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Future of KSP, still a game it used to be?


PhoenixCola

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Nitpick: Joint strength is IMMENSE in stock even without struts.

It's joint rigidity that leaves something to be desired.

I'd much rather have weaker rockets that don't wobble quite so much but CAN break than the reverse.

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I know that a low post count doesn't mean you're brand new to the game. It doesn't have to assume that at all. However, it's easy to assume that, especially when writing a sitting-high-on-the-horse  article titled “what will become of the game?” when the obvious answer is “nobody knows but it's steadily progressing” So I'm happy to take a stab at the issues listed:

1) Patched Conics: n-body is not realistic to expect. If you mean the representation in game... Yes, there's room for improvement. But a nightmare?

2)  Rocket stability / part attachment node strength: the great Raymond Chen once said: whenever you are asking a question like this, try to see what happened if they did it the way you suggested? Think of it; the game is fun because it's challenging. It's not fun if you can blindly send anything up without any problem. There has to be some middle ground. Yes. And we're right there. “it is the only thing that enables construction of all those awesome huge ships everybody loves.” Again: Challenge. Those huge ships would be a lot less fun to build if there wasn't any achievement in getting them into orbit. Do, by the way, keep that term “awesome huge ships” in mind. We’re going to need it later.

3)  Mission and timewarp management : yes, KAC would be nice in stock. But would you need it? The only reason I'd like it to be stock is to minimize the chances the mod developer pulls a kerbalstuffy on it, aside from that I don't mind the mod status. Keep the basic game basic, so to say. The nauseating effect when warping at high speed... Well... if you're going through multiple day-night cycles per second, how would you prevent it? You could switch to one screen refresh per day/night beyond a certain warp speed. And then you'll get complaints from people saying they didn't realize they were warping so fast.

4)  Planetary exploration : it's particularly interesting to see this in combination with (2). "I can reach anything with traditional chemical rockets" obviously requiring some big-s ships. I don't think you can have your cake and eat it here. Either you admit that there's a good application for these high tech parts, as you can build smaller and lighter and bypass the issues of launching mammoth ships. Or you say “I prefer old fashioned chemical rockets (if only there was a coal-fed rocket engine!) and I'm willing to pay the price that comes with launching large contraptions.” But don't say that you don’t need lightweight long-mission parts after complaining that your ships are too large to launch.

5)  Contracts and rewards - “This part is really done much better than anything mentioned above.” To be honest, that’s an insult to the rest of the game. Well, let me rephrase that carefully. I think the contracts are done very well and they have greatly improved since their introduction, thanks to the people who worked so hard on them. Career mode itself needs fixing though. Although: Eve and Moho should give a ton more science/money because they are far more difficult to complete than anything else” — wait. Didn’t you say earlier “everything within the stock Kerbol system is far inside the reach of conventional chemical rockets and solar panels, so there is no real need for high tech parts like those. Regular engines + asparagus will get you anywhere you can go in stock system?” So which one is it? All planets are easy to reach even with conventional chemical rockets? Or Eve and Moho are too difficult even when using those special rockets you have no need for?

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I also disagree about part joints. Making stuff strong enough to stay together is part of the challenge. I remember the old days where properly strutting out a ship was a real a skill on its own. Nowadays it seems like only the largest boosters need more than a few struts each. 

 

The lack of exploration is a big reason I've largely ignored career mode. Everything is all instant with a click, or takes only seconds for the game to mark it as done. It seems to me that the game never moved away from its origins as a flight sim, and never lived up to its full potential. 

 

I'd love to see a version of the game where sceince results come from a continuous system, rather than the discrete "biomes"  they have now. Something where you can go for a drive, and watch the numbers on your sensors change, and collect detailed, systematically generated data. Maybe even make a discovery or to of your own if you follow your nose the right way. 

 

I find it interesting, when visiting the suggestion forum, many of the problems raised still come from the more fundamental problems with career that were raised more than a year ago. 

Too much of the game is tied to features which are finite. The tech tree ends, and ends a bunch of other things with it. Then there's only contracts which feel like you're achieving someone else's goals- there's not a lot of reason to do things on your own. 

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>>> I find it interesting, when visiting the suggestion forum, many of the problems raised still come from the more fundamental problems with career that were raised more than a year ago.

