KSP Weekly: Longest Stay on the Moon

[Raptor9]

1 hour ago, Vanamonde said:

Non-moderating, personal opinion post: 

I am convinced that most people would be happy with the parts Squad makes if Squad just put them out without giving people the change to complain about them first. 

Well like most things on various social mediums nowadays (forums, reddit, youtube, etc), it can be easy to get a false impression of the prevailing opinions.  I acknowledge that despite the few complaints every time a WIP image is released, there is a silent majority of forum users/players that don't weigh in for one reason or another.  I hope @SQUAD keeps that in mind whenever they release preview images.  I'm no programmer or 3D artist, but I'm sure it takes a lot of work and it can be easy to get a sense of broad disapproval from a small number of negative posts.

[Mako]

5 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Well, it's been "enhanced" with the features of 1.2.2

A very fair counterpoint. There is something more than just fixing what was broken. I would argue that "not broken" is the most imporant new feature of the "Enhanced Edition," but it is only fair to mention the other improvements as well.

Please allow me to offer a counter-counterpoint:

If they brought it up to 1.3(.1) with all the new languages that update brings then they might actually have an argument for calling it "enhanced." 1.2.2 is a logical version to target because it brought code refactoring that could improve performance (especially for a fixed hardware platform that can't gain improvements from hardware upgrades), and because targeting the original version (1.0.5?) of the console release was probably more difficult than targeting cleaned-up, optimized, less-spaghetti code. That's why I called it the "Finally Finished and Working" version, because 1.2.2 was in large part a polish and optimization update (if I remember correctly) the likes of which you'd see before releasing a finished product to market.

I do honestly give Squad credit for doing the right thing in fixing the console port. It's unfortunate that it's noteworthy praise to say a developer or company is doing the right thing, but it is rather remarkable. That being said, there's no way to know how much credit moving to 1.2.2 deserves. Would they have moved to 1.2.2 if the original code was salvageable? I believe that 1.2.2 was the best choice for Squad and Blitworks. Credit where it's due: it's also a good choice for customers in that it likely makes the fixed version available sooner than if they had targeted 1.3.1.

Overall, I do need to mention that I agree with saying it seems disingenuous calling it "Enhanced Edition." It has a very the-guys-in-marketing-said-sell-it-like-there-was-never-a-problem feel to it. It rubs me the wrong way a bit, because I find I have a lot more respect for a person or company who owns their mistakes and works to fix them. Acting/sounding like you're doing someone a favor by fixing the mistakes feels insulting and like you're only doing it because you have to and not because you want to.

And now I've said way more about this than is probably needed.

 

TL;DR - Yes, Squad is ultimately doing the right thing. Which is what everyone should do. Do the right thing people -- with or without acknowledgement from others -- and try not to show off or make it seem like you're doing everyone a huge favor by doing the right thing.

[stibbons]

2 hours ago, Mako said:

If they brought it up to 1.3(.1) with all the new languages that update brings then they might actually have an argument for calling it "enhanced." 1.2.2 is a logical version to target because it brought code refactoring that could improve performance (especially for a fixed hardware platform that can't gain improvements from hardware upgrades), and because targeting the original version (1.0.5?) of the console release was probably more difficult than targeting cleaned-up, optimized, less-spaghetti code.

It's nowhere near that complicated. This release is 1.2.2 because that was the latest when porting work started. Whether work will start on a 1.3.1/1.4 release after this one's out the door remains to be seen, but my money is on yes, targetting a concurrent Making History release.

Edited December 10, 2017 by stibbons

[Mako]

28 minutes ago, stibbons said:

It's nowhere near that complicated. This release is 1.2.2 because that was the latest when porting work started. Whether work will start on a 1.3.1/1.4 release after this one's out the door remains to be seen, but my money is on yes, targetting a concurrent Making History release.

Sure, that was the latest when the work started. But unless I'm misremembering things, 1.3 is on the same version of Unity as 1.2.2, so no engine work is involved in bringing the console version into parity with the PC version. The biggest change with 1.3 is to the UI to facilitate translations. Targeting either 1.2.2 or 1.3 would mean implementing the optimized coding, so since they were rebuilding it all from scratch anyway why not just target the updated UI as well? Unless they thought that would take to long. Or unless the old UI was done and working before 1.3 came out, but 1.3 has been out for a while and the changes had been in production in tandem with a lot of the console version update work. In fact, 1.3 has now been out longer (6 months 15 days) then the amount of time between the announcement of Blitworks working on the new console version and the release of 1.3 (5 months 12 days).

