Devnote Tuesday: A big announcement

[Gwtheyrn]

See if you can get your hands on 1.0. Not 1.0.2, or 1.0.1, but 1.0.

One of the things they fixed in 1.0.1 was this problem. I'd elaborate but you'd probably say I was insufferably whining.

Played 1.0 plenty. Never experienced any game-breaking bugs, much less one with heat, unless you count my 9590 getting a wee bit too warm.

However, all this raging over a console port absolutely is nothing but insufferable whining. What it boils down to is the "PC masterrace" crowd losing exclusiveness and feeling betrayed.

[Superfluous J]

Played 1.0 plenty. Never experienced any game-breaking bugs, much less one with heat, unless you count my 9590 getting a wee bit too warm.

I'm surprised you never tried deorbiting a Mk1 command pod with a parachute on top and a heat shield on the bottom. That configuration can hold prograde (with the heat shield in front) so long as the power lasts. the moment you lose power, your command pod would flip around because aerodynamic stability was 180 degrees from what it should have been.

They fixed that right quick, and also made it so the fix wasn't necessary by turning the heat down so far that you can re-enter at over 6km/s withOUT a heat shield and still survive.

However, all this raging over a console port absolutely is nothing but insufferable whining. What it boils down to is the "PC masterrace" crowd losing exclusiveness and feeling betrayed.

Agreed. My only problem with the announcement was how it was teased (as some great addition to the devnotes, and about development of 1.0.3 or 1.1) and what it replaced (those devnotes).

[kreutzkevic]

Agreed. My only problem with the announcement was how it was teased (as some great addition to the devnotes, and about development of 1.0.3 or 1.1) and what it replaced (those devnotes).

Granted. The communication could have been handled better. When they dangled "big news" in front of my nose last week, a PS4 port didn't exactly cross my mind.

But can you really blame Squad for being excited about this? Sony is doing things pretty much right when it comes to Playstation Plus and indie games. The fact that KSP is accepted, is more or less a mark of quality. (Still won't buy a console, though)

On top of that, half the company was on a well-deserved vacation. I'm not usually my best at work two days after I get back from vacation. That's not to say I don't look forwards to the devnotes. I missed them as well last Tuesday. But there will be a Tuesday next week. And the week after that, and the week after that, and the week... And suddenly: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/345-KSP-and-Unity-5

Never forget that KSP oozes the (sometimes hamfisted) love given by Squad... (that sentence sounds iffy, but hey...) It already is a great game and they will improve it still.

Less blind panicking and more patience, please.

Edited June 19, 2015 by kreutzkevic

[Gwtheyrn]

Huh, yeah, I never ran into that issue at all, but I tend to come in steep with pods (less time flying through atmo). Maybe I just never ran out of power before my chutes deployed. But again, the only time I've had problems with heat is hitting mach 3 at 14km in a spaceplane, causing the explosive failure of my ram air intakes. And LV-N engines. Those suckers get hot now.

Edited June 19, 2015 by Gwtheyrn

[Two]

PS4 Hypetrain, yay! Do you guys realize that you also released this game for PC some time ago, and that it is still full of bugs and your customers are desperately waiting for a patch since forever?

But I am sure those five people that will buy it on PS4 will be happy at least.

[softweir]

SQuad are constantly patching it - just some patches tale longer than others because they want to test them well enough that they can be sure they have killed the bugs.

[Guest]

When they dangled "big news" in front of my nose last week, a PS4 port didn't exactly cross my mind.

Did you see the list of potential announcement topics started on these forums? A PS4 port didn't cross anyone's mind. I don't know what SQUAD was thinking, did they think we would be excited? Start jumping up and down cackling with glee? Are we all going to run out and buy PS4's to play a game most of us already own?

It's been a weird day...

