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Arsonide

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Posts posted by Arsonide

    Developer Insights #18 - Graphics of Early Access KSP2

    in Dev Diaries

    Posted

    I'm confused by the implication that High Definition Render Pipeline, a render pipeline that by Unity's own admission was not built with performance in mind, might help with performance. If anything it will enable a ton of fancy effects that will harm performance.

    If performance is a concern then that is something I typically associate with the Universal Render Pipeline.

    Career Mode

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Arsonide

    This was actually the intended use of that contract.

    It all started back with the "Get Science in Orbit of X" contracts - players were spamming them, and repeatedly completing them using the same craft. That sort of felt like an exploit, so it was slated for patching up, as a lot of contracts have special logic to prevent exploitative behavior when applicable. The thing was that any time there was an attempt to "fix" this "problem", there was quite a lot of resistance to the idea. Players really enjoyed these repeatable contracts because back then there were no contextual objectives (like satellite adjustments or station expansions). They felt like these contracts encouraged them to build infrastructure and then allowed them to gain a repeatable source of income from that infrastructure. This behavior was never patched to my knowledge, but the payouts of those contracts were lowered slightly to reflect this.

    So that sort of renewable income was seen as sort of a gray area, but SENTINEL had one thing going for it - it was an optional official mod, rather than stock, so players had to opt-in to this mechanic. This gave us a bit of wiggle room, and we wanted the contract to feel different than other contracts, so we heavily accentuated this renewable income. That is to say, if you already have a SENTINEL satellite in orbit where the contract designates, all you have to do is accept the contract, wait, and rake in the cash. This made it different than anything else in the game. It heavily encourages building infrastructure, in a way similar to contextual station contracts, or the CommNet mechanic does.

    Obviously, the mechanic was popular enough to eventually be fully integrated into stock.

    Career Mode at last

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Arsonide

    22 hours ago, Kelderek said:

    If you're not a big fan of contracts like me, then there is a good admin strategy that you can use called "Leadership Initiative" which will reduce the funds, science, and rep from contracts, but give you much higher gains for funds and reputation from milestones as well as a boost to any science data you collect in the field.  I usually upgrade my admin building to level 2 and then save up to buy this strategy at 60% (which is the max for this building level).  Contract gains will be about 45% lower but milestones are 90% better and the science gained in the field is about 30% better.  The setup cost is not cheap (something like 160k funds, 320 science and 64 reputation cost and you need at least 250 reputation to access it), but I can usually grab it after 5 or 6 launches in an early career.

    Once you have this enabled, then you can just go anywhere you want and the first time you do anything you get nice milestone bonuses.  The disadvantage is you don't get funds up front like you do with contracts and also you only get the milestone rewards once, so it's not very good if you plan to make repeated trips to the same locations.  You can still do some contracts, they just don't pay out as much, but if you come across ones that align with what you were planning to do anyway then you may as well take them.  But the way I like to play is to explore lots of new places, so the milestone rewards are the easiest way for me to do that and I don't have to rely on finding the right kind of contracts to fund my missions.

    Leadership Initiative was added when milestones were added because there are indeed players that wish career mode was less guided, and more free-form, like sandbox mode with funds and science. These players wouldn't be satisfied with any changes to contracts, because contracts are not what they want from career mode.

    The reason it has such a large activation cost is because of the initial "record" milestones - altitude records, speed records, distance records, and depth records. There are a lot of those early in the game to kickstart your career on a positive note, and give new players some wiggle room. Having Leadership Initiative active as those are earned would be quite unbalanced, however, which is why the activation cost is a bit steeper. This ensures that players get it a little later in the game.

    I like that you noticed that it forces you to keep moving forward, instead of doing the same things repeatedly. This was intentional, to emphasize a playstyle that is very different than following contracts. It emphasizes more of a trailblazer or pioneer attitude, which is why it is called "Leadership Initiative". You want to be the first in your field to do these things that have never been done before. You want to keep moving.

    Another point I'd like to make is the boosted science gains. This might appear strange to someone initially, but the intent of that was not actually to give you more science. What do you do if you are using this playstyle and you are stuck? You've done everything you can do in the Kerbin system, but you can't make it to Duna yet? What if you've explored everything in the system, and there are no milestones left? The intent of the boosted science was not to give you science, but to give you a source of recurring funds when paired with another strategy. When initially doing science, this still supports the trailblazer attitude, as science comes from finite pools (doing it in the same places lowers and eventually uses up all the science there). However if you've done all the science there is to do, this will boost the amount of science your labs produce, and therefore potentially boost the funds they produce when paired with other strategies.