Obviously it's more complicated than this, but if the old UI was complete before 1.3 released, they've now had longer than it took them to complete the old UI implementation to instead offer the new implementation. I'll say it again. I know it is way more complicated than this and there's much more to account for, but it does appear the time could be there to just go to 1.3(.1), albeit with a bit more delay to release, instead of completely implementing old UI that would all need to be redone if they want the console version to keep up with the PC version. It's twice the work to get to the same place in the end, and it seems horribly inefficient if the goal was always to get the expansion out on consoles at some point.

It probably is exactly what you said, but it sounds like they're going about it the slower, more expensive way if that's the case.

Edited December 10, 2017 by Mako

[stibbons]

2 hours ago, Mako said:

Targeting either 1.2.2 or 1.3 would mean implementing the optimized coding, so since they were rebuilding it all from scratch anyway why not just target the updated UI as well?

Because you don't switch targets midway.

[Wallygator]

On 08/12/2017 at 10:39 PM, klgraham1013 said:

I approve of the console name!

I was thinking “What you originally thought you were getting in the first place” edition 

 

[0111narwhalz]

Since SQUAD seems to enjoy the junkyard aesthetic so much, why not call it "Duct Tape and Prayers Edition?"
The botched FT release being the "Not Enough Struts Edition," naturally.

[Majorjim!]

18 hours ago, Raptor9 said:

And I for one like the new monoprop tank

What do you like about it?

 

21 hours ago, Bottle Rocketeer 500 said:

What I dislike the most is that that yellow stripe is too uniform, and that it looks like something made in a few minutes as a placeholder,

This. It looks like it took five minutes to make. It's too uniform, too bland and sterile looking compared to the one we have now.

10 hours ago, Raptor9 said:

Well like most things on various social mediums nowadays (forums, reddit, youtube, etc), it can be easy to get a false impression of the prevailing opinions.  I acknowledge that despite the few complaints every time a WIP image is released, there is a silent majority of forum users/players that don't weigh in for one reason or another.  I hope @SQUAD keeps that in mind whenever they release preview images.  I'm no programmer or 3D artist, but I'm sure it takes a lot of work and it can be easy to get a sense of broad disapproval from a small number of negative posts.

Hang on, you think Squad didn't expect anyone to not like what they post..? You post something, anything, and opinion will always be divided. I'm not a yes man mate, If I don't like something I will say so. I think it's very healthy and productive to listen to both sides of an argument [sic] and to make judgments and conclusions based on both.

 Squad would do well to heed this. And I am sure they are grown up enough to know it's not personal. It's just buisness.

12 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Non-moderating, personal opinion post: 

I am convinced that most people would be happy with the parts Squad makes if Squad just put them out without giving people the change to complain about them first. 

Really? You think peoples opinions would change simply because they didn't have a chance to voice them? How peculiar..

Edited December 10, 2017 by Majorjim!

[SG Aero]

I'm honestly quite confused why they are even including the level making DLC. Wouldn't it just make more sense to include it as part of the full game? Honestly this game shouldn't even have DLC, as they can't add any new parts as DLC without screwing up the craft sharing community.

[Deddly]

4 hours ago, ShadowGoat said:

I'm honestly quite confused why they are even including the level making DLC. Wouldn't it just make more sense to include it as part of the full game? Honestly this game shouldn't even have DLC, as they can't add any new parts as DLC without screwing up the craft sharing community.

I get what you are saying, but how would that finance continued development? 

[SG Aero]

Idk donations or new buyers? They need more advertising.

[RoverDude]

'Donations' are not a viable financial basis for a for-profit company that has a payroll   

[tater]

On 12/8/2017 at 11:05 PM, Raptor9 said:

Speaking of switching textures, I have long wished for a feature that would change regular tanks (like the FL-series) from the current white/black to a gold or silver Mylar foil, like the picture of an early Altair render below left.  Or even larger series tanks like Rockomax or Kerbodyne models to make something like in the picture below right of the Copernicus MTV.

          

And if we were getting really fancy, some stats tweaking could be included that would have pros/cons to justify the switch.  Example: normal style has more mass but stronger and more impact/heat resistant, whereas the foil-wrapped version would be lighter but more susceptible to excessive G-load or shock heating failures (i.e. exploding in KSP )

Like these?

 

20 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Non-moderating, personal opinion post: 

I am convinced that most people would be happy with the parts Squad makes if Squad just put them out without giving people the change to complain about them first. 

I think that many of us realize that new parts are a substantial amount of dev work by the people capable of making them, and we see... "less than ideal" new parts as a lost opportunity, since making a "meh" part takes about as much work as making a good one. Look at cylindrical tanks. They are not complex objects, yet the stock 2.5m tanks, as the obvious example look terrible. Not "meh," it's like they were intentionally made ugly.