[NFUN]

Huh, yeah, I never ran into that issue at all, but I tend to come in steep with pods (less time flying through atmo). Maybe I just never ran out of power before my chutes deployed. But again, the only time I've had problems with heat is hitting mach 3 at 14km in a spaceplane, causing the explosive failure of my ram air intakes. And LV-N engines. Those suckers get hot now.

The problem was that the heat shields had no mass (physics significance), so the CoM was too high, dragged up by the command pod and the chutes. That was fixed in 1.0.1.

[MaxPeck]

The entire discussion could have been avoided.

...In this forum every user may be a guest, technically speaking. But in your balance sheets I am your customer...

...This is me as a former seasoned journalist and communication guy, with IT experience, a degree in business administration, some law education and currently a very challenging job trying to keep customers and developers in our company from starting to hate each other because of wrong expecations and faulty communication. This is not bragging, I am merely trying to make you realize that there are some people here who have had experience in a lot of situations that you have went through in the past and are still going through. And I believe there are a lot of people here that can offer a lot more valuable input than me.

Yes we are guests. As are guests in a restaurant. But guests in a restaurant can still expect to be served what is on the menu and not what the chef suddenly decides he likes to cook. And like guests in a restaurant we pay for your product. Please keep that in mind. And keep listening. Thank you.

I know this is from a couple of pages back, but this guy makes good points. I played the demo, I thought "holy crap! this is amazing! It's the game I've always wished for!" So I plunked down my dollars and found the production version of the game was practically unplayable. And now this.

Let me tell you, to further what Shadowzone was saying, I'm a college aviation professor. I teach aerospace courses to college kids, and I was actually really excited about the EDU version, enough so that I went in and told my boss and colleagues how awesome KSP is. Egg on my face. I love playing KSP, crashes and all, but there's no way in HELL I'm introducing this in my classroom. I think this game has massive potential, and I really like the way it illustrates concepts of flight in an easy to understand way (like weight and balance in the SPH)... but more and more I've been turned off by the fact that the 1.0 version feels like it should be a pre-release candidate, what with so many bugs, that the timing of 1.0 had more to do with the dev's vacation schedule than it did with production, and the fact that there are GLARING BUGS in the game that squad is taking their time fixing and spending virtually no time addressing.

Let me tell you guys something. Yes, NASA showed interest in your game. Yes, you got a ps4 deal. But if you're serious about getting serious long-term EDU customers (like I almost was), you're going WAAAAAY in the wrong direction. Teachers are not going to TOUCH your product if it looks like it's just going to be headaches and create student complaints. I don't want to spend my time troubleshooting student issues, I want to teach. Right now, I don't have confidence that this product is, or will be, useful for me.

My $0.02. Back to my fledgling Mun base.

[Mr Shifty]

the production version of the game was practically unplayable.

I've spent a few hundred hours playing this practically unplayable game.

[Zucal]

I've spent a few hundred hours playing this practically unplayable game.

Not everyone is able to play the game for more than 20 minutes without crashing. I have had to deal with freezes, bugs, and crashes since update 0.90. I have spent far more than a few hundred hours in this game, but yes, for all intents and purposes it's completely unplayable for me and many other Mac users. Despite what it may seem like, unplayable doesn't mean I won't play it. It also doesn't mean I have to consider it okay.

[Bedwyr]

Played 1.0 plenty. Never experienced any game-breaking bugs, much less one with heat, unless you count my 9590 getting a wee bit too warm.

However, all this raging over a console port absolutely is nothing but insufferable whining. What it boils down to is the "PC masterrace" crowd losing exclusiveness and feeling betrayed.

You hit the nail on the head. I can see no way the degree of the response is proportional to anything. It's whiny, rude, graceless, thoughtless, and completely free--as the internet so often is--of any degree of proportion. I find it absolutely fetid rubbish and a big bowl of sour grapes.

Point by point:

- I congratulate Squad on getting to PS4 and the dream of popularizing an amazing game amongst Playstation gamers and especially their countrymen who deserve to understand what a wonderful development team they have right in their backyard. This should be a point of national pride and joy for Mexico and, if nothing else, a true victory lap for these guys.

