PDCWolf
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Posts posted by PDCWolf
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3 minutes ago, Periple said:
That doesn’t matter at all.
It does so long as it doesn't get better. People won't magically forget when release arrives, they have to rebuild that during however long they plan to take. It's incredible how decontextualized people have become in regards to the game's situation:
- The people that want the game no matter what already have it. They won't "come back" because they're already there.
- The people who felt hugely betrayed or disappointed are gone, they won't come back. Welcome to the 75% activity decrease slump.
- The people who don't trust the devs might still stick around to see where they end up. There's probably a chance to convince them if FS! and following headliners are actually worth it.
- That KSP2 will have the same engine, spaghetti codebase, unoptimized physics and comical joints is already set in stone, and so the people who wanted the foundational pieces changed are gone, and won't come back.
- The people that don't mind the point above but wanted more will only come back on further headliners, provided those are good, or even in post 1.0 DLCs (remember how KSP2 will not have robotics or life support?)
So far 0.1.5 and FS! announcement haven't done anything for the reviews or the playerbase being back again on a negative trend after the small patch spike.
Just now, regex said:Well no, you'd be taking away another gameplay element, the sandbox, the ability to build and fly things. They've given us just enough sim to support the game, but the game is the most important part; the sim is not intended to intrude into the game unless it's considered actually interesting for the game by the designers. And since not every game has to be for everyone you add in modding "support" (or in KSP's case, you just don't get in the way of modders, or don't care if they bypass your obfuscation) so that people can turn it into the sim they want to play.
I don't care about mods, I care about whatever they want people to pay $50 for. At least we'll be getting the first taste of "the game" with FS! which'll probably be a big reality check by the looks of it.
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6 minutes ago, MechBFP said:
If you think that has market value, then go ahead.
Hey, if we wanna talk market share, whatever they're doing now has like 20% of the market of the previous game.
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5 minutes ago, regex said:
KSP has always been a game, first and foremost, not a simulator. You need mods to add the complexity you want into the game. Intercept has taken the torch from Squad in that regard, they're more concerned with "user stories" (what makes good gameplay) than providing a coherent simulation where you have to ensure you've taken everything into account (and the fact that they're considering "user stories" tells me they're far more serious than Squad about making a good game). If you want a sim go back to KSP1 and get RO/RP-1 (or wait for whatever's coming for KSP2), you're never going to get it from the base game.
If the whole lego building and physics simulation is only there to account for a very limited, well demarcated "user stories", might as well build a linear VR animation like Apollo.
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33 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:
Aaand, you would improve that how? You can also argue that warband is repetitive. Sure, I am fighting for different lord and reason, but the fight is the same. Here, the rockets are different, reasons are the same.
You could chose to not fight and open enterprises and trade, which'll get you to retire richer than fighting. You can choose to not ally with any lord, or take on the cause of the exiled lords. There's also the fact that what happens on your map, and thus the story of your character, will be completely different, as that's pretty much emergent narrative. That's the thing with open ended, emergent narrative games.
KSP2 is open ended, but has almost no narrative elements save for whatever story will come out of the easter eggs or discoverables, which even if told non-linearly, will start and end up in exactly the same place on your first or hundredth play-through.
How to fix that? I'm sure there's hundreds of ways that me and others could've thought of, and not a single one of them realizable because we're getting another puddle depth lego game. They could've turned the contract system into something remarkable by transforming it with allegiance/sponsorship mechanics with different companies, governments, competing space programs/nations and so on. Colonies could be an interesting point as well if included in that same system. Kerbals could actually be unique individuals rather than having different hair and skin colors and randomized stats. Heck, just think of similar games like Stormworks or From The Depths, just having a purpose for vehicles other than get X to Y place, drives players to extremely different playstyles, where you'll find some people never ever develop a water tanker helo/plane for forest fires, others just do trains, and so on. In KSP2 the only way for those to be born is self imposed restrictions, or role-play, because not even contracts are there to challenge you anymore.
This is why I have so little faith in "exploration mode".
In fact, to continue the rant, here's another piece of mind: for my stint as a gaming journalist, one of my personal jobs was to review the Sims and its expansions. EA would provide us an account with access to all DLCs forthe Sims 4 every time they added a new one. Do you know why the Sims 4 is such unfunny, soulless garbage? Exactly for the same I'm describing. Every DLC is its little uninspired, disjointed, bottled in experience. Back in Sims 1, 2, and even parts of 3, Sims would act on their own most of the time, and every non-asset DLC would add stuff to the world. This meant every sim could partake in the new features. You'd have your neighbors be turned into vampires by a random visitor, people marrying and having children, cheating, doing good or bad at their work, and so on.
