KSP Weekly: The son of Mars and Venus

[John FX]

10 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

So let's not do anything ever because someone will complain no matter what we do.  

Or you could follow the path I took when dating someone who complained no matter what I did.

I just did what I wanted because they would complain anyway.

[passinglurker]

6 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

People complain if they don't show work in progress.

I haven't. I've complained about the lack of a preview early on because I was worried squad would adopt yet another unique and fractured art style instead of finally conforming to standards, but I've never complained about the lack of an early fugly work in progress shot. Those are worthless.

6 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

People complain about the work in progress that if they do show it.

Well of course when they say "we finished up work on this!" and it looks half baked because it's actually only a WIP there will be feedback. This is natural and expected, and they only really have themselves to blame for the misunderstanding. Hopefully this is avoided in the future.

6 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

People complain that it wasn't strenuously enough emphasized to be work in progress.

I don't see why you're complaining about people complaining about this. It would have saved a lot of the drama you are complaining about if this had been clear from the start.

6 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

And now you don't want to see work in progress if it's too preliminary?

Why yes. They say that parts get taken in to be given the crisp high fidelity details I often ask for AFTER they have been previewed. I'd much rather see this phase as my purchasing decision hinges on if the parts are good enough that I don't need to crack open blender and krita too feel satisfied with how my game looks.

6 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

This has gotten ridiculous.

*sigh* Another week of this... You seem to be confused at no point did I ever ask for early WIP shots, and so its not hypocritical of me to ask now that they keep thier art to themselves until its in a state that they can be proud of much like the previews we received under [CENSORED].
 

2 hours ago, John FX said:

If I could make a suggestion?

Obviously by posting you were wanting a critique of your post and feedback on it.

If you could refrain from looking at, and by implication commenting on, works in progress, specifically regarding textures, then the people making it would be able to get on with their job. We also get to see WIP parts which the rest of us are quite interested in seeing.

People who care too much about textures should only look at finished textures or be involved with making them, it seems there is no sensible middle ground possible IMHO

Thank you for responding to this universal and unwritten request for feedback I've taken your suggestion underconsideration.

Unfortunately we have received very few textures that have been considered finished or near finished (though the appropriate amount of praise for such events has been given), and since there has been no follow up or commentary on the artistic state of a WIP picture we have had to make do highlighting the common omissions to try to insure they are not overlooked. If we could receive confirmation that these common omissions are indeed not being overlooked then there would be no need to comment further on these omissions when observed in future pieces.

If one feels that my regular commentary on this is indeed repetitive, trivial, or some how distracting to the artist the forum has a block function they can utilize to filter me out.

2 hours ago, John FX said:

Historically too much complaining has lead to a game less good than it otherwise would have been and so is counterproductive. As someone who cares about Squads game, which I play, I want it to be as good as possible and so, whilst a certain level of feedback is good, too much complaining leads to a degradation of game quality.

Citation needed. In fact I'd counter and say "complaining" has saved us on occasion. "Complaining" stopped the barn for example.

2 hours ago, John FX said:

One example of when complaining becomes too much is when the complaining is at the level of subtle effects on rivets on a texture for a WIP part.

Kerbal's aesthetic as established by the quality work of B9, and [CENSORED] is a culmination of subtle effects, but this falls apart if one of those effects overpowers the others through high contrast or overly repetitive symmetry such as the shirt button rows of rivets you bring up. Though at the time the WIP state of the part was not clear making this a prime example of avoidable drama had the WIP state been clear from the beginning.

2 hours ago, John FX said:

One way to recognise you may be complaining too much is if you ask to not be shown WIP parts because you know you would complain a lot if you were shown them.

The WIP revaluation changes very little ultimately.I will still speak my mind and highlight what I see, in the possibly futile hope that improvements will be made. Feedback and critique will continue until I am either confident that it is unnecessary, or until it's explicitly outlawed, and no amount of rebranding this all as complaints and whining is going to change this.
 

