Most Frustrating Things in KSP

[Goddess Bhavani]

Well I've been here in one form or another since 2012 so I thought to share some of my pet peeves for lulz. 

Having never went out of Kerbin SOI for the past 5 real world years, I only really get frustrated at two things: 

- Upgrading versions breaks mods randomly, and places weeks or months or delays to your perfectly functional space program. I'm tempted to just freeze it at 1.3 and leave it as it is for the rest of eternity. 

- The really, really, horribly slow load times on a modded install. Of course, I am on a potato computer that was formerly, very good and due for replacement, but if I could run a 1.0.5 or 1.1.3 modded install I'd actually go back to that. I didn't have to cook breakfast while the fully modded game loaded back then. I guess there's no way to make the load process faster with the way KSP wants to read and load every single file into memory at the start of the game. 

In fact, I've never seen other Unity engine games have this problem...

[MR L A]

How long before someone brings this back to features implemented by mods?

wait.. I'll be that guy.

My pet peeves are that mods like KER, KAC, Chatterer and RealPlume are mods... honestly think the should be stock. KER because it provides a lot of information a successful mission needs. KAC because I have no idea how anyone can do multiple missions without it. Chatter because KSP is ridiculously quiet without it and RealPlume because once you've used those engine fx you NEVER want to go back.

True pet peeves though other than loading time... honestly idk. All the bugs are usually entertaining to some degree... apart from landing on moons where your craft just randomly starts wobbling about after landing and falls over.. that really grinds my gears after the 26th time.

 

Edit: No I've got it! Craft save file system... can't create branches or subfolders withing sph/vab sections... hate having a list of all files rather than being able to have families of rockets grouped together. e.g. 1.25m family subfolder that contains all the 1.25m designs rather than alphabetical order  Please fix this SQUAD.. I'd literally pay for this feature as its own DLC because I want it so bad.
 

 

Edited November 11, 2017 by MR L A
Additional content

[invision]

4 hours ago, carmenara said:

 

- The really, really, horribly slow load times on a modded install. Of course, I am on a potato computer that was formerly, very good and due for replacement, but if I could run a 1.0.5 or 1.1.3 modded install I'd actually go back to that. I didn't have to cook breakfast while the fully modded game loaded back then. I guess there's no way to make the load process faster with the way KSP wants to read and load every single file into memory at the start of the game. 

 

hmm my game has 20 or so mods and it loads before the screen timer which is set to 2min, i usually boot the game and use the internet while it loads in the background.

what i really hate is how the game stutters and slows down even tho theres no good reason for it then goes back to normal.

[Guest]

- When you're in orbit and the biome you're directly over flickers between two things and you keep timewarping past the one you want. Not exactly a vanilla issue though since I only have biome information through KER.

- When solar panels are intact yet broken but engineers can't repair them pls squad why.

[ARS]

Landed all the way to tylo and doing EVA... forget ladders (Dang it!)

Cannot use any planet mods on 1.3

Random crashes when loading KSP

[Dafni]

7 hours ago, carmenara said:

... but if I could run a 1.0.5 or 1.1.3 modded install I'd actually go back to that..

You can do that, easy. Copy, keep and play your older istalls however you want. I play 0.9 sometimes.

And if you dont keep old installs, I believe you can dial back to 1.0.5 on steam (not 100% sure on this, I'd need to check my steam. but look for the tap with last stable versions)

[Superfluous J]

Forgetting comms on a probe is mine. Or only putting one solar panel on a probe because surely this time I'll remember to keep it aimed at the Sun and then... well you know the rest.

[James Kerman]

Children - they're either staging my ships when I make a coffee or renaming vessels when I'm at work.
Case in point: My underwater rover "The Neptune":

[The_Rocketeer]

6 hours ago, MR L A said:

Chatter because KSP is ridiculously quiet without it

I've installed Chatterer a few times, and every time I've uninstalled it within a matter of hours. It's neat, but it gets annoying fast. And for a game about space exploration, KSP is already really noisy.

Forgetting to quicksave is *still* the most annoying thing in my game, this after nearly 5 years. Shame on me.

[NSEP]

When i see people play KSP for the first time, i cringe about everything they do, like adding fuel tanks to SRBs or calling a peewee rocket "big". A big pet peeve of mine is when people take the time to convert everything from Metres to Miles. For their videos.

[Mr. Peabody]

Frustrating stuff eh? Don't get me started...

[Vim Razz]

The most annoying thing is when orbital lines of nearby ships fade out when you zoom in on map view, making early game rescue missions (from, say, misaligned Minmus returns before 1st radar upgrade) really obnoxious.  Making final course corrections requires zooming out and back in again constantly in order see how close your trajectories are aligned.

Also, I sometimes want to throttle whoever switched the positions of the LV-T30 and the LV-T45 on the tech tree (version 1.1 or 1.2, if I remember right).  It makes starting up 10% science games far more tedious because the LV-T45 can't manage Munar flybys, and it seems impossible to get a part test contract for the LV-T30.

