Patch 1.4.3 to be released next week!

[Lisias]

"Oh, my God! Another patch delay? So I will have to play 1.4.1 KSP for another week?"

Ok. This is not a problem. :-)

And this is the very reason devs should be shielded from stake-holders, by the way.

[steve_v]

"Oh, my God! Another patch delay? So I will have to play 1.4.1 1.3.1 KSP for another week?"

FTFY.

1.4.0 & 1.4.1 also have serious regressions WRT 1.3.1.

 

7 minutes ago, Lisias said:

And this is the very reason devs should be shielded from stake-holders

So that they can blissfully beaver away at anything but what the customers actually want, presumably.
Besides, do you really believe a developer penned that update? If they did, it's a gratuitous misdirection of effort.

Edited April 21, 2018 by steve_v

[silverfox101]

I have to admit that it was only relatively recently not that long before I joined this forum that I found out I could copy KSP from steam to another location and play an older version for instance out of steam. I had thought that it had to be ran using Steam. It never crossed my mind to copy it elsewhere, I just play the game. I have come across others since who where unaware also.

As someone suggested and I have said previously, a KSP 1.5 final stable release with most bugs fixed and maybe some minor bug fixes I would be happy with. Then moving forward from that a separate dev release for however long it was required to be made available to those who have more experience with quashing bugs and getting into the bones of the game could participate in. For you average KSP like myself I don't want to update and find out landing legs don't work when I get to the Mun. It would also be a better solution for the developers and our talented mod makers out there. Anyhow the sun is shining again and the dog is sat here holding its lead, don't have to be a mind reader to know what she is hinting at. 

Nobody is against Squad, Its all about KSP. Everybody here is passionate about KSP and it shows. It is for that reason that comments even if some disagree with them make KSP what it is. I myself only found out about KSP via word of mouth, since then I have spread the word and introduced others to the joys of KSP. Anyway dog walking............

[genbrien]

10 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Player opinion, not moderator post. 

Squad: We are working on an update. 

Forum: You don't give them to us fast enough! 

Squad: If we give you release dates and then delays happen, you get mad. 

Forum: No! You MUST give us ALL THE INFORMATION! 

Squad: Okay, probably next week. 

Forum: WHERE IS IT? Furor, hubbub, ire, complaints! 

Squad: [depressed silence] 

Forum: WHY DON'T YOU TELL US WHEN UPDATES WILL ARRIVE? 

its pretty much like that for EVERY game though...

With Project CARS2 forum, when they released their 1st patches, the patch notes were quite small

People were complaining that they did not give enough info on what was changed/fixed

 

Next patch they made a HUGE patch note (over 200 items IIRC)

Well... people were complaining that it took too long to read all that and wanted shorter notes...

 

Dam if you do, dam if you dont

Better do things your way

Edited April 21, 2018 by genbrien

[steve_v]

10 minutes ago, silverfox101 said:

I had thought that it had to be ran using Steam.

Probably because Steam, and the game industry at large, has conditioned you to accept DRM and arbitrary restrictions a matter of course. Resist.

 

10 minutes ago, silverfox101 said:

moving forward from that a separate dev release for however long it was required to be made available to those who have more experience with quashing bugs and getting into the bones of the game could participate in.

A beta release stream! Prereleases! What a capital idea! Who'd 'a thunk it?
If we were discussing bugs in a prerelease, I bet you there would be no demanding, griping, or otherwise impatient comments here at all...
But what we're discussing is a much-hyped full release, made out to be the most-awesome-thing-ever that everyone should get so that they can buy the DLC, and it arrived as a buggy mess. Two patches later, it's still a buggy mess.

 

9 minutes ago, genbrien said:

people were complaining that it took too long to read all that and wanted shorter notes

Uhh, that's very silly. People need to learn how to search.