Edited July 8, 2017 by passinglurker

[Pi_]

 

7 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Squad, do you think...

 

5 hours ago, KSK said:

Thanks Squad! 

 

4 hours ago, Scientia1423 said:

We should let Squad...

I know it's just a technicality, I know Squad still exists as a company, I know it doesn't matter either way.  The users above are just cited as examples, no malice intended.

Are the devs in fact still employed by Squad?  I'm just curious if most of us don't even associate TT with KSP.

[passinglurker]

10 minutes ago, Pi_ said:

 

 

 

I know it's just a technicality, I know Squad still exists as a company, I know it doesn't matter either way.  The users above are just cited as examples, no malice intended.

Are the devs in fact still employed by Squad?  I'm just curious if most of us don't even associate TT with KSP.

While TT now owns kerbal (allowing them to make franchises and stuff) Squad is still independent.

[Streetwind]

15 minutes ago, Pi_ said:

Are the devs in fact still employed by Squad?  I'm just curious if most of us don't even associate TT with KSP.

The way I understood it:

Take Two bought the intellectual property "Kerbal Space Program" from Squad, and then promptly tasked Squad with the task of developing it in their name. Take Two could give the project to any other development studio too if they wanted, but a.) transitioning a project to a different team costs a lot of money and throws the project back for weeks or even months, and b.) Squad probably negotiated a guarantee to be the exclusive contractor for at least a certain amount of time as a requirement for selling the IP at all. Ergo, Squad remains an independent development studio, which has become a contractor hired by Take Two for the purposes of developing Kerbal Space Program. The developers working on Kerbal Space Program are employed by Squad for the purpose of fulfilling Squad's contractual obligations to Take Two.

DISCLAIMER: I obviously do not know the actual details of this deal, but based on what's been communicated to us, this is the most likely setup.

Edited July 8, 2017 by Streetwind

[John FX]

1 hour ago, passinglurker said:

Citation needed.

The barn. The barn was something which IMHO was better included than excluded because I value gameplay over getting a texture perfect.

1 hour ago, passinglurker said:

the forum has a block function they can utilize to filter me out.

 

Where is this `ignore user` feature?

Until this point I have never considered using it on this forum.

Personally I would rather users adjust their behaviour instead of making others put them on ignore but that would require a sense of perspective and awareness of self in order to work.

Edited July 8, 2017 by John FX

[weissel]

16 hours ago, Kerbuvim said:

This is the "Empty emptiness" as it is. We read the same thing from week to week for many months. This is only a formality, so that "do not whine"

So what information exactly do you want?

• The number of bugs fixed?  (23)
• The titles of the bug reports newly added?  (really?  Would you even understand them?)
• The number of open bugs (say, 100.  That could be 15 game breaking/crashing bugs or 100 typos/bad translations ...)
• The amount of hours spent?  (irrelevant.  Also not something companies reveal to the world just like that.)
• The change in Lines Of Code?  (relates to progress as much as the distance relates linearly to dV.  Especially if you start at a random velocity vector.  Also this tends to change little while bugs are fixed.)
• If bugs are cleared faster than added?  That might be interesting, but in the beginning of QA the unsolved bugs are rushing in and towards the end the bug numbers dissolve --- and yet, a bug can be anything betwenn[sic] a typo and a "we need to change everything, it'll take 6-9 months at least." bug -- remember the Kraken!
• A fixed delivery date, no matter what?  You want them to release something less than ready or hold a finished product back, for the sake of a date?  Lots of developers say "it's ready when it's ready" and that simply is the truth.
• "Work is progressing (nicely|adequately|slowly|barely)"?  But that is what they said!  QA is working well, console developers are reacting quickly, stability and playability are the focus and are improving lots.

How about you mock up a sample of what information you want to see and tell us why you want each of the parts in your mock-up progress report on consoles?

[weissel]

2 hours ago, passinglurker said:

In fact I'd counter and say "complaining" has saved us on occasion. "Complaining" stopped the barn for example.

