Varses
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Posts posted by Varses
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I think that the current balance should be left the same. When the new planets were added in 0.17 and the 2.5m parts were added, they left the 1.25m engines the same. The greater challenge of reaching new planets (especially ones requireing more delta-v like Moho and Jool) was met by proportionally more powerful engines.
Any future outer planets will be more difficult to reach which will put the SLS engines to good use. The way I see it, each size class will be required to reach certain parts of the solar system. 1.25m parts for the Kerbin system, 2.5m parts for the inner solar system, 3.75m parts for the outer solar system.
Rebalancing isn't necessary because (in my oppinion) the curren difficulty level of the game is just about right. Reaching any future outer planets will be a bigger challenge but at the same time you'll be given more powerful engines so the difficulty remains largely the same. At the moment, the 3.75m engines are a solution to a problem that doesn't exist yet.
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Ah, but you're talking about units again, not player skills. The basic strategies remain the same at each point in the game.
The skill is in the organization of battle groups. A defensive frontline with a powerful but frail backline. Archers and machine gunners fit the same niche, they're just from different power level. No matter what point you're at in the game, your battle lines will generally have the same structure.
With airports and such, the basic strategies of defense didn't change, just the mobility and force projection of your units. The airport opened up new gameplay while still maintaining the skills required to know when a city needs defense, what units to garrison, etc. The player skills have remained the same, they weren't replaced. But by this point, we've digressed far from the original discussion and you seem to be doubling down and focusing on the minutiae of my argument rather than the broader point
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Technologies become obsolete and replaced in Civilization. Units become obsolete and replaced. Player-learned skills do not. Once you conquer one civilization, the game doesn't say 'Ok, you never have to do combat again. Instead here's a crossword you have to finish before you take over the next civ'. Because that's what you're saying a game should do: you master one skill and then it should be replaced by a new challenge.
All previous player skills build off of previous skills and achievements. You took over one civ? Maybe the others become more hostile, necessitating stronger units or more diplomacy. You made one city happy? Well, now you have to deal with pollution in addition to happiness. Those are not new challenges. They're harder versions of previous challenges, they don't replace them completely. And the new challenges are truly new--something you have to manage in addition to everything you had to worry about before.
What makes civilization fun, as you noted, are all the different choices and fun decisions you can make. Do I focus on this technology or that one? Do I want to be a Fascist or Democratic government? Do I want to be warlike or peaceful? Choices are fun. Sid Meier (the designer of the Civ games) is quoted as saying that 'a game is a series of interesting choices'. The problem with the new SLS engines is that there are zero interesting choices to be made regarding them--they are better in every way than previous engines. That's a very dull choice, like choosing between
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Name a game where a skill becomes obsolete once you master it. Where there's a certain point in the game where the game no longer tests that skill and there's zero reason to use it. I imagine you would be hard pressed to name one because they're quite rare and generally not very well recieved.
Nearly every game has new challenges which build on previous ones, not completely replace them. In RPGs as your player progresses they get more powerful and better items. The game continues to challenge you with new puzzles and harder enemies. Take Zelda games, for instance. Each dungeon has a specific special item and the dungeon's puzzles are built around using that new item. But puzzles in later dungeons use that item too. Very rarely is it that once you beat the dungeon where you get the hookshot, you never use it again.
If you're constantly removing old skills and adding new ones to master, it generally doesn't make a game fun. And this isn't just from my personal opinion--this is what they teach in game design courses. Constantly adding new things while removing old ones leads to the feeling that you're constantly playing a tutorial and never get to have the fun and satisfaction of further mastering your skills. A racing game where your car suddenly became twice as fast once you placed in 3rd or above on a previous race wouldn't be fun because it makes your previous effort feel meaningless and the game feel unfair and arbitrary.
Again, I'm not against the SLS parts in general or even against them being more powerful than previous parts specifically. I just don't think they should be so far above all the previous engines as to outclass their direct analogues. I think stupid_chris' suggestions are exactly the right attitude--keep the SLS engines more powerful than previous engines, just not to such an extreme degree.
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To all the people using straw man arguments to justify not nerfing the SLS engines: I don't think anyone who's advocating nerfs wants to remove the 3.75m parts or engines. In fact, I'm even ok with them being overall better than 2.5m engines. I just don't think the difference between 3.75 parts and 2.5 parts should be as enormous as it currently is.
For example, the Rockomax 48-7s is overpowered--most people agree. But it's only slightly overpowered. Which is why people weren't whining loudly about it needing nerfs. For the most part, it was in a good place. The new SLS parts should occupy the same area--slightly more powerful than other engines but not completely outclassing them. At the moment, they completely outclass anything smaller. That's the issue.