Conversely, Sims 4 is a dollhouse where nothing happens unless you directly intervene for it to happen. You can start your save, play for 7 generations of Sims, go out of your house and realize the world is exactly the same as when you started. Added DLC? That's something only you can partake in, and will only meet the sims pre-generated for the DLC plus maybe one or two visitors from the homeless sim pool. Once you're back from the DLC area? no one cares, no one knows, and no one will ever partake in that. Thus every DLC is a droolfest pit of clicking, and then going back and never playing it again, or seeing its effects again.
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12 hours ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:
What would you have said if they gave us a game with no discoverables?
My worry is not discoverables or no discoverables. Easter eggs are great, and I probably took them for granted until this point (having already landed on one before refunding). Discoverables seem to be another name for easter eggs, or some remarkable hand-made feature planted in a procgen world. My worry is what about the entire rest of the planet sized map those discoverables are in? More discoverables? More barren procgen uninteresting wastelands? Is science only tied to discoverables or does the biome system make a comeback, or something better/worse?
If the science gameplay revolves around discoverables, then we're all gonna be playing exactly the same game, and almost exactly the same route.
12 hours ago, Superfluous J said:what sort of non-repeatable experiences that we cannot share in common were you hoping for in the game?
Some time ago I realized my top games in my whole life were the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series, Kenshi and Mount & Blade Warband. At first, it looks like a wild, disjointed selection, but in reality they're all games that share something very important in common: Emergent narrative elements in a world where the player is just another person, rather than the protagonist. Save for common story elements on the first series, every experience you will have is different, every goal you could craft is different, every way of achieving that goal is different as well.
As it stands right now, the only thing that makes your experience of KSP1/2 different to mine (before mods) is how we design our rockets. Anything but that is the exact same for you and me, and the challenges we'll face will be the same: Land on the easy bodies, maybe try Moho and Eeloo, a Jool 5, make an SSTO, and an Eve ascent vehicle. Anything after that is roleplay. KSP2 is shaping to be the same, even if they include a grotesque amount of "discoverables", and there's one thing that makes the idea worse: They're selling it as an exploration game, even if what we'll end up exploring, seeing, and achieving is almost exactly the same.
This is sadly the current state for most single-player experiences: A bottled in little story with few divergences, that requires you to not look at anyone else doing it, lest you spoil the experience for yourself, because it's literally gonna be the same for you.
I honestly don't know what I expect, but I do want to see the narrative side taken further since they mentioned hiring writers.
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19 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:
Its more like if I had cancer I'd weigh the opinion of an oncologist higher than I'd weigh the opinion of some random person off the street. Its not because of the title and the lab coat, its because they've spent their lives understanding and treating the disease that I have.
On the latter I think thats kind of the point of colonies and interstellar, taking what we've learned making fairly simple flags and footprints missions and applying it to build a much more diverse set of vehicles to explore surfaces, deliver outpost modules, harvest and transport resources, etc. I've experienced that with modded KSP1 but not yet with KSP2. Every time a player goes into the VAB they should be tackling a really new problem in terms of design and engineering, flight profile, and overall mission architecture. We'll see if FS! expands on that.Good thing this is not about cancer, good lord.
The problem with appeal to authority is that they failed to present an argument and instead just bring an authoritarian figure that shares their viewpoint into the conversation. The pitfall of appeal to authority is precisely that not all authorities might agree, thus the discussion turns into a pokemon card match, to see who's got the biggest or most famous authority, instead of discussing the matter at hand.
Even oncologists can have differing opinions.
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5 minutes ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:
You mean you’ve never gone looking for Vallhenge or the whale skeleton or the dead Kraken on Bop? Finding the Easter eggs in KSP was a lot of fun. And if the POIs are as pretty as that Laythe screenshot…
I've seen them just so my missions had a point of getting there at all. Other than that, it's a repeatable experience we share in common, and when you think about the game having 3 star systems with many planets each, all of us going to the same places to see the same sights is kinda sad.
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Just now, Pthigrivi said:
In regards to Chris Adderley I think it's more of an appeal to expertise. He's both seen KSP1's heat system, understood its flaws, and developed a system that was much more robust and in-depth. I've also used that mod pretty extensively and as fun as it is I wouldn't recommend it for stock. It took many, many hours of trial and error to understand how everything was supposed to work. But I have to understand how heating and cooling and solar gain and thermal mass works in buildings for my job so it was appealing to me. To draw an analogy it would be a bit like making engine design, engine cycles, turbopumps, and fuel ratios stock. Im sure a small subset of real rocket nerds would have fun with that but for post players who just want to snap on an engine and have it go it would be a huge source of confusion and frustration. The devs need to consider the entire player base and make judgement calls on how much is too much for most players, and how much emphasis to put on one system vs another so that the whole experience doesn't become an unwieldy slog. KSP already has a bit of a reputation for having an incredibly steep learning curve. Heat is a really cool problem in space so Im really happy to see them digging into it, but in doing so they need values and behaviors that are pretty clean and easy to understand and predict. If I'm generating x heat, then I need -x cooling to stay at equilibrium. If radiators are already assumed to have proper plumbing to and from heat sources there's no reason to those sources should also then bleed heat into adjacent parts. It's just an opaque overcomplication.
