PDCWolf
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Posts posted by PDCWolf
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On 9/15/2023 at 6:05 AM, Vl3d said:
I just want Unity to be competitive, do good research and flourish. Unity has allowed a great number of devs to find financial success. I think they should have a revenue stream that allows them to compete with Unreal and be a foundation for the games of the future. We're arguing specifics, but I don't see a real problem after reading the conditions.
They charge $2000 per seat yearly to the cheapest non free tier customers., and goes up to like $5000 yearly IIRC. One of the last numbers for Unity is 3.9 Billion users. Now, I'm totally sure that like 90% of those are just free accounts used for varying stuff or not even using the thing anymore, but they're operating at 1.8 BILLION dollars of revenue.
It's not them "looking for a revenue stream that allows them to be competitive", it's them being greedy and charging for something that comes at zero cost to them, which is whatever the hell a user does with pre-packaged software.
People move to Unreal and Godot because Unity is trash, and has been trash for a while, and now they want more money as well.
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3 hours ago, RayneCloud said:
My two cents here, sine I started this thread,
I've had times in my life where people would compare this situation in gaming where you're upset with a product, to one of ordering food at a restaurant and it coming out wrong, cold, or just plain bad. Yes, as a consumer, you have a right to be upset about a good or service you paid for using money you gained from working away your life not being what you expected it to be. What you don't have a right to do, in my opinion, is to be toxic and abusive even in that situation. If you wouldn't stand up at a restaurant and yell and scream at the server, or go storming in to the kitchen, why would you do that here?
My original post may be a bit spicy for some, but at no point am I yelling at, insulting, or attacking the dev team. People don't stop becoming human beings just because they sold you a product you're not happy with.We're way past that here.
A lot of pressure is put on whoever happens to criticize the game to adorn and prop up their post with as much praise at possible, otherwise that post and poster get thrown into the "hater pile", whilst the same group of 10 claps at each other for doing it. If that's not dehumanizing, then nobody has a semblance of a right to call anybody toxic or abusive.
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6 minutes ago, PicoSpace said:
Likely because its integrated physics engine framework that is core element of the game, which is going to take a LONG time to make a permanent fix. So a short term is required to make the game playable (cough: Autostrut).
So... that'd wipe the "no autostrut" statement Nate made, or the other "editing that CFG is not the fix". I wonder what are they gonna come up with.
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I thought wobble was a "long term" thing? How come it is now approached with "short term solutions" ?
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On 9/14/2023 at 10:52 AM, RayneCloud said:
Gotta say, I'm pretty disappointed at the moment at the near radio silence, or the complete lack of communication. The dev chats are fun and all, but where are the weekly posts from Nate? Why are we back to having to look at Discord and getting nothing here? Can we have something please? About 1.5? Or am I just not seeing the communication that was promised? Can we have something please?
Disappointed doesn't even start to describe it, specially when it took a lot to correct them from their initial course telling us everything was fine and dandy whilst 7 months later the game is still in the same place but barely more playable. They keep to discord because that's the only place where criticism is not allowed and engaging in it means their pets get a free pass to harass you. Even if you're not in the discord they get a free pass to make up stuff about you to make you look bad. That's why they feel free to throw bones in the discord for users to play fetch like dogs.
They've also completely abandoned Reddit after failing to gaslight them, resorting to insulting the community and then going silent.
The forum is the most current one in the list of abandoned places. They'll probably prop up another dev to answer softball completely useless questions about their hopes and dreams and what pizza topping they like on an AMA in like a month and that's the only piece of garbage you're expected to digest as communication.
By the way, since you say the P word. Remember the "rules" people play by here:
- If there's no literal "we promise", then it's not a promise.
- Whatever they say can change at any point, no reason needed. It doesn't count as a lie, just the truth changing.
- You're supposed to take anything they say as an unquestionable truth, even if the game comes apart at the seams and they take 7 to 12 months for the first content update.
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10 hours ago, RayneCloud said:
Would could certainly make an educated Guess on "insider Trading" having happened, also,
John Riccitello sold less than 1% of his shares, he lost a magnitude more money with the shares he kept than whatever he got from the ones he sold. I cannot speak about other execs because I didn't track their movements.