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When technology progresses, things that used to be hard should become easy. What was the correct way to do things in the early career mode should become useless by midgame. Most of the mid-career mode expertise should be worthless later in the game. Progress is disruptive by its nature, and if the career mode doesn't work that way, it doesn't feel reasonable.
This is just wrong, wrong, wrong when it comes to gameplay. I agree that things that used to be hard should become easy later on but that's because the player's skill grows, not because of some new item. In games, you want a player to grow their skill, each new skill building on the last, not cast it aside as soon as they gain a modicum of profiency. Take the typical progression of a new player, for instance.
1. Launch a craft to orbit.
2. Send the craft to the Mun and orbit it. (This builds off the first skill)
3. Send a craft to another planet and orbit it. (Again, this takes 'send a craft to the Mun' to the next degree).
Each skill builds off the others creating a feeling of mastery. That's what psychologically gives people satisfaction, what makes them feel like they're 'good at a game'. What you're suggesting is a game where, once you've mastered one skill, you never have to put much effort into doing it again. There's a difference between something becoming routine and something becoming easy. Instead of the game getting more difficult as you go on, what you suggest means it gets easier. This is the definition of a messed up difficulty curve. To keep a game fun, the game's challenge must keep increasing in order to match player skill.
It'd be like learning to play baseball and once you learned how to pitch, the coach goes 'ok, here's a pitching machine. Your job is now to feed balls into it, not to pitch the balls yourself.'
Just because real life technological progress makes things cheaper, more efficient, and even obsolete as it's developed to maturity doesn't mean that a game should be that way. This is why KSP has much simplified fuel systems and extremely powerful engines as compared to real life--sometimes realism just isn't fun.
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I don't disagree. I'm just saying that it's quite clear they are overpowered. Whether that's something that needs to be changed soon or in the far future is a different discussion but I think it's pretty clear they need to be changed at some point.
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Jouni: I guess that's where I fundamentally disagree with you. I don't think they should be cheaper, more powerful, and more efficient than early ones. I think they should instead occupy new niches and open up new possibilities, not replace old engines.
Take the Aerospike, for example. It's high on the tech tree (as compared to other 1.25m engines) so it takes a long time to unlock but it has an extremely high atmospheric isp (a new niche!). Or the Rapier--again, late unlock, but new niche: hybrid engine.
The SLS engines, on the other hand, unlock at the same levels as most 2.5m engines and deliver far superior performance in the same niches. The Mainsail and KR-2L occupy the same niche: 'heavy, atmospheric launcher'. And the KR-2L is completely superior.
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I notice that most people saying the balance is fine say something along the lines of 'in the full game they'll cost a lot and be higher up on the tech tree'. Which, to me, is a kinda implicit admission that they're OP as they are right now. In career mode, they unlock at the same tech levels as the Mainsail--there is not a significantly higher science cost. And since there's no currency system at the moment, that argument is irrelevant. EDIT: For example, yes, the KR-2L costs 4x as much as the Mainsail. But the mainsail costs the same as an LV-T30 and less than an LV-T45.
In the game as it currently is, they are overpowered. There is no argument about that. The have the same costs as the Mainsail and far superior performance. I'm getting kinda annoyed that people are being all handwavey and saying 'but it will be balanced eventually' to try to argue that they're balanced now. They're not. Not in career and not in sandbox. Maybe they will be in the future but that's irrelevant at the moment.
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I had the same suggestion a while ago. It's something I would like to see myself.
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You could already face all of the challenges with existing parts and docking. The SLS engines don't open new gameplay, they simply make old gameplay enormously easier. A little easier would be fine, but they make things way too easy which is why they need to be tuned down. stupid_chris' suggested changes at the start of this thread still put the SLS engines above the power curve. And that's fine. Us people who think they're OP don't want to see them nerfed into uselessness. We just want them to be more in line with everything else.
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The new parts just highlight how shoddy the Mainsail is at its job
The real launch engine efficiency comparison would be a 48-7S cluster, and they're not much better than that.That point of comparison is kinda flawed because the 48-7s is considered pretty OP as well. Comparing overpowered engines to other overpowered engines misses the point. Again, I direct you to stupid_chris' graph near the beginning of this post. It is unequivocally clear that the new parts are far and above the power curve set by all previous parts.
I'm not arguing against the idea of bigger, stronger engines. KWRocketry, for example, has been doing 3.75m engines for a long time without them being stupidly overpowered. And that's because they have reasonable masses and isp ratios.
