K^2

The OS itself is perfectly fine for games. The largest barrier to developing for OSX is usually the Metal API for rendering, which isn't even bad - in some respects it's better than DirectX 12, but it's very different. So if you want a game that runs cross platform, you have to have resources for developing for both. Or hire somebody to provide the port. Unity does support Metal, meaning making a Windows/Mac cross platform game is actually easier than ever. But you do still have considerable overhead. You still need to test on OSX, because not every bug will show up on Windows, you have to make sure all of the controls and key combos work as expected. There can be little problems with material shaders due to the differences between DirectX12 and Metal, and these have to be fixed. All of the performance bottlenecks are going to shift a little. There might be little hick ups in networking. They're all fairly minor problems, but there are a lot of them, spread throughout the code base. It would easily require at least one engineer, one tech artist, and maybe one or two QA working on it full time. Would that be worth it? Possibly once the 1.0 is ready. Apple has a pretty big cut of the market, and at least their high end laptops should be perfectly capable of meeting KSP2's minspec. It's definitely not the overhead you want to take on while in the early access, though. So while I kind of expect an official Mac port, I don't expect it to happen at least until whenever the console release is.

That's not entirely true. There are specific requirements that your game, or any given patch for it, has to pass in order to be allowed a console release, but they have very little to do with how playable the game is. You can have a very rough, very WIP game, so long as certain requirements are met. You can't hard-lock the console, the game has to keep responding to the controller, you have to be able to get to relevant menus, certain accessibility requirements must be met, and I think there are some limits on how often it crashes, but I'm not even sure about that. You just have to consistently make it from startup to the main menu without crashing. You'll note that none of it even indirectly says, "Should be able to play the game." The state that the KSP2 early access is in would probably pass console review. Yeah, there are severe bugs with rockets deconstructing, being unable to launch until you restart the game, and other corruption of the game state, but you can still get into the escape menu from anywhere, and the game doesn't lock up. As far as the console certification goes, that's good to go. Would it make sense to release the game on consoles in this state? No. The initial release was followed up by two patches. It'd be an absolute pain to try to get these through the cert along with everything else that the Intercept was doing. But even if the Intercept had some spare time to get patch 2 out for the consoles, and assuming it worked at least as well as the PC version, requiring no further patching, while the Sony and MS would technically allow it, I don't think the player base would accept it. I mean, we see how poorly it's going on the PC side. And it's bound to be a lot worse for consoles, where, yeah, the console gamers are just far more used to playing finished games. Or at least, much closer to being finished.

Crisis in Cosmology. Some of the assumptions that factor into both the red shift distance and the mass estimates are challenged, and with a more flexible approach, much more reasonable numbers are obtained. Basically. The approach the research suggests is a bit manual. Run the software to estimate red shift with standard IMF. Get background radiation temperature for the relevant age of the universe. Get adjusted IMF for the temperature. Run the software with adjusted IMF, then repeat 2-4 if it the red shift changed significantly. Get the mass from the adjusted IMF from the most recent run. But this whole loop can, of course, be trivially automated once this process is accepted as standard. There are concerns about overfitting, which is part of why the iterative method is being used, but the only real way to resolve that is going to be with recording more spectral information. I don't know if that's something we can get with JWST instrumentation, or if this is a note for the future observatories that are currently being developed.

Yes, but I'm not qualified to gauge the effort required. And likely, the only way to know for sure is to try.

Hopefully this is a good topic to stick this into. Just recently there was a bit of a talk about the JWST discovering "problems with physics." There's now convincing research on what's going on, and this is a very good video explaining it in simple terms.

I think, if it was something that close, people would definitely have found it while looking for the Easter Eggs. And in general, if any secret planets were in the code base at all, I think someone would find them while data-mining. That said, data-miners have found assets for planets not yet in the current version of the game. It's been assumed that they belong to the upcoming star systems, but there is no guarantee that one of them isn't secretly meant to be in Kerbol system and just hasn't been enabled yet. We might get a secret planet yet - I just don't think there's any point in looking for it right now.

As much as I really hope that science in KSP2 is nothing like "Stick a thermometer, a barometer, a seismometer, a gravitoli detector, and a can of goo on a ship, then go to every biome and click on them one by one," or worse yet, "Drive around KSC touching buildings and clicking on instruments one by one," I do actually hope that the instruments themselves stay. Well, not necessarily the silly ones, like the green goo. But a working thermometer and barometer would be welcome. Especially if we can eventually use these as input axes in automation. Why we couldn't in Breaking Ground, I have no clue. It'd be so much easier to build automatic guidance for rockets in vanilla KSP if I could feed the KAL 1000 the barometer data... But I digress. I just hope we get the instruments anyways, even if they aren't involved in science directly. And I hope the science system can at least clear the low, low bar of "Better than KSP."