- I congratulate Flying Tiger on getting the contract. I trust that their experience will help KSP translate well to a living room experience. The most difficult task will be UI design, but I've seen previous efforts such as X-Com done well elsewhere that I would not have anticipated being as clean or controllable. It doesn't use the same mechanical design, but then I didn't expect X-Com to do as well as it did. I express my optimism.

- I really don't care about Flying Tiger's pedigree. inXile has done small games I care little for but which paid the bills and they're working on a spiritual sequel to my favorite game of all time: Planescape Torment. Other studios have done the same. I look on this as their big break and a chance to show what they can do.

- I also don't care about the console politics. PC vs console conflicts are largely garbage in any case. I'll cheer any great game that makes the leap from one platform to the other. It means the game is doing well and deserves to do well on a cousin platform.

- The release pattern of KSP follows very closely to Minecraft. I have not seen Minecraft's development degrade with either the Xbox release or any of their mobile releases or even the Raspberry Pi (hey there's an idea and a challenge Squad!). So far as I know (I'm about played out on Minecraft for a long time), the development is still going well post Microsoft acquisition. The software company has state publicly and repeatedly they don't want to kill or hurt what Mojang is doing. It could change in the future, certainly. Public companies can sometimes get fickle over a long period such as a decade, but so far so good. The key takeaway is that the PC game Minecraft hasn't actually been actively damaged. It's still there in all its Java "glory" as playable and fund as it was three years ago. Mods are still actively developed and used. I cannot see KSP being any different.

- Read the clues carefully. Harvester is doing everything he can by hints and outright internet yelling to tell you all they're working really hard on KSP. Check out his article: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/345-KSP-and-Unity-5.

Little footnote: In case you're wondering why we don't write articles like this more often, it took me over an hour to write and proof-read this, which could have been development time. In the time it takes to write an article post, we can fix an average of 0.9 bugs, tweak 10+ balance items, run one test build, or put exactly one article writing's worth of time into a developing a new feature.

Cheers

How about that, huh? He's measuring his time to the hour and rues every one wasted not developing KSP. Doesn't remotely sound like "abandonment".

Also:

It's worth mentioning though, that our moving to U5, which I think is fair to say is something everyone has been asking for quite a while, has been largely sped up by our collab with FlyingTiger, who are developing the PS4 version. The first step for them was to move the game into U5, and because that was something that affected the entire project, we felt the best way to go about it was to work together on upgrading the project, so the PC version wouldn't be stuck on Unity4 as they moved on. So contrary to popular belief, the move into PS4 is actually giving PC development a boost, not hindering it.

Well goodness gracious. If you have any modicum of trust in Squad and in Harvester's word (And don't tell me you don't because you're taking actual time to write actual words in response to a missing weekly blurb from the same guy. Claiming your disgust with Squad and making dramatic "It's over!" gestures ring hollow when you post here. Of course you care.), then it sounds like this is win-win, not remotely a zero-sum tradeoff.

- The PS4 announcement was a little strange. It would have been better to be a separate announcement rather than replace dev notes. I look forward to Tuesdays as much as anyone here, but I'm surely not going to fly off the handle about a missing installment. For those who need some social guidance, the proper response if you're annoyed by that would be something like:

"Huh. Hey Squad, thanks for that announcement, but could you not displace the dev notes to do so in the future? I get that you're excited, but we look forward to dev notes and it's a little cheeky to drop them like that. Thanks!"

See? No overreaction required and Squad would be much more likely to respond kindly. You don't always have to get so damned dramatic. In fact I'll go further. A lot of you guys need to learn to restrain yourselves. It's the internet, I get it, and a lot of people do this. But you're not classy grown-ups when you do that. Seek a better, restrained, classier self alright? *Even on the semi-anonymous internet*. You'll go farther in life. I wouldn't normally lecture random people like that, but you all have the patience to play and love a hard-core physics simulation so you already get more respect and regard from me than, say, Something Awful. So don't consider it patronizing. Consider it an embarrassed acquaintance whispering to you to back off the volume a hair.