Oh no, don't take it as me questioning Chris' authority on the issue at hand. I wouldn't dare. I would dare, however, to point out that appealing to his authority as the ultimate decider is a fallacy, and I'm not even asking, but outright stating it.
In regards to the system itself, sure, it doesn't need to go as deep as to be a good tool for actual spacecraft planners, we're all on the same side on that. KSP1 does have a steep learning curve, but there's noting to do once you're at the top, neither in the form of other learning curves, or anywhere to apply what you learned (bar roleplay, or mods).
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41 minutes ago, MechBFP said:
I think I'll take the word of the person who actually developed the most in-depth heat management system mod in KSP1 as to the value of such a system.
How many hours did you wait for the discussion to develop just to add a basic appeal to authority type fallacy?
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I think the point of the K.E.R.B is to tell us what you're working on rather than what you think is important. Have you been working 6 weeks on the same bug? the K.E.R.B. should reflect it. If an item is dropped from the list, it should be mentioned why (unless it shows up in patch notes, obviously). Otherwise what you end up doing is obscuring the process. You can easily see this reflected in the amount of questions on the K.E.R.B when the whole list changed and some of those bugs were indeed not fixed.
This:
QuoteAs a major change to the K.E.R.B., we are going to start removing entries to the K.E.R.B. that require fundamental feature overhauls to be "fixed" in the community's eyes, such as Surface Rendering Fragment Shaders are Inefficient and KSP2 is Calculating the Physics of all Parts of all Crafts. We see these as MAJOR issues to features, as you do, but we also understand the scope of what it would take to get these resolved. We really want the K.E.R.B. to be focused on issues that exist patch-to-patch instead of milestone-to-milestone.
Is the absolute opposite of what you should do.
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54 minutes ago, The Aziz said:
Are we really not talking about these?
What's there to talk about? Blackrack's immense work for sure, but other than that? Yeah, there's gonna be easter eggs, and mountains. The rover doesn't seem to have anything new on it, or anything you could look at and say "wow they added that to the game!?!?!"
The whole concept of POIs doesn't really add much to the gameplay.
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38 minutes ago, Periple said:
Yes, that demonstrates that a deployable radiator (TCS) analog part exists in KSP2.
It demonstrates that every part will act as the magic DTCS in KSP2. There are no examples provided of parts that don't magically sap flux from anywhere in the vessel.
38 minutes ago, Periple said:I contend that the changes have minimal impact on design (radiator panel analogs need to be attached directly to the part that needs cooling) and significant impact on the overall game (loaded and unloaded craft/colonies are simulated the same way at all warp levels). In my view this is a worthwhile trade-off.
I mean, for someone that completely overlooked how heat worked on the original, yeah, it's obvious to me you'd see it as minor. Instead of taking the good system from one, maybe making it better and actually having any mismanagement of it end up in proper consequences, they stripped it down to a mass tax and called it a day.
There's still no source for the "significant impact".
40 minutes ago, Periple said:I understand that you disagree, although I still don’t understand why you feel so strongly about a relatively minor design impact. I am also a little disappointed that you don’t appear to have shifted your position at all even after you realized that you had completely misunderstood the system by assuming that part-level simulation had been eliminated altogether.
Having the whole vessel be a single total flux would kinda at least account for heat propagating and normalizing along the whole craft, as if it had internal cooling systems that move it around, even with the pitfall that it'd be instantaneous and magical. Now that you made me see that every part will be its own little heat thing in isolation, without conducting anywhere, yet with magical heatsinks that can be anywhere on the vessel, actually makes it worse.
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3 minutes ago, Periple said:
How do you know that all radiators have implicit heat piping?
I just re-read Nertea’s article and it didn’t say that. On the contrary, he mentioned heat sinks and radiators on a part.
Check the "complex" examples, the one below the 3 part ship orbiting kerbin specifically. The radiators deployed near the engine are used to cool the (i guess) reactor at the other side of the ship.
4 minutes ago, Periple said:I take it you never use the deployable TCSs in KSP1, then?
I did ISRU a couple times until I learned to manage the heat and design good looking stuff, then like with literally everything else in the game I figured there's no point to it. One of my biggest gripes of KSP1 is that every gameplay "loop" is cut by simply asking "why". Why would I add ISRU to a Jool5 ship and bother with the extra designing and mass? for literally nothing other than saying I did.
Sadly the rest of the game doesn't really require much heat management (again, blame SQUAD for being afraid of consequences), and KSP2 will make that even lesser it seems.
