Kerbal Space Program patch 1.1.2 is now live!

Does "Optimized drag calculations" actually mean that there is slightly more drag being produced? Because this is what I have noticed. I've also compared the results from 1.1 and 1.1.1, it looks like 1.1.2 applies the most drag (compared that on the same vessels, in the same conditions - speed, altitude etc.).

1 hour ago, steve_v said:

Just how many band-aids do you intend to stick on the physics / collision / wheels & legs issue anyway? Applying temporary hacks that don't fix the actual cause of the problem isn't a particularly productive use of time and resources IME.

They had to put a band-aid on the wheel clipping bug, or craft would have exploded en masse. What we got may seem just as bad... software is still broken. Some rovers with wheels tucked in close to other parts, unusable after the upgrade from v1.05. But Squad appear to have judged this to be a better outcome than exploding rovers. Now, there are reports of craft exploding for other reasons, but this particular Unity bug work-around was handled appropriately, in my opinion.  Stuck craft can be replaced in new missions with rebuilt rovers, and isolated Kerbals can be rescued. At some future date after a Unity engine upgrade, those stuck rovers should start working again.

1 hour ago, basic.syntax said:

They had to put a band-aid on the wheel clipping bug, or craft would have exploded en masse.

If craft are exploding en-masse due to a physics engine bug, fix the physics engine bug, call in someone who can, or just don't release until it's sorted.

I'm actually not too disgusted by the hacky fix for explode-on-load clipping, but all the band-aid fixes so far have introduced new problems, and none of them address the real (and common to all the wheel related bugs AFAICT) cause.
The latest "autostrut" band-aid for bouncing and jittering is already shaping up to be a can-of-worms, particularly for mods like IR, and I'm not convinced this is better than the previous jello suspension "fix" TBH.

Gear and landing legs still react violently or explode if faced with a sudden change in terrain height (or a kerbal for that matter), softening the suspension won't fix this, strutting things won't fix this. Endless mucking with module parameters won't fix this either. It's an engine bug, stop buggering about and fix it properly. If that requires another Unity upgrade, so be it.

That's just wheels (and those were advertised as being "way better" than 1.0.x). What about the crashing? Or the graphical FUBARS in the VAB and elsewhere? (esp. on Mac) What about windowed mode being totally broken on GNU/Linux, to the point that its random window geometry shenanigans stalls my window manager? There are more.

The real kicker: What about the ~1300 open bugs on the tracker? This number is still increasing, and most of the serious ones are from the pre-release. What is the point of doing a pre-release at all, if you don't actually fix the bugs it reveals?

Edited May 2, 2016 by steve_v
Use actual current number, not extrapolation from last visit.

* Made wheel autostrutting more configurable.

YES

THANK YOU

I THOUGHT MY ROVER BUILDING CAREER WAS OVER JUST AS IT STARTED

Squad has been very good to me with free updates since I "bought in" during the release of the Asteroid Redirect Mission, two years ago. Two recent updates, and promises to come back after a break and keep working the problems, say they have not given up on fixing bugs and improving KSP.

So I was in career mode, And I was in Alt+F12 And Then all of a sudden I pressed SOMETHING And It disappeared, Alt+F12 doesn't work anymore, Please help!

I am not seeing the huge problems some are reporting. Some areas, I've maybe not used yet, and I think I was rather casual about taking game saves, but I don't have a super-hot machine, and things are working better.

But I am using Linux. Some people are using Mac hardware, and I know, in other contexts, people are having problems specific to that.

So maybe I am lucky. But if you want to make a fuss about the quality of the current version, I figure it might be the OS you are using, not KSP, that is the root of the problem.

3 hours ago, steve_v said:

If craft are exploding en-masse due to a physics engine bug, fix the physics engine bug, call in someone who can, or just don't release until it's sorted.

I'm actually not too disgusted by the hacky fix for explode-on-load clipping, but all the band-aid fixes so far have introduced new problems, and none of them address the real (and common to all the wheel related bugs AFAICT) cause.
The latest "autostrut" band-aid for bouncing and jittering is already shaping up to be a can-of-worms, particularly for mods like IR, and I'm not convinced this is better than the previous jello suspension "fix" TBH.