4 hours ago, Kerbart said:I'm in a business where when we give out products away for free customers complain that we're fleecing them, so yes, I will not agree over the severity of a 20 cent surcharge when there are other parties who take away more than half the revenue.
Time will tell; when everyone dumps Unity in favor of Unreal then we know the iron boot of Unity is indeed too much to handle.
Let's start from the basis that this fee is completely unjustified: you installing a game once or a trillion times does not cost Unity any single resource. They also get free telemetry from Unity games so every install actually provides them an income in the form of user data. How? Unity bought InstallCore (a company well known for making a famous malware), but outside tinfoiling, Unity already has a bad track as spyware itself, both for devs and packaged games: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/unity
Now, from the economics side for a developer, not only is this another source of your income going away (specially for those that already pay $2000 yearly per seat), but it is also not scalable until you get bumped off the free license.
TL;DR It's unjustified, screws over small devs even more for no reason, pushes developers towards implementing DRM to avoid install bombing (though they've apparently walked back that part), AND pretty much destroys any trust in Unity as a product for the last group of people that had no problem with it.
9 minutes ago, Lisias said:And how they will tell a new installation of mine from a reinstall due a Windows crash followed by a total reinstall (see Vãos on YouTube this week).
How they will tell a pirate install from a legitimate one?
How they will tell honest installs from unethical competition reinstalling the game ad nauseaum on some sort of install farm to drive them out of business?
How they intend to do that without breaking the GDPR on EU, or LGPD in Brazil? Who will be liable to the inevitable fines, Unity or the Game Developer?
Read above. Both the editor and packaged games were pretty much spyware already. If nobody complaints about GDPR, nobody minds, and the last people who want to be in a legal fight against an industry giant are small gamedevs in their basements.
Edit because forgot: Unreal is not the replacement for Unity, Godot is.
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4 hours ago, James M said:
It looks like Unity is changing up their licensing plans. Anyone have any more information and is this going to effect KSP2’s development?
They're walking back the change gradually, but pressure from devs/studios is still on. There's absolutely no justification for the install fee and it's not been well received at all.
2 minutes ago, Alexoff said:https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steam20#SaleSection_12313
KSP2 is in the top list of 2023 games!
It seems this year has turned out so-so
Well, it was a popular release... until people opened the game.
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1 hour ago, chimera industries said:
Terrain features as in Breaking Ground stuff and easter eggs?
No, the literal mountains and valleys and such.
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Great image. It's always easy to say numbers but putting it on an image amps the impact.
12 minutes ago, chimera industries said:I saw a mod once that made the solar system 1/10 as small as it already was, and I believe it was already about 1/10 the size of our solar system in the first place...
It was called Toy Solar System, or something along those lines.
I remember (not sure if they fixed it later) that the terrain features were not scaled so it was really funny.
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I like parts of this idea, but I feel it's really trying to slalom around the elephants in the room: the first one being punishing the player.
Even if you propose the whole system as a way to gain efficiency (or bring lower efficiency to normal levels), nothing stops the player from just going around the system by spamming, or timewarping. Kerbals slow when mining/performing experiments? send more Kerbals with more drills/experiments and so on. It'll end up just being a mass tax in one way or the other, either by requiring the player to include those modules to extend the efficient time of a Kerbal, or bigger capsules to send more inefficient Kerbals.
Further on, when a system is this simple and linear, it really doesn't bring in to the table any sort of engineering challenge. It ends up being "add more part to live longer". A system like life support needs to have a certain depth and complexity to it to hit just right and not become a straight up mass tax. You need to give players a myriad of tools to experiment and design mission profiles to their liking. Maybe they want to just spam LS cargo without any recycling for a simple mission to a colony? Maybe they want a self-sustaining, no-waste, closed loop of LS for a 100 years long interstellar mission? Maybe they want a quick Kerbin to Mun shuttle that packs barely enough food and water for the trip and just drops waste into space?
This system also stands on the way of the "sequential" gameplay, wherein players only fly a single mission for its complete duration instead of doing many at the same time. This is for me the second elephant in the room, which happens to extend from time not being a limited resource and not wanting to punish the player, thus allowing them to do literally nothing but fly a single mission for a hundred years whilst their entire kerbal civilization and space program just stares doing nothing.