Rather than interesting, I find it downright disappointing.  The media may applaud squad for it, but I see them as totally ignoring the fundamental problems with career mode.  I remember day one, the day we got contracts.  Before even playing I dug into the configs looking for how we would write and edit contracts.  I hoped for an explosion of mods offering interesting stories and challenging projects.  What I got was "take X thing to Y place " .... and that was about it for career mode.  Squad's pathetic attempts to "balance" career mode are like teaching a hippo to dance Swan Lake.  The mistake is the attempt.  To quote a much regarded movie: "the only way to win is not to play".

Edited by Sandworm
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I enjoy KSP as it is, I play it with KER as the only mod. It's one of my favorite games, but it's not perfect. I don't mind that there is an element of structural challenge to building vehicles, but the way it is implemented in game can be tedious. Strutting a large multi-piece wing is a very good example. I'd rather have the an option to choose the strength of a joint or set of joints and then pay a weight penalty for extra strength. It would make building a lot easier and help to keep vehicles neat. The other problem with struts and weak joints is that they can't be added to things outside of VAB/SPH. This isn't just a limit on building in the stock game, but it cuts out gameplay by making it impractical or impossible to do something like arrange an orbital construction mission.

 

The game has enough content for me to enjoy, but I don't play it day in and day out. I play sandbox exclusively and I think KSP deserves praise for having such a mode. Career mode feels a bit too gamey and I disagree with how it progressed (things like manned missions preceding probes, the order of the tech tree). I play as an explorer and visit the planets with my own set of rules. While I do enjoy it, I agree that exploration could be made deeper. It's really disappointing that you can't map planets in the stock game. I would also like science to be a bigger part of sandbox. Not science points like in science mode, but research and data collecting. I'd like to have a record of experiments and results, so if you happen to record temperature in an atmosphere that data is saved and visible to you somewhere, and you can use it to plan future missions or find more data. There's also a lot of potential for added content not in the stock game, like mapping, weather, terraforming, etc. More than Squad could reasonably be expected to add.

 

On the other hand, there are mods. Say what you will about them, but they fill the niche for expanded content. For many games these days they can be considered a feature. Developers can't match the combined output of modders, nor can they cater to as narrow an audience as mods can.

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21 hours ago, Amianoob said:

I agree with some of the points you've made but not others, mainly I disagree with you on the joint reinforcement. I believe that having weaker joints and lots of struts is just such a Kerbal thing and that if suddenly all of your rockets were rigid and didn't explode for no reason then some of the fun would definitely be lost. What I mean to say is, Do we want Kerbal space program to become a strict simulator? Or do we want it to be a game? Personally I think that where it is right now is a pretty good medium and that adding KJE to stock would definitely take it further into the sim side, which may not be the best for play-ability.

Exploding for a reason, I can live with because (in theory) I can track down that reason and fix it. Exploding for no reason, because lolkerbal, is counterproductive and ultimately tedious. Random failure is not a fun gameplay experience - which I believe Squad have acknowledged. It's one reason why KSP spacecraft (provided they stay in one piece) never have any malfunctions.

I don't have a problem with some joints breaking. If I hang a ridiculously overweight lateral booster off an undersized decoupler, it should snap right off, with any amusing pinwheeling, exploding rocket effects that you care to add. If I stick two fuel tanks or fuselage sections together, I want them to stay stuck. That joint is just an artefact of the way you build things in KSP and I shouldn't be penalised for having it.

Edited by KSK
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Kerbal will follow the same route as Minecraft, being a platform for mods. I see no problem in that, since the community can develop 100x more content than the original developer. If I were from Squad I would try to make the game as stable as possible and then start working together with the modders to incorporate their work into my game with adjustments to make it balanced.

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Solution for joint strength/flexibility: introduce multiple materials. I already started last year, after 1.1 has arrived, I'll continue the project.

Note: links in the topic are dead at the moment.

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As for flexible joints: I would like if *some* parts actually had good joints (the ones already meant to be structural parts. Especially the parts that change diameter often seem to uselessly weak. (Even with a part like this the combination of the two joints should be stronger than a suddenly change in diameter. 

 

Biggest problem i indeed see is that exploration is still so undervalued by the game. Sure I can have a mission "go to X, place a building there". However I would really like this to be less arbitrary and actually a goal minded way. I would like to be able to create true "bases" at other planets. Create my own VAB (of course this would be really expensive in the sense I have to bring all materials there to build a VAB). The fuel drilling is a small gesture in this way, but I'd like it to be much more: make fuel drills, raw material processing and use those materials to build ships (or have them imported from other planets). Create a stable launch platform (landscaping).

 That way one can actually build new staging area from where you can discover the rest of the kerbol system. Instead of always starting from kerbin and going somewhere.

