Squad- Please "Chop this wood"

[regex]

I think procedurals would solve a lot of gripes about parts. People could have all the sizes of tanks, wings, and structural parts they want at a much reduced cost to running memory for the game. They are easily gated in size in career and science mode as shown by several progression mods, so there's no worries about that.

[Alshain]

37 minutes ago, regex said:

I think procedurals would solve a lot of gripes about parts. People could have all the sizes of tanks, wings, and structural parts they want at a much reduced cost to running memory for the game. They are easily gated in size in career and science mode as shown by several progression mods, so there's no worries about that.

That would only solve the gripes about not having procedural parts.  It wouldn't satisfy the people that want the parts.  Those people would still want the parts.

[regex]

14 minutes ago, Alshain said:

That would only solve the gripes about not having procedural parts.  It wouldn't satisfy the people that want the parts.  Those people would still want the parts.

But the parts would be there. All you have to do is dial them in. You could even have some presets. Add some extra textures and you're good. All the tanks you want, all the sizes of structural panels you want, all the wings you want.

[Alshain]

11 minutes ago, regex said:

But the parts would be there. All you have to do is dial them in. You could even have some presets. Add some extra textures and you're good. All the tanks you want, all the sizes of structural panels you want, all the wings you want.

But the the problem is that if they are procedural, they aren't what we want.

It's two different mindsets of play.  The people that want more parts will not be satisfied by procedural parts.  The people that want procedural parts will not be satisfied by more non-procedural parts.  Neither way is wrong, but there is no middle ground there.  It's one way or the other.

[regex]

6 minutes ago, Alshain said:

It's two different mindsets of play.  The people that want more parts will not be satisfied by procedural parts.  The people that want procedural parts will not be satisfied by more non-procedural parts.  Neither way is wrong, but there is no middle ground there.  It's one way or the other.

Even with presets? We'd save tons of memory. We could use the advanced tweakables feature to lock out certain controls and only leave presets for the "LEGO people", and it's not like that has to go away even with advanced tweakables on. Hell, you could just add another option in the new game menu to allow for procedural parts. There are ways to easily accommodate both styles of play with the benefit of reduced part count and memory, and the bonus is that you can just as easily share craft.

[Jengaleng]

23 hours ago, Casualnaut said:

Perhaps we could give SQUAD ideas that aren't already made?

Like what? Last I checked mods can even start my microwave in the kitchen so I can watch Jeb crash and burn. 

[Alshain]

1 hour ago, regex said:

Even with presets? We'd save tons of memory. We could use the advanced tweakables feature to lock out certain controls and only leave presets for the "LEGO people", and it's not like that has to go away even with advanced tweakables on. Hell, you could just add another option in the new game menu to allow for procedural parts. There are ways to easily accommodate both styles of play with the benefit of reduced part count and memory, and the bonus is that you can just as easily share craft.

You can save tons of memory without going to procedural parts.  @Venproved that with his stock part revamp.  You just have to better re-use existing textures.  The Porkjet parts do a pretty good job but the older parts are a mess.  Having a procedural part simply locked wouldn't satisfy the desire for more parts though.  It would only be a justification for adding procedural parts.

[Casualnaut]

55 minutes ago, Jengaleng said:

Like what?

Hmm... Realistic spacecraft damage that can be toggled, Sonar as a water experiment, realistic heating effect on craft spacecraft equipment and engines that can be toggled, A.I space programs that you play against, gravitational effects of larger asteroids. There are tons of things that people have never even thought of.

 

[vger]

On 6/13/2017 at 7:42 PM, Azimech said:

I think T2 will move to increase activity on all bodies. It may surprise some but an increasing number of the userbase is bored with space. Interesting fact: the dominant craft type on KerbalX.com is not rockets nor landers. It's fighter jets.

Surface activities always felt underrepresented in the game. I don't see it as JUST a space game. To call it that would be like saying it's "just" an orbital simulator. Which it clearly isn't, and was probably not meant to be, or we wouldn't have been given rovers and planes to explore all the biomes. But it still feels like there's an exploratory element to the ground game that is missing. Getting to a new world shouldn't be the end of the adventure, it should be the beginning. There should be things to discover that you just can't figure out where to go to with just scanners, and need to either get some boots on the ground or get a probe to drive right up to it and start analyzing.

And while we're on the subject, life support resources and long-term bases should be stock elements, to make that aspect more interesting.

[DeltaDizzy]

19 hours ago, Alshain said:

Its not about difficulty with LS.  It has 2 effects...