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7 hours ago, Periple said:
If you assume bad faith, then even “there will be no microtransactions” becomes “there will be microtransactions.” Not a whole lot anyone can do about that!
On the one hand people tell me if they didn't include "WE PROMISE" then it is not a promise [1] [2] [3], then I'm told that everything is highly changing, so whatever they say pretty much holds no value? [1], then the communicators themselves clearly produce borderline lying statements [see list above].
AND THEN I'm expected to take "No microtransactions" (which doesn't include we promise btw), and of course is also part of a highly changing context, at face value. It makes no sense that you'd ask anyone to believe that statement when at the same time you're telling them nothing is believable unless they say we promise, and even then things can change.
None of you can't be serious at this point.
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35 minutes ago, razark said:
"No microtransactions" was clearly stated, but people still post their worries about it being added, so it really doesn't matter what the devs or PR folks say. People are going to read whatever they want into it anyway.
Well, I'll fall into repeating myself again. "No Microtransactions" comes from the same people that brought us:
- Re-entry heating will be there in release
- ^ will be in shortly after release
- ^ will be added shortly after this patch (when they teased the effect back in like april).
- The price will increase. (Yes, I know).
- The K.E.R.B. will be posted every two weeks.
- The game is ready for release and we're only polishing it (2020, 2021, 2022).
- The game will enter early access in an advanced beta state.
- Velocity is good.
- We're slowing down updates so they're more polished.
- And so many more classic hits.
They don't have the credibility to just throw "no microtransactions" around and expect people to believe them. You're reversing cause and consequence: it's their own lack of credibility and absolutely disastrous communication that makes the community not believe what they say.
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49 minutes ago, razark said:
I completely agree about them not posting reliably in any single location. It's absolutely ridiculous. Other aspects of their communication strategy also need work. But a lot of people seem to be reading a lot more into what they say than what they actually say. "The game’s price will certainly increase when 1.0 arrives" means one thing, and only one thing. The price will increase when 1.0 is released. They didn't say it wouldn't go up or down before 1.0, or that sales would not occur; they said the price at 1.0 will be higher than the price immediately prior to 1.0.
Clearly the "unless sales" bit was needed, otherwise it's pretty normal (based on percentage of people that interpreted that here in the forums and other sites like reddit). A lot (to the point I'd gladly say most) people interpret the statement as also implying "The game’s price will certainly increase when 1.0 arrives [and not decrease anywhen else]". You're free to your interpretation, I really don't wanna argue semantics of a language that's not mine, and I'm "happy enough" to know I wasn't alone or in the minority on what I got from that statement.
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14 minutes ago, razark said:
As I recall, they said the price would go up at 1.0 release. Nothing they've done or said has been contrary to that.
They said "we're sticking with [the schedule] for now" three months ago. Are they never allowed to change, or do you really expect a report every two weeks until the game is released?
I expect that, when they decided it was gonna be only "post-patch", that they'd told us so, and not almost a month later when people start asking. They're obviously in their entire right to change things up, just communicate them, clearly, in a timely manner. It's precisely the problem that we have to play both charades, fetch, and jeopardy with them to get information, and even then we have to hopefully all be tuned into like 5 different channels to get all the bits and pieces they throw out.
The exact phrase was "The game’s price will certainly increase when 1.0 arrives", and it was clear that most people understood that this message implied the game's price was not gonna go down, otherwise we wouldn't have had this thread at the time and then them having to add "unless sales" to clarify.
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1 hour ago, Spicat said:
That was not the point I was making.
I say it again, the communication isn't ideal, but you weren't complaining about that initially but that they rewrited "the truth" because they are imcompetent.
Two separate things: They've "rewritten the truth" twice (prices, now K.E.R.B. scheduling). AND I believe there's incompetence involved in how almost 7 months later we're still fighting with something as basic as knowing what is going on/what is being said about the game (which, by it being this long, that feeling of incompetence is starting to turn into suspicions of intention).
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2 minutes ago, Spicat said:
Try at least to understand why things are like they are before getting mad at everything.