Edited April 21, 2018 by steve_v

[DeliriumTrigger]

6 minutes ago, steve_v said:

A beta release stream! Prereleases! What a capital idea! Who'd 'a thunk it?
If we were discussing bugs in a prerelease, I bet you there would be no demanding, griping, or otherwise impatient comments here at all...
But what we're discussing is a much-hyped full release, made out to be the most-awesome-thing-ever that everyone should get so that they can buy the DLC, and it arrived as a buggy mess.

I agree with what you're saying but the way you're saying it is counterproductive.  This level of snark isn't going to inspire anyone to do better.  

Your frustration is valid, it really isn't fair to paying customers to say a game is out of early access when pushing updates that break the game.  And the proposed solution would basically solve the current problem, as well as potentially making further updates happen much more smoothly both from a stock and modded game standpoint.   But the attached vitriol is really unnecessary.

Edited April 21, 2018 by nanobug

[Lisias]

5 hours ago, steve_v said:

1.4.0 & 1.4.1 also have serious regressions WRT 1.3.1.

Yes, or at least it''s what I'm being told. However, I have no 1.3.1 legacy to worry about and the bugs on the 1.4.1 doesn't bugs me - but there's one on 1.4.2 that got into my nerves. So I just rollbacked to 1.4.1 and I'm having fun since them (but granted, eventual grinds too).

Being a developer myself, I'm recognizing the reasons the 1.4 series are breaking up 1.3.1 mods, and let me tell you : they had no choice but to do it. This will make things better and faster on the short and long run for new players (as me). Sooner or later they would have to migrate to a new Unity's version anyway - new versions for key components, death and taxes: no one can run from them.

 

5 hours ago, steve_v said:

So that they can blissfully beaver away at anything but what the customers actually want, presumably.

No. :-)

So they can focus in what *need* to be done, and not what a myriad of stalking-holders "think" they should be doing. Someone, somewhere is responsible for this work, but not the developers. Developers should focus on developing the thing. What should be developed is, usually, a task for a third person.

Development *is hard enough*. I'm peeking the published API and let me tell you, the Dependency Structure Matrix for this thing must be... Intimidating at best. :-) 

Managing customer's expectations is a full time job by itself.

 

5 hours ago, steve_v said:

Besides, do you really believe a developer penned that update? If they did, it's a gratuitous misdirection of effort.

I can think of may reasons this had happened, the two main ones IMHO are:

1. the developers *knew* what's going to happen, but some business need had to be coped with and someone above them told them that this heat is a less undesirable collateral effect that what would happen by not doing it.
2. there's no one handling customer's expectations right now, and the dev team is handling this themselves.

The first option has no remedy - the guy with the guns, I mean, money is the guy that take the shots, I mean, decisions. If this is the reason, we must deal with TTI, not with Squad, in order to have this sorted out.

The second option appears to be easier to fix.

Edited April 21, 2018 by Lisias
and yet more bad grammar. X-(

[steve_v]

5 minutes ago, nanobug said:

it really isn't fair to paying customers to say a game is out of early access when pushing updates that break the game.

True.

5 minutes ago, nanobug said:

And the proposed solution would basically solve the current problem, as well as potentially making further updates happen much more smoothly both from a stock and modded game standpoint.

Also true.

5 minutes ago, nanobug said:

the attached vitriol is really unnecessary

Probably also true, but it wasn't aimed at @silverfox101. Squad did a prerelease, and it caught a lot of bugs*. Then they stopped doing that. Why, when 1.4.0 so clearly would have benefited from one, remains a mystery.
*And also generated it's own arguments, due to a stupid decision to distribute it only on steam...

 

3 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Being a developer myself, I'm recognizing the reasons the 1.4 series are breaking up 1.3.1 mods, and let me tell you : they had no choice but to do it.

I'm not concerned about mod compatibility, that always happens.

Edited April 21, 2018 by steve_v

[DeliriumTrigger]

2 minutes ago, steve_v said:

 

Probably also true, but it wasn't aimed at @silverfox101. Squad did a prerelease, and it caught a lot of bugs. Then they stopped doing that. Why, when 1.4.0 so clearly would have benefited from one, remains a mystery.