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Becoming and being:

Squad always intended to make a  "tycoon style" space management game.
As a first phase they created all the spacecraft construction and exploration features => there are many here who still remember what an achievement it was just to get to orbit, let alone Mun.  If there was a moon.
In the second phase they concentrated on spaceplanes because of all the demand from the community.
Thirdly they worked on (science then) career mode with all its contracts, strategies and other 'non flight' features.
Then aerodynamics and atmosphere expansion, plus re-heating, etc. because of all the demand from the community.
And more career mode because it needs it.
... hiatus forced by Unity update.  A change of the underlying engine is a major operation but also brings a lot of opportunities.  At the moment we have no idea what good and bad (new bugs) will come of it.
For 1.2 and forward there's not much more than speculation, so it's a bit early to make any statement.

Seen in context of rockets + spaceplanes + career + management it isn't surprising that squad have been working on things away from 'space', even if I don't like them.
There's more challenge and interest in stock KSP than in any other game I've played, squad are continuing to build the game they always wanted and reacting better to community demand than any other developer with a business and a plan.  Glad I bought it, wish I'd done so earlier.

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On the subject of integrating mods...

Whichever mod(s) we feel should or should not be 'stock', I don't think any can, or should (or possibly even could), be simply 'copy and pasted' into stock code as it is.  Yes the mods work, but they are designed and written to be add ins.

By all means if a mod does something that would be a benefit to stock then integrate it, but it needs to be done so that it knits into the stock code properly.  Which inevitably means streamlining it's code and tweaking bits that may not quite tie in with how stock 'should be'.

 @Porkjet is a good example of this with the spaceplane parts, the mod wasn't just added to stock as is, the parts were tweaked to make them symmetrical and (I assume) the code needed to be adjusted to ensure it was fully stock compatible and as such could also be streamlined given that it no longer needs to be a separate entity

Let's use KER as another example...  There have been a lot of requests to make this mod stock and It has a lot of info that would IMO be very useful in stock, but a lot of other interesting and useful stuff that is probably out of scope for a 'stock' game as the devs see it.  So just making KER stock as it is would be a bit over the top, but integrating some of the more basic functionality and features that it offers into stock, whilst leaving the more advanced stuff only available in the mod for those who want install it, would be the best approach.  It may well be that, in this case (and other similar cases), that the desired functions could be integrated into stock without actually needing any of the mod itself, but by only including some of the more basic functions the mod still remains valid and very useful for those that want the extra stuff.

OK, tl;dr ...  The point I am trying to make is that (IMO) simply 'adding a mod to stock' is not the best way.  The best way is to take the 'essence' of the mod, use the parts/code than can be used and are appropriate, then tweak the rest it so that it fits into the 'stock' game properly (with suitable agreement with the mod maker of course).  In many cases this will also leave the original mod as a useful add on with extra features that may not be appropriate for the basic 'stock' game.

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On 3/3/2016 at 9:13 AM, PhoenixCola said:

So, I am reluctant to say "KSP is supposed to be a space exploration game" because it is not only that, if I am correct, it should be a merger of a flight simulator, construction/engineering game, manager and space exploration, and if so, why oh why is so much attention given to a lot of trivial things and improvements that are tied to the management part of the game and there are close to none improvements in other aspects of the game, mainly things I have addressed above.

I can see your point, but....I think it's misplaced, and the statement that I've quoted here is not entirely accurate.  I'm not sure that KSP was 'supposed' to be anything more than a goofy game with little green guys in big rockets going to funny named bodies in space.  Yes, of course there was the interesting addition of some physics and a pseudo simulation aspect, but I think that our community here has taken it much further than even WE would have expected.  

Remember, there was a time when we just thought it was funny to build absurd rocket ships and laugh our butts off at the reactions of the little green guys when we launched it.  

The Modders are incredible talents and have truly added to the whole thing.  I'm not convinced though that making it a merger of a flight simulator, construction/engineering game, manager and space exploration platform is really what the intent was.  Maybe I'm wrong.  

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As far as joint strength/rigidity goes, I wish it was a little more rigid too. 

Patched conics... never had a problem with them. I don't know what you mean when you say they're a nightmare.

The one thing I think the game needs, though, desperately, is some way to know when a planet is in the right position for an intercept. A launch window, basically. This isn't something you should have to download a mod for.

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On 3/3/2016 at 8:13 AM, PhoenixCola said:

KSP is becoming more and more of a "framework" for community mods, which are for me a more and more a necessary "evil", hell, if you want to do something in KSP in a really enjoyable way, you are going to do it with mods

You make it sound like a DLC thing, which is laser-guided illuminati alien unicorns teleporting from the fake moon landing soundstage: It makes people want to hit something for listening to that blast of... yuck.