7 minutes ago, Periple said:Anywhere else, such as…?
ISRU, rockets with too many engines (like nukes), high speed atmospheric flying, flying near the Sun. Again, you can't blame the system for SQUAD not having made enough scenarios for it to be used. KSP2 will include those scenarios apparently but not the in depth system, which is really funny and sad.
8 minutes ago, Periple said:But the question was specifically about exploding parts!
I don't get this, you want a situation where heat buildup would explode a part but it could be stopped by conducting to its neighbors? That's literally anything I mentioned above. If there wasn't an adjacent conduction between parts, those heat producing parts would just be isolated and build up heat till they explode. Again, the only ones that don't explode are ISRU and that's because they were programmed specifically to not explode.
11 minutes ago, Periple said:Once again, how do you know this? Nertea didn’t say so, and nothing about removing conductivity between parts precludes having radiator panels that only cool the part to which they’re attached. Would you be happy if KSP2 provided such parts?
It's funny because every example he gave points to literally that: You have part with negative flux somewhere, it counteracts parts with positive flux anywhere else. Check the "complex" ship example, and the colony example:
^Radiator on the bottom cools reactor at the top even though (if piping is not assumed) the thermal mass of the truss in the middle would be negligible.
^Steam turbine looking thing and water piping cool down the whole base.
As for what I would be happy with: An expanded rather than reduced heat system, with actual consequences and that required some thought be put into ship design. Hopefully well tied into life support. But hey, they're clearly making a cartoon instead of a proper sequel.
12 minutes ago, Periple said:I’ll refer you to Nertea’s article again:
“We don’t have a lot of user stories that benefit from simulating conduction between parts, or intrinsic simulated thermal emission. A lot of the time this reduces to equilibrium in KSP1, particularly at high time warp factors. In addition, if we want this simulation to apply to vessels in the background, we need to simplify things. It’s hard enough computing thermodynamics for 500 parts on a vessel – imagine if we wanted to crunch fancy thermodynamics on 50000 parts on 100 vessels! This has to scale effectively and be performant.”
This part is really funny, and also disingenuous for many reasons:
- That a hot thing makes things around it hot too is reality. If you think you "can't benefit from simulating that" then might as well not simulate anything, as you've thrown reality out the window. This is exactly what trivializes the whole heating system and reduces it to nothing more than soulless a mass tax.
- In KSP1 it reduces to equilibrium because it was safeguarded that way to not have parts explode on timewarp without warning. That safeguard is really dumb and trivializes the whole game.
- They need to simplify everything because they've build an overly bloated serialization system that needs to save every part of every vessel at every point of data they have. He talks about 50000 parts in 100 vessels when you can't even do that in the current game, let alone when heating and colonies arrive.
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Just now, cocoscacao said:
The you could increase time-warp, and forget about it all-together.
Lack of consequence is an issue that permeates every system, yet funnily enough heat does build up under timewarp for isru parts.
Now tell me, how has the perma-timewarp problem been addressed for KSP2? oh wait.
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1 hour ago, Periple said:
Maybe? Or could it be that you're missing how unimportant it is? You did have a pretty fundamental misunderstanding about the system, if you believed that parts had been removed altogether and the entire craft is simulated as single part!
Actually, being individual parts that can't conduct to each other yet somehow can have their heat dissipated by select others is worse. That a hot thing will heat others around it is basic reality.
1 hour ago, Periple said:As an aside, has correcting this fundamental misconception altered your view of the system at all? Because I do agree, if the entire craft was simulated as a single part, that would be a significant change for the worse!
Definitely, but it didn't make it any better.
1 hour ago, Periple said:Exactly like in KSP1. If a part heats up past its limits, it will explode, by itself, without affecting anything else. I think we've all seen this happen when re-entering a bit too hot, as solar panels, antennas, goo containers etc. explode... or even the retrograde parts of the spacecraft itself. (It could cause a structural failure of course, if a component in the middle of the craft blows up, like when you're coming in too hot in a spaceplane.)
Even if that's true on re-entry, it's not true anywhere else. A part having lots of neighbors means its heat can dissipate before it's a problem, even if to other parts.
1 hour ago, Periple said:Exactly like the deployable radiators in KSP1.
Contrary to KSP2, where every radiator is a magic radiator and parts don't conduct to neighbors.
1 hour ago, Periple said:I think the skin/core system can be abstracted away with zero impact to anything. If I understood it correctly, it was a representation of a part's ability to soak heat flux, which can be represented as a single value (thermal capacity).
It's also an abstraction of conductivity not being 100% efficient, thus a part could soak up flux, as its skin remained hot, and then after the skin cools, it'd slowly conduct to neighbors or the environment. Yes, it can be abstracted to a single value, so long as you include the efficiency factor for conductivity, which'd make no sense if all your radiators can magically conduct to themselves.
