KSP Weekly: Ultima Thule

[Benji]

Hach, I miss the times the devnotes talked about fighting pointers, float-integer-conversions and memory-management-stuff.

[severedsolo]

I for one welcome our part revamp overlords.

[Moss]

Huzzah! FL-T series revamps. Almost feel like I owe SQUAD an apology after complaining about how horrible the current ones look. 

[klgraham1013]

56 minutes ago, Moss said:

Huzzah! FL-T series revamps. Almost feel like I owe SQUAD an apology after complaining about how horrible the current ones look. 

No need to apologize for honest and correct statements. 

3 hours ago, Benji said:

Hach, I miss the times the devnotes talked about fighting pointers, float-integer-conversions and memory-management-stuff.

Well, that's why it's KSP Weekly now, and not Dev Notes.  The development part is optional.

[Frozen_Heart]

So excited to see the 1.25m parts getting an overhaul. It's been desperately needed for a long time.

 

0.625m next?

[klesh]

7 hours ago, passinglurker said:

If they are willing to cut corners where we can see them then they are definitely already cutting corners where we can't see them. As a result its very important for the community to care and hold squad to the standards for professional work and quality we've come to expect from squad's predecessors.

 

For instance the offset CoM's on a bunch of the MH parts.  You couldn't see it unless you looked at the part by itself with the CoM turned on.   In one instance it took them over 100 days with a couple patches coming and going with no fix to sort out the problems with Soyuz boosters so they decouple in a uniform way, making a nice Korolev Cross, and not spinning off in all directions.  It was literally a fix that could take 30 seconds, and the correct values were even given in the bug report.

Or how about the new Structural Tubes and Engine Plates from MH?  Because of sloppy copying and pasting, every version of the parts had the same mass and cost values (75 kg, 300 funds to use, 3000 funds to unlock) regardless of diameter.  Somehow those were released to the QA team who apparently didn't notice (or for whatever reason, they were not fixed for the expansion's release).  They were then bundled in and sold as professionally done parts.  Bug tracker got a report 10 days after the release of MH, and it took until 1.4.4/MH1.3 to get a fix for that.... except its just a fix for the Structural Tubes, because there are more unfixed problems with the Engine Plates...  They still reverse fuel flow when that view is toggled on, and they still confuse the Engineer's report which will tell you that the decoupler on them is backwards.  Who knows when the mass, cost, and various additional functionalities are going to be fixed for the Engine Plates, possibly the most useful part in the entire expansion.

Thats the kind of sloppiness that I don't expect when I am paying extra for these parts.  Especially when I can get working parts for free.

 

Ooof.

[passinglurker]

1 hour ago, Frozen_Heart said:

So excited to see the 1.25m parts getting an overhaul. It's been desperately needed for a long time.

 

0.625m next?

You're excited for them to break and quadruple in ram footprint like the 2.5m revamp? 

 

[panzer1b]

8 hours ago, StarStreak2109 said:

The game costs 40 bucks now, 55 bucks, if you count the DLC in. That is almost on par with an AAA game title. For that you get a game essentially still in beta, with pretty outdated graphics. Unity can do so much more as other Unity based games show. But that is not the point here. My point is that if I buy the game now, I am paying at least 40 bucks and get mediocre graphics. At least some effort should be made to make the game look as pretty as possible, without giving up on its heritage. Many modders in here have shown that this is possible, and "unfortunately", this is the standard the base game is measured by.

It is of course also understood, that this game has some history, i.e. the "original" game's scope was much different / smaller, than what it is now and that this history is also a burden. But all of this is IMHO no excuse to not just try to walk the extra mile to get as best a result as possible.

I have to agree with this, and as ive seen, with the right mods the game looks amazingly stunning and almost as good as a AAA title, but sadly that requires ALOT of mods to pull off...

My own custom made glow textures for the engines (stock ones look unrealistic and just plain ugly).  No idea if i should even release this as a mod as its just a quick 5 minute photoshop job, but it does look better then stock by a long shot...

And ofc the near mandatory EVE (running my SciFiVE cloud configs), scatterer, texture replacer (i just cant stand the stock skybox), and possibly KS3P if only for the glowy bloom effect and the lighting changes that makes the entire game alot darker and more authentic looking.