[StrandedonEarth]

6 minutes ago, tater said:

Like these? 

Yes, Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease!

[RoverDude]

12 minutes ago, tater said:

Like these?

[Speaking purely as a player, and not a Squad employee]

No thank you.  While lovely, they are incredibly jarring with the current stock aesthetic. 

[passinglurker]

7 hours ago, Majorjim! said:

This. It looks like it took five minutes to make. It's too uniform, too bland and sterile looking compared to the one we have now.

Oh thank god I wasn't the only one who noticed. I find it unfortunate that normal maps a great tool for increasing fidelity is just being used to mask completely sterile swaths of texture.

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, RoverDude said:

[Speaking purely as a player, and not a Squad employee]

No thank you.  While lovely, they are incredibly jarring with the current stock aesthetic. 

But when you can have nice shiny stock parts.... (Thanks to @Electrocutor's stock conversion patch for @Shadowmage's Textures Unlimited PBR shader bundle)

[Raptor9]

8 hours ago, Majorjim! said:

What do you like about it?

The consistency between the DLC 1.875m monoprop tanks and the new "base" game tank look.  And because I prefer eggs to tuna cans. 

8 hours ago, Majorjim! said:

Hang on, you think Squad didn't expect anyone to not like what they post..? You post something, anything, and opinion will always be divided. I'm not a yes man mate, If I don't like something I will say so. I think it's very healthy and productive to listen to both sides of an argument [sic] and to make judgments and conclusions based on both.

 Squad would do well to heed this. And I am sure they are grown up enough to know it's not personal. It's just buisness.

I'm not saying anyone is or should be a yes man, I was responding to Vanamode's post (no one else's) in saying that just because a small number of people post their disapproval, it's not indicative of the prevailing opinion.  In my real-life job, I gauge how well things are going by how quiet everyone is.  It's human nature to not say anything when everything is going well, but if someone doesn't like a product, those negative reviews and surveys get filled out real quick.  So I agree that it is healthy and productive to hear both sides, but I was simply saying that many times people don't feel the same motivation to point out the positive as they do to point out the negative.

While Squad as a company is well-known to be a marketing company, and would undoubtedly understand this, the individual employees of the KSP development team are not; rather they are composed of game coders and 3D artists.  I am sure they are all grown up as you said, but a little positive reinforcement never hurt anyone either.

1 hour ago, tater said:

Like these?

Not quite, because those would (like @RoverDude pointed out from a player's persective) be quite a different look than the existing parts.  More along the lines of the ROUND-8 Toroidal Fuel Tank, but just in the shape of longer, rounded off cylinder like in the first picture you posted.  Or the PB-X150 Xenon Container as an example for silver Mylar foil.  But that's just my personal preference.

[passinglurker]

2 minutes ago, Raptor9 said:

The consistency between the DLC 1.875m monoprop tanks and the new "base" game tank look.  And because I prefer eggs to tuna cans. 

No disagreement here the new models have generally been nice. Its the textures that haven't consistently met the mark.

[Raptor9]

11 minutes ago, passinglurker said:

Its the textures that haven't consistently met the mark.

I went back and re-read your posts above, along with some of the other players' posts regarding texture.  I'm curious, what exactly do you mean?  Is it about how the light is hitting it, or you want more greeble detail like rivets or "general wear and tear" from Kerbals handling it; like the grayish "rub marks" on the current one below the upper gray band.

Edited December 10, 2017 by Raptor9
grammer

[tater]

3 hours ago, RoverDude said:

[Speaking purely as a player, and not a Squad employee]

No thank you.  While lovely, they are incredibly jarring with the current stock aesthetic. 

Given the stock aesthetic of extant rocket parts... yeah, it's jarring. Of course the stock aesthetic means that the bulk of rocket parts look like rusty 1950s (steel) beer cans (on a good day).

The stock rocket parts look jarring next to the @Porkjet spaceplane parts, too (or the spaceplane parts look jarring, it's one or the other).

My observations on all the new parts for Making History:

1. They are really nice.

2. I wish they didn't have to play nice with the godawful looking stock rocket parts, since those should have been rebooted long ago.

[Wallygator]

5 hours ago, RoverDude said:

'Donations' are not a viable financial basis for a for-profit company that has a payroll   

Unless said company has a overwhelmingly compelling USP that inspires people to contribute for the greater good.

KSP isn’t that and was never intended to be.

However, (to tilt a windmill) such an organisation may still arise in a post-capitalist future.

Regardless, I look forward to the next release and I sincerely hope that the fortunes of squad and all of us players will be realised. 

Or at the very least more bugs will be squashed than born. 