[katateochi]

16 hours ago, MR L A said:

My pet peeves are that mods like KER, KAC, Chatterer and RealPlume are mods... honestly think the should be stock

So I have to be that guy who says; I prefer them as mods. I use 1 out of those 4 and I like that I have the choice about that. The one I do use (KAC) is perfect just the way it is, and tbh I've not been all that impressed by the stock implementations of existing mods.  In the case of KER, I prefer to use MJ for dV info, I prefer it's layout and I've it customised just how I want (plus it's what I'm used to). My reasons for using MJ in preference to KER are irrelevant though, point is I can choose and we all like different mod cocktails. 

 

17 hours ago, carmenara said:

Upgrading versions breaks mods randomly, and places weeks or months or delays to your perfectly functional space program. I'm tempted to just freeze it at 1.3

I think these days mod developers are pretty quick at getting fixes out when KSP updates, infact I think it's impressive the rate at which they get the fixes out. I always play pure stock for a while when a new version drops and then upgrade my modded install once the mods have had a chance to catch up. 

 

16 hours ago, MR L A said:

No I've got it! Craft save file system... can't create branches or subfolders withing sph/vab sections... hate having a list of all files rather than being able to have families of rockets grouped together.

So much this. never mind such fancy concepts as sub categories, but the list can't even be sorted or searched.  And when you have loads of craft the time it takes to open the craft list is terrible.  I presume this is because it has to read each craft file and work out all the info (size, crew capacity, cost etc) for each craft, every time you open the list. That's just sloppy program design. That info should be cached against checksums of the craft files so it only has to be calculated for craft which have changed or are new (and reset the cache if certain conditions apply like a change to the installed mods).  
I do hope that if they do fix this aspect they don't actually go with the concept of folders. Tags would be much better as they effectively do the same thing just with the added advantage that something can have multiple tags and therefore can be in multiple "folders" at the same time. 

My current pet peeve; how landed craft, even on perfectly flat ground, slide sideways ever so slowly.  I've got a base which is doing a very convincing impression of a glacier, I ended up installing Vessel Mover just so every now and then I could shunt it back into place. But even at KSC, where it's as flat as you can get, parked aircraft will sometimes drift sideways.  I think that things that are landed should have a threshold for external and internal forces and below that threshold they should be locked to a position on the ground. 

And from this latest version; things with wheels doing little (and sometimes not so little) jumps into the air when you get into physics range of them. 

[Goddess Bhavani]

17 hours ago, invision said:

hmm my game has 20 or so mods and it loads before the screen timer which is set to 2min, i usually boot the game and use the internet while it loads in the background.

what i really hate is how the game stutters and slows down even tho theres no good reason for it then goes back to normal.

5-7 minutes load and 22 (!!!) minutes for the Tracking Station view.

Good news though I sort of discovered why. 

In the past, visual mods tended to be enhancements of specific things and dropped your framerate by a few fps to achieve something. Now, they are absolute monstrosities with 4 or 8K textures which are way overkill for those of us who still run on 1980x1080. 

I get that today's desktop machines are more than powerful enough to transform KSP into a CGI movie, but not all of us want this level of "enhancement". One cloud layer is sufficient. Why three? And what for do we have lightning storms all over the planet when there's no weather system mod yet?

Went back to basic EVE, Scatterer and stock textures, suddenly my load times are back to sanity. And the game looks as great as I remembered. To me, adhering to the original system requirements of the game and having the same general look and feel like the original are important.
 

I also dislike feature creep and trying to make the stock game more 'comprehensive' by reworking mod content and touting them as stock features, which brings me to...

2 hours ago, katateochi said:

So I have to be that guy who says; I prefer them as mods. I use 1 out of those 4 and I like that I have the choice about that. The one I do use (KAC) is perfect just the way it is, and tbh I've not been all that impressed by the stock implementations of existing mods.  In the case of KER, I prefer to use MJ for dV info, I prefer it's layout and I've it customised just how I want (plus it's what I'm used to). My reasons for using MJ in preference to KER are irrelevant though, point is I can choose and we all like different mod cocktails. 

I agree a lot of things that were "eaten" into stock should remain as mods. Thats why I prefer 1.05 or 1.1.x. The functionality was literally, exactly the same when all the added bells and whistles were mods.  

Why expend dev resources to reinvent the wheel, why not focus it on things modders can't do? Like an optimized dynamic asset loading system, parts and craft database, etc. 

We should all take into account the puny computer that takes 22 minutes to load the KSP tracking station with SVT installed.... takes just 20 seconds to load a 2 mile x 2 mile cinematic quality battlespace and 8 fully rigged and animated giant robots. Yes, twenty seconds. And that Unity game takes two seconds to get from desktop to main menu. Two! 

Edited November 12, 2017 by carmenara

[invision]

3 minutes ago, carmenara said:

5-7 minutes load and 22 (!!!) minutes for the Tracking Station view.

Good news though I sort of discovered why. 