 

Now im not unhappy with what squad has done sofar (even the not super great rocketmax tanks are far superior to the oil drums on space craft, only refineries get the drums) as its relatively trivial to edit a texture i dont like on a model (ive already done a few modifications to the rocketmax fuel tank textures squad released in 1.4 to make em a bit better, fixed normal maps, ect), but i do agree with what some of the people here are saying, porkjet set a incredible standard with his work without going to the crazy high polycounts some of the modders on here have done (as amazing as ven's revamp and many other modder's custom models are, they are not resource friendly at all).  Currently its not that bad, but ive actually looked at some of the MH parts and they are nowhere near as impressive as porkjets parts in that they require more polys, and have inferios textures (not to mention the lack of a glow texture on most if not all newly released engines).

 

Still, ill take the new models over what we have, the one and only thing i cant stand in stock KSP right now part wise are the 1.2m LFO tanks, they are so terrible looking they should not be seen on any vessel that isnt made by pirates (and thus already looked like it was pulled out of a dumpster by design)...

 

Edited August 5, 2018 by panzer1b

[panzer1b]

1 hour ago, passinglurker said:

You're excited for them to break and quadruple in ram footprint like the 2.5m revamp?

This is not entirely true, the MAIN reason for the increase in ram is the fact that the texture size increased by a huge amount.  You can argue as to whether its a good idea to use 4 2048x2048 textures, but looking at the total size of the 3D models:

 

The model (.mu files) total size has gone from a previous 308kb to 214kb.  So the new models are actually superior in terms of space efficiency vs the old style models.

 

The textures have gone from a total size 5.3mb of to a new size of 21.3mb.  Yes this is a HUGE increase to texture size, but if you consider that the resolution went from a variety between 512x512 to 1024x1024, all the way up to 2048x2048, you can understand WHY the size increased that much.  Personally, i would not justify using 2048 sized normals as that is beyond overkill imo for a 2.5m tank (might be required on 5m parts to preserve detail, but thats about the smallest part id consider using 2048 textures on realistically).

 

So anyways, im not questioning your conclusion as to teh new parts taking more RAM, but it is NOT due to bad modeling/art, its purely because of the choice to use such massive texture resolutions (which i myself would not have used, not for normals) instead of smaller ones like older parts had.  Also, if you are super concerned about texture sizes, feel free to open them in photoshop/editor of choice, and lower the res, itll still look better then the oil drums we had b4...

 

Ohh and a bit of a side though, i just checked the texture sizes used by porkjet, and he selected 1024x1024 for most of his parts, so there is why its so much more efficient on RAM.  1024x1024 is imo pretty standard for KSP, since its high enough to get good details in, but low enough to not eat RAM.  Just drop the 2.5m tanks to that size and they are equivalent to porkjet's art in RAM footprint...

Edited August 5, 2018 by panzer1b

[Redneck]

1.5 new tanks and bugfixes? Thats it? Roverdude could bust those out in a weekend! Come on man give us something useful this update! We have done all kinds of stuff OUTSIDE the ship how about stuff to do INSIDE the ship. Us sandbox players havent really gotten a update in a long long time if you think about it. We got a couple of parts in the dlc launch and landing site but thats about it for last 2 years. Career builder and Localization updates have no bearing on a english speaking sandbox player. Can it be our turn this time? And while we are on subject of parts can we get proper attachment nodes/colliders on the cargo bay doors for attaching stuff such as radiators (and whatever else people come up with) and solar panels

Edited August 5, 2018 by Redneck

[ThreePounds]

This weekly wasn't posted on reddit. It's as if they'd knew how poorly the new part revamp would be received. Not that KSP weekly have managed to spark much interest on the KSP subreddit in the past.

[passinglurker]

1 hour ago, panzer1b said:

(as amazing as ven's revamp and many other modder's custom models are, they are not resource friendly at all)

Ven's revamp started on the idea of how far you could push things and still fit in the same footprint as the squad-folder if you did it efficiently. As a result its has its own standards for texel density and polycounts from what is often refered to as "stock-alike"

As for other modders I'm not sure who all you are refering too but one example I have is Cobalt's BDB which has over 400 high quality parts of all sizes from sounding rockets and probes to saturnV's and skylabs (the squad folder has like ~300-350 parts?) yet has half the footprint. Any modern post-porkjet mod at least is going to be crazy resource friendly compared to what we've seen squad put out.
 

56 minutes ago, panzer1b said:

This is not entirely true, the MAIN reason for the increase in ram is the fact that the texture size increased by a huge amount. 

