Profugo Barbatus

[snip] Regardless, on the 4 sites 4 players line, your making the assumption that the four sites will be agency and single-person restricted in some way. The former, agency restriction, is highly unlikely barring the four launch sites being clones of each other along the equator - It'd provide mechanical advantage/disadvantage to particular missions to launch from them, and only be restrictive of a players options, which tends to go against KSP's fundamental design goals. And we already know for a fact that the multiple pads on the KSC are explicitly for allowing multiple launches at the same time in multiplayer, so the idea that its one site one player is just not true. [snip] Regarding the actual original survey of this topic, I'm surprised Disruptors are so low, or that free spirits are so high, for a talk about KSP multiplayer. I would have imagined that Disruptors would have been higher, what with multiplayer KSP being an opportunity to show off live the absurdity of some of the launches we can do. Then again, small sampling size, and office hours are only just coming to a close in NA, so maybe it'll balance out as more results come in. Achievers are about where I'd expect, lots of folks flying to do their first X mission or Y challenge variant.

And if you look at the material I posted, incorrect. The actual literal screenshot of multiplayer, being played, has owners of objects at the moment numbered, and we see up to P#7. We already know the intent is to have additional launch sides beyond the KSC in the future, and there's nothing preventing multiple people from sharing a launch pad - they just can't launch at the exact same moment. And as agencies set up their own colonies orbital or otherwise, that constraint lessens. Its really nice to see all the excitement over multiplayer, but my frustration is growing more and more [snip]

Canadian here, you haven't had real bacon until you've had Canadian Bacon As for KSP 2, I don't play modded, but only because there's not really any mods that I want yet, rather than a desire to avoid modding. Once we see some nice part packs rolling out, and/or life support mods, I'll be jumping on the bandwagon. A fair position, but I wouldn't completely dismiss mods in the value equation - There is cost and effort put into modding support and frameworks, take it firsthand from a hobby dev, making a moddable game is harder than not. Doesn't excuse a poor quality base game, but it might be a few parts sparser than otherwise on its own.

I highly recommend you go and actually read the stuff thats been posted out about multiplayer, because no, that's not how it works from the details we do know. There's still gaps in the exact details of 'how', but actual interaction is confirmed, along with some talks/mentions of time track/synchronization system to allow people to play at different times and into the 'future' relative to another players perspective. We don't know what that looks like in UI/Mechanics/Gameplay, but just that a member of the team (think it was Nate) mentioned coming home, jumping into a multiplayer game, and seeing what a friend has done while he was away. What we also know is that its not some massively multiplayer or universal drop in/drop out multiplayer - Its specific save sessions, together with other players, much like a more traditional coop game. There's not going to be a server browser or hundred player games - Expect to be playing with a friend group, or doing LFG forum posts.

Mostly the fact that the devs have release screenshots of multiple active players controlling vessels in the same scene. It doesn't get much more "See and interact" than that.

Not really, but I didn't put much expectation into the initial launch, and still have KSP1 installed and heavily modded, which has seen more play. I knew that KSP2 would be me playing around once or twice at best before Science is introduced, and still don't expect to really run a protracted campaign until colonies and resources are in. The particularly rough launch just made that decision easier, but even in a smoother boat I woulda done the same thing, I'm a very systems and goals driven player.

Hi Nate, two simple questions for you. Without making any promises, can we expect to see new Parts introduced between Roadmap releases? While the major roadmap releases are pretty likely to see new parts relevant to their particular functionality, it'd be really nice to see new parts popping up that are less revolutionary and more utilitarian between major milestones. Building and taking advantage of new stuff is one of the reasons to keep coming back to KSP2, particularly in Early Access days. Stuff like a new Station Core type, or fuel tank/cargo tank set/piece etc. The second question is specifically aimed at you and your experiences with the game, what is the Jankiest mission you've ran personally? Not Buggy, that's a whole separate ball park, but a mission where your design choices turned out to be sub-optimal at best, and lead to some weird, borderline stupid actions to compensate. Stuff like realizing your suicide burn was more suicide than planned for, and the Rapid Unplanned Disassembly that somehow didn't end the mission, but made the return trip fun in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the word.

Kek, I love you guys, dumb fun threads make the forums what they are. Dakota's probably gonna come back to let us know that precise collision was a victim of KSC Optimization. I never drove in, so I can't say whether it was a full blown mesh collider or something slightly less expensive, but I wouldn't blame them for turning them all off and just giving it a big old simple box collider to squeeze out a fraction of low hanging gains. Colliders don't have the biggest impact, but every drop counts when your trying to appease an unhappy audience.