A. It adds mass to craft

B. It adds repettitive resupply missions to stations/bases.

It adds nothing engaging to gameplay. A. Has no real impact and B is just tedium.  It has nothing to do with making it more difficult, it has everything with adding nothing engaging and in fact the opposite.

I don't care if they add it, but it better have a way to shut it off so people who want to do more interesting things don't have to deal with that nonsense burdensome 'feature'.

 

 

[DMagic]

1 hour ago, Alshain said:

You can save tons of memory without going to procedural parts.  @Venproved that with his stock part revamp.  You just have to better re-use existing textures.  The Porkjet parts do a pretty good job but the older parts are a mess.  Having a procedural part simply locked wouldn't satisfy the desire for more parts though.  It would only be a justification for adding procedural parts.

I don't think the RAM usage due to parts is as bad as most people think it is:

It's all of the stuff that you can't touch that uses up the most RAM. And that is even taking into account how inefficient older stock part textures are; my guess is that you could make the same parts (the old ones, not the space plane parts), or parts with higher quality, with around half of the texture assets that are now in use.

Parts mods are a different story because they can be as high quality as someone wants, and they may or may not be optimized at all. Something like BDB has over 300 parts, but only uses about 150MB, whereas something with individual textures per part could quickly take up more space.

So I don't think memory usage is really a relevant justification for procedural parts.

[Azimech]

If you look at real life, you could say that in a way all parts are "procedural" until designed, built and tested. An agency could choose to use parts that are already proven when creating a new design. The rest depends on the time/money ratio. The more money you have, the faster you can create new parts.

Now that would be an interesting game element: Either you choose existing parts or spend time/money for the creation of new parts. Essentially making the tech tree obsolete.

 

Opinion: Who really likes the tech tree anyway?

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

On 6/12/2017 at 2:40 PM, TheRagingIrishman said:

The way KSP works currently (and it would take a ton of work from Squad to change this due to Unity) is that all textures and models are loaded into the game regardless of settings which means that even if you turned the clouds off, the massive files that make up good cloud mods will still be loaded into RAM causing problems for people with not good computers

Not arguing whether or not squad should add clouds, but really, that is a non-issue.

KSP directory --> GameData --> Squad --> search "clouds" ---> *delete* (or cut and paste it somewhere outside the game if you don't like deleting things)

If you think your average player couldn't figure it out, put instructions in-game.

Again, not arguing whether Squad should add clouds, just pointing out that the game loading thing isn't really a problem.

Edited June 15, 2017 by EpicSpaceTroll139

[Galileo]

5 minutes ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

Not arguing whether or not squad should add clouds, but really, that is a non-issue.

KSP directory --> GameData --> Aquad --> search "clouds" ---> *delete* (or cut and paste it somewhere outside the game if you don't like deleting things)

If you think your average player couldn't figure it out, put instructions in-game.

Again, not arguing whether Squad should add clouds, just pointing out that the game loading thing isn't really a problem.

Well, having maintained SVE for the last year, I would probably have to say that no, the average player probably couldn't figure that out  

Edit: I say that jokingly but as I think about it, there is some truth there. That is why CKAN exists for the most part.

Edited June 15, 2017 by Galileo

[vger]

3 minutes ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

Not arguing whether or not squad should add clouds, but really, that is a non-issue.

KSP directory --> GameData --> Aquad --> search "clouds" ---> *delete* (or cut and paste it somewhere outside the game if you don't like deleting things)

 

Unity can't load assets on an as-needed basis? Are you freaking kidding me?

[Alshain]

6 hours ago, vger said:

Unity can't load assets on an as-needed basis? Are you freaking kidding me?

Yes, it can.

[vger]

2 minutes ago, Alshain said:

Yes, it can.

It amazes me how many here are griping about performance issues if clouds were added to stock then.

Graphics settings... If clouds = yes, then load cloud textures. If not, then don't. Why does anyone think it's anymore complicated than that?

[Alshain]

16 minutes ago, vger said:

It amazes me how many here are griping about performance issues if clouds were added to stock then.

Graphics settings... If clouds = yes, then load cloud textures. If not, then don't. Why does anyone think it's anymore complicated than that?

It's because someone starts a rumor that because KSP loads all it's part and planet textures at load time (a design choice) that it's Unity's fault and all textures have to be loaded at design time.  Then despite all logic, they take that rumor and run with it. Logic like the existence of mods that run on Unity and do exactly that for KSP.  I mean really guys, if the mods can do it, so can the base game if they choose to.  Now, Squad CHOOSES not to load the part and planet textures as needed (most likely for lag reasons).  That doesn't mean that at start up they can't choose to load or not load a texture based on a setting.

Edited June 16, 2017 by Alshain