Lord Aurelius

If I end up doing anything with this, I very well end up doing something along those lines, although it might be a bit more like the Skyrim Revisited guide. Pretty much just sharing with my personal modlist and tweaks/settings so others can benefit from the time I've put into planning everything out and tweaking things to work together (and maybe get some suggestions on other mods to include I may have overlooked).

These new parts are much better looking than what were shown last week. Hopefully the new parts going forwards will be of at least this same quality, and the previously shown parts that weren't up to this standard will be updated to this level before being released.

I know that, I've been hanging around the forums since 0.19. I'm very much aware that everyone has their opinions on the "perfect" KSP setup. Especially the people who tend to be more active on the forums. Like I said, all I'm trying to propose is something like STEP. KSP and Skyrim are both alike in the sense that they're great ideas with lots of bugs and half-baked execution, and I'm just trying to see if there's any interest in putting together a guide to give some examples of mods to address the core issues and provide a reasonable foundation for adding additional mods onto. A lot of the motivation for this comes from the fact that a lot of mod authors have a list of recommended mods on their pages, and these recommendations have been very helpful to me with getting ideas and seeing new mods to make my game better. I would just like to have a lot of this information in one place, with directions on how to install the various mods and have them play nice with each other instead of having to dig through old forum posts. If there's no interest in a community effort for this, maybe I'll put together a quick-and-dirty guide for myself (so I can remember which mods I've used and how I got them working together) and post it up in case anyone finds it useful.

I'm not suggesting a modpack. A modpack would be a single download with all the mods pre-modified and bundled together so it's a single archive to install. What I'm suggesting is a step-by-step guide that tells what mods to download and install, what files/in-game configs to edit, and possibly provides some small helper mods with modulemanager configs to make everything play nice. Players would still download the individual mods via CKAN or the various author's download pages. I'm not surprised something like that would happen, although which particular attempt are you referring to? The only mods I'm aware of that have tried to do anything like this are RSS-RO and SETI, and neither of those have had that particular problem. I'm familiar with realism overhaul, and like you said, it significantly changes the game which is what I'm trying to avoid. Your second point is valid, but I keep feeling like there could be a place for a "good enough" baseline that at least includes bugfix, and popular graphics/audio QoL mods. Some players will obsess over building their perfect KSP version (I know I've been like that, and yes, to some degree that mindset has prompted me to suggest this in the first place), but I'm at point now where "good enough" is preferable to playing stock, or spending a bunch of time messing around with mods and never actually really playing KSP before I get frustrated and move onto something else. I find it hard to believe that I'm the only player who feels this way and would at least like some basic starting point.

One thing I keep thinking would be really nice to have for KSP is something akin to Skyrim's STEP project. For those who aren't familiar with STEP (Skyrim Total Enhancement Project), here's the description they provide: " STEP is an extensive, STEP-by-STEP, guide to enhancing TESV Skyrim with the best mods, tweaks and settings. The focus is quality over quantity. STEP tries to stay as close to vanilla Skyrim as possible while improving visual quality and correcting game-play mechanics." The goal would be to have a set of baseline mods and tweaks that everyone using the guide would be expected to use (things like bugfix and optimization/quality of life mods that don't change gameplay or increase game requirements). Additional configurations could be specified beyond the baseline, and could include things like graphical overhauls, part rebalances (with some new parts as well to fill in gaps) and even full career overhauls (kind of like what SETI was trying to accomplish). The modding community outside of the project would be encouraged to create their own configurations starting from the baseline or other official configs, and the best of these could potentially be "adopted" by the project and maintained by the main project team. My idea is to make this more of a community rather than an individual project (kind of how RSS-RO has been done) so multiple modders can contribute and come and go from the project in response to real-life demands. I've seen far, far too many great mods get abandoned by the wayside when the author went MIA and left their mod with a restrictive license, and I would want to see the project organized in such a way as to (hopefully) prevent this. I don't have the time myself to lead something like this, but I would be willing to help contribute with planning/organization and/or creating part configs. Does anyone have any interest in something like this?

Does anyone have any epic playlists and the associated settings they would be kind enough to share? I've toyed with the idea of setting this mod up myself and would like some inspiration on what other people have done with this.