By the way, I run stock, and can do just about anything, including a network of stations, bases, fighterjets (I cite macey dean) and let's not forget Gregorxmun's train. I also remember that guy that said no one really uses mods, and this is a horrible assumption. The modding community is so big for a reason.

I guess it would be safe if you didn't assume about everyone so completely so often? This is a fair compromise. Just stick to general discussion.

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On Thursday March 03, 2016 at 8:13 AM, PhoenixCola said:


 

And then, we are supplied with parts that would enable exploration of bodies further away than Eeloo (nuke engines, ion engines, RTG-s) which have absolutely no real use, everything within the stock Kerbol system is far inside the reach of conventional chemical rockets and solar panels, so there is no real need for high tech parts like those. Regular engines + asparagus will get you anywhere you can go in stock system.


 

They help with not needing as big of a spacecraft to get a given payload to a given location, which then simplifies booster/spaceplane construction.
 

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Okay, let me say a few rebuttals.

  • Patched Conics - Try flying without them, then decide whether you like that better. They aren't perfect, but they're a whole lot better than flying blind.
  • Stability - KSP isn't designed to be exact-to-life, hence the 1/10 scale planets, tiny astronauts and variable thrust for all the engines. Struts are a Kerbal thing, designed to give the game a little bit of fun while adding a useful tool.
  • Planetary Exploration - In real life, Mars isn't too interesting past the occasional dust storm. Same with the Moon, or Europa, or Pluto. Just about everything is boring except Io. The interesting part comes from what we bring there. If you think Duna's boring, bring a dune buggy!

Blocks text wall, returns for 2000 damage.

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Interesting discussion.. I don't have much to add, but I have been watching a few older videos on Youtube featuring pre-1.0 KSP, from Scott Manley and others, and I am very thankful for the progress the game has made since. Lots of basic stability for the game engine, quality-of-play fixes and improvements, and content like a whole lot of new parts and ways to play the game. I was playing the game back then, in pre-1.0 and I feel like it's come a long way even in the ways you mention as being left lacking. The Kraken was certainly more rampant, the Career mode had no funds to consider, the main way to get science was to spam the same experiment over and over, the wasn't any contracts, then there was contracts but they were not worth using, and now in version 1.0.5 I started a brand new career on Hard difficulty and find much more purpose in playing it. It has come a long way for me.

But I do not mean to use this comments to refute your own, OP. I am satisfied with the game and where it is going, I think we can not expect perfection from it, but you know if the developers read your comments and decide to improve the things you mention I would be delighted, it would be a better game for us all. I guess what I mean is, I think with some patience we will end up seeing the type of thing you would like coming into stock. I trust Squad will keep working on improving the game and the Kerbol system and the experience of playing it, because that is what I have see over time already. From the frequency of new patches and the content in them I do not get the impression that the developer team is large, so they make take a while. :)

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On 3/4/2016 at 8:46 PM, KSK said:

Exploding for a reason, I can live with because (in theory) I can track down that reason and fix it. Exploding for no reason, because lolkerbal, is counterproductive and ultimately tedious. Random failure is not a fun gameplay experience - which I believe Squad have acknowledged. It's one reason why KSP spacecraft (provided they stay in one piece) never have any malfunctions.

I liked this post because I 98% agree with it.  I also typically play with Dang It!  (lately I've been having to run all stock because the only real play time I get is on my laptop which is old enough that mods quickly kill it).  Having random failures which are easily distinguishable from design mistakes is very fun - for me - but I also like the ability to turn it off.  I like the balance the Dang It! mod has maintained (The chance of a failure at launch is really really low - the chance of a failure on a round trip to Plock (OPM's pluto) is very very high.  Further more, manned flight has ways to patch/repair failures mid-flight while unmanned flights need planned redundancy.  Connect that to something like USI-Life support and you have a very interesting cost-analysis to do when planning manned/unmanned missions.  Stock has a similar balance with the difference between the two being smaller.

 

On the OP's topic:  Mods are one of the things which makes this game absolutely amazing!

When 1.1 is out and stable (and the major mods are out and stable) I hope to have 3 installs to mess around with.

