PDCWolf

https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-committed-to-multiplayer-career-and-sandbox-modes/

You're reading me just fine and then warp my questions by including your own assumptions of what I'm thinking into them. Just to clarify: All those questions are literal, and I'm sure that whilst related, they can be answered separately, enough that I don't need to assume and imply things like the ones you assume I did. On top of that, as I said, I'm free to do with the information provided, or lack thereof, as I see fit. Will I take the devs at face value? Will their answers end up creating more questions instead of solving issues? who knows, but I think any answer is better than no answer. [snip] Your first assumption is completely incorrect: KSP2 is a product I am interested in, and a franchise I've been a part of for more than a decade, with enough investment as to create and publish mods for the game, and buy every DLC that's come out. Thus I'm heavily invested in the future of the franchise and the next sequel. Elden Ring is a product I did not follow, and though I do own DS2 and DS3, really didn't care about (you can search my steam profile and check my playtime). However, I do have friends that are heavily interested and invested into the franchise, the kind that can't shut up about every single detail, and want me to purchase the game to play with them. I wasn't even interested in communication from the devs, I took the other route and just gave people months to play the game to make an informed decision. I can however attest that my friends have been acting like I do for KSP2, they've followed every single bit of news and leaks. Just chiming in over the gif here: The glass broke because they hit the doors with a sledgehammer first, which they didn't account for when they tested the ball bearing against the glass before the presentation. Integration test vs unit test. If they did half-bake anything, it's the order of the tests.

It's like you're not reading me. They're free to not explain and not address concerns, and remain completely silent until the product is done and released. I'm also free to voice my concerns and do whatever I want with the answers and info they provide or with their silence if they don't. My concerns and reasoning are as valid as their response or lack thereof, and at the very least I'm gonna make sure my concerns are clearly laid out, just so that "you didn't ask" isn't an excuse down the line. We should also take the time to learn a bit: Developers don't say anything, they're hired on a payroll, come in and do their work. PR/Marketing teams are the ones doing the talking to us, and they're also on a payroll and a clock, and are specifically paid to obtain the best possible response to a product.

Let's not confuse waiting patiently with silence. If concerns are not voiced, how can we expect them to be addressed?

The thing is I've been through that thread, and if you know about developing software, or games, you'd know "pleasing most people" is just a thing that doesn't happen, specially with engineering type games. Whilst the devs, you, and other participants might like to play hide and seek behind the "huge challenge", the community has already gone and made 2 different multiplayer systems work, in the shape of mods. Further on I imagine that, at the very least, an idea of how to solve the challenges and implement the solution would have already existed both times it was promised, for the original and sequel games. Otherwise there's another concern for my list: Why promise multiplayer 2 separate times when you had 0 idea how to work it out? The rest of your post is speculative answers to my other concerns, which really bring nothing but faith to the table, and I don't include faith in my financial transactions.

I know this wasn't me you were quoting, and I agree they can't show stuff they haven't done yet, that should be pretty obvious. First off, the 2022 date was taken off their earnings call (or another economic document, can't remember), and the release date on Steam, though that's been there for a long time. Point I'm trying to make here is 2022 is still not confirmed in a realistically compromising way. On this same note, as an information seeking customer, I'll add the fact that we've had a studio swap and a delay. All of that happened after they announced the game to be coming out only a single year later. I believe you'll have to give it to me there in wanting more information. Did they have anything done when they announced the game was only a year away? What have they done since then if the game was a single year away? Why do you need to give yourself an unconfirmed date till 31 December 2022 when you had a product that was a single year away from release? Why has it been 2 years and we're still seeing more or less the same thing with the only difference between footage from 2020 release date and 2022 release date being new parts? Why are we on the same year the game releases yet you're unable to show hands on gameplay and are still showing untextured asset renders? Why did you guys promise multiplayer for KSP1 and then never let out a single word about it again? Why has been KSP1 left abandoned in a super buggy state? Why is Breaking Ground even worse in the bug department, even when the community has already investigated (and solved) the issues? These are pressing concerns that we are more than justified to have, that they've still failed to address. Even when they do not have a single obligation to answer, it does effect their public opinion of them.

This is business, not a charity. I'm not "grateful" nor do I have to be. I'm on a market looking to buy a product and they're trying to get me to purchase theirs. Developing a game for X amount of time does not make it AAA, as the definition comes from budget, which makes it funnier considering KSP1 + mods are all passion works with almost negligible budget. On top of that, we really don't know what budget they're working with for KSP2, specially considering how little new stuff they've actually shown for it. It's taken them this amount of time to produce something that has been identified time and time again as "ksp1 with mods". You are right that nobody is forcing me to spend money, but I'll remit myself to my sentence replying to the other poster I quoted. I'm doing business with them, not with you. I'm free to demand and then purchase (or not) as much as they're free to completely ignore concerns like mine and lose my preorder along with those of people who share this point of view.

