PDCWolf

I'm pretty sure most people don't know what a "damper" is when referring to suspensions, much less what "damper strength" does, which is why we repeatedly see complaints of flipping, skating and such, and almost never complains of porpoising due to bad damper settings, or bottoming due to bad spring settings. As for your unity experiments, if you need to tweak the whole wheel and suspension settings in Unity, and still get a result that only works for a specific weight and speed then you didn't create a "racing sim", but rather hacked together a believable simile of a single vehicle in a single situation, and that is a completely different thing to creating a proper simulation of tyre grip, suspension and all the elements that go into driving, which would work anywhere. This is exactly why proper racing sims go through so much trouble to get suspension elements right and you won't find a professional, or even just widely approved racing sim that's made in Unity, and the projects that get at least decent driving use middleware like VPP. This is not even considering how it's impossible for me to try your unity experiments but that somehow is brought in as evidence.

oh no, I'm not contradicting the state of Unity's wheel and joint system, please, I wouldn't even try to pass those as decent anywhere. I will however disagree that you can get them working "perfectly", no Unity game that I've tried has ever achieved it, there's always skating, or bad suspension simulations. In fact, in KSP1 if you go through the trouble of making a proper suspension system (like a rocker bogie), wheels instantly work better, because once again, a "magic spring" per wheel linked directly to the chassis is the worst way to make a suspension, specially when you expect the player to actually understand what esoteric values they're manipulating when they move "spring strength" and "damper strength" values.

And it's been 10 years and gamedevs still fail to understand that independent wheel modules with arbitrary grip values and magic springs for suspensions don't work and will always end up skating.

It's what happens when you turn the entire forum into a shield for the developers and eat up whatever "developer asymptotes" bull they spew as an excuse for doing stuff that's effectively not developing the game. On top of that add shutting down every suggestion with "there's a mod for that" and it's no wonder the game ended up where it is. The only people that did not see this forum making it impossible to criticize the devs was... this forum.

Should've read literally every single suggestion thread for KSP1. "Hey the game could use this", followed by an instantaneous "there's a mod for that". Later on and even to this day they would complain that KSP1 was lackluster and defend KSP2 by refusing to compare it with the KSP1 mods they themselves would suggest.

It's not an opinion, it's a fact. It took 8 months of wobble being the top voted bug for it to be even considered (it is a bug, a glorified one that people refuse to acknowledge because it lets them brag about building around it as if adding struts and right-clicking to add autostruts required intellect). The game forces you to go out. You will not complete the tech tree in only the Kerbin system. I do agree that such a push is better than being able to do it with just the 3 initial bodies, but that's forcing the player's hand, a harsh design choice made out of need for people to actually play the game, since KSP2 is clearly gonna be a semi-linear storytelling "experience" that'll require some lackadaisical base-building on the side to allow you to reach interstellar and progress. This design vision is almost surely the root cause of the many design disagreements plaguing KSP2 between what players expected ("improved codebase", "new physics engine", "rebuilt systems") and what the devs are getting us, which is barely a remix of KSP1 with some very bad-opinionated inclusions. Players expected an iteration of a space simulator sandbox, but we're getting the equivalent of what were some random writers hijacking the Halo name to make a forgettable live-action as an excuse to show us their not-even-halo fan fiction tier story. When you compare stock KSP1 to stock KSP2, you also have to compare the pricing, the faster updates on KSP1, the size of the dev team, and not having the biggest publisher in gaming behind the dev team. KSP2's current offering is insufficient for the resources it seems to have and the price tag. Specially almost a year after releasing. Since you mention mods, I'm not touching the KSP2 modding scene with a ten foot pole, specially since it ends up in bepinex and, god forbid, the thunderstore and similar spyware disguised as modding aids. Official moddability is gonna take so long nobody is gonna be interested in the game anymore and I do invite you to print this statement and quote me on it some years down the line. Fonts have their own hard parameters: Resolution, kerning, serif or no serif, and so on. If you find a font that matches the parameters, it's literally a drop-in replacement. As for the rights, that's a bit more complicated, but even in cases of emergency (I.E. YOUR PLAYERS BEING UNABLE TO READ) then you can opt for one of the tens of thousands of OPL/PD/GPL fonts, or any other free culture license. Either way, doing all of that for a paid, designer font with the same parameters would still not take almost a year. The only way for these statements to make sense is if they started considering the font situation barely after for science, even though it's been a recurring complaint since release along with the rest of the UI/UX being garbage. I'm sure there are more and even better solutions than looking for a matching drop-in replacement. Hope that's where we end. As of right now, to me this font drama is just another heavily opinionated "we're the professionals and you're gonna listen to us" issue, like the camera controls, the navball, and so on.