A) Pure stock - can work on craft designs on my laptop to fly at home, finally be everywhere in the stock system.
B) My "canon" Moded kerbal:  Aethetic mods for clouds, texture replacements, KAS, KIS, USI-Life support (maybe take the time to learn all of @RoverDude's stuff since most of it is great but I don't seem to get far enough to use it properly), OPM, Dang-IT.  A gorgeous kerbol system for my well fed kerbonauts to explore in comfortable KnK planetary base crew quarters in a massive, sprawling program.  Ideally the ships will have a sleak-ish sci-fi gleam to them as the grow out of Apollo era tools into a space-faring race.  Somewhere between the artists render of the ISX-Enterprise and the Constellation mission pack by @Majorjim which dropped my jaw so hard when I first saw it I needed an aspirin.  I won't achieve that, but I'd like to think I could.

C) RO/RSS/RP-0 - The save where I sheepishly admit I don't know what I'm doing and feel accomplished if I can blow-up/crash as intended.  Eventually looking properly Mercury/Vostok like since Orbit is a fair goal to set there (seeing as I've not done it yet).

That the game allows me A, B, and C equally is absolutely amazing!  That A actually does help me with the skills/ideas I need for both B and C is also amazing.  The idea that I might be able to get a D (Bare bones RO/RSS/RP-O) running on my laptop and add on KAS/KIS, Life support, and more to that save on my computer is great.

 

 

TL/DR - I think that the Dev team working to make KSP as modifiable as possible is possibly one of the smartest things they could be doing and an amazing use of resources.  They get the core, or as others in thread say, skeleton, working as well as possible and allow the modding community to take what is already a very good game and make it, well - out of this world.

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On 3/4/2016 at 4:46 AM, KSK said:

If I stick two fuel tanks or fuselage sections together, I want them to stay stuck. That joint is just an artefact of the way you build things in KSP and I shouldn't be penalised for having it.

This is the sole reason why I use KJR; without it, so many sensible-looking rockets become uncontrollable noodles unless you strap lag-inducing struts all over them. It did seem cheaty when I first read about it, but now I can't stand playing without it. I'm surprised there's so much disdain for it around here. Adding struts isn't much of a challenge, it just drives up part count, so I don't feel like the wobbly joints add anything other than humor, and it gets old after a while.

Something more to do on the surfaces of planets might be nice, but it's hard to think of something that doesn't feel like an attempt to shoehorn generic gaming mechanics into a "beautiful void" imagination-driven sort of experience. More weird easter eggs to discover (whatever happened to Magic Boulder?), or the long-lost plot linking them together, would be neat. Rare space critters on Laythe and/or Eve, maybe?

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Maybe a solution for joint stability could be simulating joint "welding" (or internal strutting) in game. For some price, you could make chosen joints stronger, and maybe it would add a little weight to parts also, to simulate weldings (or strutting). And you could play without using it if you like to use struts.

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6 minutes ago, zuuhis79 said:

Maybe a solution for joint stability could be simulating joint "welding" (or internal strutting) in game. For some price, you could make chosen joints stronger, and maybe it would add a little weight to parts also, to simulate weldings (or strutting). And you could play without using it if you like to use struts.

I like it. This is what I thought "root part" was for, however I tried it and it didn't seem to do that, I still don't know what it does. :P

 

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Joint strength used to be a lot worse, since that was fixed it is possible to build sizable rockets without struts.  
But with KSP having no real-world limitations on engineering, there is always a bigger rocket that can be build for which default part-to-part connections are not strong/stiff enough.  


I do not think KSP is becoming to much different from what it was - not in a bad way anyway. All i see is improvements (though arguably not enough so far to warrant a 1.0 release), but i mostly agree on your other points, and have one point to add:  

I think it has been a long time ago since anyone in Squad or QA who did not already know delta-v requirements for a mission to Eloo, has play-tested such a mission.    

Planning of high delta-V missions takes to bloody much trial and error due to lack of design assistance wrt matching vessel delta-v to required delta-V. 

Edited by rkman
clarity
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12 minutes ago, rkman said:

Planning of high delta-V missions takes to bloody much trial and error due to lack of design assistance wrt required delta-V.   

There's always tried and true do-it-by-hand math, and KSP gives you the information for that in the VAB/SPH, and it's not at all hard to do.  No need for trial and error.

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6 hours ago, zuuhis79 said:

Maybe a solution for joint stability could be simulating joint "welding" (or internal strutting) in game. For some price, you could make chosen joints stronger, and maybe it would add a little weight to parts also, to simulate weldings (or strutting). And you could play without using it if you like to use struts.

I like that too. I was trying to think of a good way of implementing my earlier suggestion but couldn't really think of one. That would do the trick though.

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