Summary: Good gravy you guys are overreacting. Back it off and stay off the boards for a week. Take a breather. Play some sandbox mode. Enjoy the sunshine. Post when you're not Angry On The Internet.

Edited June 19, 2015 by Bedwyr

[Gwtheyrn]

PS4 Hypetrain, yay! Do you guys realize that you also released this game for PC some time ago, and that it is still full of bugs and your customers are desperately waiting for a patch since forever?

But I am sure those five people that will buy it on PS4 will be happy at least.

Yeah, because development totally stopped just for a deal with another company to get done. Everyone just quit doing their own jobs while a guy negotiated. Makes complete sense now.

Oh, wait! That's NOT what happened. The next patch is undergoing extensive testing and tweaking while the rest of the team is working on the Unity 5 migration (which, as it turns out, the PS4 port is making faster). Maybe you'd prefer that Squad just drop a buggy, half-finished patch on you, just for the sake of dropping a patch, hmm? At least then you'd have something new to whine about.

- - - Updated - - -

Not everyone is able to play the game for more than 20 minutes without crashing. I have had to deal with freezes, bugs, and crashes since update 0.90. I have spent far more than a few hundred hours in this game, but yes, for all intents and purposes it's completely unplayable for me and many other Mac users. Despite what it may seem like, unplayable doesn't mean I won't play it. It also doesn't mean I have to consider it okay.

That sounds like a problem with your system more than anything. I can run the game for 3-4 days solid without experiencing a crash (although the Kraken likes to show up at the launchpad now and then). Do you have sufficient RAM? Decent single-core performance? From what I can tell, Apple sometimes has issues with Unity 4, too.

[Raptor9]

I really wish this thread would cool off. At this point, everyone on either side of the debate on whether this decision is good or bad has said their two cents (or some case, whole dollars). When forum threads explode in a way like this one has, in the long run it just teaches the devs to maybe be more withholding of updates in an effort to avoid backlash. I'm sure the members of Squad have thick skins, and as a business they realize they can't please everyone. However eventually the negative response will undoubtedly wear on them, because they're only human.

I'd hate for these forums to turn into the Eagle Dynamics DCS forums, where for the most part, dev updates are few and far between, and pretty vague and completely absent of any timelines or outright estimates of progress milestones. Every time a dev update or future feature is posted, the forums usually explode with people losing their minds over it on a fanatical scale.

Please everyone, calm down and don't burn any future communication and info the devs might give us. Passion and opinion are fine, but let's keep it rational and civil.

[Javster]

After some thought, here are my opinions:

- This PS4 port is unexpected

- As long as the PC version is not neglected in any noticeable manner, I don't mind

- I am part of the many people who don't own a PS4

- I don't quite get why Squad is going to make a PS4 port

[Zucal]

That sounds like a problem with your system more than anything. I can run the game for 3-4 days solid without experiencing a crash (although the Kraken likes to show up at the launchpad now and then). Do you have sufficient RAM? Decent single-core performance? From what I can tell, Apple sometimes has issues with Unity 4, too.

Nope, not at all a problem with my system. A good fraction of Mac users, with varying specs, have this issue, there's a dedicated thread in the KSP Support subforum. My computer is sufficient for the game, it ran it extremely smoothly up until the 0.90 update at which performance began declining. It's an issue with the game, and it makes it unplayable for a large percentage of the people that run it on OSX. And It's not even promised to be fixed in the Unity 5 update!

[softweir]

After some thought, here are my opinions:

- This PS4 port is unexpected

- As long as the PC version is not neglected in any noticeable manner, I don't mind

- I am part of the many people who don't own a PS4

- I don't quite get why Squad is going to make a PS4 port

To take your points in order:

- HarvesteR mentioned a few times, a while back, that he wanted KSP on as many platforms as possible, and a significant number of people were asking for a PS4 port.