[snip] Oh yeah, I should totally be grateful I get to give them money, oh how magnificent and magnanimous of them to let me give them my money. Private division had a product and pulled the trigger, then T2 formed a new studio and poached their employees, sending KSP2 to this new studio and leaving PD in the dust. THEN Covid. Perception of scale is clearly subjective. Nothing on the footage looks like anything we can't get out of modded KSP1. [snip]

Customer of the franchise and almost all its related services. Guess you don't own a business that sells a product, otherwise this'd be basic knowledge: Brand loyalty sells, and has to be maintained, and when it fails, the entire business fails. This isn't even going into even more basic stuff like forming a good image in the eye of potential customers, specially since a game is not a product of need, so sales are all but guaranteed. Well, they first of all lost my preorder, and any preorder from people who follow the same principles. You might be loyal and/or impulsive enough, and with enough money to just throw at stuff you like, I'm not, I'm neither in fact. I could afford Elden Ring right now and I want to play it, I'm not purchasing it till it drops at least to about 50% its current price in my region. You also seem to grossly overstate the interest in KSP2, if you go outside the forum and subreddit, the game is pretty much unknown and everyone already forgot whatever they saw on the last big gaming event they showed it on. Only if you don't read into it. The marketing of Cyberpunk clearly reflected an extreme oversell, easy to see that the game wasn't going to be even close to promotion material, so much they had to start cancelling features 6 months before release, after 4 delays. Most of those features they cut, they didn't even manage to show once, whilst other appeared a single time in the whole years of marketing. Of course, the marketing granted them the most preordered game in history, but also the worst ever launch, multiple lawsuits, and the highest stock value drop ever for a game company. Even blizzard's "issues" didn't lose their stock as much value (40% loss for actiblizzard vs 80% for CDPR). Wrong, they showed enough to drive their non loyalist community to outrage, as OVW2 was indistinguishable from OVW1, driving them into delays to actually make a product, the one they now are actually not showing stuff about. The world is not "expecting" KSP2. There's almost 0 talk in any place that is not here, the subreddit, or the comments of KSP1 youtubers.

Let us not confuse spoiling stuff, with revealing the capabilities of the software. Answering questions like: How well does it work Will it have X feature at launch Will X feature be part of the scope, or is it never coming Do not spoil anything at all, specially when the game is built as an allegedly bettered version of an existing product. The marketing they've shown till now includes less than 2 minutes of actual hands on gameplay, and when you add the 2 year delay with a still mysterious release date, really doesn't bode well for whatever will come out. Now sure, I can wait till release date and let other people play it first, but I'm guessing they do want my preorder, along with everyone else's, and my preorder comes attached to the condition of both pricing, and them making a good job of informing me as a consumer. You seem to think "more information" means them showing me easter eggs, stats for every planet, a detail of all parts with their numbers, and that couldn't be further from the truth. As I said, Gaming: The market where you're beaten down for trying to be an informed consumer. I'm almost 30 now, I was alive back then, and you'd get FREE SHAREWARE CDs of stuff to try, with a nice "if you like it, it releases xx/xx/xxxx, purchase at xxxxxxx". Of course, games now don't even fit a CD, or even a full on storage drive anymore, so we can't have that, but we have this amazing thing called the internet where you can show me an unlimited amount of media about the product without concern for mine or your storage, or wasting my time with a bad demo that also took the space of something else on that shareware CD. After we had patience till 2020, shoving a 2 year delay with a release date still in the air is good enough grounds for patience to run out. Some people like to think that every dev you hold accountable will pull off a cyberpunk, and every dev you don't hold accountable will pull off a duke nukem, it's neither in reality. Accountability helps the product in the end, like it did NMS, like it is doing for Cyberpunk, and like it is doing for many other games.

You mean the things they weren't doing that caused a 2 year delay? Also if you think a video every 3 months and a 15 second clip of an untextured asset every once in a while is "saturation"... we've clearly got very differing standards.

My very first MP experience was the best: I joined a random server and went to space to rendezvous with a station, only to find out it was a cloud of debris from what used to be a phallic shaped docking hub. That's when I realized the potential. If they promised it for release and skip it, that's not gonna look good, as much as me or you might care about multiplayer. That's a lifelong stain as much as the original SQUAD promising multiplayer then selling the game and running away. Gaming: The only market where informed consumers are looked and beaten down by... other consumers who wish to not be informed.