I know it wasn't aimed @silverfox101.  It's aimed at the dev team.  I'm just saying that it's not going to inspire them to listen to you.  A little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down.  Try to remember that these are human beings you're talking to and about.   They have feelings.

Edited April 21, 2018 by nanobug

[Lisias]

7 minutes ago, nanobug said:

 But the attached vitriol is really unnecessary.

People do what people do.

We need to draw a line somewhere to prevent verbal abuse escalation, but if you draw the line too low, people just leave. Paying people, I must remember.

One need to learn to tell bad from evil. Bad can be handled and it's not rarely useful.

People needs venting. It's what allow them to come back and try again. We need to learn to cope with that.

 

2 minutes ago, nanobug said:

Try to remember that these are human beings you're talking to and about.   They have feelings.

The same can and must be said about users.

Users invest they scarce free time on the game. Time that cannot be recalled. And they demand some satisfaction in exchange of such time invested - otherwise, they get angry. The very angry you get when your money invested didn't rewards as you was told it would.

Developers are being paid to develop. Users are paying to use. This is a HUGE difference.

Edited April 21, 2018 by Lisias

[Lisias]

23 minutes ago, steve_v said:

I'm not concerned about mod compatibility, that always happens.

My bad, I didn't expanded the idea correctly: the same things that break mods, break the game internally.

You can see KSP as a small, general physics and world drawing Kernel, and a ton of mods interacting with themselves in order to have something useful drawn on the screen. Some of these mods are written by Squad theirselves, some others by third-parties (us).

I have the feeling that when they updated the "kernel" to cope with Unity's new version, they didn't propagated correctly all the changes to their "mods", and then someone above them told them to rush the thing out the door at some arbitrary (from their point of view) date, and then they crunched things the best they cold to meet the deadline demands, not the quality ones.

Edited April 21, 2018 by Lisias
typos, typos!

[DeliriumTrigger]

13 minutes ago, Lisias said:

People do what people do.

We need to draw a line somewhere to prevent verbal abuse escalating, but if you draw the line too low, people just leave. Paying people, I must remember.

One need to learn to tell bad from evil. Bad can be handled and it's not rarely useful.

People needs venting. It's what allow them to come back and try again. We need to learn to cope with that.

 

Right.  Everybody is here because we love this game, and sometimes caring about things can lead to frustration boiling over.  Just trying to point out that we can vent our frustrations without being unnecessarily mean about it.  I totally get where @steve_v is coming from, I'm fairly frustrated myself since I'm basically waiting around for a stable 1.4.x release so I can play a career mode game with the new DLC stuff that I paid for.  I'm reluctant to even begin one with the current bugs.  Hearing that the bug fixes are being held up because of launchpads is certainly annoying, and I think suggesting that the devs separate new content from bug fixes is constructive feedback that they need to hear.  But beating them over the head with it and implying they don't care about their customers is just mean spirited.  I'm sure if they could wave a wand and fix everything to make everyone happy they would.  They love the game too.  Hopefully they learn from this mess and do better next time.

Edited April 21, 2018 by nanobug

[steve_v]

8 minutes ago, Lisias said:

I have the feeling that when they updated the "kernel" to cope with Unity's new version, they didn't propagated correctly all the changes to their "mods", and then someone above them told them to rush the thing out the door at some arbitrary (from their point of view) date, and then they crunched things the best they cold to meet the deadline demands, not the quality ones.

My feeling also, and it's only the bit from "then someone above them told them" onward that annoys me.

My vitriol is aimed squarely at whoever is making such decisions, but since I can't tell who is who from here, with the "stakeholder shield" and all, I can only direct it at "SQUAD" as a whole.

Perhaps I should clarify:

19 minutes ago, nanobug said:

It's aimed at the dev team.