This is a VERY meaty patch, you touched a lot of things across a lot of spaces. I'll be giving it a try today, hoping the other half of "didn't break more stuff" holds up. If the team can sustain this pace until the games in a more stable state, and they don't break too much else (The LoD on lights is very trivial, glad it didn't act as a blocker) then I'm going to be a lot more confident in this games feature. Either way, great job from the team, love to see detailed and thorough patch notes. Bonus thumbs up to whoever was keeping track of all the commits and impacts and collated the list. Too many games try to get away with "Assorted Fixes" and it just sucks to have to guess "is that one bug that bricks this particular option still here? won't know until I waste my time I guess".

Good stuff - Glad to see the rolling patch cycle is starting to pick up, with patch 2 already in the oven. Is 2/2 for Dev/QA the dream goal, or is the hope to slide out to a 4/4 once the immediate fires are out, make room for some meatier works. Understanding that its all planning and speculation, and not commitment, of course.

This reads like you've only ever made static environment, limited interaction games at best, and have no idea what your talking about at worse. What you've written reads to me as "Just abstract away every interacting element of the simulation in pursuit of a stable physics delta" which can be translated for the less development inclined as "Just use the KSP Physics model from 2013 and drop all the new simulation details". It defeats the purpose of a freeform sandbox simulation of rocket building and flight. Not to mention half the abstractions via assumption you propose break fundamentally under anything more complex than single resource sink perfect scenario operations. And if it were as simple as "if 15 seconds passed irl and lag means you only finished 8 seconds worth of processing, just simulate the other 7 but faster" is like telling someone to charge their phone by turning up the brightness - you can't fix an execution speed problem by enforcing that the execution happen on time without just abandoning a processing cycle halfway through every time it goes under load - which would ensure complete collapse of the physics simulation at that point as you just have to ignore impulses or time travel. Reducing the physics delta is what they already do, and its the only viable option. Pretty much the only thing I nodded along to with a "Yea" was the rename/map issue where someone just forgot to set a flag somewhere in their UI toolkit or input mappings.

Its unlikely to be related. Significant layoffs like these take months to plan out, not the barely week and a half that they've had. You also don't axe from the corporate top if its a few projects that just dropped that aren't showing as expected. Its much more likely that its actually what they said, that they've got too much in the corporate and planning levels that they don't need now with their current projects in their current states. Everyone is looking to be ahead of the curve in clawing back to reasonable operating levels after the last few years drove the markets into a weird frenzy where organizations dealing in digital goods felt invincible. Its likely that they're reducing their project load now, so stuff that woulda dropped 2-5 years from now is not getting the greenlight, and they don't need these people as a result. Odds are they're expecting to lean on currently confirmed projects that are released or underway to make the gap, like Outer Worlds 2 and the long tail of KSP2.

I think so as well, but the whole goal here was to be ironclad about mitigating the infinite quibbling and panic over terminology people seem to get when they're blazing the hype or fear trains. If I definitively say it will be Exploration mode, and then it comes out as "Kardashev Mode" People will panic and freak out that they're not getting the thing that they were looking forward to - Even if its just a rename after a classic way of measuring a growing civilization in Sci-Fi. Whereas if I'm relatively clear that it may not be called that, people may not immediately jump ship in despair Yes, and it has me excited too, but once again I err on "probably' just by virtue of the above. Once folks get it in their head that something 'is' happening, they are very very very displeased when its not, just look at the EA launch As far as I'm aware, this is how resource distribution worked in the first game, with relatively randomized ore distribution. Modded expansions to that system did much the same, with biases for worlds to have certain materials in certain biomes, but within a given range. Its unlikely that they would materially regress in this area, considering the relative ease of development to expand it to have randomness.

There seems to be a lot of confusion and misinterpretation going around about what has been said, so I will try and make it clear for you and others Career Mode - Funds-based vehicle construction restriction, with Science Gathering required for tech unlocks. This mode is NOT coming back. Sandbox Mode - Unlimited construction, all parts. This mode is already in and will not be going away to our knowledge. Science Mode (Name unclear at this time) - Unlimited construction, Science Gathering required for Tech unlocks. Science Gathering may not resemble the previous instrument heavy, biome specific approach, but not much detail is known. This mode is road mapped and coming in the nearer future. It is likely but unclear as to whether a science-only mode will remain in the game into 1.0. Exploration Mode (Name unclear at this time) - Resource-based vehicle construction restriction, with Science Gathering required for tech unlocks. This mode is the Career Mode successor. The funds cost for a vessel is being replaced with a resource cost for a vessel. Rather than running contracts for cash, players will run missions (Potentially still contract-system guided) to acquire and increase or transport their resource income/supply/stock (Resource model and whether resources are 'consumed' or treated as a checklist is unclear at this time) to pay the costs for ship assembly. This is road mapped and coming in the farther future. So yes, Career mode is gone, money is gone, and it has a feature equivalent successor that fills the same game space. The exact mechanical details are unclear. There is no plan to create a cash analog at this time. Now, while modding is no pure substitute for game mechanics, there is no obvious barrier to modders implementing cash as a resource just like steel and uranium, with supply mechanics (Taxes on colonies? Dunno, up to the modder) to ensure its available and expandable. If you really want to be playing a pure-cash KSP or want finances as part of your construction considerations, its very likely to be a modded option. This is highly speculative, as we have no idea what's open, exposed, easily edited, etc., but its extremely unlikely the games hardcoded to only handle certain resources.