You don't need 2k textures for 2.5m fuel tanks especially ones using practically flat colors like this. The texel density as a result is all out of whack and wasted on such a dull sterile design. Not only that but the texture is then duplicated for the pallet swap a feature they are also adding to the 1.25m tanks. this may not be a problem if done efficiently but squad has demonstrated that UV mapping is another corner they often cut...
 

56 minutes ago, panzer1b said:

The model (.mu files) total size has gone from a previous 308kb to 214kb.  So the new models are actually superior in terms of space efficiency vs the old style models.

Not even 100kb. Its better to leak geometry than it is pixels. vertices go farther. Also pop that model into blender you'll see that fuel pipe on the side is weirdly high poly compared to the rest of the mesh its just sloppy, and is a sure sign of bigger problems if they would be willing to ship mistakes like these.
 

56 minutes ago, panzer1b said:

Yes this is a HUGE increase to texture size, but if you consider that the resolution went from a variety between 512x512 to 1024x1024, all the way up to 2048x2048, you can understand WHY the size increased that much.

Done efficiently you could fit good 2.5m textures in a half to a quarter of that look at the techniques porkjet and modern modders use, and they make good use of that space for detailing. Something as simplistic as these flat color monstrosities  could be recreated in an even smaller footprint.
 

56 minutes ago, panzer1b said:

So anyways, im not questioning your conclusion as to teh new parts taking more RAM, but it is NOT due to bad modeling/art, its purely because of the choice to use such massive texture resolutions (which i myself would not have used, not for normals) instead of smaller ones like older parts had.  Also, if you are super concerned about texture sizes, feel free to open them in photoshop/editor of choice, and lower the res, itll still look better then the oil drums we had b4...

No it very much is due to bad modeling the UV map is part of the mesh and a sucky one like this helps drive the crazy inefficient use of texture space. Which is again wasted because they are just painting the diffuse map with flat simple colors and what detail you think you see such as foam or corigation is actually in the normal map(which is why the normal map resolution is so damn high).

I'd go as far to say they are NOT better than the oildrums as out of place as they may have been somebody still actually had to use more than a box selector and a fill tool to make those...

Edited August 5, 2018 by passinglurker

[klesh]

4 minutes ago, Three_Pounds said:

This weekly wasn't posted on reddit. It's as if they'd knew how poorly the new part revamp would be received.

 

They were not impressed to say the least.

 

Spoiler

 

https://old.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/94jtpf/so_what_happened/

[ThreePounds]

6 minutes ago, klesh said:

 

They were not impressed to say the least.

 

  Hide contents

 

https://old.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/94jtpf/so_what_happened/

hillarious!

[passinglurker]

9 minutes ago, klesh said:

 

They were not impressed to say the least.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

https://old.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/94jtpf/so_what_happened/

Its even my new flag 
 

[klesh]

I mean, at this point, I'd rather have the 2018 edition.  The 2016's are just going to be yet another mismatching set.  Missing History already reskins the 2016 1.25m tanks and adds the variants in stock style so you get a bit of both worlds, should you feel like fixing stuff with mods.

I would've rather spent the $15 I did for MH on a skin pack/art dlc that brought everything up to a 2018 standard.

[passinglurker]

On 8/3/2018 at 7:21 PM, Nertea said:

Damnnit guys I'll do it almost pro bono. Two UCS Millenium Falcons. 

@klesh and what if you did have a bunch of nice parts to match the 2016 set? What if squad gave in? what if modders came through? I mean by the looks of it nertea's already halfway there with the launch vehicle side of things. 

We shouldn't have to settle for halfbaked goods

Edited August 5, 2018 by passinglurker

[Vanamonde]

Personal opinion. Not moderator statement. 

For people who express so much hatred for the game and the people who make it, you guys sure do play it and talk about it a lot. When I dislike a game, I stop playing it. I don't just keep going back to its forum to insult the makers for years at a time. It's better for my mental and emotional health. 

[passinglurker]

6 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:

Personal opinion. Not moderator statement. 

For people who express so much hatred for the game and the people who make it, you guys sure do play it and talk about it a lot. When I dislike a game, I stop playing it. I don't just keep going back to its forum to insult the makers for years at a time. It's better for my mental and emotional health. 

You are wrong. I insult thier poor work not the people who make it. I don't know why the work is poor after all maybe it's time constraints dictated from the top maybe it's inexperience resulting from lapses in judgement from the hiring manager maybe they just suck but I can't see that I can only see thier products and vocally judge thier product to be lacking by both subjective and objective metrics.

