PDCWolf

Right now, science has been reduced to a rat in a cage waiting for a blinking box to click a button. As the OP said, why even have science at that point? I agree with most of your points, I hated the pilot class letting a kerbal that didn't even know to hold prograde (or press the button to do so) fly a rocket, but I think it's well worth it to draw a line between "this system requires involvement" and "we simplified this whole gameplay to check a light and click a button when it flashes". There's no way people in any universe are considering the second option as good gameplay.

I personally love the QOL. I dislike that the QOL is implemented over what's essentially the same system, keeping all its flaws and shortcomings. Science in KSP1 was bad. Reducing the variety of requiring scientists to get more out of experiments, to EVA your kerbals to get EVA reports in precarious situations (high atmosphere EVA report during re-entry anyone?) and so on.

I wish I was more right when I said it was gonna be a copy of KSP1 science. It's a bad copy that adds emphasis to the worst parts about the prequel. It's a skinnerbox for people who feel lost without a semblance of the game patting their back and handing them some fictitious points to unlock artificial limitations that make absolutely zero sense. The very first issue I encountered with it was solid rockets. Whats their point now? Back then they were a much cheaper way to move stuff and save a buck, now not only do you start with liquid rockets, but since there's no economy there's no longer a reason to get solids which is exactly why they're obligatory to get for tier 2, because anyone with 2 neurons able to do synapse would skip over them. You also already start with the T45 unlocked, so you get thrust vectoring from the get to, making the T30 completely useless, and the little wings too, unless you have absolutely no idea what are you doing, or really happen to try something wild for your very first flight. This is a pattern that's repeated for everything. You want docking? Gotta unlock 3 nodes of useless stuff in the middle. As for missions. COME ON. This is for everyone: Start a new save, launch a rocket to orbit (you can do it on your very first launch). Once your rocket is in orbit, head over to the Mission Control building. You haven't completed reach space or reach orbit yet, because for some reason you've gotta read them before they're able to be completed. You have to go in, read the missions, and then go back to your ship to remind the game you've already reached orbit. As for heating, the amazing new heating system means I can just plunge a rocket tail first into the atmosphere from the Mün and have each part detonate one by one, and by the time the pod is the last thing remaining, we've slowed down enough. Parachutes are irredeemably broken, shouldn't-have-released type broken, they're immune to heat if they're perfectly tucked behind a flaming pod, but they'll randomly disappear afterwards. If people hadn't been starved of content for 10 months, this launch would've been a laughable disaster. Be glad the fans are so hardcore that they actually wanted to play the game this hard. I have more to say (lots on the UI, dear god), but that'll have to wait till I'm back from work.

Colonies on the ground would probably have no physics, however they're still modular structures, which gives way to the possibility of having to simulate different resource producers, holders and requesters, all off-focus, which is already part of the problem. Of course, they could always abstract resources to single magical pools. On the other hand, I doubt they'd go the same route for orbital shipyards, since those are also modular structures, and in fact sounded more like specially built craft (as in, a set of parts) than space colonies. Further on, if you want them physic/module less, you'd have to communicate to players that those shipyards once installed are magically no longer manipulable with engines or RCS, and damage would have to be global rather than per-part.

This is one of the points where I feel doomerism is probably the most justified. Seeing a 1 part full gravity ring, and a 20 part "huge interstellar mothership" is such a turnoff. KSP2 is saving more data than KSP1 for an individual part, it needs to for off-focus thrust, as it can't just dump unloaded vessels into a 1part protovessel like KSP1 did. If you add that to their heavy reluctance to claim maximum part numbers, the trend of dumbing down constructions (and now science parts) to 1 part solutions... yeah it doesn't look good, and that's seemingly by design in a way to reduce both save bloat and to keep the game performant as you build and launch stuff. As of now it looks like KSP2 is gonna have a much tighter part count/vessel per-save limit versus the prequel. So yeah, my answer would be "they're not gonna solve it", or "maybe they can optimize it a bit but the overall limitations are already mostly set". Entering the bubble would still load the models/textures and physics, so approaching a part-dense craft will still have an impact as it enters the physics bubble. Yes to all, unless you actively refuse to use them and build things manually. Less parts = less possible combinations, that's basic math. If they only do one gravity ring, then every player's gravity rings are gonna look the same.