And I am so happy there is no "barn" --- NOT.

The jump between 30 parts (very limiting) and 255 parts (not a limit for most vessels) is quite extreme.  But then I value gameplay a lot over glitzy graphics --- if I wanted glitzy graphics I'd be playing AAA games.  And the barn could have been improved ...

[passinglurker]

53 minutes ago, John FX said:

The barn. The barn was something which IMHO was better included than excluded because I value gameplay over getting a texture perfect.

Well he won't hear me but for anyone else reading along the barn had more wrong with it than just the texture

15 minutes ago, weissel said:

And I am so happy there is no "barn" --- NOT.

The jump between 30 parts (very limiting) and 255 parts (not a limit for most vessels) is quite extreme.  But then I value gameplay a lot over glitzy graphics --- if I wanted glitzy graphics I'd be playing AAA games.  And the barn could have been improved ...

You're confusing a desire for quality consistent work with a desire for next gen hyper graphics I only want the former.

Anyway this is not a fault brought on by the exclusion of the barn. This is squad's unwillingness to give career mode a balance and polish pass and it's a problem that can't be narrowed down to a single flaw like 3 tiers vs. 4. All of carrer mode is this disjointed hodgepodge of ideas they never bothered to iron out. No one's bothered to fix the tiering issue because the old devs put it off to be fixed with everything else "later" and the new devs decided there is nothing wrong with the core game and moved on to localization and DLC.

But here's some easy not-crap-barn solutions if you need 4 tiers... 

Option A: use the same building set for more than one tier (for example tier 1 buildings cover both tiers 1 and 0) its better to reuse a minimally decent asset than it is to use the barn as it was previewed.
Option B: the same as A only give tier 0 a pallet swap so its easier to tell apart at a glance.
Option C: stop being cheap and make a decent looking barn.

You can do almost anything with the right code. In the end the number of tiers and the appearance of the tiers are separate issues, and there is no reason squad can't implement a 4th tier right now without the barn.

Edited July 8, 2017 by passinglurker

[klesh]

50 minutes ago, weissel said:

How about you mock up a sample of what information you want to see and tell us why you want each of the parts in your mock-up progress report on consoles?

 

Thats not needed.   Look at how they explain the progress in designing MH expansion.   The provide examples, relate them to the player in a understandable way.  

Flipping it, would you be satisfied if the updates for Making History consisted of: "Work continues on the Making History expansion.", then moved on to other topics?

 

I feel like this is a result of another company doing the port, and the employees there are not tasked with "do a thorough write up of what youve been working on".   This leaves whomever writes these updates with little more to say than "work continues" because that work is happeneing in another office.  

[TheEpicSquared]

21 hours ago, SQUAD said:

the camera would madly flicker up and down after you crash a vessel into the ground

About time  

[zzguy]

I think passinglurker is simply trying to hold squad to a their own standards of quality. It doesn't quite make sense for the devs to release parts/textures that are in any way half baked or not consistent with the level of quality and detail found in the rest of the game. It may seem like he's nitpicking small details, but being lazy about the small stuff can snowball until three dlcs down what we get is really bad compared to the stock game.

 

And I think the barn was bad in many ways, not just texture. Any kind of industrial warehouse could have sufficed in it's place.

[regex]

tbh I'm incredibly thankful that the travesty of idiotic tropes, bad and misaligned textures, and low-count polygons that was the barn managed to get "complained" out of existence. Nothing that terrible belongs in a production game.

"WIP" means nothing around here considering we got stuck with the administrative building; I take any previews as included in the game as-is.

Edited July 8, 2017 by regex

[Kobymaru]

13 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

People complain if they don't show work in progress.

People complain about the work in progress that if they do show it.

People complain that it wasn't strenuously enough emphasized to be work in progress.

First of all, these "people" are usually different people.

Second: instead of viewing the second kind of complaining as "complaining", artists could also regard it as early feedback and learn from what people like and don't like. Because the same people will complain (for real) when it is too late to make changes.