    Anyway, a lot of thought went into that strategy, hopefully I've explained some of it. :P

    KSP Weekly: The discovery of the Kerbol... I mean TRAPPIST-1 system

    in KSP1 The Daily Kerbal

    Posted · Edited by Arsonide

    8 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

    Actually Sun is referred to Kerbol several times in-game, in contracts. Though I think this has more to do with the contracts being written by RoverDude and QA'd by the community than any intentional addition by Squad themselves.

    RoverDude has never worked extensively on contracts to my knowledge, you might be thinking of my prior work. As far as I'm aware the word "Kerbol" is not and has never been in the game anywhere. If you see it, grab a screenshot and report it on the bug tracker. For the most part, it is referred to as "the Sun". The words "keliosynchronous" and "keliostationary" are in the game, however, so you might be thinking of those. You can find them in Contracts.cfg, and can modify them there if K-Syndrome is bothering you.

    Explore Mun Contract

    in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials

    Posted · Edited by Arsonide

    21 minutes ago, WanderingKid said:

    Thanks for dropping in!

    A question that's been bugging me for ages.  Why is rendezvous/dock at (x) less important than flyby at (y) yet more important than land at (y)?  In particular, dock at Mun always seems to drop in between flyby Minmus and Orbit Minmus.  Drives me BUGGY!  If you happen to know offhand and can explain what seems to be an odd choice of priorities to me, that would help me not want to throttle the career mode sometimes.

    It's not a matter of importance, it's a matter of progression. What happens is the game sees that you are ready for advanced stuff on x, and therefore also qualify for a flyby at y. After your flyby, it creates a pool of advanced X subjects and basic Y subjects, and makes a choice from the pool that is created.

    7 minutes ago, eddiew said:

    While we have your ear @Arsonide - I find with my current career that the game is never offering exploration contracts for places I've yet to visit, and is obsessed with asking me to rendezvous/dock/transfer crew around places I've been to already.

    I do however have a 3.2x setup. Is it possible that the contract system is checking for planets within a particular distance of <homeworld> and not finding any? Or do I just need to clear out the rendezvous/docking stuff before it will ask me to move on?

    The only time it checks distances is when it calculates the next flyby, otherwise it's just watching your progression. It could probably use a few extra options to allow people to tweak how they want it to behave. There are a lot of these in Contracts.cfg, but there could probably be more. Might be worth a suggestion thread.

    Explore Mun Contract

    in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials

    Posted · Edited by Arsonide

    On 2/6/2017 at 1:57 AM, bewing said:

    I can try asking the devs for you, but mostly it's a mystery wrapped in an enigma. AFAIK, only Arsonide ever knew, and he's not talking.

    I mean, nobody's ever asked me, so that would help. As would mentioning me properly so I get pinged, as I am active on the forums. It isn't really a mystery at all.

    Explore contracts have a very specific logic to them that is semi-random, but also quite ordered at the same time. They used to be entirely random, but that is not the case anymore. I'm not going to get into specific details, but here is the gist of things. They look at what you have done on the planets you have been to. They will keep offering you objectives on those planets up until a certain point of progression has been met on that planet before offering the next planet. However, if you "skip" a planet, and visit Duna, for example, then the game will assume that you are capable of reaching Duna, and start offering things there as well. Just because they start offering a new planet does not mean they stop offering things on an older planet.

    Advanced objectives for the old planet, such as rendezvous and docking, will appear alongside more basic objectives on new planets, such as flybys and orbits. They will always appear in a logical fashion. You won't see a return from flyby before you see a flyby, and you won't see a request to planet a flag before you've been asked to land.

    These contracts also keep track of what you are capable of, so for example, they aren't going to ask you to place a flag on the Mun if you've never sent any crew to the Mun. They aren't going to ask you to EVA if you don't have the facility upgrades to EVA, and they aren't going to ask you to dock without docking ports researched.

    E-class asteroids, Asteroid day mod, and modded planets

    in KSP1 Mods Discussions

    Posted · Edited by Arsonide

    18 hours ago, Streetwind said:

    You might get better answers to this over in Add-On Discussions... but I'm not sure the Asteroid Day plugin can even be modified. Do we have the source code? What kind of license is it under?

    Asteroid Day is open source and can be modified, as per the modding guidelines, and has a permissive license. The source code comes right with the addon.

    KSP Weekly: We’re back!

    in KSP1 The Daily Kerbal

    Posted

    On 1/8/2017 at 8:40 PM, regex said:

    I'm curious how many times people have to point out that career mode feels like a disjointed pile of mostly unrelated and "forced" features before Squad finally acknowledges it. Probably isn't worth it, rewriting a good chunk of the game would be a pain.