Hey, enjoyment is subjective, and also not part of my argument. My point is for $50 I don't expect them to remain at the same level of depth as KSP1 and its systems, I'm not saying it wouldn't be enjoyable, I'm saying it wouldn't be worth the value for me if that's all they aim for. As for depth, if you don't mind me going off genre (because the genre is pretty dry with only 2 current titles): Stellaris, or any 4x for that matter. Not only do all systems go deep, they all tend to interact with each other in some way or another. Larian's Divinity 2 and now BG3. They're games built on both depth, emergent narrative (even if constrained by the overarching story) and giving you a myriad of ways to achieve what you want. Dwarf Fortress actually goes so deep it is hard to fathom at points. In this same vein here's 2 more ASCII-but-mad-deep games: CDDA and Caves of Qud. Kenshi where the game itself morphs from third person survival to RTS with a very alive world. Obviously Factorio. From The Depths, which is not only a physics sim where you build your vehicles, you go as deep as designing your own engines, ammo and guns. ^Same with Stormworks, to a lesser degree. Stationeers, where even atmospheric pressure and composition of your settlements is at play. E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, where after you break the initial confusing barrier, you can theorycraft amazing builds with intertwined skills that feed off each other. The combat systems in DMC4. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. may be mostly atmosphere and shooting, but the AI system goes so deep those of us waiting for 2 are afraid they might even scale it back or fail to port it to UE5 AC VI, and most Armored Core titles to be honest, have mecha building systems that are pretty much hundreds of hours to completely master. Aurora 4X, if you really like having painfully granular control over absolutely everything in a military campaign. I never said Orbiter is inferior, in fact it is what I was playing before KSP. However Orbiter not only lacks the accesibility, but also the lego building system which is vital to both the freedom you have in KSP and its success.

What game like KSP, with lego styled spaceship building and somewhat realistic physics were you playing before KSP became a thing? Orbiter doesn't have the construction, simplerockets came afterwards, most other games have soap opera physics.

And we'd fall into the same comparison: KSP1 was the groundbreaker, developed by indie devs. This is a studio of professionals and so far we aren't even on feature parity with the prequel nor does it look like the future systems will have any depth or level of compromise one would normally associate with AAA $50 projects. Of course, there's still a long way for them to surprise us, but the current evidence points to "is this it?" being the recurrent theme.

The core gameplay has been shown to remain mostly the same as KSP1, with minor QOL improvements and a time mechanic added. I seriously doubt they hid anything big because the game really could use the good PR and there's no point in having a very strong set of features or parts and not showing it to build up hype right into the holidays which is one of the peak purchasing times for games. Like seriously, they've showed very minor stuff before that they could've kept hidden as part of extra stuff for this update (gridfins, extra engines), so I very much doubt there's more to 0.2 than meets the eye. Considering what they answered on AMAs, dev chats, and such, I firmly believe "is this it?" is gonna be a recurring theme for every single thing they bring forward, specially when you bring the price into the equation.

As I was saying, no 4th camp. What's gonna be forced on us is whatever the developer wants. I doubt we can peer pressure them into doing LS and since they clearly have no plans to challenge players other than with basic physics, I'm pretty sure when I say you're safe. I will however hold the opinion that not including and enforcing life support is laughable for a game that has any hope of calling itself a space sim. On the other hand, I could tell you that you're actively making the game worse for people that want LS, and that NO LS could be a mod, as much as mechjeb is a no gameplay mod.

Optionality is extremely damaging to the game on these big systems, much more during EA. Check CDDA: all the drama aside, if you make features toggleable, people will muscle-memory into leaving or turning them off, thus new features don't get used or tested. The dev had to remove the toggles for the features to get used at all, causing an outcry, sure, but a small one that died out in like a month. This is not even going into having to balance the game both (or n^2, based on number of toggles) ways, because without LS your rockets would be lighter, smaller, and you wouldn't be on a timer (assuming a good LS system) for your missions, meaning the game isn't just the same with LS off, it's a whole different experience. You're not on an alleged 4th camp because ultimately it's not about a toggle, it's about LS not being in your game no matter the cost. If there's one thing KSP2 is definitely looking like it's not gonna be, is difficult, so y'all can rest completely assured on that, plus LS was confirmed not coming long ago anyways.

Whilst adding joints doesn't scale the issue of worldsim, the mindless addition of extra joints will have an impact. That's as basic as saying a 100 part vessel is gonna perform better than a 200 part vessel. The worldsim problem compounds this. Sadly we can only wait and see how it works when we actually get interstellar ships under acceleration outside the physics bubble, along colonies and stuff. Improvements which remain to be seen and properly analyzed.

That's advanced words for what autostrut does: unite parts arbitrarily by creating X number of joints between them. Creating extra joints had a big impact in KSP1, and will have a much heavier impact in KSP2 until they ever get around to fix this one which they said was a "design choice" and then actually began recognizing it for the huge timebomb it is. Autostrut is pretty much high quality fuel to that fire, which is why they didn't "want autostrut" at first but turns out that's the only way to deal with unity's subpar-needs-to-go joint system. That's the price of having wobble.

Not only are some elements still excessively big, being curved means they're wasting space they don't need, plus a lot of them can really just go or be reduced to very faint queues. There's also no reason they couldn't combine the atmosphere indicator with the altitude tape for example.