Third, I don't recall ever having encountered the latter kind, so that seems a bit like strawman.

[Mako]

7 hours ago, John FX said:

The barn. The barn was something which IMHO was better included than excluded because I value gameplay over getting a texture perfect.

The community complaining about the barn did not cause Squad to omit a Tier 0. Squad chose to omit a Tier 0 rather than postponing the update, and has chosen to continue omitting a Tier 0 ever since. At any point they could have chosen to add it in, but we've seen no signs that they are interested in doing so. If I were a gambling man, I'd bet that the community would deliver multiple options for a Tier 0 if Squad was interested in making the buildings mod-able.

If a company doesn't want feedback, they don't use an open-development strategy. Squad obviously wants feedback. Choosing to only hear the feedback you like is far more damaging to a game than listening to all of the feedback.

Feedback hasn't hurt this game or kept it from reaching it's full potential, inexperience from top to bottom has. It's actually remarkable that it was able to come this far, and that is only because of its unique core concept of building vehicles from prefab parts and operating them seamlessly from planet to planet under semi-relistic physics.

Edit: I'd be remiss if I didn't add that I'm glad for how far KSP has come and that it's possible that the inexperience of the early team somehow made them take chances that a more experienced team would have avoided. However, as development continued, it seems (in 20/20 hindsight, of course) that management might have avoided some missteps if they had more experience. It's been an interesting ride to say the least, and any heated discussions exist because we all like this game enough to care about what happens to it.

Edit #2: I forgot I wanted to point out that omitting the barn in that state was the right decision. It was objectively worse, quality wise, to the rest of the assets, and it would have been the first impression anyone playing Career mode would have seen. While I'm sure people could look past it, it would have been a bad way to present the game. The only good option was to redo the Tier 0 assets and we've seen no sign of that happening.

Edited July 8, 2017 by Mako

[John FX]

15 hours ago, Mako said:

The community complaining about the barn did not cause Squad to omit a Tier 0.

I will stop you there, yes it did.

[passinglurker]

18 minutes ago, John FX said:

I will stop you there, yes it did.

For those reading along it did not. They made thier own separate conscious decision to omit the tier 0 from the balance instead of just use pallet swapped tier 1 buildings as non-eye-gouging placeholders, and even with 4 tiers career mode would still be a steaming pile of disjointed half baked gameplay ideas anyway, but ultimately how the tiers are balanced and how the tiers appear are separate issues. Don't let users like this combine them in order to discredit the value of mass public feedback.

Also "complaining" saved the round8 from being recycled as a xenon tank you're welcome stock-purist spacecraft-exchange users.

[weissel]

23 hours ago, passinglurker said:

the barn had more wrong with it than just the texture

You're confusing a desire for quality consistent work with a desire for next gen hyper graphics I only want the former.

And I want quality gameplay.  The non-barn progression is cobbled together and never will be "good", no matter what you do with the rest.

As a lot of "High Res" packs and patches for older games have shown, graphics can be updated pretty easily.  Gameplay, however ... not so much.

 

23 hours ago, passinglurker said:

[...] to use the barn as it was previewed.

"previewed" is the important word here.  You can object to the quality of the barn space centre --- that can be improved.  Or you can object to the idea of having any barn whatsoever in the game.  I thought the barn fit well into the haphazard way Kerbals build rockets with no thought of safety, and a lot of "ad hoc".  Apparently others thought the idea that rocketry started very much improvised was not worthy of the glorious KSP.

 

23 hours ago, klesh said:

Thats not needed.   Look at how they explain the progress in designing MH expansion.   The provide examples, relate them to the player in a understandable way.  

Flipping it, would you be satisfied if the updates for Making History consisted of: "Work continues on the Making History expansion.", then moved on to other topics?

But the console does not have new workflows, nor new features getting implemented, no new screens added, no new parts made/overhauled.  MH has all that, that is why there is much to report.