1 hour ago, Periple said:Can you describe a vessel where this would actually happen? I can't think of any way to do this. Literally, any way, even if I tried. It's always the heat flux directly on a part that kills it.
Literally anything ISRU. Converters and drills were the biggest heat generators in the game. Of course they wouldn't explode parts, as they'd shut themselves down first with bad conductivity. Again, blame SQUAD for not wanting to include proper consequences for bad stuff. However, to see the effect at hand, you could make a craft that has drills and converters at the bottom, and static radiators at the top. You could then try putting the radiators closer to the drills and converters and see the difference as the heat transfer becomes more efficient and those parts are able to operate for longer.
53 minutes ago, Periple said:I think my previous message was a bit long, so I'll try a tl;dr. @PDCWolf, can you describe, or show, an example of how the thermal system in KSP2 would change the way you would have to design a vessel, compared to KSP1? And by "an example," I mean an actual vessel you're designing, not describing the system in general terms.
(I've done this exercise, and the only difference I can find is the one I've been repeating: if you have radiators that only cool the part to which they're mounted, then you have to attach them directly to the part you want to cool, rather than an adjacent one. And, once more, if that really is the only difference, then in my view it is a pretty trivial one -- and well worth it, if the reduced computational cost allows simulating thermals for all craft and bases, whether they're focused or not.)
Well, in the case of ISRU or NERVas you can't attach them directly, adding a bit of nuance to how you have to manage that, and giving a chance for the system to show its workings and consequences. In KSP2 it literally doesn't matter: radiators can suck heat from any part anywhere in the vessel, so where your heat generators and your radiators are has 0 influence on how you make your ship.
Also KSP1 would simulate heat (and ISRU) for off focus vessels, in a basic way. In fact there was a bug at some point where your whole base would save up heat and instantly explode when focused.
You also keep mentioning CPU impact, but I haven't seen any metric of it, so I'd appreciate a source. The last thing I remember is the heat overlay bug, but that was graphical.
41 minutes ago, Lisias said:Something that I learnt over the years, Forum's heartbeat is kinda reflected on reddit et all (or vice versa, or even besides - I didn't managed to establish causality) and the number that matters the most is the anonymous readers ones. This Forums os a source of curated information, after all.
These days, not at all. Also, anonymous readers don't matter at all, given that the people we can gather an opinion from are not the anonymous readers, and them reading the forum doesn't mean they agree with anyone in particular. In fact, I'd bet most anonymous are here for mods.
Also, the reddit doesn't exist in a vacuum. The "cesspool" of hate pictured on Reddit is the same on Steam, on their twits, the youtube comments and so on. Only FS! announcement has changed that a bit, and a lot of that change is also by people giving up and going away instead of staying for 8 months to support or criticize.
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18 minutes ago, Periple said:
(Also, I have to nitpick -- it is conduction, not convection, which is a totally different process.)
My bad.
19 minutes ago, Periple said:Really, tweaks to the thermal system would be pretty far down my list of things that need richer simulations!
I'd agree with this on principle, I didn't really expect to be discussing something like the heat system, but I expect a sequel to go deeper rather than simpler.
19 minutes ago, Periple said:I'm sorry, but you're mistaken about this. The whole vessel does not receive/radiate as a single part. Fluxes on each part are simulated separately. The only change is that conduction between parts is no longer simulated. Quoting from Nertea's article (emphasis mine):
Then you're missing how important part to part conduction is. I hope you realize the problem by looking at the 3 part spacecraft in orbit example, and the one right below them:
- A part can explode by itself without affecting anything else.
- A part can cool another on the other side of the craft even though there's no part to part conduction, and thus that hot part doesn't affect its neighbors.
- As a bit of a secondary consequence of the downgrade, not having a Skin/Core system also means heat can instantly be dissipated to the environment for free.
Now think of how that lack of dynamics compares to KSP1, where a heat part might not only take itself out but its neighbor/s, and where you place heat generators vs dissipators influences the design (bar usage of the one magic part).
The one reason this kind of stuff isn't headlights-to-the-eyes evident is because SQUAD was really afraid to put consequences for anything in the game. Normally, having a Kerbal EVA right after you re-entered a capsule means the little guy should melt. Having a nuke producing heat should degrade the quality of life in the cockpit as coolant is sent there unless you had extra. Living in a hellhole where you can't touch the walls should mean the science or resources produced should have a drop in quality or amount. Mounting 17 engines to a single plate should mean a piping hell that kills your performance with excessive mass. Flying your SSTO inside a fireball should vaporize the kerbals inside before the structure (or worse). But god forbid the game actually has any semblance of difficulty, and now in KSP2 any semblance of depth.
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Just now, LoSBoL said:
-snip-
And you think those assumptions (some of which aren't assumptions) are not grounded on reality. They are.