I agree, sound design is one of the weakest parts of KSP. Free music is great for a placeholder in an early access game, but KSP supposedly left early access years ago. At this point the free music is pretty much an established part of the game now, but I don't see why they couldn't commission the artist to create some new music to complement the tracks that are already in the game. I would especially like to see transition tracks in place of the abrupt and jarring audio transitions we have now. As has already been mentioned, I would love to see the devs officially implement something like what the Soundtrack Editor mod implements, complete with unique theme music for each orbital situation around each planet. Instead of those random bird sounds, have a KSP theme that plays while looking at the KSC. Have a variation on that which plays while driving/flying a vehicle around the KSC. Outside of the KSC, have a main Kerbin theme, with different variations depending on the situation (landed, splashed down, flying, upper atmosphere, low and high space). Then do the same thing for all of the planets. Also have some situational tracks that play in other situations, like immediately after lifting off or when docking, or when reentering an atmosphere. It's no small task, but good sound design is a big part of crafting an awesome gaming experience.

From reading all this discussion back and forth on art styles and what not, I just had a thought. What I really liked about the old KSP art style is that most parts were visually distinct. This made it easy to see what each part is on the rocket/vehicle/contraption and is very helpful for prototyping and was very helpful way back when I was a new player as well. However, this visual distinction also made all the craft look like they had been cobbled together from a bunch of random parts. Sometimes this is funny, but it's also incredibly annoying when trying to build replicas or realistic-looking craft. The new art direction does address this, but it almost goes too far into the clean look where it's difficult to tell parts apart at a glance. My feedback on the art direction is to find a middle ground. Make each part family have its own unique flair from the common design language, but keep it subtle enough that any part can be paired with any other part without it looking awkward and out of place. The boosters on the OP are a bad example of this since both parts look too similar. Find a common theme for all SRBs (a specific texture and model design language) and use things like varying stripes (color/position) and other tweaks to identify the individual parts from each other so that they are unique enough to tell at a glance. I'm sure a lot of this is just common sense for design, and to a large degree I see this happening already, especially with the fuel tanks, but right now they're a bit too similar without enough visual distinction (especially in the thumbnails). Like dvader said, a different background would be very helpful, but I would also propose to have a bit more visual differentiation between the different tank families.

I'm very glad to see that the game is finally getting an art pass, but... Honestly, those new boosters just don't look that great. Given how long it took us to get new art for these parts (over 5 years), I would hope that the art pass would be a solid upgrade over what we have now, not just swapping one set of poorly done textures and models for another. Especially since this is likely to be the one and only art overhaul these parts will receive. Maybe it would be a good idea to follow some of Nertea's suggestions and do things correctly the first time instead of continuing with what appears to be quite sloppy work. I'm not calling for super high res/high poly models or anything, just clean, optimized models and textures without amateur mistakes that follow a consistent style. This game is supposed to be a released product made by a professional company after all.

Glad to see the devs slowly adding in requested features like Steam integration and better controller support for PC. Now if we can just get some sort of life support mod integrated (like what the devs did with RemoteTech), an art and audio pass, a rethinking of career mode, and a proper balance pass, then maybe we'll finally have a more or less complete game.

From thinking more about this issue, it seems more than anything else like there's a general trend in companies to reserve as many rights as they possibly can with the EULA "just in case", knowing that most people don't read it or otherwise don't care. Seems ridiculous, but I suppose the same thing happens everywhere people can get away with doing it (including government). Most of the time it doesn't really have any bearing on the company's behavior since if they really tried to enforce the more controversial points, it would be such a PR nightmare that it wouldn't be worth it.

This looks more like Take Two covering their bases for the future of KSP more than anything else since it sounds like it's not too much different from the EULA's for their other games. However, the wording about content ownership with mods is still extremely troubling. Are contracts like this even legally enforceable since it basically amounts of intellectual property theft on the part of the company if they choose to assert this clause? I've heard of similarly draconian work contracts where everything you do, even in your free time while employed is supposed to be the property of the company, but modders aren't employees of Take Two. Best case, I hope Take Two is simply applying their standard EULA to KSP with no plans to curtail the modding scene and will clarify (with a legal addenum) this intent. Some modders will understandably leave the KSP scene (a lot have already with all the problems with KSP's development over the last several years), but others will take their place. I don't want to think about the worst case with KSP being ruined with overly aggressive monetization attempts. Edit: If they changed the EULA out from under us and we don't agree with the new one, are we technically eligible for a refund since the EULA specifically says that we need to agree to it to continue using the software and the conditions have changed since the original purchase?