And it's not a matter of nostalgia, of wanting to "use the lifter they spent a week designing instead of SLS parts". It's the fact that now, there is pretty much no reason at all to use some engines because of the SLS parts. The Mainsail has become almost completely irrelevant because the SLS engines are the same or better in every way. The KR-2L has 66% more thrust than the Mainsail yet only 8.3% more mass. It also has an enormously higher ATM isp which makes it a completely superior replacement for the Mainsail since both engines occupy the 'heavy launch, first stage' niche and the KR-2L is better in every way.
By contrast, when the Mainsail was introduced it did not make LVT-30s and LVT-45s irrelevant because they still had clear advantages over the Mainsail. Yes, their TWR was worse but they had overall better isp in both atmosphere and vacuum. The Mainsail was also significantly heavier--it weighed 4x more and delivered 7x the thrust. There was a clear tradeoff.
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It's worth noting that MechJeb is a mod, not part of the stock game. And ions were buffed specifically because most of the community felt they were unfun. Unfun to fly with (because burns took forever) and unfun to design for (because everything else was better in most situations).And overall a big HELL NO because some folks think it is "Too easy" By that attitude Ions should not have been buffed and mechjeb should be banned right?Yes, Mainsails were powerful and made some things easier but they also came with their own challenges--they were wobbly as hell and could often make your ship break apart on lauch. And they had low isp, both on the ground and in space which meant they were mostly useful only as first stage engines. There were trade-offs. The new engines, on the other hand, have extremely minimal trade-offs.
By nerfing stock parts it is changing the game for people that are not you. In my opinion that is open and shut case of dictating how other people should play KSP in the sandbox. If KSP were not so easy to mod I could understand. Yet when "hard mode" mods are a simple unzip away there is little reason to nerf any part for those who are not yourself. And Squad did not put the SLS stats in at the last min to rush ARM out.It's also worth noting the Squad has nerfed overpowered parts in the past, before career mode, when sandbox was the only game mode. In fact, Aerospikes are a perfect precedent for balancing overpowered engines. Aerospikes were nerfed (IIRC) in version 0.18 because they were stupidly strong before that. Just like the new engines, they had minor downsides (no bottom attach node and no thrust vectoring). They were the engine you used for everything--there was no need to use anything else because they had a very high TWR and extremely high ISP. You could literally make every design work by spamming aerospikes.
This whole blog is very fascinating reading but here are some important links and a summary:
“When players have multiple options or routes to victory, each option or route should have a risk-reward relationship that prevents dominant strategies."--The new SLS engines create a dominant strategy.
“All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.â€Â--The new SLS engines reduce challenge by generally allowing you to skip a skill that's more difficult to master: docking. It also makes lifting large payloads to orbit (another difficult to master skill) much easier.
"Reward the player with more than just score increases. Include rewards that expand gameplay itself.â€Â--The SLS engines reduce gameplay significantly (making it much easier to achieve orbit, a skill you use for everything) while only increasing gameplay marginally (allowing you to move asteroids around, a very specific feature.)
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I've actually done this before myself--manually went through and renamed everything. But I gave up because I had to do a bunch of manual changes with each update and added mod and it was just a pain. Personally, I think this is the wrong solution to the right problem.
A better solution, imho, would be to give each part several tags in their config file. For example, the Mainsail would get the 2.5m, LFO, and gimbal tags (perhaps others but those are just the ones off the top of my head). The idea being that you could add filters to your part window in the VAB. This would also make it much easier to integrate with mods--all the mod author would have to do is add a line to each config file listing all the tags. At least, that's my own personal vision for the future.
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Just a small point. As I recall, RP-1 and H/LOx actually have similar tankage weights. Yes, the hydrogen is lighter and has more energy per unit of mass but it also requires a lot of insulation and special tankage because it's cryogenic and (I think) under pressure as well. RP-1, on the other hand, is liquid at STP and much easier to handle. The extra structural requirements of hydrogen largely offset the benefit in fuel efficiency. That's why many large rockets use RP-1 in their first stage and H/LOx in upper stages--that small amount of weight savings is very important in upper stages but near meaningless in lower stages.
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Edit: Derp. Memo to self: always check the last post before replying.
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Anyone interested in doing a HotRockets! config for BobCat's Soyuz?
Can you point me towards which mod that is? I'm guessing it's the historical rockets mod?
Frankly I'm a tad burnt out doing configs for new mods at the moment (it's mostly just a bunch of trial and error and can get tedious). My current project is trying to tackle how to integrate HotRockets and KSPI but if I need a change of pace I'll take a look at the Soyuz mod
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Those engines aren't actually mine, they're from Lack's SXT mod. All I did was set up a config file to use the HotRockets engine effects on them.