This argument would've destroyed a lot of discussions around KSP1 heh. "Design decision" is not a trump card against criticism: the devs made a choice? sure, but a conscious choice can still create problems, be unintuitive, or outright bad.

>UI blog >Ctrl+F "Navball". >No mention. All I needed from this thread honestly and it's not even mentioned. The unification is nice, but that really is 101 stuff if you aim for your product to at least look professional. The same way you tightened the UI by apparently removing whitespaces? Do that to the Navball, and for the love of god let me put it where basic common sense dictates it goes.

The atmosphere changes in KSP1... It wasn't a placeholder, it took a lot of threads consistently appearing and FAR becoming the most popular mod (after mechjeb I think) for them to realize they had done something wrong. As for evaluating the change itself, the most extensive part was probably having to go through the whole part catalog to fix lift and drag values for the new formulas, and going from single value drag to a precalculated orientation and occlusion system (probably the biggest part). I wouldn't say the changes are "big" to do, it is their impact that definitely was. Also most of the brunt of the work was precisely caused by them refusing to have a proper atmosphere until so far in the development cycle.

Honestly I don't believe the whole "basic implementation of everything and then iterate" approach. I don't think I've ever seen it in any game (examples appreciated, not as educated in this one aspect). The idea that they're gonna get to the latest milestones only to come back and redefine or redesign the foundations those features are standing on seems impossible to me. We might get balance tweaks, more parts, a tech tree reordering, sure, but I seriously doubt these milestones would be retouched anything more than that.

Really doesn't show so far... And it's arguably not a good recreation either, just remixes and QOL on some parts, regressions on others.

Some good work in there. Means they've been able to reproduce the bug consistently in internal testing, which is kinda the first step to get it fixed.

And if you've read the first paragraph you'd realized the concept is limited to patched conics, which is not how the universe works, but rather a simplification used to calculate celestial motion faster. The real world works in what we approximate as n-body physics, which is straight up incompatible with the concept of sphere of influence.

SOI's are completely fictional and arbitrary to whatever game rules the Kerbal universe follows, which is more of a reason for them to not be hidden or repeating the mistake in 1 of hiding the orbital predictions behind tracking station levels.

And what metric do you use to gauge the success and retention of something? Because that's exactly what drives further investment be it on a particular feature or the product at all. Why do you think every game nowadays has a skin store, a battlepass, and some even a casino? For Science! already has ~2000 people playing it went almost under yesterday, might be today, KSP1 is back to being the most played of the two. In the end, KSP2 doesn't exist in a vacuum, it has a cheaper, and clearly once again more endearing, competitor, which thankfully keeps it in check when it comes to justifying the up to 5 times bigger pricetag. It's barely a remix for now. It's KSP1 but done differently, with most differences hard to appreciate and under the hood, and only believed to be there because no mechanic takes advantage of them (other than loading times, which is a discussion worth its own thread). And for those "improvements" that are out there... orbital decay is back, that's all I've gotta say really. For people that dreamed about a new, professionally made physics engine? The game was over from day 1 when they told us it was gonna be Unity again, and later on we learned they're still using the same middleware and a lot of recycled, looked-at-but-allegedly-not-copypasted components from KSP1. As for the graphics, I really don't feel as positive. For me the overly plasticky look on the parts, the overtly saturated terrain and the disney movie smoke is much more offensive than KSP1s mess of clashing styles that at least somewhat tended to realistic enough if you had a ton of suspension of disbelief. Thrust on rails is absolutely broken for now, as is anything that includes thrust during a change of scene. As for selling the future of the game, they're completely uncompromising in the bad sense of the word, as in they're really against making any sort of compromising statement because they clearly lack any faith in being able to take any plan they publicize to completion. Some may say it's a lesson learned from the mess that was the pre-launch campaign, I'm more inclined to believe it's lack of capacity, but that's entirely my personal view... If the science systems they hyped for months are just a lazy remix of KSP1 whilst still keeping all the bad stuff... What hope would anyone have for anything further, specially when the devs themselves don't even have what it takes to make a single promise about it? At least people are clearly getting bored of the main progression system after a couple weeks, that's enough of a message for themselves and the dev team, I'd hope.