Gear and landing legs still react violently or explode if faced with a sudden change in terrain height (or a kerbal for that matter), softening the suspension won't fix this, strutting things won't fix this. Endless mucking with module parameters won't fix this either. It's an engine bug, stop buggering about and fix it properly. If that requires another Unity upgrade, so be it.

That's just wheels (and those were advertised as being "way better" than 1.0.x). What about the crashing? Or the graphical FUBARS in the VAB and elsewhere? (esp. on Mac) What about windowed mode being totally broken on GNU/Linux, to the point that its random window geometry shenanigans stalls my window manager? There are more.

The real kicker: What about the ~1300 open bugs on the tracker? This number is still increasing, and most of the serious ones are from the pre-release. What is the point of doing a pre-release at all, if you don't actually fix the bugs it reveals?

Shhhh.... it upsets the software developers on here if you expect actual performance for a product you paid for.  In the world of software development, apparently "almost" is good enough.  Expecting something to be a finished product is just crazy talk.  Do you even dev, bro?

The worst part, and I'm far too lazy to actually look for it, but I remember talk back when 1.0 was released where the devs came right out and said the best solution was to use a different engine, but declined to do so because it was too much work. Here we are a year and 8 patches/releases later and hundreds of labor hours have been invested in still trying to hammer that square peg into a round hole.  

But we're not software/game devs so we have no right to question those who are.  Nothing to see here, move along.

8 minutes ago, JJE64 said:

The worst part, and I'm far too lazy to actually look for it, but I remember talk back when 1.0 was released where the devs came right out and said the best solution was to use a different engine, but declined to do so because it was too much work.

I'd be interested to see that quote, if you can find it. It's possible they were talking about the need to migrate to Unity 5.

8 minutes ago, JJE64 said:

Here we are a year and 8 patches/releases later and hundreds of labor hours have been invested in still trying to hammer that square peg into a round hole.

I guarantee it's way more than just hundreds. Just one developer full time for a year is around 2000, and they've got several devs and probably worked overtime.

I just had a vision of one of my larger constructs exploding spectacularly on the launch pad. And in front of it all, Detective Frank Drebin waving off onlookers. "Nothing to see here, move along."

1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:

I'd be interested to see that quote, if you can find it. It's possible they were talking about the need to migrate to Unity 5.

@JJE64 @HebaruSan

Most likely it was in answer to a forumer suggesting to not use Unity at all and switch to something completely different.

happy holidays guys!!!

2 hours ago, JJE64 said:

The worst part, and I'm far too lazy to actually look for it, but I remember talk back when 1.0 was released where the devs came right out and said the best solution was to use a different engine, but declined to do so because it was too much work. Here we are a year and 8 patches/releases later and hundreds of labor hours have been invested in still trying to hammer that square peg into a round hole. 

If you are too lazy to properly quote them in context (about them being lazy, ironically enough), why should they listen to you? You do realize that using a different game engine essentially makes it an entirely different game from the ground up right? Perhaps graphical assets would be re-used but that's it. The game wouldn't look, feel, or act like the KSP we know. And then people would complain about that! In the "ideal" world the best solution is probably a custom engine built from the ground up.  That way everything works exactly as you want it to. But that's no easy task. They probably wouldn't have the expertise, or resources to do that.

Once again this community is disappointing, complaining constantly instead of enjoying a great game. I've been playing and haven't run into most of these bugs that make the game supposedly "unplayable". The worst thing I've seen is having a kerbal touch a landing gear and spontaneously combust. I F9'd and moved on, thinking "well they'll have that one on their fix list!" It's likely a lot of the bugs are caused by mods also, it's not like there has been a lot of time for those to be perfected yet.

Sit back and enjoy the game, and give constructive bug feedback so the game can be fixed/tweaked as soon as it can. That's all you can do. Having the memory limit lifted is worth a painful migration.

1 hour ago, CloudlessEchoes said:

I've been playing and haven't run into most of these bugs that make the game supposedly "unplayable". The worst thing I've seen is having a kerbal touch a landing gear and spontaneously combust.

Exactly, you have no experience with what everyone is talking about. You might not be saying that and have the attitude you do if you had experienced all the many game-breaking bugs that everyone else has.

You aren't speaking from experience or expertise either. Just because your game isn't broken doesn't mean that 90% of our games aren't broken too. You seem to fail to grasp and understand this.

Your realize how silly you sound right? You basically said "I haven't seen any of these bugs so they must not exist/people are over-exaggerating."

i'm happy with unity. 