11 minutes ago, Periple said:I don't understand. Can you elaborate?
The only thing the KSP2 thermal system changes is that it removes thermal conduction between parts. The only effect on gameplay/craft design is that placing a radiator panel on a part next to the part you want to cool won't work anymore, instead you'll have to place it on the part you want to cool.
How does this change make the difference between "skipping the entire system" and not? It strikes me as completely trivial.
KSP2 removes the Skin/Core system, and doesnt remove "part to part convection", it removes the whole part dynamic from the equation, and you're failing or refusing to see how that affects the whole dynamic. The whole vessel receives and radiates heat as a single part, that wasn't the case in one, as every part would generate and dissipate heat at different rates. Even if the DTCS in KSP1 does abstract a plumbing system to draw heat from all parts, it doesn't outright delete heat like it would in KSP2. This means in KSP2:
- Craft design doesn't matter. Any dissipating part will be equally effective anywhere.
- Since part to part convection is not a thing, that means craft design just got not only stupid easy but outright unimportant. In KSP1, mounting all your heat generators to a single part would easily make that part overheat, so even with the DTCS there was some nuance to craft design where not all your drills or converters could be attached to a single part, unless you outright spammed the one part that trivialized the whole system.
- Not using the DTCS also meant there was a whole new world to craft design, as heat wasn't magically sucked from all parts.
- This also gave you the chance to create realistic structures where a heat generating part is built away from the main craft, and piped through a multiple part system (specially with docking and thanks to part to part convection) so the heat would dissipate into a number of parts instead of magically heating up a cockpit on the other side of the craft.
- For bases on hostile planets (with mods, as god forbid they actually make the game challenging), isolating your base from the ground was a proper challenge, contrary to any leg of your base conducting heat into the whole of it.
- The Skin/Core system also meant parts could build up and keep heat without dissipating it effectively, as cooling the surface wasn't directly translated to cooling the core.
- In KSP1, I could NOT use DTCS and thus have to play with the heat system in a different way, in KSP2 there's no playing with the heat system, only attaching magic parts anywhere and be done with it. It's literally just a part tax that doesn't even influence design.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying the system in KSP1 was perfect or even good. My point is entirely based on the new system being a clear downgrade. There's less simulation at play, so there's less stuff that will happen, and there's diminished point to the whole system as it is trivialized by magic heat dissipating parts that don't care about spacecraft design. This was mentioned multiple times to Nertea (and I'm sure explained better than me) on his devblog.
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27 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:
Indeed, but you don't have a sample size of 15k.
And Reddit doesn't give you a 15k sample size, it gives you Reddit user samples, not the complete KSP 2 communities sample. So the sample is no good in the first place.
The question who to believe, Reddit, forum, steam, discord , is none of them.
Nah, you just can't find a sample that agrees with your view and thus are ready to think everyone else is just a groupthink. Again, the subreddit has 1.5 million followers. If you wanna assume they're a hivemind and not viable as a sample because reasons when they represent almost 30% of the entire market share this game has the hope of achieving, then there's nothing to talk about, you're not interested in representativeness, just pushing a point that's completely not based on reality.
6 minutes ago, Periple said:I'm confused, I thought you said it was a "droolfest" when you can just spam radiators anywhere on the craft to solve the heating problem? Because KSP1 totally lets you do this with the TCSs!
If KSP2 has both kinds of radiators, they will work almost the same way. The only change is that placing a radiator panel on a part that's next to the part you want to cool won't work anymore, you will have to place them on the part you want to cool.
How is it that "attaching a radiator panel to a part next to the part you want to cool" is intelligent, deep, realistic, simulation, whereas attaching it to the part you want to cool is dumbed-down, droolfest, arcade, gamified, downgrade? I just don't see that as a change that's worth making a fuss about, especially if the reduced computational cost lets you simulate thermals in the background for all of your craft and colonies at all warp factors -- something that KSP1 can't do.
It's an option, you're not forced to skip the entire system. Meanwhile KSP2 skips the whole system for you.
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42 minutes ago, Periple said:
I'm afraid you're mistaken about this, as this is only true for the fixed radiator panels. The deployable radiators (thermal control systems) cool the entire vessel.
"Deployable Thermal Control Systems (TCS), take heat from every part of the vessel (as if plumbed in with a cooling fluid loop)."
https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Radiator
The functionality is there and a part including an abstraction for plumbing simulation and others not is actually more depth.
10 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:Dataset not specified enough to make conclusions, assumptions and gut feeling take over, you don't know.
For the entire playerbase of KSP2 (people that have actually bought it, so around ~300k), you need a sample size of ~15k for 99% confidence in your results. Who do you think would be closer as representative? The 50 people in the forum bashing the first game to have a reason to defend the second, the thousand active on reddit on peak hours, or the tens of thousands active on Steam? So yeah, the majority is not playing the game. The majority is also not on these forums, they're on those other two places.