A feeling I know all too well - Making games is super fun. Finishing games is miserable lol. But gotta push through to go from 'Fun, wonky prototype' to 'hey its a game'.

No worries, I appreciate just seeing the actual list of rolling fixes. God knows I know exactly what your talking about when it comes to the important bugs being the hardest to fix, and taking time to actually bundle a release together. After all these years, I consider a 4-week turnaround 'pretty fast' for most things, so you're at least on track to meet my expectations already. Also glad to hear it hasn't become an all hands panic onto patching and that there's still manpower working on the rest of the tree. It wasn't exactly a big concern, since just throwing people at the problem usually just makes more problems when someone unfamiliar steps into a new code space trying to 'fix' it. Here's hoping the worst of the crunch clears out in the next few weeks, and that you can transition from fire fighting to watching the community do challenge flights and youtube videos in relative stability and confidence their missions won't just up and explode, lithobraking excluded.

Came in here to say as much - Code bounties/external contributors aren't just some "spend money get code" situation. There's a significant administration overhead on the devs plate to facilitate any sort of come and go development model, where you have to review everything coming through by SME's from the relevant teams and possibly an architect. I run into this problem every time a company wants my help to set up Citizen development, thinking they can cut the core team and just have the business units take it all on. Rando's coming in to fix and add to the code means you have to corral them all, enforce standards, and review that they're not accidentally doing anything destructive to stuff in other branches - I might see this weird floating stub and useless verification operation as a weird resource hog and waste, and trim it while rewriting something to handle a bug. Only later for the devs to go to merge and find that I've rewritten and deleted a key point for the new stuff they were building in a different branch and now we've got collisions and bug fixes that need to be undone and remade. Considering the small headcount, and the fact that only a portion of that headcount is actually programmers instead of artists or designers, they'd almost certainly spend months setting up the groundwork for this only to end up fixing bugs slower as the devs spend more time herding cats and rejecting bad fixes. It would be cheaper and easier long term to hire on 2-3 contractors for 6-12 months as extra muscle for a dedicated fix team that can actually be trained up and trusted to be set loose. After all, we know all the other major features like colonies are half complete, those teams will still need to finish them, and odds are they're not super familiar or useful in the core stuff thats broken right now - The guy making colony resource management probably has minimal understanding of the physics problems underlying SAS going monkey mode.

I don't really see the cause for negativity here - They're communicating early the expectations and immediate priorities. Save corruption (I'm guessing this is at least in part related to weird behaviors when loading the game and the VAB occasionally throwing your ship to the floor in a temper tantrum) and loading failures are both obvious and immediate issues to resolve - The former can indirectly cause an absolute ton of errors, like the failing docking ports, engines, landing irregularities, etc, anything where the games loading data that it buggered writing out in the first place. Considering every ship is a parts list thats loaded in and referenced regularly, having that break is a big deal. Loading failures are similar, good luck getting any feedback or enjoyment when the game won't start. Maneuver nodes is probably some gremlin in the simulation thats manifesting now, but likely affects other things we haven't noticed/reported widely that the team spotted when they confirmed the issue. Actually, now that I think about it, Save gone wrong might explain the bizzare behavior I had where I time warped to a Jool launch window in the Tracking Center, left the TC and launched a rocket, only to find myself having traveled about 6 months back in time to 0:00 universal time. Only noticed when I got to orbit and the Gas Giant had gone and left me The rest of the buglist come release will probably be bits of low hanging fruit, as I've mentioned prior. Lots of little niggling, low and medium priority issues that'll be fixed based on how easy it was to get bonked into shape. Nothing they've listed seems like some terrible misallocation of resources, pretty standard to be honest.

Glad to hear it! Discord is nice and all, but its all but impossible to keep up with anything that is going on when I actually have a job to pay attention to, times 40 other servers that also want me to exclusively watching their feeds and 'engaging' to actually see anything. Forums/Steam News are so much better as I actually get a feed, don't get \@spams all day and night, and can review whats what when I actually get time in my life.