What isn't clear to me is how "unity wheels" worked alright in 1.0.x (unity 4), but not 1.1.x (unity 5).

If it is indeed a matter of unity needing to fix their wheels, then i'm sure it'll get fixed in time.

From my few hours on 1.1.2 i can confirm that wheels are still borked, haven't had a chance to check landing gear in the field. 

Its unfortunate because landing on the other bodies is what it's all about for me, i'm hesitant to launch a mission just to see it fail at the end.

It's also interesting how varied the issues are.

13 minutes ago, KocLobster said:

Exactly, you have no experience with what everyone is talking about. You might not be saying that and have the attitude you do if you had experienced all the many game-breaking bugs that everyone else has.

You aren't speaking from experience or expertise either. Just because your game isn't broken doesn't mean that 90% of our games aren't broken too. You seem to fail to grasp and understand this.

Your realize how silly you sound right? You basically said "I haven't seen any of these bugs so they must not exist/people are over-exaggerating."

Just because your game is broken doesn't mean everyone elses game is broken. Duh, that also works the other way round.

Situation is sub optimal in some regards, but there were always issues with the game. 1.1 is a net positive to a huge degree to me. Even rover wheels work a lot better than what we had before. Plane landing gear still needs tuning, but it's promising to be a lot more reliable when the quirks are hammered out. For example, the old landing gear would just rip appart when it got to fast. That kind of stuf doesn't seem to happen anymore.

10 minutes ago, Violent Jeb said:

What isn't clear to me is how "unity wheels" worked alright in 1.0.x (unity 4), but not 1.1.x (unity 5).

From what I can see, it's because the systems are completely different, the U4 wheels just don't work in U5 anymore. KSP uses wheels in a very unique way, so there is a lot of things that need to be changed. Our current wheels are also a lot more complex, featuring much more realistic grip, especially sideway (U4 rovers would just tilt over all the time), and much more advanced suspension.

E.g. vehicles in KSP are somwhat loosely connected parts. So those parts act as a suspension for itself, tilting in when heavily loaded, and pushing back when trying to get to a neutral spot. Combine that with wheels having their own suspensions, and you can end up with 2 systems fighting against each other. That also lead for example to oscillations, where parts would just jiggle themselves to death.

On top of that, we got apparently also got bugs in Unity 5 itself, causing additional issues with wheels.

 

All said, the new system is better in a lot of ways, but it's gonna take a while to get fixed. For short term fixes, keep a look out at the modding community. Modders are usually a bit faster than a dev (there are also a lot more modders than devs :^) ). Most of the issues I see are with plane landing gear. Rover wheels seem to need more careful setup because of their added complexity, but they seem to work fine most of the time.

Edited May 2, 2016 by Temeter

12 minutes ago, Temeter said:

Just because your game is broken doesn't mean everyone elses game is broken. Duh, that also works the other way round.

Of course; I assumed that this went without saying. I guess not in your case huh?

Take a look at the relevant tech support forums and the bug tracker. You will quickly discover how massive the issues and bugs are, and how a huge portion of the community is experiencing significant problems.

13 minutes ago, Temeter said:

Situation is sub optimal in some regards, but there were always issues with the game. 1.1 is a net positive

+1 I agree.

6 minutes ago, KocLobster said:

Of course; I assumed that this went without saying. I guess not in your case huh?

You didn't assume it for him, so why should I expect it from others?

Quote

Take a look at the relevant tech support forums and the bug tracker. You will quickly discover how massive the issues and bugs are, and how a huge portion of the community is experiencing significant problems.

Oh, i've played KSP for 1+ thousand hours by now, and also spend quite a bit of time post 1.1. I'm aware of a lot of issues. Still few things I'd call unplayable.

Edited May 2, 2016 by Temeter

22 minutes ago, KocLobster said:

Exactly, you have no experience with what everyone is talking about. You might not be saying that and have the attitude you do if you had experienced all the many game-breaking bugs that everyone else has.

You aren't speaking from experience or expertise either. Just because your game isn't broken doesn't mean that 90% of our games aren't broken too. You seem to fail to grasp and understand this.

Your realize how silly you sound right? You basically said "I haven't seen any of these bugs so they must not exist/people are over-exaggerating."