- I am in full agreement!

- Nor me.

- Money! And to get HarvesteR's baby out to as many people as possible. Why they chose PS4 over other consoles is another matter, it may simply be that it is easier. Or maybe developers have to jump through fewer loopholes. Then again, maybe Squad are touting for it to appear on any and every console they think can cope and Flying Tiger are just the first company to sign up (with the intention of creating KSP rather than something cut down until it is unrecognisable like some companies might insist upon). We don't know, and we won't until other ports start to appear OR fail to appear.

[Rizendell]

So is 1.0.3 dead in the water or something? I don't really care about ps4, and I dont think any of the customers that purchased a PC game really care either. yea, cool, ps4 version... but I would rather have a game that works as intended (without crashes and bugs) first.

[Zucal]

So is 1.0.3 dead in the water or something?

1.0.3 comes out next week.

[Bedwyr]

After some thought, here are my opinions:

- This PS4 port is unexpected

- As long as the PC version is not neglected in any noticeable manner, I don't mind

- I am part of the many people who don't own a PS4

- I don't quite get why Squad is going to make a PS4 port

- Sorta. They've hinted about wanting to before when pressed.

- Good attitude!

- Me neither. Steam is my console and I do have a dedicated TV machine. I'm curious whether some of the UI solutions could be rolled back into the main game for xinput controllers. Would surely be nice.

- Money. And pride. Read the bits where Harvester talked about the console/PC balance in Mexico. Getting the game on PS4 means a lot beyond money for The Team That Could out of Mexico City.

[Columbia]

Nope, not at all a problem with my system. A good fraction of Mac users, with varying specs, have this issue, there's a dedicated thread in the KSP Support subforum. My computer is sufficient for the game, it ran it extremely smoothly up until the 0.90 update at which performance began declining. It's an issue with the game, and it makes it unplayable for a large percentage of the people that run it on OSX. And It's not even promised to be fixed in the Unity 5 update!

*Pulls out torch and pitchfork and starts chanting

In all seriousness, I hope it soon does. KSP on OSX has more lag and instability than I could imagine. Ples Squad..

Is there a Mac 64-bit version?

[John FX]

Wow, 11 pages of comments on these 'Dev notes', or is it more accurate to say 'Dev note'

They do seem popular. I'd rather there was the normal Dev notes with the PS4 announcement as part of them instead of replacing them though.

[softweir]

I'd rather there was the normal Dev notes ...

There was nothing new to talk about, what with the lead devs on holiday for the last week. The only thing they missed out that might have been "dev note-ish" was "testing continues. No news on the development front. Harv and Mu are back from holiday!

[Ignath]

There was nothing new to talk about, what with the lead devs on holiday for the last week. The only thing they missed out that might have been "dev note-ish" was "testing continues. No news on the development front. Harv and Mu are back from holiday!

Not 100% true...we also have Rover Dude's "featurette" that is coming in 1.0.3 that has been HYPED to all Hell and was teased to be released in this weeks "devnotes" but obviously was not...

[Yakuzi]

Not 100% true...we also have Rover Dude's "featurette" that is coming in 1.0.3 that has been HYPED to all Hell and was teased to be released in this weeks "devnotes" but obviously was not...

Yeah, I was hoping that all the "OMG, we're working on something cool, we're just not gonna tell you..." hype inducing fluff would've ended with the release of "1.0". Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy riddles and guesstimation as much as the next person. However, I find the continuous over-hyping of every "featurette" or "secret business deal" in the devnotes (solely for promotional reasons it seems) is getting quite tiresome and somewhat distasteful.

EDIT: Also, still no news on the additional pilot, scientist and engineer skills and the "something rhyming with schmelta vee" that was hyped up over 4 months ago.

Edited June 21, 2015 by Yakuzi