HotRockets actually has SmokeScreen included and many of the configs actually require it to work properly. If you install the engines from SXT, HotRockets, and the config file I posted above, everything should work fine I think. I'm actually a novice at this myself so I don't pretend to know for sure but if you run into problems just PM me and I'll try to help you out.
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I realize that in the past week I've kinda adopted this thread. Hope I'm not stepping on any toes
tygoo7: I'm finally finished with the SXT config. I ran into some trouble with the MEM Ascent stage--sometimes the effect just disappears and I really don't know how to fix it. I'm pretty sure that currently existing flights after you add the .cfg will have their effects disappear but all new flights after installing should have the new effect correctly. The smoke particles on the K1 engine may be a little sparse--I turned down the emitters because there are 16 of them and I was worried that there would be tons of lag with that many particles. I also added some nice, rumbly sounds to the bigger engines
Here's the download. And here's a picture:
Will there be support for KSP Interstellar?I don't know about Nazari but my big ambition is to make this mod compatible with KSPI. It's quite a big task though since each engine has about 6 different running modes (no joke) and I'm not quite sure how to tackle that. At the moment I'm just cutting my teeth making it compatible with less complicated mods since I'm just a .cfg wrangler and completely new to this stuff. But KSPI is always in the back of my mind and it's something I'd really like to do.
Currently I like the FX of the stock 2.5m Poddle upper stage engine most... It does look great for an upper stage engine that works in (near) vacuum environment, the exhaust is quite semi-transparent and it expands from the nozzle widely.Exhaust spreading widely is actually pretty unrealistic for upper stage engines. The most efficient engines have the exhaust going straight back so that the force (the 'equal and opposite reaction') is straight forwards. Though this mod is more about style than realism so it doesn't really matter
And to make things even better, hope that FXs can utilize the SmokeScreen plugin and use the scale & size modulation curve about the atmosphere density, so that the exhaust will change its shape dynamically.I think that'll be one of my future projects
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This is a simple feature I've wanted for a long time. Just a master volume control in the settings panel so I don't have to change all the volume sliders one by one. Not that I have faith that anything in this forum actually gets looked at by the dev staff but hey, I can hope.
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Much appreciated, sorry for my rudeness earlier.
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The way part files are organized seems like an absolute mess. If there is a system to it, it's impenetrable by me. Compare Squad's part folder to yours:
I really don't mean to be rude, I'm just extremely frustrated because I've been trying to set up a .cfg to make HotRockets work with SXT and I've been pulling my hair out all afternoon trying to find where all the parts are hidden. Multiple parts coded in the same .cfg file, completely unrelated parts and models stored in the same folder, the probe chassis is a command part and yet it's not in the command folder, etc. It's very frustrating to try to find things
</rant>Also, I'm pretty sure the Stage3NEng.cfg (the stage 3 nuclear engine used in the KV-N ship) uses the same title as the smaller NERVA so only one shows up in the VAB. As far as I can tell, the Stage3NEng doesn't seem to draw fuel from fuel tanks--it runs when you use the infinite fuel cheat in the debug menu but when I stage, it just shows an empty fuel gauge.
And in the MEMLander.cfg, there are too many empty lines between the ModuleEngines and RCS Module. It makes it so SXT and ModManager don't want to play nice together:
MODULE
{
name = ModuleEngines
thrustVectorTransformName = thrustTransform
exhaustDamage = True
ignitionThreshold = 0.1
minThrust = 0
maxThrust = 12
heatProduction = 150
fxOffset = 0, 0, 0.125
PROPELLANT
{
name = LiquidFuel
ratio = 0.9
DrawGauge = True
}
PROPELLANT
{
name = Oxidizer
ratio = 1.1
}
atmosphereCurve
{
key = 0 311
key = 1 280
}
}
MODULE
{
name = ModuleRCS
thrusterTransformName = RCSthruster
thrusterPower = 0.44
resourceName = MonoPropellant
atmosphereCurve
{
key = 0 290
key = 1 100
}
} -
Excellent
I left the mono engines alone because I thought their current particles were passable and I couldn't find a good picture of what a hydrazine rocket looks like. I'm glad to hear you're working on it EDIT: Derp, looking in the HotRockets files I see there already is an OMS effect. I knew I saw it somewhere, I just forgot where
Feel free to add it to the .cfg yourself or I can. -
Sure, I'll give it a shot
Although Nazari deserves all the thanks. All I do is tweak a few numbers in the .cfg files, he does the real work.
The real launch engine efficiency comparison would be a 48-7S cluster, and they're not much better than that.
</rant>
Feel free to add it to the .cfg yourself or I can.
HotRockets! Particle FX Replacement + Tutorial
in KSP1 Mod Development
Posted
I'm assuming that what you want is shock diamonds, yes?