That depends. If the devs are the ones who decided not to do a prerelease, and to release 1.4.0 in the state it was in, then yes. But I doubt it was the dev team, more likely some meddling manager or marketing team.

Edited April 21, 2018 by steve_v

[klgraham1013]

2 hours ago, G'th said:

Idk man, these instructions we'rent clear enough. My dog now owns my house and I owe 5 sandwiches to the Earl of Lacrosse team.

 

Now I know this is a lie, because dogs are loyal, human friends.  If anyone owns you and your house, it's a cat.  Cat's are truly the overlord no one sees coming.  Beware the cat.

[Lisias]

18 minutes ago, steve_v said:

My vitriol is aimed squarely at whoever is making such decisions, but since I can't tell who is who from here, with the "stakeholder shield" and all, I can only direct it at "SQUAD" as a whole.

What, IMHO, it's the right way to address the thing. The dev shielding is (between other things) precisely a way to redirect the backslash to the group as a whole, and not to individuals.

From now on, it's over the Squad's shoulders the responsibility to address the issue and fix the problem. How? Who? When? It's their decision, not ours.

They will win as a whole, or they will fall as a whole.

Edited April 21, 2018 by Lisias

[DeliriumTrigger]

9 minutes ago, steve_v said:

My vitriol is aimed squarely at whoever is making such decisions, but since I can't tell who is who from here, with the "stakeholder shield" and all, I can only direct it at "SQUAD" as a whole.

Perhaps I should clarify:

That depends. If the devs are the ones who decided not to do a prerelease, and to release 1.4.0 in the state it was in, then yes. But I doubt it was the dev team, more likely some meddling manager or marketing team.

Fair enough.  I share your suspicions that the directive to release in this state probably came from on high somewhere, and that the developers wouldn't regress in this way if it were up to them.  

Hard to say what's going on behind the scenes.  I just hope that whoever is making the decisions listens to feedback.  I'd happily do what I could to run prerelease builds through the paces and submit bug reports if it meant stable releases were truly stable and mod updates wouldn't get scattered across point releases, and surely there are plenty of other people here willing to do the same.  It's a waste to not take advantage of that going forward.

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, nanobug said:

Hearing that the bug fixes are being held up because of launchpads is certainly annoying, and I think suggesting that the devs separate new content from bug fixes is constructive feedback that they need to hear.

My point is that it's pointless (pun not intended) to address this to the developers. This is a business decision, and should be handled as such.

Devs do what the guy with the money tells them to do. We must address our concerns to these guys, not to the devs.

Since we don't know who's this guy, then we address our rage =P to the Squad Team as a whole, and then they have an argument to be used with that guy,

2 hours ago, nanobug said:

But beating them over the head with it and implying they don't care about their customers is just mean spirited.  I'm sure if they could wave a wand and fix everything to make everyone happy they would.  They love the game too.  Hopefully they learn from this mess and do better next time.

Well, clearly someone there really *do not* care about present customers, and are focusing on new ones. 

You are right, devs usually love what they do. But they need money to pay their bills, not love. And this money come from someone that doesn't love the game, but the incoming the game can provide him.

We, users, need to find a way to to use money to tell someone, somewhere, what they should not do with the game we love.

Edited April 21, 2018 by Lisias
(sigh) typos.

[steve_v]

3 minutes ago, Lisias said:

My point is that it's pointless (pun not intended) to address this to the developers.

I do (usually) try to avoid  anything that resembles "the developers should do [x]". I have no problem calling Squad out on bad decisions though, and I do like a bit of gory shop-floor technical detail in my announcements.
While I would sometimes like some names, so I can say "Gus the PR guy is clearly a moron, he orchestrated this whole debacle", it's probably best for everyone that we don't have those details.

[silverfox101]

Sorry for the long comment, just ideas from an old guy who like to play the game. I still play zx spectrum games, what do I know

@nanobugAs far as being vitriolic, not the case, just sharing and caring.