That's like the DRM error when everyone went on their way to insult devs before trying to see it was an obvious mistake.
I agree that the communication isn't ideal but instead of acknowledging the fact you didn't know and being mad about that, you see malice instead and become snarky about it..
Oh no, I'm totally in the wrong for not knowing, I get that, however think for a second why didn't I know: I'm not on the discord, and even then, it seems the discord is also not the place to get the complete news about the game, and that's even if you do spend the time going back and forth tracking every message by the about 5 different people that talk officially about the game's progress, updates, and such.
Plus, it's hard to think about joining the discord when considering the stuff that's allowed in there, which you know about.
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On 9/10/2023 at 6:05 PM, Spicat said:
(Snip)
No it was planned this message was just one week after the patch, another one on the day of the patch:
My guy, you're telling me that whilst posting lost bits from the discord that unless you scroll the dev tracker every single day, you're 90% sure gonna miss. We have threads about small posts on twitter, we have threads about reddit posts/announcements, we have threads about literal discord screencaps, we have the K.E.R.B., we have Patch Notes, we have AMAs. It sure does sound like a lot, yet here we are, trying to go piece by piece to see what the heck they're doing with bugfixes because they can't bother to make complete patchnotes, or keep the K.E.R.B. updated, or talk in any sort of official manner because they canned the upnates, and they refuse to answer anything useful about the game in AMAs.
I'm seeing incompetence first, with a smell of "maybe they're doing it on purpose" second.
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4 hours ago, Spicat said:
In dev tracker also.
It's because things are moving a lot when a patch release (new bugs, more people playing...).
So, they miss it for 3 weeks, and when it's about to hit the 4th we get the "oh no, it's 2 weeks post patch". Reminds me of how they appended "unless sales" to the original statement. It also reminds me of Fatshark: "It's not a lie, the truth changed"
4 hours ago, razark said:They missed one on the 25th1, probably because they were busy getting the patch ready. I'd say the patch is more valuable and tells more about the state of bug fixing and game progress than a forum post.
I mean yeah, if fixes don't come in the update, you know they didn't make it to the update, that's obvious.
K.E.R.B. is more interesting for "long term" bugs like wobble. In fact, from the bugs that are on the last K.E.R.B. only the following made it to the patch notes: 2 (partially), 4 (partially? patch mentions UI, not clouds), one instance of 5, 14, and 20. I hope you understand my gripe with how, for posts that are supposed to be informative (Patch notes, K.E.R.B.) the promised periodicity is now optional, and they've made it clear that including fixes in the patch notes is optional as well.
What do we get? two completely disjointed, incomplete, impossible to track bug lists. I guess it's par for the course for what's essentially shotgunning information all over and have users fetch like dogs.
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2 hours ago, The Aziz said:
Ah yes, remember when this was supposed to come out every 2 weeks and the last one we have is from almost a month ago?
Source: https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1080246925699326032/1129535564564152321 (you can see it on the tracker)
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So, there's a 1.5 before science? First time I feel my "science in October/November" bet is actually threatened.
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1 hour ago, MechBFP said:
You are already incentivized to use probes, they are much lighter and therefore much easier to get the required dV to do something.
20 minutes ago, Periple said:Crewed missions need crew modules which are a lot heavier! I always use probes if I can because they're so much lighter and I can use such smaller rockets!
Probes require commnet infrastructure, turning one launch into potentially a hundred. Even with a level 3 tracking station, you'd require the biggest antenna to talk back to the DSN, and even then you'd need other comm relays in the way to keep control all the time.
The command pods being all less than 10 tons mean they're negligible as payloads and you always have control no matter what.
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6 hours ago, Nertea said:
PDCWolf
Has the concept of heating changed at any point based on the feedback posted to its thread?
I read every post in the thread, which was nontrivial because it was a long and uh, vibrant thread. The short version is no, the long version is yes but…
A lot of the interesting discussions sat around things that are further down the roadmap, and they provided us with a couple additional things to consider. Interestingly, the player stories we have were well aligned with the comments that I read, but the way the player stories were addressed were not unanimously approved. That’s fine – part of the EA conversation– and in particular with a lot of discussion being on items later in the roadmap, this makes me confident in the iterative model.