The distances between the star and the planets you've listed are not equally spaced. It's not reasonable to assume based on this that one dot represents specifically 1/7 the distance from Kerbol to Eeloo. (Edit: To be precise, not more reasonable than many other possible interpretation.) Why not 1/3 the distance from Kerbol to Kerbin? Naturally, that would put it on an orbit intersecting that of Eeeloo, at least in the projection back to the plane. So that kind of interpretation of data doesn't seem strong. A hypothesis that the message hints at another star system, and dots representing a much greater distance are much more plausible. It's been suggested that a single dot could be a light year, as the devs have hinted at that being a common interstellar distance measure, a parsec (which would be about 0.4ly for Kerbin), the Kerbol-Eeloo distance.

I don't know if you even need a fusion drive for it to become worth it. There are a lot of materials in the asteroids that are pretty easy to reach compared to Earth, and you can use rather destructive means without worrying about causing environmental damage. You can then use linear accelerator magrails to launch cargo to wherever it needs to go. In a vacuum of space and with some massive rock serving as your anchor, getting a few km/s of delta-V is not hard. The only thing in this scheme that you'd need efficient drives for is delivering human workers, so the more automation you can come up with for the process, the less relevant that becomes.

That's needlessly pessimistic. "Not this year," is entirely within the realm of possibilities, however, especially if multiplayer is still blocking the main release.

The early access will only be available on PC. Console release is still planned for gen 9 consoles, but there is no specific date. Given the current state of the game, and what we know of the roadmap, I wouldn't expect it for at least a few months.

I would love to have an open-to-public bug tracker, where related issues can be linked and some indication of bugs being added to the work queue being provided. Mojang has something like this for the Minecraft, and while that doesn't guarantee that any given issue would be addressed, at least it never feels like the reports are going into the void.

No hope of getting any patches that improve things in the future? What is that based on? I'm just curious, because I can see some people being disappointed in how slow the progress has been, and in the fact that Intercept opted not to go for high cadence of patches, but even if you personally not seeing performance from the first two patches, the ones that were literally targeted just to put out the worst fires as quickly as possible, it seems a strange conclusion to make that there cannot be future improvement, when so many other people have reported improved stability and performance. That sounds like a non sequitur, so I'm wondering if I'm missing additional context.

Who said it's my favorite? And while T2 has properties that would pay well enough, for me to have a comparable comp, this probably isn't one of them. At the Intercept, I'd have to be basically head of their engineering to be earning as much, at which point, I would personally recommend to them to hire someone with more Unity experience for that position. I can do the job adequately well, but at my comp level, you can find someone with experience that's a better fit for the role. I also happen to enjoy life-work balance in my current position, have a great team of experts to work with, get direct support from Intel, AMD, Sony, and Microsoft to make sure we can deliver the best experience across all platforms, and I expect an absolutely disgusting ship bonus. I should give that up to work in a mid-size why exactly? Outside of jumping on board of a new studio as CTO and co-founder, I don't have a lot of incentive to do something else. And the economy isn't in the best place for that right now. Maybe in a couple of years. You know, for somebody who keeps trying to convince me that I've made a terrible mistake in buying a game for $50, your career advice has been absolutely awful so far. "Hey, you're so stupid to waste $50, here's what you can do to waste at least $50k!" No, thanks. I mean, have fun tilling at that windmill. I've outlined precisely where my experience comes from, why I'm sufficiently confident that I'd be buying KSP2 eventually anyways, and why, therefore, spending the money now or later is of no consequence. You keep treating money as something absolutely binary, that I've either spent on something that brings me instant gratification, or I have wasted it. If you cannot even imagine money working any other way, then I cannot help you. I buy every game on a whim. Games are a thing of whimsy. I get no nutrition nor shelter from games, Wolf. That's not how games work.

These specs are above the recommended. Performance-wise, if you're seeing slow framerates, it's because everyone's seeing slow framerates in that situation. Unless something's just straight up broken, which you'd probably notice, there's nothing wrong with that setup.