Your "don't know" argument is poorly thought out and doesn't reflect any sort of reality of how polling a group works.
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10 hours ago, Periple said:
The extensible radiators in KSP1 cool the entire craft, placement didn’t matter. It only matters for the radiator panels which would only cool the part they’re attached to. Your “droolfest” was already there.
The heat needs to convect part to part to reach radiators, which diminishes cooling efficiency the further the cooling part is from the heat generating part. Placement did matter.
8 hours ago, Superfluous J said:To be frank, no I will not wade waist deep into the cesspools that are the KSP Discord or ANY game's Reddit. And I don't need to, as they're also tiny microcosms compared to the entire user base. These kinds of places always will be.
The subreddit has 1.5 million followers, and it was a massively active place before KSP2 dropped as well. Even then, it's got a magnitude more active people than here, thus, less deviation from what can be considered a general opinion about the game. This is also true for the Steam Hub for both games, which is probably the most active place where the game is discussed, and has like 250k followers for the base game and about 180k for the sequel.
If you don't want to get out of the forum, that's fine, but that'll never change the reality that the 1.5 million in the subreddit and the almost 500k between both hubs are more representative than the 20 to 50 users that keep posting in this forum.
8 hours ago, Superfluous J said:It perfectly fits that 80% haven't purchased the sequel, though. They're not buying it because the content of the game is not worth the money to them. It's not like the game's got any more content than it did when it was released, and it's still got a lot of bugs.
I mean, that's gotta be the biggest part and I agree with that statement, but again, you'd know how big the demand for knowing what happened between the first release date for a full game in 2020 and the EA release in 2023 is if you dared to get out of this echo chamber. It's almost ubiquitous to any discussion of the game (even here if you want to only take the forum into account).
2 hours ago, cocoscacao said:Never mentioned simulation. Just downgrade and simplification. There's a difference. Downgrade is when you lose a certain functionality.
We lost functionality. Where you place radiators has no relevance anymore, separating parts with more than a single joint doesn't matter anymore, separating heat emitting parts from each other and not having them all linked to a single part doesn't matter anymore.
The system has been downgraded, and thus the experience around it has been degraded, as it's been relegated to a simple "look at number and include part with bigger number". I guess it really is the latest form of copium to just bash the first game without really haven't paid attention to how it works.
2 hours ago, cocoscacao said:Yes.
Well, not for me. I have no plan to pay $50 if all systems are gonna be either carbon copies, or downgrades, and if new systems are also reduced to simple implementations. That'd be a failure to justify the pricetag.
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1 hour ago, Superfluous J said:
Correction: "prospective customers who will not buy the game unless they go into a ridiculously in-depth discussion of the day-to-day operations of the Studio for the past 5 years."
If the game's good, only a tiny, tiny fraction of the potential customer base will hold off buying the game because no one explained why it was late.
If the game's bad, only a tiny, tiny fraction of the potential customer base would buy it simply because someone DID explain why it was so late (and still bad, presumably).
In principle what you say sounds right, but doesn't really fit 80% of the first game's playerbase not purchasing the sequel almost a year later, and the people that have still keeping it in mostly negative reviews. As I told another user before, get out of the forums, we're like 20 people posting in these threads, what we say and think here is not indicative of absolutely anything that may be reflected in the 30000 people that played the game at peak, or the rest of the 5 million that bought the first and aren't buying the second yet.
58 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:Fair enough. But simplification and downgrade are two different things.
Not for me. Simplification is the opposite of simulation.
58 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:There's an explanation why it's being done. I don't hear the contra arguments on that. Yes, re-entry is a single situation, but can you name another where this thing actually matters? If not, then what's the point? If yes, please, name it.
Mining, where radiators could be too far from heat generating parts, causing heat to build up, is the first thing that comes to mind. Also funnily enough, building in extreme environments would work more realistically in KSP1, with skin vs core temperature interactions and part to part convection versus "lol you're touching water here's instant negative flux to your whole base" that the new system proposes. More importantly, where you'd place radiators matters so heat management becomes more of a challenge than the droolfest of looking at heat number and add the right amount of parts wherever to counteract.
58 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:You get totally new systems... Baked into the base game. Giving modders even more material to work with.
Systems they're charging me AAA price for, versus free mods.
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5 hours ago, cocoscacao said:
You'll have to remind me why it is a downgrade... As for the reply, someone has to steer the boat. Whether they are capable devs or not... we can't do anything about it either way... so... what's the point again?
5 hours ago, Vl3d said:1. The new heat transfer system is not a downgrade.