As for things that should be changed: Navball sizing and styling. It occupies about 40% more space than it should for the information it gives and said information is presented in a really bad way. The tapes are completely useless, as deriving relative speeds from them is pretty painful and requires complete distraction from flight. There's both negative space and with the borders. One or the other, preferably the later as to not waste more space. Vector icons (prograde, retrograde, velocity path, whatever else you might wish to draw on it) should have interlocking lineup hints, be it empty little spaces or whatever for other icons to line up with and make such alignments more accurate. Dot on dot has always been the worse way to do this, specially when one dot can be bigger than the one it is occluding. Disregard space wasting curves, embrace straight lines. This has been basic HMI theory since the 60s. The only things that need to be a circle are the navball, and certain analog gauges which the game doesn't have. Make labels consistent, readable. Put it where it goes, in the center, or at least give me the option to do so. Making it good and readable and small means it can go in the center without intruding. You made your own self fulfilling prophecy by making it uselessly big and then having to shove it to a side. The PAW is objectively bad, go back. Clicking a part and having a window filled with similarly named parts come up is a nightmare. Having all parts in a single window doesn't allow me to re-align and re-sort them to my needs like I could in the prequel. Fuel transfers and pretty much anything else that requires two parts open are a pain thanks to 1 and 2. The UI noises should be way less invasive and obnoxious. The settings UI needs to be much clearer on what is on and what is off. Checkboxes will always be the superior option instead of ON/OFF sliders. The camera controls in the VAB suck. Sorry, should be caps, SUCK. Just go back. The new game UI is confusing as hell, though this is probably personal. If I'm picking colors, I shouldn't have to click confirm for the colors to apply to my save, same with the flag. The save system is confusing in itself, and the new game UI doesn't help. Again, might be personal.

Great watch. I saw you guys transmitting from the pod without any antennas, so I guess it's safe to assume pods will have at least a basic comm antenna integrated on them? Does it consume electricity as well? It was also visible that the pod can hold more than a single result from the same experiment. As for the rest, it still looks like my initial assessment of basic QOL and minimum changes from KSP1.

I just finished examining this phenomena, and yes, It's completely the Steam Awards. Around 162 of the 209 new reviews are nonsensical, presenting unrelated text, memes, thumbs up, or even the bare minimum to qualify: a single character. Others included in this category straight up attack other reviewers, or tell you to buy the game now and wait because it is not good. 104 reviews come from "suspicious" accounts: They haven't reviewed other games, don't own other games, or are extremely new accounts that haven't even changed the default PFP. Finally, 89 of those 209 reviews haven't gone above the set 5 hour threshold. Most people reviewing the game already owned it, they're not new purchasers and have in fact almost not even played the game in the 9 months it's been out. The thing is with so little players it really takes just 200 reviews to completely flip the score.

Glad we have a date, not glad it's right there with the holidays. Not for me or players, but for the capacity the team might have to deploy hotfixes if something goes wrong. Hope those 2 months since it was "locked in" have been well spent in actual testing.

I was giving the video a chance (leaving my comments to "too cartoony" and nothing else), but this is... just bad. It doesn't look "dynamic", it looks funnily stiff with some glitches coming and going. The worst part for the "glitchy" effect itself is probably 0:43 and ahead. Before that what looks really wrong is the entire thing being completely static. It's AIR my dudes, it twirls and contorts around the shape, forms vortices further back. If you're using an ablator then there are particles ablating and flying away from the shield. If it gets turbulent it can form even more crazy shapes.

Ah yes, the terrain turning into mipmapped mush at 100 meters, scatter as dense as the vacuum of space, and the cartoony clouds... It reminds me of Space Engineers (2013, PBR and such a bit further down the line): It's an amazing improvement over the stock KSP1 that released years ago, but so is Parallax, and these screenshots are not beating Parallax at its best.

If that's the argument then we'd rather just keep it at sandbox and leave it to mods to implement literally anything past a basic selection of parts, the VAB, and the physics integrator.

I'm only answering to this part as the rest is really just part of your setup and personal preference. Save for landing in the middle of the day, the shadows will (depending on how you've turned your camera) approach from the edge of the screen first, and you can always rotate the camera to find it and put it in the axis you want it to follow. So on any time of the day other than noon, you'd have to specifically rotate the camera to leave it under the navball.

That'd take your peripheral out of the ground. Normally you'd be looking at the navball and (with a correctly placed camera), you'd have the ground and bottom of your rocket right above the navball. You can't do that with the navball on the top. The following is all on the same screen, 1920x1080, 22" sitting at 40 centimeters from my face. I do not have any sort of visual impediment. The circling is approximate of course. in KSP1, the Navball stays inside symbol recognition range for my peripheral vision. In KSP2, looking at the same spot means I see more of the ground, but nothing of the navball. Trying to fix that by searching for a new middle point, puts most of the craft outside my useful vision. EVEN with the bigger, wasteful, exploded, negative space, unreadable navball. In KSP1, any combination of zoom and panning can get the craft visible whilst the navball remains in peripheral vision. In KSP2 you can't unless you artificially set it the camera in a way that just replicates KSP1 anyways and wastes a good 2 thirds of your screen on emptyness. How is such a basic fact of reality something that remains in question is why I'm no longer responding to certain people.

The "flaw" is misconstrued into existence based on a severe lack of basic understanding, this is why I lost interest in arguing [snip]

Very well put. Sadly it's in one ear, out the other 99% of the times.