EDIT: Also need I remind you they asked for feedback 

Edited August 5, 2018 by passinglurker

[Redneck]

24 minutes ago, klesh said:

 

They were not impressed to say the least.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

https://old.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/94jtpf/so_what_happened/

jesus man i went to the link......I dont know what to say. I dont like the fact of them beating up on roverdudes work. He does the best he can. Ive seen him do awesome great stuff on his twitch streams. So there has to be another factor at play here. He is under all these damm DND agreements and legal crap so he cant defend himself if he wanted to. I dont know who is calling the shots over there or who determines whats going in the next update or the roadmaps but my opinion is that they are WAAAAAAYYYY out of touch with what the players want or the games development moving forward and have been for a long time. I have one question for that person. "what does KSP look like in the next year? Or 2 years?" I hope the answer is not "Umm, Well, we retextured old parts and fixed bugs that we didnt fix the last time we said we were going to fix bugs that the time before that we didnt fix" 

[passinglurker]

1 minute ago, Redneck said:

jesus man i went to the link......I dont know what to say. I dont like the fact of them beating up on roverdudes work. He does the best he can. Ive seen him do awesome great stuff on his twitch streams. So there has to be another factor at play here. He is under all these damm DND agreements and legal crap so he cant defend himself if he wanted to. I dont know who is calling the shots over there or who determines whats going in the next update or the roadmaps but my opinion is that they are WAAAAAAYYYY out of touch with what the players want or the games development moving forward and have been for a long time. I have one question for that person. "what does KSP look like in the next year? Or 2 years?" I hope the answer is not "Umm, Well, we retextured old parts and fixed bugs that we didnt fix the last time we said we were going to fix bugs that the time before that we didnt fix" 

Did you ever consider the possibility this isn't roverdudes work? Like the textures for the outside surface are super simple like box selector and fill tool simple anyone on the staff with intro-photoshop knowledge could do it and modeling cylinders ain't hard either. Even I would consider it an insult to RD to pin these tanks on him so it has to be someone less qualified.

[Redneck]

7 minutes ago, passinglurker said:

Did you ever consider the possibility this isn't roverdudes work? Like the textures for the outside surface are super simple like box selector and fill tool simple anyone on the staff with intro-photoshop knowledge could do it and modeling cylinders ain't hard either. Even I would consider it an insult to RD to pin these tanks on him so it has to be someone less qualified.

I was referring to the reddit link. They were beating up on rover. And I dont like that and I dont think, after all he has done for the community, deserves that. And yes what you said is totally possible it may not be his work. So all the more reason those people should leave his name out of it

[klesh]

34 minutes ago, passinglurker said:

@klesh and what if you did have a bunch of nice parts to match the 2016 set? What if squad gave in? what if modders came through? I mean by the looks of it nertea's already halfway there with the launch vehicle side of things.

 

I offered to buy those 3.75m parts for myself. I would adore KSP looking like that. 

Modders can be tough though.  I really do see value in parts coming from Squad that are "guaranteed" to work with all future versions of the game.  A modded part that looks great today may be abandoned or forgotten a year from now. 
 

 

7 minutes ago, Redneck said:

I was referring to the reddit link. They were beating up on rover. And I dont like that and I dont think, after all he has done for the community, deserves that. And yes what you said is totally possible it may not be his work. So all the more reason those people should leave his name out of it

 

I just saw it on reddit, I didn't post or even have an account there.  However, I just searched the page with control+f for "rover" and didnt see anyone particularly "beating up" on him, personally or otherwise. Am I missing it?

[passinglurker]

11 minutes ago, Redneck said:

I was referring to the reddit link. They were beating up on rover. And I dont like that and I dont think, after all he has done for the community, deserves that. And yes what you said is totally possible it may not be his work. So all the more reason those people should leave his name out of it

Yeah no on second thought you're probably overthinking this I just parsed the thread I saw no rover bashing.

specifically this -> "I'm not very fond of his texturing, he can get fairly detailed, but, at the risk of going very subjective, Porkjet had flair that I, personally, just don't feel in the new work." <- isn't rover bashing. the rest is just confusuion over when he started working at squad and if he's still there.

Edited August 5, 2018 by passinglurker

[Redneck]

good lets keep it that way. Shall we move on now?

Edited August 5, 2018 by Redneck