Edited December 11, 2017 by Wallygator

[passinglurker]

3 hours ago, Raptor9 said:

I went back and re-read your posts above, along with some of the other players' posts regarding texture.  I'm curious, what exactly do you mean?  Is it about how the light is hitting it, or you want more greeble detail like rivets or "general wear and tear" from Kerbals handling it; like the grayish "rub marks" on the current one below the upper gray band.

Well these rcs tanks like many of the MH-era parts utilize a cheap trick of just layering a uniform repeating normal map over a sterile flat stretch of diffuse map. you take away the normal map and it looks like a flat grey base with flat yellow band painted down the middle, and that exact trick looks cheap its always looked cheap, and I've pointed this out and explained how in half a dozen different ways since it first surfaced in the 1.875m  fuel tanks that this normal map trick is cheap. You could literally recreate the broad outside face of this fuel tank in 10 minutes or less with nothing but a box-selector, a paint fill tool, and xnormal to generate the normal map bit. Compare to any modder or former dev known for thier textures and you'd see these sort of normal map depressions filled out with hand painted details as part of the diffuse and specular map that reflect the presence of these depressions.

So in this case the problem isn't the lack of a exact type of detail like smudge or scratch but just the general lack of detail whatsoever. Such a lack of detail that without the normal map there would be literally nothing there.

Now to be fair this rcs tank and all the other parts that suffer from this problem could just be in perpetual WIP limbo. A lot of the early rage about this squads defenders like to harp on was because squad didn't communicate how WIP everything was this early in MH's development so hopefully they'll give this an extra detail and polish pass before release. These are genuinely a good start with well done meshes. We just need a little more attention to detail in order to equal the standard of quality we already have in game.

Edited December 11, 2017 by passinglurker

[Kaa253]

Apollo 17 also conducted the longest traverse or lunar drive by a lunar rover, covering a distance of nearly 36 kms! Perhaps more importantly the Apollo 17 landing was the first, last and only Moon landing that carried a real honest-to-goodness scientist already renowned for his field of expertise. I am talking (of course) about Dr Harrison Schmitt, Geologist, last person (to date) to have stepped onto the Moon, later a US Senator and all-round astronaut role model/hero.

The cancellation of the Apollo lunar landings program ranked for me as one of the saddest events of my life, a comparable depth of emotion to the losses of President Kennedy and John Lennon. (Note my location, I am a scientist/citizen of Earth but not of the U.S.A.).

[Cheif Operations Director]

22 hours ago, Mako said:

A very fair counterpoint. There is something more than just fixing what was broken. I would argue that "not broken" is the most imporant new feature of the "Enhanced Edition," but it is only fair to mention the other improvements as well.

Please allow me to offer a counter-counterpoint:

If they brought it up to 1.3(.1) with all the new languages that update brings then they might actually have an argument for calling it "enhanced." 1.2.2 is a logical version to target because it brought code refactoring that could improve performance (especially for a fixed hardware platform that can't gain improvements from hardware upgrades), and because targeting the original version (1.0.5?) of the console release was probably more difficult than targeting cleaned-up, optimized, less-spaghetti code. That's why I called it the "Finally Finished and Working" version, because 1.2.2 was in large part a polish and optimization update (if I remember correctly) the likes of which you'd see before releasing a finished product to market.

I do honestly give Squad credit for doing the right thing in fixing the console port. It's unfortunate that it's noteworthy praise to say a developer or company is doing the right thing, but it is rather remarkable. That being said, there's no way to know how much credit moving to 1.2.2 deserves. Would they have moved to 1.2.2 if the original code was salvageable? I believe that 1.2.2 was the best choice for Squad and Blitworks. Credit where it's due: it's also a good choice for customers in that it likely makes the fixed version available sooner than if they had targeted 1.3.1.

Overall, I do need to mention that I agree with saying it seems disingenuous calling it "Enhanced Edition." It has a very the-guys-in-marketing-said-sell-it-like-there-was-never-a-problem feel to it. It rubs me the wrong way a bit, because I find I have a lot more respect for a person or company who owns their mistakes and works to fix them. Acting/sounding like you're doing someone a favor by fixing the mistakes feels insulting and like you're only doing it because you have to and not because you want to.

And now I've said way more about this than is probably needed.

 

TL;DR - Yes, Squad is ultimately doing the right thing. Which is what everyone should do. Do the right thing people -- with or without acknowledgement from others -- and try not to show off or make it seem like you're doing everyone a huge favor by doing the right thing.

You understand 1.2.2 Isn't just a patch it's the final version of 1.2 Which adds Kerbal Network, Relay Satellites, and all those antennas basically it makes satillites worth something.

Edited December 11, 2017 by Cheif Operations Director