I'm very glad to see that Squad is finally doing something resembling a balance pass. I would have preferred to have seen this before 1.0, but better late than never. Hopefully they'll eventually do the entire game and not just a few fuel tanks. Now if we can also get life support and a dV readout in stock, I'll be quite happy with vanilla KSP combined with the Making History expansion. If I'm understanding how Making History works, we should be able to effectively create our own campaign/story mode that the game currently lacks.

Awesome, glad to see some of those old eyesore parts getting an overhaul, not to mention the new parts that should fill a few gaps in the game. A question on the balance pass: is this pass only for the new DLC parts, or are there plans to consider the existing parts as well?

I was thinking rover wheel sounds and deploy sounds for things like solar panels and radiators, and cargo/service bays. Also, RCS/Vernor engines should make some sound in a vacuum due to the fact that they're rocket engines. Same thing goes for Kerbals on EVA with their thrusters. I'm not expecting Star Wars levels of sound effects, but at least some mostly realistic sound cues for actions. For music, I can see things being quiet just before launch, but once a craft launches it would be nice to have some music in atmo. It's also silly that simply being in an atmosphere results in no music, but everywhere else, including landing on other planets (as long as they don't have an atmosphere) has the same music as outer space. To me it's another inconsistency that doesn't make any sense. Ideally, I wouldn't mind seeing each planet have their own music theme, with different tracks for each of the environments to provide audio cues for switching situations.

I first played KSP back when it was 0.19, and the demo was 0.18. The first thing I did (after the tutorial) was to start adding more and more boosters, fuel tanks, and engines until I managed to put Jeb on an escape trajectory out of the sun. In the more recent versions of KSP, the first thing I do with a new version is install MechJeb. For career, if for some reason I've decided to put myself through the pain of the vanilla game progression, the first mission is to launch a command pod to get science from the launchpad. That's enough to unlock the next tier and build a slightly better first real rocket. Otherwise, I spend several hours getting a bunch of mods installed and working together before starting career.

Yeah, I probably should have used different words or been a bit more explicit in what I was getting at. Given your art background, it probably drives you crazy when people throw out the word graphics like I did when they actually mean something else. And I even watched an Extra Credits episode on YouTube not long ago on this whole issue...

@Corona688 I apologize if you took any of what I said as an insult, that was not my intent. I'll try to clarify where I stand with graphics in KSP. The visual fidelity is fine. If the devs have time eventually to add some extra eye candy for people with the PCs to handle it, great. My issue with the graphics as they stand is the inconsistency. With the exception of the 1.25m and 3.75m parts, all of the rocket tanks have textures that don't really go together. Mixing 2.5m with anything else looks pretty awful, and the giant orange tank doesn't even fit within the 2.5m family. This particular issue is probably my biggest peeve with the current graphics since 2.5m parts are some of the most commonly used, yet they have some of the worst textures. The smaller SRBs also don't really fit with anything. When I'm talking about placeholder parts, this is the kind of thing I'm referring to. Visually, it looks like Squad started to put together a consistent art style with the 1.25m, 3.75m, and spaceplane parts, but then ran out of time/gave up/etc with the other parts. To me, they look like placeholder parts that were intended to be improved at some point. Take a look at Ven's Stock Part Revamp. See how all the parts have a nice, clean, consistent style. It's not any higher resolution than stock and doesn't really impact performance, but it IMHO it looks much better. This is what I mean when I talk about consistency, and is what I would want to see an art pass accomplish. In my mind, the graphics issue that you're picking a bone with is actually secondary to the atrocious part balance and broken career. All I was saying in my previous comments about graphics is that better graphics would be nice, but the real need in the graphics department is consistency. Squad has shown that they can make good looking textures for some of the parts (3.75m and the new/overhauled spaceplane parts), and I would like to see that work finished for all the parts instead of having the inconsistency we have now.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree for the most part. Technically yes, a placeholder is a part that is intended to be replaced at some point with the final version. When development gets rushed, sometimes the placeholders end up unfortunately being the final versions. This doesn't mean that they aren't still poor quality parts that drag the overall quality of the game down until they're upgraded. Fair enough, for me, the game isn't worth $40 in its current state. I got it at the early access price, and the price I paid at the time was worth it, although I'm more than a little disappointed at how the development has gone since then. The value of a product is always in the eye of the buyer, and if I were to go and buy the game right now I wouldn't pay $40 for it and would wait for a significant sale. You're putting words in my mouth here. I said that the planets are dull and boring once you actually get there, and was trying to give some ideas on how they could be improved. Ground scatter is simply one easy way to make them somewhat more interesting barring larger additions like many more random anomalies or a more robust surface science system. You're putting words in my mouth again. There's such a thing as graphics settings and optimized (read: lower resolution) textures. What I was trying to say is that basic graphics could be what they are now with just having the textures redone to be a more consistent style, and the higher graphics settings could utilize the more demanding graphics options that some of the mods enable. Orbiter is free, and has significantly better graphics than KSP. Fair enough, but Harvester doesn't work for Squad and isn't involved in the game's development anymore. Developers sometimes make mistakes, and given the popularity of KER and MechJeb even with players who otherwise play completely stock, I would suggest that it was more of a mistake. A seat-of-the-pants trial and error approach to spaceflight is fun for the first little bit, but then gets extremely annoying when you realize that the game is arbitrarily hiding critical information from the player (but still displays that little dV readout for maneuvers) for "reasons". Which is a classic example of a placeholder part that should have been replaced but wasn't. Like in my reply to Corona688, there is such a thing as graphics settings. You simply leave the higher graphics options disabled for slower PCs so they're doing exactly the same graphics they are now, but the ceiling is higher now for players with the extra performance. I do realize that Squad has put a tremendous amount of effort into KSP and don't dispute that it still is likely a lot of work to really finish the game and polish it up nicely. That doesn't change the fact that the game as it stands now is still pretty rough and unfinished in many ways despite being "released", which has been my point all along. Again, I'm not advocating photorealistic 4K graphics. Fidelity improvements would be nice, but the biggest issue is the lack of consistency that makes a lot of rockets look pretty terrible with all the mismatched textures.