You keep saying that, but you refuse to tell me what is the opportunity I'm missing out on. What am I supposed to do with these $50? Buy another game? I already bought the games I want to play. I don't have time to play more games. If I buy another one, it just sits in my Steam library. That's an actual waste of money. Invest it? Then the cost of opportunity is the interest on $50. That's a cup of coffee over the next few years if things go well for my investment. Not meaningful. What is the opportunity that I'm missing? Or, you know, I can do that for a game I'm actually paid to develop. I'd have to undercut Steam to make any sales. Even if I was going to buy the keys for $50, and they were going for $70, maybe I could sell for $60. (Though, there are so many key scams, that "Trust me, this is a good key for $60," is not always a convincing pitch.) Then pay the cut to the storefront where I did the sales (or roll my own, advertise it somehow, still pay a cut to Stripe or whomever). Then do all the tax work. If I make a 5% RoI on these keys, I'd be lucky. And that's if the game doesn't release for $60, which is a real possibility here. Why would I do any of that? I can dump money I can invest into my mortgage principal and get 4% over the next couple of decades. And that takes a couple of clicks for me. Why would I want the headache above? Money shouldn't be a foreign concept that needs to be explained like this. Unless you're still in college, and probably even if you are, you should have better grasp of finances and what is actually worth doing and what's an absolute waste of time if not an actual waste of money.

I've provided details in a number of threads over a number of years. But to save you trouble, here's Kat in a nutshell: Particle Theory, ABD. Two startups, two AAA studios, one mid-size, and a FAANG company in no particular order. One published paper. Two software patents, both implemented in shipped games. Two shipped products. Three shipped games, about to ship a fourth. Two you know, two you might have heard of. For the past four years or so, I've been leading teams with total head counts from 3 to 7 engineers, including various combinations of direct reports, indirect reports, and contractors. That includes hiring, performance reviews, promotions, road maps, sprint planning, and milestone approval processes. On the engineering side, I specialize in bespoke engines, with focus on physics and animation and everything that heavily involves, like memory management, numerical performance optimization, and threading.

Which is fair! The statement was always a conditional.

Generally, you'd place these on a radial decouplers, so that they can be jettisoned, not attach them directly to the main body. They will wobble quite a bit if you don't add struts, though. I would add at least one strut near the bottom of the side tank and one near the top, connecting it to the central body. All of this, starting with placing the decouplers, should be done in 6-way radial symmetry mode. I have seen a symmetry mode bug where physics joints just aren't created, but that tends to happen when you try to build a sub-assembly with its own symmetries, then attach the sub-assemblies in a symmetry mode. Hopefully, that gets fixed, as it's annoying. But simply building out the side tanks in place seems to work just fine.

In this analogy, I already got the cars I wanted now. I don't have the time to drive more cars, and the rare wreck that I, personally, have confidence will get fixed, makes for a nice conversation piece in the meanwhile. Again, I repeat, if spending money on KSP2 EA right now blocks someone from buying and enjoying another game right now, they shouldn't be buying KSP2 EA. A lot of people here are time-limited in how many games they can enjoy, not budget-limited. That doesn't mean that simply throwing away $50 would be sensible, but it drastically alters the marginal utility of spending the money now vs later. Well, then we don't really have a topic for conversation. Wait for a deep sale. Even if KSP2 EA was flawless, if this is your stance, you still want to wait for the full release, then another few months, and pick it up during one of the Steam's holiday sales, and the state of the game makes absolutely zero impact on that decision. Either you take the position that it is sometimes worth to buy the game for its full price, or you take the position that you should always wait for a sale. I'm not saying that either one of these is wrong - it's honestly a personal choice involving a multitude of your own preferences and even, to some extent, your self-restraint of buying something while it's new and shiny. But you can't have it both ways. Either you wait for sales, and then you're not the demographic for this game - PD is not going to get the full price out of you anyways, so why should they give you a discount now? Or you're the kind of person who will purchase the games early after the release, and then we go back to the balance described above. Either one's fine, but you have to recognize that people who are making the other decision aren't acting irrationally. They have a different preference and marginal utility of the money they can spend on games.

Why does that factor into it? If I'm sure that I'll buy the game eventually, what is the actual difference between me spending $50 now or $50 then. (I'm not even considering the likely price increase. Forget about it. I'm not trying to save on the difference here.) The net loss to me is $50 either way. The difference is that I get to try the game and see how the development is going and to have something to compare it to as the game gets finished. I can try it for an hour and decide it's unplayable. (In reality, I've put in about 20 hours total by now.) Or I don't do any of that, and still get the full game later on. Either experience costs me $50. Where am I taking a loss by getting the early access now? At 35% off from $70, it's still $45. I'm sure I can look for a deeper discount at some arbitrary point in the future, but then by that logic, spending $70 for any game ever is stupid, because it will go for $20 eventually. Again, I'm not trying to save $5 here. We're talking about the bulk of the purchase for someone who would get the game day one or near that when the game is finished. You clearly don't think the game will ever be finished or be good. You shouldn't be getting early access. And that's fine. I'm not sure why you're trying to convince other people that your pessimism is the only rational state of being, and everyone else is an idiot, without any relevant experience to actually help you make predictions like that. You can make your own decision. Unlike you, I'm not trying to convince you to buy the game. And I'm not trying to convince anyone else to buy the game. At this point, you're just being a person on a soapbox telling everyone the end is near.