 

Edited April 21, 2018 by silverfox101

[DeliriumTrigger]

11 minutes ago, Lisias said:

My point is that it's pointless (pun not intended) to address this to the developers. This is a business decision, and should be handled as such.

Devs do what the guy with the money tells them to do. We must address our concerns to these guy, not to the devs.

Since we don't know who's this guy, then we address our rage =P to the Squad Team as a whole, and then they have an argument to be used with that guy,

I'm not so sure that releasing a patch that introduced a game breaking bug was a business decision.  Pushing the 1.4 release before it was ready to get the DLC out?  Sure.   But this landing leg thing feels more like typical code debt that piled up well before Take Two ever got involved.  They probably need to do a bunch of refactoring because the code base is getting sloppy and fixing one thing breaks 2 other things.  It's a common problem.

 

Edited April 21, 2018 by nanobug

[DeliriumTrigger]

11 minutes ago, silverfox101 said:

 

@nanobugAs far as being vitriolic, not the case, just sharing and caring.

 

I know, that wasn't directed at you.  And @steve_v wasn't being especially awful about it either.  I was just trying to keep the discussion constructive, not trying to wag my finger or make anyone feel bad.

[silverfox101]

Fair enough @nanobug, I'm more of a what you guys would say was a casual gamer anyway, probably not as informed on issues. Probably picked the wrong thread to comment on.

[Errol]

19 hours ago, BLN said:

That's exactly why I mentioned RockStar  . Squad is still working on the game because it is the original team but it's not meant to be forever IMO, especially on a hypothetical KSP 2

It is not still mostly the original team. Most of the original devs are no longer working on the game in fact. After the sale to 2K, there was a mass exodus of devs. That's when the dev notes also started to take a nose dive in quality again as well. We used to get a detailed paragraph from each dev about what they'd done that week. Then someone was hired to do that for them, who initially didn't understand enough about the game, or what the community wants to hear in dev notes. The format was changed, and things got a little better, we were even promised more developer articles. We had exactly 2 dev articles since last year. The "history" portion of the dev notes has been getting larger and larger, and the dev portion of the dev notes has been getting smaller and smaller.

They even acknowledge that they know we want more:
 

20 hours ago, SQUAD said:

There are of course more fixes and improvements included for the release which you will learn about once we publish the Changelog next week.

I have two main points:

1. I don't come to dev notes to read space history, that's what I play with mods for. I learn about things I've never heard of from mods, like ballutes and reaction wheel saturation. They give me interesting things to go look up, lots of referenced nasa articles. Honestly, I don't see the benefit to re-hashing information that can easily be found in context elsewhere. 

2. Start putting more detail in the dev notes again. Even just seeing the patch notes for the internal versions between official releases would be far more interesting/engaging than what the dev notes have become again. 

EDIT: Ping @Darth Badie

Edited April 21, 2018 by Errol

[LoSBoL]

22 minutes ago, Errol said:

Most of the original devs are no longer working on the game in fact. After the sale to 2K, there was a mass exodus of devs.

Sorry to correct you, but this is how stories start having their own lifes. If I recall correct, the mass exodus was right after KSP 1.2.2's introduction, which was way before Take2 purchased KSP's IP. I've seen the same attributes about the Making History expansion being Take 2's evil doing by introducing 'evil' DLC's to KSP. The Making History expansion was also announced before Take 2 was in the picture.

Edited April 21, 2018 by LoSBoL

[Errol]

1 minute ago, LoSBoL said:

Sorry to correct you, but this is how stories start having their own lifes. If I recall correct, the mass exodus was right after KSP 1.2.2's introduction, which was way before Take2 purchased KSP's IP. I've seen the same attributes about the Making History expansion being Take 2's evil doing by introducing 'evil' DLC's to KSP. The Making History expansion was also announced before Take 2 was in the picture.

I stand corrected. However, that is just a small discrepancy in the chronology of my post. My points still stand. Also.....the mass exodus was more of a gradual trickle, if I remember correctly.