In the past, visual mods tended to be enhancements of specific things and dropped your framerate by a few fps to achieve something. Now, they are absolute monstrosities with 4 or 8K textures which are way overkill for those of us who still run on 1980x1080. 

I get that today's desktop machines are more than powerful enough to transform KSP into a CGI movie, but not all of us want this level of "enhancement". One cloud layer is sufficient. Why three? And what for do we have lightning storms all over the planet when there's no weather system mod yet?

Went back to basic EVE, Scatterer and stock textures, suddenly my load times are back to sanity. And the game looks as great as I remembered. To me, adhering to the original system requirements of the game and having the same general look and feel like the original are important. I dislike feature creep and trying to make the stock game more 'comprehensive' by reworking mod content and touting them as stock features, which brings me to...

I agree a lot of things that were "eaten" into stock should remain as mods. Thats why I prefer 1.05 or 1.1.x. The functionality was literally, exactly the same when all the added bells and whistles were mods.  

my pc's biggest drawback is its CPU and crappy single thread speed as kerbal just destroys it and since the game isnt very multi core friendly this game remains one of the only games i cant run on max settings. i installed high textures and visual mod and that didnt seem to effect my FPS too much. but launch a rocket with 100 parts and watch that FPS drop to  15 until i hit high atmosphere or space to get 60 frames again.

im really hoping the new unity engine fixes a lot of performance issues.

[Goddess Bhavani]

Single thread? They did a lot of multithread optimization with physics being run on separate core I believe. Performance shot up after that since 100+ part ships didn't start to bog down the frames as much. 

[klgraham1013]

Memory leaks.  Wildly inconsistent art.  Mods that are still just mods.  Toy solar system.

Edited November 12, 2017 by klgraham1013

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

Ugh

It would be great if the wheels worked on my venus rover (or at all!)

[Ten Key]

Hyperbolic intercepts. 

[medicdude]

In order; Long loads, noodle rockets/SAS instability (somewhat fixed with autostruts), excrement (apparently you can't use the 4 letter word for excrement?!?) wheels, lack of auto-saving to restore broken or kracken'd ships, and breaking of mods between versions.

The one big thing I'm looking forward to is the upcoming mission system improvements in making history, one thing I feel has been sorely lacking.

Although I've never experienced it I'm also flabbergasted that there are issues with RAM ceiling and the year is almost 2018.

I'll pay more money if I really have to, but plz squad, fix the broken things please, and provide a proper API for modders so you don't break their stuff with every patch, the ones literally providing your product additional value.

And CKAN (or something very similar) should be the official tool for mods, and should be accessible from main menu.

Edited November 12, 2017 by medicdude

[Lord Aurelius]

The thing that frustrates me the most is that the game still feels rough and unfinished over TWO YEARS after 1.0. The inconsistent art, missing sounds, broken part balance/career/tech tree/etc all frustrate me. Especially since at this point the devs are working on DLC so the broken placeholders are likely permanent now.

I can still hope that at some point the devs will go ahead and just bite the bullet and do a comprehensive balance and polish overhaul.

[MR L A]

19 hours ago, katateochi said:

Tags would be much better as they effectively do the same thing just with the added advantage that something can have multiple tags and therefore can be in multiple "folders" at the same time.

I disagree tbh. How it looks now is a mess and tagging alone doesn't fix that. The ideal solution would be both tags and subfolders but seeing as how Microsoft can't properly handle tagging/file search in windows, I have little hope that SQUAD can. Subfolders would be easier to implement imo, neater and less hassle to use (in terms of remembering exactly how you spelt your custom tag).  

[Ty Tan Tu]

On 11/11/2017 at 2:38 AM, James Kerman said:

Case in point: My underwater rover "The Neptune":

Well, with the two lights as eyes and the docking port for a mouth, 'Mr. Stupid Head' sound like a particularly appropriate name to me. 

[NotJebediah]

My only frustrating issue in KSP are random SAS glitches/ghost forces. I play on a technically vanilla KSP (The only mod is Basic DeltaV) and at random some force starts to "push" my craft in a weird angle. Like a Kraken attack, but it doesn't destroy anything. F5-F9, Timewarp, SAS on-off, uninstall-reinstall can't seem to help, I can't do anything against it. The craft reacts to my control, but it gains/keeps some level of angular momentum. When I keep an SAS marker the craft just tumbles around like a stoned whale. I tried designing without certain parts, full simmetry, on clipping, but I sitll can't figure it out.

[Hotel26]

The only thing more frustrating than the Vehicle Assembly Building editor is the Spaceplane Hangar Assembly editor.  I know they are hard to do and I don't want to sound ungrateful, but frustrated isn't the right word for spending ten minutes with these pieces of software: try livid.

EDIT: I have to admit though that I can be my own worst enemy: I keep forgetting the trick in the spaceplane hangar with just placing the part very approximately and then using the RGB-XYZ-rotator-translator control to fine-tune it.

[A plug for Kerbal Alarm Clock: best mod and my household has a no-mods policy.  Could not manage missions without it!]

Edited November 14, 2017 by Hotel26