Why not aliens? We've already got crashed flying saucers in multiple places, strange monoliths, and a dead Kraken scattered around the system. I'm not expecting live aliens, but more anomalies and at least more interesting terrain scatter (preferably with collision meshes) would go a long ways to making the planets feel like more than mostly featureless rocks. Some of the placeholder parts are in the island airport. The rest are still in the VAB/SPH. I bought KSP way back in 0.19 before career mode was solidified with the expectation that we would get a great career mode to complement the sandbox. You are correct that pure sandbox games aren't necessarily my favorite. They're fun for awhile and to come back to occasionally, but I do end up burning out on them after awhile. It's really not about them costing less. It's about devs actually finishing them. As much as I like what Minecraft did to spur the market for these types of games, I also despise what it did in terms of making people more tolerant of devs who release unfinished games. Minecraft for all its good points has many of the same problems of KSP with being unfinished long after it was "released". If a someone makes a great open world sandbox that manages to put in a great story and overall goal as well and actually finishes the game and properly balances and polishes it, then I would gladly pay AAA prices for it. I do agree that I can be quite negative on this whole issue. When 1.0 dropped, I was not happy with the state of the game or the developer's apparent priorities (marketing gimmicks and a disastrous console release). I'm glad the devs are still supporting the game, but I would much prefer if they were expanding on a completed game instead of playing catch-up to a premature release. If I'm going to take a step back and ask myself what KSP would need to be worth $40, here's what I would say it needs: A proper tutorial. Could even be some kind of career mode, but the important part is that it should guide players step-by-step through all the game mechanics like interplanetary transfers, orbital rendezvous, and precision planetary landings. Life Support to balance probes vs Kerbals. Should be toggleable on a per-save basis like the comm net feature is. Some basic KER/MechJeb functionality. At the very least a dV readout. Some basic autopilot (another difficulty option perhaps) would be great. IRL people don't fly rockets by hand. Art pass on all parts for style and quality consistency, and to fix odd design choices like the Mk1-2 pod with the hatch on a diagonal. Graphics pass on overall game to incorporate some of the features of the more popular graphics mods without raising the minimum game requirements Audio pass to add missing sounds and better quality music (some of those audio tracks get really repetitive and annoying, plus no music when in atmo for some reason), plus some chatterer type functionality A rethinking of career mode. Maybe even something as simple as putting something along the lines of the Anomaly Surveyor contracts into the game, with a few cinematics when discovering anomalies and some kind of overall story to go with them. A no-holds-barred full balance pass of everything. Part stats, missing parts, tech tree, contracts, game systems, all of it. Don't worry about breaking save games, each update ultimately ends up doing that to some degree anyways. Polish, polish, polish. I agree, lowering the price isn't the answer. What I would prefer to see (likely along with everyone else here) is the game improved to match the price. Which the devs are (very) slowly doing. Hopefully some day (soon) I'll actually be able to look at the game and not feel the urge to mod the living daylights out of it just to fix these issues and make it enjoyable for me.