If we're talking about two windows installs (and I realize there are linux and mac users out there too, and that could very well be different) then the game should work the same if the installs are identical. Performance issues aside due to hardware, unity 5 is unity 5 and the bugs should be the same. I download my copy direct from the site, maybe there is a difference in how an install ends up between that and a steam update? I personally don't like "updaters" as you don't know if you're getting a clean slate, or all the settings right, etc. I would also be weary of using an old save with this new version, I'd expect tons of bugs doing that.

  I hate to admit it.. But there is fan-boyism in a lot of these posts. Don't get me wrong, I like KSP and squad as well, but there has to be a point at which you stop releasing broken material. That point is "after full release". You can't have what is considered a "working finished product" get broken with an update. At this point, you simply say "Due to the bugs of Unity 5 we cannot update the engine farther until they are worked out. We will instead work on content updates, and will remain in Unity 4 until said problems are resolved." Granted you don't have the calculation boosts that U5 allows, but who cares, if it's going to break the game, then don't use it. I think Squad is stuck in "Beta mode", which means they are used to being able to release with some problems, However they cannot expect to ingratiate themselves to the players with broken content anymore, because the game is no longer in pre-release. The Full release should still be The unity 4 version, and there should be an opt in "beta" for the Unity 5 version. Always use the functioning version for the release, not the buggy non-functioning version. This isn't really attack on you guys at Squad, I'd rather it be seen as  thought inducing constructive criticism.

Edited May 2, 2016 by Talavar

I agree and disagree with you @Talavar. I think the engine update was a requirement regardless of the bugs in Unity 5 and that upgrading to Unity 5 has been one of the more positive changes in the history of KSP. It makes a huge difference for me and makes the game much more enjoyable now that it's actually using the resources available to it. Sticking with Unity 4 would've been a mistake, as the performance and other internal issues are not conducive to games that benefit from taking advantage of a larger resource pool. That said, I think the 1.1 release should have been pushed back another month or so after pre-release instead of trying to stick with a 2-3 week release schedule after pre-release. Especially after the myriad of bugs that were reported. 

5 minutes ago, sparkybear said:

I agree and disagree with you @Talavar. I think the engine update was a requirement regardless of the bugs in Unity 5 and that upgrading to Unity 5 has been one of the more positive changes in the history of KSP. It makes a huge difference for me and makes the game much more enjoyable now that it's actually using the resources available to it. Sticking with Unity 4 would've been a mistake, as the performance and other internal issues are not conducive to games that benefit from taking advantage of a larger resource pool. That said, I think the 1.1 release should have been pushed back another month or so after pre-release instead of trying to stick with a 2-3 week release schedule after pre-release. Especially after the myriad of bugs that were reported. 

 Id go with that, except I literally can't even launch a ship now. That being said, I have to disagree. Mainly because you would have the 1.1.2 Beta available to you, and I could have 1.0.5 which actually worked, If done the way I suggested.

Edited May 2, 2016 by Talavar

6 minutes ago, Talavar said:

 Id go with that, except I literally can't even launch a ship now. That being said, I have to disagree. Mainly because you would have the 1.1.2 Beta available to you, and I could have 1.0.5 which actually worked, If done the way I suggested.

The 1.0.5 Version is available in a lot of places. I know I made a backup of 1.0.5 prior to the 1.1 release as did many others. 

3 minutes ago, sparkybear said:

The 1.0.5 Version is available in a lot of places. I know I made a backup of 1.0.5 prior to the 1.1 release as did many others. 

  Yeah, I just went reading.. Turns out the stable 1.0.5 is in "Beta" in the steam menu.. WTH SQUAD? MAKE THAT YOUR RELEASE, NOT A BETA! Your going to rack up negative reviews simply because people don't know the functioning version is in the BETA LIST!

13 minutes ago, Talavar said:

  Yeah, I just went reading.. Turns out the stable 1.0.5 is in "Beta" in the steam menu.. WTH SQUAD? MAKE THAT YOUR RELEASE, NOT A BETA! Your going to rack up negative reviews simply because people don't know the functioning version is in the BETA LIST!

We were seeing problems trying to revert to 1.05 when it was "previous stable release".  We were getting random files from the 64 bit 1.1 version mixed in with it, and the game was borked.  Proceed with caution, and let us know if you get a functioning 1.05 installation that way.  I restored from backup to get back to 1.05.