You're making a strawman. If you aren't confident that you'll want KSP2 when it's finished, you shouldn't get early access. That's true of literally any game in early access. Don't buy early access if you aren't certain you'll want the finished game. That's not a controversial statement. So the only people who might consider getting early access are people who are pretty sure they'll buy KSP2 when it hits 1.0. That's the only assumption about quality being made up there. Again, it's a necessary one for anyone to consider early access of any game. KSP2 doesn't have to be perfect for this to be true. It doesn't even have to be great. Just of sufficient quality for someone to make that purchase eventually. Everything else is covered in a point-by-point. If you don't understand it, feel free to ask questions and I'll walk you through in more details. If you have a problem with a specific assumption, you can bring it up and suggest modifications. Right now, you're just presenting a strawman argument and thinking yourself clever.

If you have gateways that talk to both protocols, and can implement tunnels for the parts of the network that doesn't support one or the other, then the network remains fully connected. It's a bit like tunneling IPv4 traffic over IPv6 or vice versa. In practice, I expect Russia not to have resources to implement a new protocol at all, because where are they going to get enough custom switches even from? And China isn't going to shoot itself in the foot so hard as to cut themselves off from the WWW. I fully expect China to have gateways and tunnels natively supporting TCP/IP.

You are making it way more complicated than it needs to be. Simplification time. Forget about the price change. Forget about the inflation, investment opportunities, etc. You and I both agree that the impact of these is minimal. For the purpose of keeping it simple, make following assumptions: Game costs $50 today. (Rounding, ignoring tax.) The game will get finished eventually, even if it's 10 years from now. (Fiat for the purpose of discussion.) The game will cost $50 when it's fully released. (Or if it's a bit more expensive, you can get it on sale.) The buying power of $50 is going to be the same now and ten years from now. (This estimate gets worse the further off the release, but lets keep it simple.) Your options for these $50 are: Buy KSP2 Early Access. Put $50 in your checking account, and buy KSP2 1.0 when it's ready. I'm intentionally ignoring possibility of using that $50 to buy something else, not KSP-related, because that's exactly the opportunity cost addressed earlier. In this case, the cost to me of getting KSP2 EA now is zero. The $50 is already destined to pay for a copy of KSP2. It can happen now, or it can happen at some indeterminate point in the future. There are no other outcomes that give me a different value. The only difference is do I have access to EA or do I have $50 sitting idly in my checking account. In one case, I'm getting value out of it, even if absolutely marginal, and in another I get zero value. In order for this equation to change, there has to be an alternative use for the $50. Like buying a different game. But then it's not a strict alternative either. You don't get $50 to spend on games for your life ever. You're not just choosing between buying KSP2 now and buying something else and not buying KSP2 at all. So lets modify it to reflect something a bit more realistic. You get $50 in your games budget every X days. There is an effectively infinite pool of games you can buy for $50 each. On average, you play a good game from the pool for Y days. KSP2 is available as EA in the pool of games, and will eventually hit 1.0 where it becomes a game you want to play. In this simple model, there are only two outcomes. X > Y - you are money-limited, and you are always looking for a new game to play. If you buy KSP2 EA now, you don't buy a game you want, and spend the next X days not having a good new game to play. Your opportunity cost in this case is the full $50 - or its utility equivalent of X days of playtime. Y > X - you are time-limited, and you always have available budget to pick up the next game. If you buy KSP2 EA, absolutely nothing changes. You still play all the other games from the pool until KSP2 1.0 is released. In case 1, the opportunity cost is $50. In case 2, opportunity cost is $0. In the real world, all of this gets more complicated, but you still have the same end points. The "cost" of playing Early Access is somewhere in that $0 to $50 range that will vary from every person's preferences, time available for gaming, and financial situation.

I think you misunderstand what an opportunity cost is. The opportunity is to spend $50 on something else right now. Say, all I had was $50 to spend on games for the next X months. Would it make sense for me to get KSP2 EA? Absolutely not. There are a lot of better games I can play in the meanwhile. Locking up these $50 in early access, even if I'm sure it will come through eventually, would make no sense. In contrast, the situation I have is that I'm going to be able to get the games I will actually have time to play either way. And whether that $50 ends up in my savings/investment account and sits there until KSP2 releases, or I just pick it up now doesn't really make a financial difference to me. Not the kind that's going to matter. It's all within a cup of coffee difference at the most. So what's the downside of getting the early access and trying it out in this case? These are the two endpoints on the opportunity cost analysis here. There is an entire spectrum in between. The monetary value of the opportunity cost will land somewhere between $0 to $50 depending not only on each person's financial situation, but also on how they budget their finances and how easy it is to amortize the $50 now vs later. So it will always be a fraction of these $50.