 

1 hour ago, passinglurker said:

For those reading along it did not. They made thier own separate conscious decision to omit the tier 0 from the balance instead of just use pallet swapped tier 1 buildings as non-eye-gouging placeholders,

I can hear people howling at a palette swapped lvl 1 VAB.  People like you, I'd think.
 

1 hour ago, passinglurker said:

and even with 4 tiers career mode would still be a steaming pile of disjointed half baked gameplay ideas anyway,

I mourn the disappearance of BTSM.  It was ... great, hard, focussed.

But with no barn or any other visual, it is kinda hard for a modder to add another level, which makes it harder for modders to actually make an attempt for a balanced progression there.

1 hour ago, passinglurker said:

Also "complaining" saved the round8 from being recycled as a xenon tank you're welcome stock-purist spacecraft-exchange users.

It's a nice lil' tank (treat very very stoically, get involved at your own risk), but ultimately you want procedural tanks.

[AverageJoeGuy]

On 7/8/2017 at 3:24 PM, John FX said:

 

 

Where is this `ignore user` feature?

Until this point I have never considered using it on this forum.

Personally I would rather users adjust their behaviour instead of making others put them on ignore but that would require a sense of perspective and awareness of self in order to work.

Yep. Everyone should just think like you.

[passinglurker]

2 minutes ago, weissel said:

And I want quality gameplay.  The non-barn progression is cobbled together and never will be "good", no matter what you do with the rest.

As a lot of "High Res" packs and patches for older games have shown, graphics can be updated pretty easily.  Gameplay, however ... not so much.

Read the rest of my post first I agree that the game play is cobbled but the barn or the absence thereof has nothing to do with that. Also I wouldn't trivialize the production of a whole games worth of consistent quality 3d art.

4 minutes ago, weissel said:

"previewed" is the important word here.  You can object to the quality of the barn space centre --- that can be improved.

The barn as the unity asset flip we saw could not be improved the only option was to start over and squad opted not to in the name of rushing a console port.

6 minutes ago, weissel said:

Or you can object to the idea of having any barn whatsoever in the game.  I thought the barn fit well into the haphazard way Kerbals build rockets with no thought of safety, and a lot of "ad hoc".  Apparently others thought the idea that rocketry started very much improvised was not worthy of the glorious KSP.

First It had been previously established by one of squads former lead artists and generally accepted by the community that kerbals are not Orks. Second the "ad hoc' design wasn't chosen because the devs at the time thought it was a good fit, but instead to mask the rushed shoddy workmanship. Say what you want about goofy tropes vs. serious tropes but using one or the other to justify bad art/ballance/code is not OK. Being made well comes first what it's styled to look like comes second/third/later...

11 minutes ago, weissel said:

I can hear people howling at a palette swapped lvl 1 VAB.  People like you, I'd think.

Only people I see howling about that issue in particular after seeing the barn would be the LOLKERBALZFLYTRASH crowd.
 
That being said I'm getting sick of being characterized as unreasonable. I give squad thier due when they make the right decisions such as implementing mesh and texture switching, rebalancing the monoprop tanks, making parts that look good, etc... I may be pessimistic, but I do not actively fish for new reasons to "complain" like you all want to believe I do in order to try to discredit me.

25 minutes ago, weissel said:

I mourn the disappearance of BTSM.  It was ... great, hard, focussed.

Something we can agree on. It may have been seemingly linear for better or worse in the earliest parts of its progression but compared to stock it was an excellent experience that encouraged experimentation and learning to break out into the larger game, and showed the meticulous care and attention to detail @FlowerChild puts into his game ballance mods. Its this sort of passion and attention to detail that I want to see in stock KSP in general not just in its art.

37 minutes ago, weissel said:

But with no barn or any other visual, it is kinda hard for a modder to add another level, which makes it harder for modders to actually make an attempt for a balanced progression there.