Already gave you the like but that's not enough. Playing NMS, Sims 4, Cyberpunk, etc. you learn to appreciate deep puddles much more over shallow oceans. A couple of well intertwined, interdependent, deep systems, will trump loosely tied, individually canned "mechanics" any day. Multiplayer was promised for the original KSP. Still waiting on that,

Price optimization is not something consumers can tackle, simply because of bias. $100 might be "worth" if you balance against playing the game for 10 years, but you've effectively alienated 90% of possible customers, as $100 is only a standard for collectors editions and other, bigger deals. Initial price is a barrier of entry, the very first one, no matter what pretty name people might want to put on it. I bought FS2020's Premium Deluxe because I know it's a product that won't have competition or a sequel for at least a decade, and it's going to give me thousands of hours, until a foreseeable alternative comes out, plus it carries an entire second market of payware/freeware addonds that will follow in its steps and abandon previous products. On the other hand, KSP2 right now looks mostly like a graphical update with some mods integrated into it, right after being bought out by a AAA publisher that gladly participated in poaching and cutthroat politics to sink the original studio in charge of the sequel. Further on, it now has a sea of competitors at indie price ranges that whilst not exactly filling the very specific niche, come damn close. Lastly, the original game was $15, bumped to $40 years down the line when the "release" came. Whilst their greed might be high enough for $60+, purchasing intent for this price range* [i believe] is very low outside of easily recognizable loyalists. *edit, this part is important.

There used to be a couple of Argies chatting around in the Spanish subforum. Plus Ezequiel (Ayarza, from Squad) is also Argentinian. Argentum = Silver, Argentina = Made out of silver. Oof, I purchased on release, it's been like 2 years and 100+ hours later and I still regret my purchase.

Thankfully, Steam is based and holds a complete record of my purchases: Back when I purchased the game for myself, 1 USD = 5.15 ARS back then, so ARS 72 for the game, when monthly wage was 3300 ARS (these numbers are about to go crazy, welcome to inflation) I then purchased the first DLC 5 years later, ARS 180 at 1 USD = 38 ARS (would be USD 4.7 converted back). Monthly average wage back then was 11300 ARS Also at the same time gifted the base game to a friend, notice how the now converted and regionalized price on a sale was less than the DLC, and about a third the price of my original purchase. Finally, BG released 2019, when 1 USD = 44.7 ARS, so converted would be 6 USD. Monthly wage at this point would be 12500 ARS. Now, if we assume KSP2 releases at a non regionalized 60 USD, I'd be paying 9900 (conversion + taxes), at a final price of 1 USD = 190 ARS, with a monthly wage of 33000 ARS. That's a huge jump, directly into non-affordability. Also yes, this retrospective depicts a 100% inflation in 6 years if you look at wages, but %3700 if you look at the Dollar.

it'd be 6000 ARS + 65% in taxes (21% local VAT, 8% "solidarity" tax, 35% for a dollar transaction to a foreign party), not only does that make the game completely inaccesible (almost a third of the average monthly income), it also misses the point of regionalizing prices at all which is: Price regionalization was brought forward to equalize markets and ensure everyone has equal access to games, this is why games are exceedingly expensive in places like switzerland for example, but South American and Russian markets tend to be the "cheapest". I on principle refuse to support companies that fail to see this point. For you, 50 dollars might be chump change, here it's about half a month's wage, pre taxes, which means (and this still applies) that greedy AAA companies that convert their prices without regionalizing them have zero sales in our market and sailing remains very high.

Those are all people that have KSP as a secondary theme of their channel, not their primary. Scott, shadowzone, etc never made content where they played KSP recreationally, it's always related to a concept they want to talk about. Matt has transitioned into news but the hit to views is clear, with real life videos having about half the views as his Kerbal videos. Stratzenblitz and VAOS, for example, are people that only make KSP content. Whilst I don't think either of them will have a conflict of interest, they are to lose a lot if they're forced to diversify. My preorder/purchase actions will heavily depend on how they regionalize pricing. If they go the AAA route thinking USD 60 = ARS 6000, that's a never buy, because not even on sale will it be worth it. Currency equivalence is not regionalization, and I don't support that practice out of principle.