We’ll get the basics of the system focusing on reentry stories out to everyone. We’ll evaluate how that works with the playerbase. As we move towards the next milestones, we can use the information encoded in the thread, which I’ve collected internally, to make sure we’re making choices (engineering or design-wise) in conjunction with the feedback from reentry to get good solutions. One thing that jumped out for me was that there’s a lot of talk about macro vs micro solutions. I’ll be the first to admit that the current solution is a macro solution. So future design work will probably focus on whether there’s more microscale interaction to look at.
If I know the peak or average specific heat flux a vessel is gonna go through on its final orbit/landing spot, what stops me from just adding enough negative heat flux parts to counteract it?
Nothing. That’s what you should be doing. Of course, it’s not really that simple. If this is atmospheric heat from going fast, adding a big radiator is likely to just increase the amount of next flux, because it has a large surface area. Most heat mitigation tools need something else too – a radiator might need electricity, which means you need to supply that, which will enforce additional constraints.
Considering its possible uses on the automated logistics network, long missions, and just straight up anything that only requires time to pass, how do you balance not timewarping versus just letting things happen in ultra-fast time?
These are the best questions because they’re the hard ones. Often we trend towards supporting a player path that doesn’t reward excessive timewarping, but doesn’t exclude it either. A good case study is resource extraction and deposit concentrations. There’s definitely fun in seeking out and finding the best deposit for mining. Obviously though timewarp makes that kinda moot in timing. You could just start mining a hypothetically low-grade deposit and warp for 50 days. That tells us that time and rate -based mechanics need to have more to work well. A specific example here is that a newly accessible resource should be constrained differently – challenging location, resource transport limitations, etc.
We try to move the real player decisions to things that are interesting with and without time as a mechanic. Mostly hypothetical examples, but here’s a few ways of thinking of these things on top of my head:
- Put a locational constraint on something. If you need to do something in orbit over a specific part of a planet, make it take longer than the average orbital cycle. This might encourage a player to put a satellite in GEO orbit over that place. If you do the work to put it in GEO, you get the benefit of being able to timewarp.
- Use binaries instead of gradients. Does ore concentration really benefit from a really detailed gradient from 0.0001% to 100%, or can you look at it as a yes/no? Trade that, see if you’re damaging player stories with that simplification.
- Use supporting systems. Sure, you could mine that deposit at high timewarp. But the deposit is on a planet with a day length of 200 days, and you need power, and the area has no fissionables. How are you going to power it? If you solve this problem, it is satisfying and you get a cookie. You did the work, enjoy your timewarpable extraction!
These are really big problems we look at for all of the more complex systems because hey, an interstellar transfer could be 100 years. Players will timewarp that and that’s… the whole length of a KSP1 campaign. Fun with and without timewarping like this is essential.
Thank you for taking the time. That was a lot of writing and I'm happy to get any answer an all, even more when they're actually detailed.
- Has the concept of heating changed at any point based on the feedback posted to its thread?
I'm happy with the general idea of this answer, until the timing of future headliner updates becomes part of the equation for fixing and implementing changes in the model. Timing has been shown to be not of the essence, and I'm doubtful anyone will want to look back at the heating design sheet to make changes when we're X years down the line and colonies arrive. Guess only time will tell, plus the best case scenario is that really no changes are needed.
I'm also not part of the club that approves of sequels simplifying systems, but it seems what's done is done.
- If I know the peak or average specific heat flux a vessel is gonna go through on its final orbit/landing spot, what stops me from just adding enough negative heat flux parts to counteract it?
My problem here is why I've steered away from most LS mods: sure, making a self sustaining loop with perfectly balanced inputs and outputs is satisfying as an engineering challenge, once, but other than that it's just really a complete gameplay loop that simplifies down to "add more parts to not explode". It's a one time engineering challenge that becomes a simple, repetitive mass addition in the long run. Tech trees might extend the challenge a bit, but the end of the road is the same.
