhawk]

Thanks 5thHorseman!

And welcome back Maxmaps! We may give you a hard time, but we still love you!

I thought some impressive piloting was displayed, along with some shocking lack of foresight in mission control and planning.

Much fun. No tidbits of real news. Oh well...

Happy landings!

[Superfluous J]

Thank you for giving me a signature quote. Note: Maxmaps said that, not 5thHorseman.

Oh I'm one too, and we've all been there, at least with the chutes.

And yeah, I mostly did the play-by-play to keep the summary interesting... for myself while making it

The two big takeaways for me were that dV will require an engineer (which makes me grumble) and Unity 5 will help in a lot of ways (I never thought about them having a 4 gig cap while designing the game).

[Columbia]

Oh yes! Thanks for the summary!

Now ​I'm really hyped for 1.1

[Streetwind]

"things in quotes were said verbatum. I use... ellipsis when I skip part of the quote. I also skip ums and ahs."

FYI - the officially accepted symbol for omitting parts of quotes is (...), three elipses in round brackets. That way you can also quote things that already contain ellipses, or express verbal pauses when they feel important.

Also, thanks for your summary!

[Superfluous J]

FYI - the officially accepted symbol for omitting parts of quotes is (...), three elipses in round brackets. That way you can also quote things that already contain ellipses, or express verbal pauses when they feel important.

Also, thanks for your summary!

Well there's no chance I'd have to quote Maxmaps' ellipsis considering he was talking, but I suppose it's possible I'd want to indicate a pause. In any case, I didn't know that, thanks!

[Wjolcz]

I seriously hope dV, TWR and other KER stuff won't be based on kerbal skills. That would be beyond ridiculous.

[cantab]

Steering system for wheels is good enough to be in a "proper car game" now.

Well, that could be Forza...or it could be Mario Kart.

Kind of disappointed that fixing SAS is such a low priority for them, it seems like a low hanging fruit QoL improvement that would really make the game more enjoyable to play and shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

I think it is a low priority. SAS including the new "superSAS" as I call it does work, and with a bit of thinking about what does and doesn't control the ship it can work very well. Yes the algorithms would benefit from improvement but there are many more important things to do.

Regarding delta-V calculations being linked to Kerbal skills, that's how Kerbal Engineer does it. This has come up before. The players are constantly saying Squad should "make KER stock", Squad mention that delta-V calculations will be connected to Kerbal skills which is just like KER, and the players then criticise Squad for that. I thought KSP players were generally intelligent people, perhaps I'm mistaken.

(And yes KER has the chip that you can put on your ship and then forget about Kerbal skills, but there is no reason to think Squad won't copy that aspect of KER too.)

[basic.syntax]

Thanks, 5th!

I feel certain they wouldn't make accuracy of the info tied to skills, just the features. The same way pilots work now: new orientations for autopilot (radial, target, etc) unlock based on skill level.

I wouldn't feel put out by anything Max says about improving small game features like gimbal/SAS. They are still in the trenches, digging through a huge rewrite to get the core game features working on Unity 5, that would be a good reason for feature tweaks to be way down on the list of priorities.

[Superfluous J]

Regarding delta-V calculations being linked to Kerbal skills, that's how Kerbal Engineer does it. This has come up before. The players are constantly saying Squad should "make KER stock", Squad mention that delta-V calculations will be connected to Kerbal skills which is just like KER, and the players then criticise Squad for that. I thought KSP players were generally intelligent people, perhaps I'm mistaken.

(And yes KER has the chip that you can put on your ship and then forget about Kerbal skills, but there is no reason to think Squad won't copy that aspect of KER too.)

I actually forget that KER requires an Engineer. It's in the list of things I change when updating the game. Frequently, my modulemanager config is in place before I even install KER. I don't think I'm alone. I even think that KER has a setting somewhere to turn it off, but I've already got the config so hey.

[yorshee]

I seriously hope dV, TWR and other KER stuff won't be based on kerbal skills. That would be beyond ridiculous.

Don't you think all those numbers would be confusing and off-putting to new players who are just messing about in Sandbox mode?

[severedsolo]

Don't you think all those numbers would be confusing and off-putting to new players who are just messing about in Sandbox mode?

Well the game already tells you: "this manoeuvre will cost you x amount of delta-v".

What's confusing, is when the player asks "Well how much of this delta-v stuff do I have?" and the game responds "oh I can't tell you that. It would take away from the fun"

[klgraham1013]

I seriously hope dV, TWR and other KER stuff won't be based on kerbal skills. That would be beyond ridiculous.

I'd put money on it being tied to skills.

- - - Updated - - -

Regarding delta-V calculations being linked to Kerbal skills, that's how Kerbal Engineer does it. This has come up before. The players are constantly saying Squad should "make KER stock", Squad mention that delta-V calculations will be connected to Kerbal skills which is just like KER, and the players then criticise Squad for that. I thought KSP players were generally intelligent people, perhaps I'm mistaken.

(And yes KER has the chip that you can put on your ship and then forget about Kerbal skills, but there is no reason to think Squad won't copy that aspect of KER too.)

I play sandbox. I was unaware of this.

- - - Updated - - -

Don't you think all those numbers would be confusing and off-putting to new players who are just messing about in Sandbox mode?

Nope. If you're just messing around, you'd probably just ignore the numbers anyway.

[regex]

a: "we're not adding kerbal engineer entirely as it is but there definitely is a plan."

Based on Kerbal skills

This is will be the stupidest game design decision they've made. Delta-V should simply be displayed for the rocket, it's something that mission control and the rocket designer know from the beginning, plus having a skill progression for simple math is literally idiotic. Also making engineers even more over-valued during the end-game...

I've been trying to stay away from the harsh talk but I'm just flabbergasted by this. I serious hope they rethink this decision.

[Wjolcz]

Regarding delta-V calculations being linked to Kerbal skills, that's how Kerbal Engineer does it. This has come up before. The players are constantly saying Squad should "make KER stock", Squad mention that delta-V calculations will be connected to Kerbal skills which is just like KER, and the players then criticise Squad for that. I thought KSP players were generally intelligent people, perhaps I'm mistaken.

I wasn't aware of that either.

[Joonatan1998]

I think the Delta-V requiring an kerbal is a good idea.

The kerbal skills really need more uses.

But because engineers are already the only classthat remains useful I think it should require an pilot instead of an engineer because pilots become useless once you get the first probe core with SAS.

[Columbia]

..Can anyone explain to me what they mean by being based on Kerbal skills?

[Melfice]

I thought KSP players were generally intelligent people, perhaps I'm mistaken.

Why be intelligent when you can criticize Squad? It's the cool thing to do, these days.

[Wjolcz]

I think the Delta-V requiring an kerbal is a good idea.

The kerbal skills really need more uses.

But because engineers are already the only classthat remains useful I think it should require an pilot instead of an engineer because pilots become useless once you get the first probe core with SAS.

Good luck running unmanned missions.

[Red Iron Crown]

..Can anyone explain to me what they mean by being based on Kerbal skills?

It will likely be like pilot experience and SAS modes, more experienced pilots permit more modes. I'm guessing an engineer of a certain experience level or a part will be required for in-flight delta-V readings.

My feeling on this is a bit like the FAR enthusiasts' feeling about new aero: Great that it is being added but I'll likely keep using the mod I use now. I think it's unlikely that the stock dV meter will have anything like KER's amount of data or customization, so I'll keep using KER for as long as it's developed.