You seem to be the one most interested in an actual mathematical approximation. Yeah, Space Engine's HDR setting has its limits, plus it's either on or off. However, other settings like magnitude limitations take priority, as they directly hide objects below X magnitude. If you bring all the magnitude limits to max value, you'll see the entire universe, to the absolute peril of your computer. [snip]

Never took it personal, that's why I said "ridiculing the argument", not me. Night at Callisto, no Jupiter to be seen, with same both settings as the previous post > Exposure "0" and Exposure "-9.5" (yes, it's all completely black). A very light colored ship in space - Here's the famous IXS Enterprise (She's bright white almost all over) , on a random patch of the Milky Way, with the galactic centre visible. Exposure "0" and Exposure "-9.5" Space Engine does not have a "dynamic range" setting, it's either normal or HDR. I'll give you some bonus shots of multiple settings on that second situation. Expanded magnitude limit, normal exposure, HDR: Heavily over exposed, with artificial ambient lighting, and HDR: Custom non HDR setting to bring out nebulas and clear some stars

As much as you might want to ridicule the argument you forget that, since we're speaking of a camera, the math is all there to be calculated. Whilst we might have differing opinions on what is better and what isn't, the objective truth of what would a camera see in the interstellar medium is easy to find. Human eyesight is also pretty much calculable as well, which is what my first mathematical argument pointed to. I took a camera to the surface of Callisto, and adjusted exposure such that I'm not blinded by anything. Stars disappear from the sky, though the other moons are bright enough to remain as point sources. I kept the settings visible in the lower right corner. https://i.imgur.com/ebTwMhf.jpg Now, with those same settings, I moved the camera to random interstellar space midway from the core of the Milky Way. Welcome to the void. https://i.imgur.com/HwrZABn.jpg Since I'm not a fan of this either, I suggested in another thread that the camera should adapt its exposure. Here's a setting that allows us to see stars, the galactic centre, nebula, and even Andromeda back there. This is superhuman, but a camera with enough aperture and exposure can do it. https://i.imgur.com/Vz18xvQ.jpg This is what happens when you go back to Callisto's surface with those same settings: https://i.imgur.com/KTEt2Dx.jpg If you can see the green magic cloud, you can see stars as well (though still not the ship). You can't have one or the other, you either have both or nothing (this is exactly what your picture hints at). Further on, human eyesight has much better dynamic range than a camera, which is why astronauts can attest to such a full sky of stars when in space.

What are the scope and camera settings for that? Because if you used those exposure settings anywhere else, you'd go blind in white as soon as anything brighter showed up. Bright stuff definitely hides anything nearby that's less bright. That's pretty much the point of the other thread. From that thread we also know that astronauts at night, what'd be the shadow of the Earth can see uncountable stars more than being on Earth. Even at night atmospheric extinction and pollution are still a thing here. Whilst the Rocinante image is exaggerated, the only thing that'd change is you'd see less stars total. I'll boot up space engine in a while and just take a couple shots, the objective side of this topic is clearly lacking some finalizing closure for some. Yep, point of this and the other thread: Exposure should adjust to the situation, so if super bright nearby stuff is in the frame, you don't see stars. If nothing bright is nearby because you're in interstellar space, you see almost all the stars. [snip]

That's why I searched the mathematical answer. When looking at the ship you'd have no color vision, no capacity to discern details, and completely unable to do any sort of work if you don't have your own lighting. That's why the background being filled with stars is so poetic. You'd have a background filled with stars, incredibly more than we see on Earth, yet out of those millions of light sources, not a single one or the combination of all of them is enough for you to see something that's right in front of you. That's pretty much unique to dark space, yet "designers" insists that their solution of making everything pitch black, or put magic color clouds in space is "better". A bunch of bull feces.

I should be asking you at this point, since you've been pretty much pushed the goalposts a whole marathon: "Yes [there's a light source] depending on exposure" > Mathematically disproven. Even with a whole lot exposure to see nebulae you'd still only see the black silhouette of your ship. "Gameplay over graphics" "Not an engaging gameplay feature" (over multiple posts, only bothered linking the first couple) > Yet you gladly never mentioned this again when reminded that lighting was part of the design [1] and gameplay [2] for the first game. "the player shouldn't need lights to interact with parts in the same manner." (another one with different wording) > Again, dodged when it was made clear that lights, even in complete darkness, aren't necessary pretty much by design with all the extra tools the game provides. Lights are rather just another solution on the list [1] [2]. "lights would probably erode on an interstellar vessel" (another repeat)> Simple stuff you're missing just to try and have a point, and then completely ignoring and jumping onto the next argument when called out. At relativistic speeds, damage wouldn't stop at lights, but the entire vessel. At FTL, dust and even gas atoms could be fatal to a spacecraft. Since you're ignoring my points anyway, here's Dr. Sten Odenwald explaining it in his blog. Now I gave you an image that is 99% pitch black image from KSP1, to the point the only parts you can barely distinguish are bright white, and suddenly that condition seems good enough for you to fumble around with parts. Even the weather is more consistent. I made this post recalling all previous points to see either what tidbit you nitpick to run off with, or how you'd dodge the entirety of the thread and come up with a different point. This is an opinion, and so happens to be different from mine.