This is why the question is worded that way. I didn't want to go the completely aggressive "can I trivialize your entire system to just a mass tax?". A clever, complex heating system would allow me to use excess heat for LS, or do crazy stuff like detachable heatsinks, or time daylight vs night sections of an orbit to not have my Kerbals die by the skin of their teeth, or that kind of proper emergent narrative/engineering stuff. It's probably one of the places where so far KSP1 and 2 (specially from what I gather from the concept of user stories) both do poorly: unless the player does a whole roleplay/self-limitation skit, everyone's experiences are pretty much guaranteed to be the exact same with all subsystems. There's a middle point between a puzzle being so simple there's no place for alternative solutions, and the puzzle being so complex almost nobody solves it.
- Considering its possible uses on the automated logistics network, long missions, and just straight up anything that only requires time to pass, how do you balance not timewarping versus just letting things happen in ultra-fast time?
For the first and third examples, "warp more" is still a solution: Warp more until the satellite has enough passes over the area to complete the task, and warp more until it's daylight again. The only way you're gonna shoot yourself in the foot is by playing simultaneous missions instead of sequential. Again, another department where KSP1 and now 2 fall really short. As for your second example, having all deposits be a consistent "100%" concentration means there's no need to pick a smart landing site, or building around a bad one, unless it happens to be compounded by having many resources on a single body (kinda like how starfield does, where you have to search a good outpost spots with different resources in its territory).
1 hour ago, Nertea said:I wanted to make sure the text question dump was in before responding to this, but asking viable questions for AMAs does require some crafting. In an hour I can't answer a ton of questions that are say, 5 minute answers, but I can answer a lot of 60 second questions, so those are the ones I'm going to pick. I'll leave the ones that were more complicated to a text answer where I can think on the response and actually give you detail. In addition, questions had a LOT of duplicates, and we tended to trim ones that were very similar and pick the one that seemed most productive to answer. We've also got the discord/forum volume differences here, and honestly the forum ones do trend to be a lot more detailed. So, text answers. Finally well, loaded questions... would you pick those to answer?
I believe there should be a balance between 300 and 60 second answers. Users are clearly in for both. As for loaded questions, you did answer a couple positively loaded ones, though I'll give it to you any day that asking a well thought out neutral question is not an easy task, and answering negatively loaded ones is not fun.
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29 minutes ago, The Aziz said:
On the contrary, I never expected anything more than I described in the last sentence. That said, I never planned to play. But it's nice to see how some people were overhyped (again) and faced the Bethesreality.
Most people were not expecting a spaceflight simulator. Thus most people wasn't disappointed. In fact reviews are very positive bar some criticisms to the writing, some "the game is not easy enough" concerns, and the 30 fps thing on consoles. I would place it a bit on the "doesn't justify hardware requirements with looks" side, but it's not that bad either.
The one professional review that gave it a "low" (7/10) score is IGN and is clear the dude writing that one never actually spent a single second of neuron firing to try and figure out things (one of the most glaring mistakes is he thinks jump range is limited only by the ship, when it is limited by how much fuel you load first, AND THEN your ship's max range).
25 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:I will say since we’re drifting off topic a bit that it does give KSP2 the opportunity to actually be a lot of the things Starfield isn’t because of that real-physics continuity from surface to surface. It’ll depend a great deal on how rewarding and fun the science system is and how experiment mechanics enhance that experience of exploration.
I'd love a Starfield thread but so many people have me on ignore that me starting it would mean it is not seen at all, something the thread wouldn't deserve. Bar BG3 and Hogwarts (don't think it'll win because implications) it's a solid GOTY contender.
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8 minutes ago, The Aziz said:
It's hardly a space exploration where the planets are limited on how far you can walk, the encounters are pretty much identical every time, and there's no other means of transport other than your ship which you can't really control near the surface. Starfield is just an (unoptimized for a full release) RPG set in space.
I smell some bitterness and some inflated expectations. The moment they didn't mention land vehicles, and didn't show any flying scenes, it was a bit obvious that it was gonna be another gamebryo CPG game but with a space related setting.
I've personally been having a blast.
Btw we do need a Starfield thread it seems.
Unity went crazy, what will happen to KSP2 (and KSP1)?
in The Lounge
Posted
Not sure how related it is, but Unity did reject a buyout from AppLovin for almost $18 billion last year.