Part of the problem is that the issues with the career mode are so multifaceted that simply using @sarbian's custom barn kit mod to smooth out the tiering would hardly put a dent in the balance issues. Only complete overhauls like BTSM, RO, CWP etc go far enough to make a difference.

The other part of the problem is that squad (despite haveing ample opportunity while stopping to rewrite the code base 3 flipping times) never opened up the facility art assets to modding.

44 minutes ago, weissel said:

It's a nice lil' tank (treat very very stoically, get involved at your own risk), but ultimately you want procedural tanks.

Eeeeh... If children of a dead earth and procedural mods is any indication I'd say procedural tanks can't be visually appealing at least not at the standards PJ brought us too. @Shadowmage's SSTU mesh switching has more potential I feel. Anyway last I checked procedural tanks from squad was never at stake or even on the table. At least not publicly.

[Mako]

3 hours ago, John FX said:

I will stop you there, yes it did.

It really didn't. Squad chose to listen to community feedback and release the update without Tier 0. They could have chosen to rush to release sub-par assets, or chosen to bring those assets up to the same quality as the other Tiers. Instead they chose to postpone Tier 0. Also, they said they intended to rework Tier 0 and release it at a later date. This was 2 years ago now. Please explain how community feedback is responsible for the lack of a Tier 0 when Squad has had full control (until recently) and they've had 2 years to do something about it.

The community is not a group of shareholders. Squad is not beholden to us; they chose what they do and how, and chose to listen to feedback or disregard it at their discretion. The idea that the community somehow has that much power is absurd.

The people who said Tier 0 is omitted but intended to be reworked and released are no longer at Squad, but we've received no new information on Tier 0 before or since they left. It was obviously a very low priority for Squad at that time as evidenced by the sub-par assets, and it appears to have remained a very low priority ever since. If you want to be upset with someone for lack of a Tier 0, be upset with Squad and not with the community which provided the feedback Squad invited when they chose open development.

[Vanamonde]

A few posts have been trimmed from this thread. Please do not make the arguments personal. 

[klgraham1013]

I love it when graphics and gameplay are treated like a pie chart.  One surely taking away from the other.  No exceptions.

Here's the truth.  All pieces of a whole contribute.  Graphics do matter.  Gameplay matters.  Sound matters.  It all contributes to your enjoyment of a game.  Period.

That is all.

[MiniMatt]

On 7/7/2017 at 9:23 PM, SQUAD said:

This week we have also been carrying on with the design of the Making History Expansion.

Could someone with more up to date knowledge than I (it's been - gulp - over a decade since I was last involved in any software dev) give a quick rundown on what I'm presuming to be RAD project management? Particularly as to how us eager & curious consumers can gauge progress.

Because I'd assumed (I being, as we've established, out of date & more than a little naive) when the expansion was announced, that the design was more or less complete with coding, art, and polish remaining - occasionally revisiting the design document only if areas proved unexpectedly troublesome or someone is struck by late stage inspiration.

Gauging progress is important to eager, naive, and... impatient... consumers like myself and whilst this point falls dangerously close to asking the understandably un-askable "when's it due for release?" - I have no idea if this is holding up for release in the next couple of months, before Christmas, or for this time next year. It's a thought entirely informed by my out of date, old fashioned development thinking, but when I see updates about carrying on with the design, consumer me says "looks interesting, I'll put a pin in the calendar a year from now and come take a look"

 

ps. I really do want to stress this is not a criticism - I don't know more about software development than Squad. Very few people on this forum will know more about software development than Squad. I don't know more about KSP development than Squad. Nobody on this forum knows more about KSP development than Squad. This really is a query borne of my out of date design-build-test-release thinking and a sneaky way of getting a release date question past the forum rules

[klgraham1013]

45 minutes ago, MiniMatt said:

~snip~

I've always been under the impression that design docs in the manner you're speaking, and the manner in which my uneducated mind knows them, isn't so much of a thing at Squad.  See career mode development as an example.  Anyone actually at Squad can correct me, of course.