What translates into heating is having enough air density for the shock bow to actually compress enough air molecules into heating up. As the atmosphere gets less dense, obviously there's less air molecules, in fact not enough of them to compress into each other, which is why you have the ISS being able to generate lift, or adopt a posture where it reduces drag, but not heating up. In reality what KSP does is close to ignoring anything above the stratosphere, so you go from stratosphere to perfect vacuum as soon violently as just changing from 69.999 to 70.000 meters. Once you're below 70.000 meters, there's automatically enough air molecules for them to compress and heat up, although very lightly. What we'd need to examine this in enough depth is a diagram that relates, at a fixed altitude, speed to temperature. From then we can discuss if it's too much or too little, but anything else apart from that has no fix without manipulating the whole atmospheric setup. IRL, even if you ignore all the other atmospheric components, you will absolutely burn up if you do what OP did (hanging around too long at high temperature). What we need to look at is that if at a certain speed, the maximum heating experienced at a fixed altitude makes sense.

I wouldn't say all feedback is weighted by amount of people repeating it, but I will say that there's of course a very heavy conflict of interest, with the devs all hanging out on discord and pretty much seeing only positive feedback, and then they are expected to put work on this or that feature that people didn't like, which of course directly clashes against their "reality" of what they see on Discord. For a very concrete example look at UI, where the further away you get from the Discord, the harsher and more varied feedback is, versus the reply we got from Nate: The most talked about points in feedback all over are the usability, design and position of the Navball, the VAB interface, VAB camera controls, UI color selection, legibility, and the PAW being a trainwreck. What did we get in return? that they're looking at legibility, maneuver nodes, icon salad, and PAW "organization issues". There's a clear disconnect between the focus points of feedback, versus what the team says they get from it. That can only come from two places: The conflict of interest I mentioned before, or that they're really not up to take high level feedback, limiting what they want from us to low hanging fruit like obvious and not so obvious bugs and playability complaints. It can also be a mix of both. For an even worse example look at science as a feature: almost a month of feedback has gone completely ignored. This is repeated on every single conversation that's been had in this forum, Reddit, and I'm sure the Discord too. I just wish that if it's the later, they made it very clear, because against all other EAs out there, this really means we're nothing more than buy-in testers.

I'm inclined to say yes. In fact they still kinda do. Back then I was on 4chan and we were visited by HarvesteR, Maxmaps, and some mods from here too, sadly those times are over.

Oh for sure, not denying that, but if you looked at the forum as a whole, yeah, defend the devs was the clear behavior. On the discord, which is the main focus of the op? definitely. Love how the awful stuff that went and still goes on in there gets ignored because haters were perceived as the problem.

It's like we spent our time at two different communities entirely. Whenever anything bad was said about the game this forum got up in arms, which is funny because the posts are still there. Only very obvious mistakes had people agreeing, like the barn.

You draw parallels to that and not to the community shielding the devs from all criticism and steering them into a bland game back during KSP1?

Well, that was the experience for what the previous dev team found to be the majority of players. Again, I'm not against the idea of adding more planets, but I think the effort would be much better invested first in giving players reasons to go there other than lame progression locks and blurbs of text.

And I actually agree with not seeing much point to interstellar. However, I will say that interstellar transfers should at least offer a different mechanism for spaceflight than normal Hohmann transfers between planets. That the planets are already barren rocks shouldn't be a justification to add more uninteresting barren rocks, it should actually be a reason to put the work in to make them interesting, varied, and worthwhile to visit. I make no connection between the argument in KSP and real spaceflight, however IRL even barren rocks can tell us a lot of things that help a myriad of disciplines from geography to chemistry, biology, astrophysics and everything inbetween. In KSP not only can't you represent that, but also the way the game is actually emphasizes how empty and barren those worlds are. in KSP, what makes a landing on Gilly different from one on Pol and Bop? Maybe the color of the terrain, one of them having the Kraken, and now whatever discoverables are out there. Other than that, once you did one there's almost nothing to gain from landing on any of the other two besides completionism.

Whilst I agree with GP2 and beyond (an actually well made asteroid system that can be used to create Oort cloud bodies too please?), there's also a harsh reality that is new players not leaving the vicinity of Kerbin. Even if KSP2 has much more incentive, we still don't know if that's changed, or will change. Plus it's not like most planets aren't barren an uninsteresting already save for hand-planted "discoverables" strewn around. What makes more planets not just be more barren wastelands, which we already have plenty of?

Gotta have more weight now that it's not a "hater" saying it. The discord is barely more than an overgrown hype squad, ready to commit abuse and worse against anyone who disagrees. E: Forgot to mention, they also share posts from here and from Reddit with each other to brigade and downvote, but I haven't seen Dakota complain about that one.