    These sorts of things depend on a bit more than how many vocal advocates there are on this forum though. If you pick out any individual feature, it's going to have someone that thinks it could use improvement, and has written a very long forum post or two about this assertion. As an example, there was an independent poll a while back with a several thousand responses that showed that over 60% of the player-base primarily played career mode. If you just read the forums, then this number will probably surprise you.

    The problem with career mode is that everybody has different ideas about what exactly it should or should not be, and the ones that feel strongly enough come and post about it. That results in a rather one sided discussion here sometimes that gets a bit confusing if you look at the actual overall statistics. The job of any developer (including modders) is to take that feedback into account, and find one solution that satisfies everybody that is also within the realm of possible implementation.

    It's a bit like finding a unicorn made of cotton candy.

    Funniest loading screen slpash sentences

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted

    19 hours ago, String Witch said:

    IIRC the game uses floating point math to keep track of the positions of objects over the distances the engine is required to work with.

    So it's a simple noun→verb wordplay suggesting they're floating the origin points for each object on water.

    Not quite, but you're on the right track. Floating point math breaks down as you move further away from the origin due to loss of precision. Only so many decimal places can fit in a number, and as the numbers get larger, you get more places on the left, and less places on the right. In most games this causes unpredictable symptoms. My first encounter with it was modding Morrowind - cliff racers spawned very far out in the ocean would jitter like mad. That's a common symptom, but you see it sprout up in various ways. I think in Minecraft they call it the "Far Lands" or something.

    Anyway, there's a method known as "floating origin" that software engineers use in many games to deal with this issue. Essentially, after the player moves a certain distance from the origin, the player is snapped back to the origin, and everything in the world is moved with him so that from his perspective, he hasn't really moved. You could say that it's as if the origin "floated" to a new location. Sometimes you can feel when this snap happens due to various artifacts occurring. In KSP you might notice some particles suddenly appear or disappear, or sounds suddenly sound like they are in a different location. But overall, from the player's perspective he's moving seamlessly through an incredibly large world with little to no loss of floating point precision.

    Anyway, if it is not already evident, KSP uses this method (As is well documented from Felipe's talk at Unite in 2013) to keep precision high at all times, while maintaining the scale of a massive solar system. So this loading hint is a sort of double entendre.

    The New Monoliths (Spoilers)

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Arsonide

    1 hour ago, lajoswinkler said:

    So now we're gonna pull out the mod card? If we're gonna talk about KSP, we're gonna talk about the stock game.

    KerbNet is a part of the stock game, a feature that I personally had a heavy hand in implementing. It allows you to map the surface of planets, visualizing the terrain, the biomes, and occasionally spotting where an anomaly is whether that anomaly is static or not.

    1 hour ago, lajoswinkler said:

    3) I'm talking about easter eggs in general. What would happen if all of them got randomized in locations. I thought I was very clear on that.

    They aren't though, most of them are still static. However, if all of them were randomized...now that people have a stock way to find them, I don't think that would be such a terrible thing. It might even be a decent idea for a mod. :wink:

    The New Monoliths (Spoilers)

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Arsonide

    21 minutes ago, lajoswinkler said:

    Easter eggs are something completely different. Those are existing famous sites for visiting with unique coordinates.

    Says who? What fun would an easter egg hunt be if the easter bunny put the eggs in the same spots every year?

    It could certainly be said that unique, static landmarks make excellent easter eggs, because these static points of reference allow the community to relate to each other much better when someone posts a video of their super low orbit going through a Mun arch. It could also be said that procedural, dynamic points of interest make excellent easter eggs, because they allow people to discover new things on their own.

    I don't think either one precludes the other, but both are definitely easter eggs.

    The New Monoliths (Spoilers)

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted

    14 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

    I don't like this "random appearance" of stuff in new KSP versions. It ruined the magic boulder and now it ruins the monoliths.

     

    14 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

    One thing that should be random and procedurally generated are somewhat rare rocks Kerbals could pick up.

    Not sure I understand here, randomizing some things ruins them, and randomizing other things does not?

    Suggestion: Make wheels act like wheels instead of round sleds.

    in KSP1 Suggestions & Development Discussion

    Posted

    23 minutes ago, steve_v said:

    Edit: I'll just drop this here, 3D tyres, apparently. Certainly seem to behave better that the ones we have:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbaPUZDJpl8

    This video was uploaded in 2011. The package itself was last updated in 2012, and therefore has not had to deal with all of the...intricacies...of Unity 5's wheel colliders. It would no longer function nowadays.

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