3 hours ago, Periple said:I’m not even sure it matters at all in re-entry
Well, the devblog has it right there, so you can compare the intricate system in KSP1, which worked to take into account the transfer between parts, and thus by nature the distance to heat dissipating parts, and also naturally by that simulation you'd have gradual buildup of unattended excess heat. Now literally nothing of that is taken into account. Also, re-entry is a single situation, and at the level of the simulated system it's just another heat intake point.
4 hours ago, cocoscacao said:This is what I expect from the sequel in that regard. If we're getting colonies and interstellar, I want to focus on those instead of half-baked points system.
Well, in my ideal world a sequel would present an evolution on most systems, otherwise what's the point? Also, whilst new features are really nice, Colonies and Interstellar have been done by mods, so they'll get compared to that when those arrive. As far as we know, they haven't even bothered solving the sequential vs simultaneous dilemma for interstellar missions (which we know includes timewarping at least decades). Drop the ball is the name of the game for now.
4 hours ago, Vanamonde said:This isn't equivalent. You didn't own the game before its release was delayed so they weren't obligated to give or return it to you by a certain time. I'm asking why it matters, just out of curiosity, why the game's release was delayed. It happened and nothing will retroactively change that, so what would anyone gain by finding out the specifics?
Your biggest mistake is thinking prospective customers and refunders are not important, so let's rectify that: prospective buyers are the majority, even if you consider only the people who've bought KSP1 (5 million, vs not even 1 million who own KSP2 currently) as the only target demographic. This demographic limit we'll put in place so that we don't assume prospective buyers are infinite.
Now, to conceptualize why the power of prospective buyers on the product is clearly enormous right now, consider the following:
Both Lisias and my metaphor are equivalent. The people who will potentially purchase the game are the ones who have the most pull right now, the bosses in my metaphor, the mechanic's client in Lisias'. Why? because what they want in exchange for the game, is those people's money. Now, at this point a lot of people are surely crying "entitlement", but that's how capitalism works, and that's why customer integration has become so mainstream on almost every process, at a level or another.
In fact, as further proof of this argument, again consider this:
The people that already gave PD the money? In the eyes of PD they're completely worthless past their continued testing of the game and bug reports they may make. I'll rely on your job as a moderator to know this very well, as you know the people that were mad at the 20% discount were the ones who'd already paid, and the people who were mad that Nate "came down" (because they couldn't say it without being despective) to talk to refunders and the people "mocking him and his product instead of those supporting him" were the ones who'd already paid.
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31 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:
This went bad with heat introduction.
The why is important there.
To stifle speculation about them not doing anything and even speculation about their capabilities as developers, they decided to let us know about a system that's a downgrade from its equivalent in KSP1, which they couldn't present in anything but the earliest concept, with line drawings. And then they went on an AMA with that dev, where they didn't pick any genuine questions and much less criticism about it live, as they left that as a homework for Nertea to post in the forum, with varying acceptance levels on those replies.
It went bad because they made the worst possible choices at every step of the way.
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5 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:
Really?
Where/when did he say that?
I think you missed the concept, I was crafting a dummy statement to show Periple you can say something happened and its consequences without assigning blame.
Nate Simpson at Space Creator Day talks about KSP 2.
in KSP2 Discussion
Posted
You do you, and all power to you, but that's not what EA is normally perceived to be for: you don't pay $50 to watch, you pay $50 (or whatever) to be part. In fact, this launch should've probably cleared it up pretty well that people don't pay specifically to be alpha testers and being held in the dark for months, they pay to influence the game and provide feedback on features, not on obvious bugs that anyone playing for 5 minutes would've noticed. As for watching the development, neither the forum, discord, or anywhere are paywalled, you don't need to pay to watch.
Also, price sets expectations. Ask anyone on the street if they'd expect this mess for $50. Heck, you don't need to ask, reviews are right there.
They showed a "complete" game (bar the obvious performance problems) for the best part of 2019 to 2022. Only in October did they announce it'd be early access with stuff missing, and even then they were still talking about how performant and polished it was gonna be. From experience, the people are really not at fault here unless you take straight up not believing anything they say or show as the norm. Sadly I can't express what I believe the marketing campaign was without risking another ban.
0.1.5 is really pretty solid, most people playing it are happy and would gladly tell you the game works, which is a huge achievement. Yet that achievement has only pulled 200 concurrent players and dropping.
The game is playable, and works wonders compared to release, and even compared to the previous patch, so you'll realize bugs aren't the problem. They were at some point, sure, but most glaringly foundational stuff can be considered fixed and the people are not coming back. Why? Exactly what I said before.
The game is stuck on a bad foundation, it's also known by now that there's a lot of easily disagreeable design decisions, there's also features confirmed not coming (robotics, life support), and of course, discounting all of that, the game is still lacking a lot of stuff you can find on the first. That is why people aren't coming back. You could make the current game bug-perfect and they still wouldn't come back.