Which kind of goes hand-in-hand with my point. There IS something wrong with KSP at $40... it's an unfinished game lacking a lot of basic polish, balance and completeness that would be expected from a "released" product. I'm not saying that it isn't the right business decision for them to price it like they have, but that I don't feel like it's actually representative of the true state of the game.

KSP is clever and entertaining, but -- at some point you realize it's an empty sandbox with a bunch of dull planets and poorly balanced mechanics and placeholder parts, and no real sense of purpose other than what you come up with to challenge yourself. Even career mode, once you've finished the tech tree, degenerates into sandbox with a few extra restrictions on funds. Sorry, not trying to be snarky, but like I said, KSP still feels largely unfinished. That's kind of the core of my feeling on the price. The $40 price came when the game went to 1.0 and ostensibly represents a "released" product. When I play the game, it still feels largely the same as it did as of 0.90, although it is nice not having to install FAR and DRE to get a decent atmosphere. It's not so much about the actual dollar value, but about what the higher price is supposed to represent and how I feel the game doesn't actually live up to that representation.

I don't disagree there, however the base game with low impact visual mods and some extra parts will run just fine.

Without even looking at the specs, the answer is yes. I've been able to run KSP on Core2 Duo laptops, albeit somewhat slowly. Looking at the specs, you're not going to have any issues running the game. Even with lots graphics overhaul mods. The only spec that might cause trouble is the only 8GB of RAM. That's enough for the short term, but considering that Windows really needs at least 2GB by itself, you're limiting yourself to around 6GB for KSP and other games before things really start slowing down (when your computer runs out of space in the RAM, it starts using the much, much slower hard drive to store the information to avoid having your computer crash). Considering how easy it was to run into the 4GB limit before KSP 64-bit was stable, that might not be quite enough if you plan on keeping the PC for awhile. I would suggest that you consider getting 16GB, or at least ensuring that your motherboard has a free ram slot to add more RAM if you can't afford it right now.

I'm very aware that people put price and hours of playtime together. KSP is a great game in this regard. However, my point is that the game is still incomplete and we're paying full release price for an unfinished product. I know, it's hard to define "complete" when it's a game that's in continuous development, but as a ballpark definition I expect a 1.0 release to be something that is a balanced, cohesive, complete experience with the necessary game system in place and working. Even after over two years of development since 1.0, I still feel that KSP hasn't reached this point. We're still missing any sort of official life support, which is one of the fundamental issues facing real world manned spaceflight and would help balance out how OP manned flights are in the game right now compared to probes. Part balance is still all over the place, there's holes in the stock part lineup, and career mode is still a mess. Even the part models are of wildly varying degrees of quality, and a lot of audio is still missing. I realize that things are slowly improving with the new devs, but until the game actually finishes these things I still consider this game to be an early access title in everything except name and price. Which gets back to my original issue with the price of the game. I've had the game since 0.19 and been on the forums nearly as long. I know KSP has a great community, especially with modding, and that's what's kept the game alive in spite of the devs. Scott Manley's videos are great, but the game really should provide all the information the player actually needs to play the game. It's poor game design, especially in a "released" title, to expect the player to use the wiki for everything. Maybe that's part of the rationale for the new expansion pack, since it shifts the burden of creating decent tutorials off the devs and onto the player base so that's one less thing they have to do. I can partially agree that it's not my game, at least not the current incarnation of the title. Especially since a huge amount of dev time (especially in that critical time leading up to 1.0) seemed to be eaten up by console development to the detriment of the rest of the game, and I have no interest in playing KSP on a console. The concept of KSP is extremely appealing and I've got lots of hours of enjoyment out of it, but I also cringe every time I see the stock career, tech tree and part balance and have to spend a bunch of time getting mods set up to make it my game.