Obviously the 2nd 4th, because 2[fort]h is the quintessential TF2 map

I've noticed that as well, I wonder if its due to the new methalox stuff being more efficient. I feel like I'm getting way more Dv out of a craft of a given size than I'm used to, and the improved wings just amplify the returns from that. Bodging over my old design paradigms from the first game has left me with spaceplanes with way too much fuel, and launch stacks that carry half the launch assembly unused into orbit with them.

I just wanted to come in here to say these are super pretty looking and you've done a great job! The fact that most of them do handle well is a cherry on top, I'll have to grab them after work and give them a spin myself.

Bannerlord immediately comes to mind, being developed by 3x-4x the staff, over a significantly longer length of time, and launching into a really rough and feature incomplete experience compared to its final goal, with chunks of kingdom, clan and troop management missing, myraid placeholder and missing assets, and a lot of unrefined core systems. Even after release from EA, many of these systems were never really completed as expected. KSP is rough, but its among good company, not alone in its state. KSP2 is technically very ambitious, moreso than Bannerlord in many aspects. Whether they can deliver that ambition is to be seen, but I'm happy to give them a chance.

I get the feeling you've never actually run a software project - Managers are about as far from understanding the scope and complexity of the work being done as one can get. They rely on the developers, Subject Matter Experts specifically, to feed information up to them. Optimism and enthusiasm in the development team can affect the results, but its not nearly as simple as "Who to trust and who to not" because software development is extremely complex and the guy who got the last eight guesses right may completely whiff the ninth guess on timeliness because of a dozen different unforeseen complications. There is no malice or incompetence, because it all operates under gut feelings and 'best guess' operations. I highly recommend you look up the concept of "RACI" - you seem to be attributing a lot to higher management as a task, as opposed to something they are informed of. There's no universal distribution of the different segments, but management tends to occupy the Consulted and Informed spaces, they're not responsible for actively managing or delivering the scope constraints and changes. Otherwise you end up with the nightmare of trying to explain why the team wants an extra week to refactor a core loop in the resource module to avoid an edgecase where ships yeetus deletus all their fuel, to someone who doesn't really understand the actual impact of this. As opposed to them being informed that a SME who developed the original resource function has signed off on this as being a worthwhile change to avoid risk, and just needs a rubber stamp. You've neglected option 3 - Devs: "Probably? If these things we're working on come together, and Dave's feeling pretty optimistic about them, I think I can make that work". And the Management says "alright, best answer we've got, lets try for it". And by the time people realize that Dave could not work his wizardry this time, its too late to change plans without massive community backlash. I cannot count the number of times in my own career that "Yea this should be a two day job based on what we know" turns into an all hands on deck three week nightmare because of completely benign, unpredictable factors suddenly reared their ugly head. Software development is extremely hard, and there's a reason that people we consider responsible for bad projects/release are rarely held accountable - the people actually doing the work know how hard and variable it is. Companies don't like to just casually witch hunt their staff or management for trying their best, that's how you end up with mass departures. Leadership isn't going to hang around to be under the guillotine for every developer decision, and developers aren't going to hang around just for their input, optimism, and pessimism to be ignored in favor of corporate mandates. Project Management is an art form, not a science. All the 'clearly delineated' roles and 'foolproof' processes fall apart immediately in favor of what works, stuff constantly shifts around, deliverables go in and out of the window all the time, and that's in a well managed one. It is incredibly difficult, and even a good result often looks like a pale imitation of the original plan.

I'm not really sure why these stats are surprising or concerning - KSP1 has had forever to be super popular, and KSP2 has launched roughshod at best, and feature lacking. This is expected in an EA title, but such an anticipated title is going to get way more attention than might otherwise be warranted for an EA release. So a lot of people bought it expecting way more, letting hype and anticipation overcome the warnings about the games state. So a lot of people have likely done what many of us have done, which is 'enjoy' the bugs, review as to how they felt about the current state of the game, and then put it down to wait until whenever it looks better before seriously diving in. I can't speak for everyone else, but I was running a heavily modded KSP1 leading into the release, and I'm still playing that save now, just because its got the content I want. When KSP2 starts to have more of the content I want, I will probably pivot over for the last time. Until then, I'm booting it up here and there to get kraken'd and participate in the journey, just like I did back in KSP1, playing on and off since before the Mun was released (I actually played the VERY first version way back when, for like 30 minutes which hardly counts) right up until Career Mode came out, then I started playing seriously. I would hardly argue that Pre-Mun KSP1 wasn't very fun, just that there wasn't much to actually strive for - a very important difference. KSP2 is in much the same state, There is fun to be had when you do things - there's just not much to do, and doing any of them doesn't really matter. Despite all that, the fact the game already has 10% of the reviews of KSP1 in less than a week is actually a really good indicator - not only are there a lot of buyers, but a lot of them are invested enough to feel that they need to get their opinions out already. Its got a rough rep out the gate, but I've seen worse launches do better.