Let pilots be able to land a ship.

[Vanamonde]

The thread has been pruned a bit because the argument turned personal. Please talk about the game rather than each other. 

[Loskene]

1 hour ago, Vanamonde said:

The thread has been pruned a bit because the argument turned personal. Please talk about the game rather than each other. 

[Jacke]

I remember back in the bad old days of 0.23 when the joints were so weak that pre-struts I wasn't flying so much as a rocket as a collection of parts moving in roughly the same direction.  I finally got 1 rocket into Kerbin orbit.  Then I couldn't for the life of me do it again before the rocket came apart.  MechJeb Ascent Guidance saved my sanity by taking control of something that just wasn't working for me and allowed me to keep playing and getting better.

Later (especially after stock joints became better) I improved and learned how to do a lot of things manually.  Doesn't me I want to never have the autopilots.  And for landing aircraft, I really need systems like Instrument Utilities to aid me in setting up on the right glide paths.

Currently in KSP things are much better joint-wise, but there's still a lot of things in the stock game that are frictions and irritations to players, especially new ones.  Having data available in map view but not in flight view (apoapsis, periapsis) is one.  Another is the old almost unchanged stock science system where my Kerbals fly fantastic rockets but can't record 2 Crew Reports in a row in their seat without doing a silly EVA-and-science-shuffle.

Anyone who looks at Steam achievements can see it's rather amazing (and perhaps sad) how many people buy a game and then do very little with it.  This is happening with KSP too.  And it matters to all of us.  To stay alive, KSP needs its community of users who buy stuff and contribute to the game.  Like every organization, every community is always losing members.  To everything up to and including the members dying.  That means it's always necessary to recruit and for the new user experience to not just alienate and drive most of the new recruits away.  Else the community and KSP will die.  It's happening right now to other games as we all can see.

So, yeah, we don't need an "I WIN" button in the cockpit for Jeb to push.  But even more than new parts models, we need some of the irritations of the stock game to improve.  That vital features like displaying delta-V and TWR per stage are now stock is a good indication things are going in the right direction.

Edited February 9, 2019 by Jacke

[Loskene]

Y'know, I think I have a solution that may, in a rare occurrence, please everyone, including the developers who have to do the legwork making it happen, and publisher looking to skim profits and prestige off the top.

What if they released the a DLC called, I don't know, something Kerbally, like "Artificial Unintelligence"

This DLC would focus on a suite of advanced navigation, automation, data display tools and maybe some borrowed concepts from Realism Overhaul to allow you to fly your space probes just like real space agencies do. Things like KOS, KER, mechjeb fully integrated with a lovingly crafted UI, remotetech's speed of light delay and command queuing functions, things like that. All with granular difficulty settings to customise how easy or hard you want to make it on yourself each time. To be used by veterans looking for a more realistic experience, or noobs looking to see how it's all done with the numbers showing for every step of the process, basically an on-demand tutorial for any part of the game you want to study. Promote it for educational as well as gameplay purposes, get KSP in the news for teaching schoolkids again, etc. TakeTwo would love that kinda youknowwhat

None of that sounds appealing to you? No problem, don't have to buy it. It'll be treated like MH for everyone's challenge rules and bragging rights, nothing will change except people struggling with the basics or people looking for more depth in the base game (especially if it makes modpacks like realism overhaul more stable as by-product) will have something to turn to that'll potentially keep them playing longer and speaking highly of the game to others instead of saying they got bored or frustrated.

Now how's that for a slice of fried gold?

[snip]

 

Edited February 12, 2019 by Starhawk
Moderator Edit

[Gargamel]

The problem with making a DLC from the contents of mods is sales. 

For a DLC to work, it has to be profitable for the company making it.  They look at what their projected sales will be, and compare that to the cost of development.   If it looks like they will turn a profit, then they will probably make that DLC.   But when they realize that the vast majority of things they are planning to offer in a paid content are already available for free in a mod, then they know they won't have the sales to support the cost. 

So while your idea might be a good one in theory, it won't happen. 

[Loskene]

Seems a little pessimistic and prophetic at the same time doesn't it? Neither of us have done Squad's risk analysis on it yet to know it wouldn't work. I'd certainly pay for all of those things to be part of the game experience, to work in a unified fashion, able to freely share data and functions while being seamlessly integrated into the stock UI without having all kinds of janky and often redundant windows popping up. I have KER and mechjeb installed because even though they have a lot of overlapping data readouts, one does some better than the other. It would be less load and hassle if they were condensed into one with the best of each taken, not to mention relieving the hassle of ensuring some of these (what many consider after a while) vital quality of life tools being guaranteed to work immediately after an update, or even exist at all 3 versions from now.

How many mods is that one guy maintaining by himself now that all of their original developers have stopped playing and maintaining their mods for the game? What happens when he finally moves on to something else? I think the best thing Squad should be doing at this point is taking the best features from popular mods and working with their devs or maintainers to integrate them as core components or optional extras, if for nothing other than the sake of archival and preservation of some classic and beloved mods. BDArmoury could be another game in itself for god's sake. KSP is the most moddable game I've ever seen, and has only thrived in the way it has because of that fact, and that should be celebrated more as the game ages and eventually reaches its end of life. How many other mods put together transform KSP into something next level altogether? SCANsat, Ferram Aerospace (which I believe is also no longer maintained by the original maker), various life support mods, the visual overhauls. You get the point. This game has gotten huge, but it still has so much potential to be even more, and it's not as hard or unprofitable as you might think at a glance. Don't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling 

[Jacke]

On 2/8/2019 at 6:01 PM, Gargamel said:

The problem with making a DLC from the contents of mods is sales.

I agree with @Gargamel here.  Paid expansions need to have general appeal to the player base to ensure sales.  (They can also fragment the player base into those who've got it and those who don't, but that's another matter (and can be addressed in various ways).)

Tools that can be divisive yet have enough support, like adding delta-V and TWR to stock, should get the appropriate attention in base game updates.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Jacke

[Snark]

On 2/8/2019 at 5:01 PM, Gargamel said:

The problem with making a DLC from the contents of mods is sales.

That, and also mod code ain't shipping commercial code.

I've been around the forum a few years now, and from time to time I'll see some well-meaning person suggest "they should take that and put it into the stock game", perhaps with an accompanying suggestion that they should "buy" the mod from the original author or something.

The problem is, the sort of code that a private individual writes when they're making a mod is not the same as when you're a professional developer adhering to a team coding standard working in a group to launch a product when you have access to all the internals.  It's just not.  Lifting a mod's code and trying to put it into the stock game would be very much a case of cramming a square peg into a round hole.  They'd likely have to rewrite / refactor major chunks of it, at least.

That's not to say that it would be impossible-- just that it would be a lot more expensive in terms of engineering time than people often think.  I think much of the reason why people keep suggesting things like that is that there's an underlying assumption "well, it's right there and it works great, so they can just stuff it pretty much as-is into the game and not have to do much work other than maybe sanding off a few rough edges."  In other words, it gets suggested because it's assumed to be a low-hanging fruit.  The thing is... it's not.  It's hanging way up high on the tree-- in many cases, it would be more time/effort/headaches to try to adapt a mod from someone than it would be for them to simply implement the thing from scratch.

"I like this mod and I wish they had something like it in stock" is a perfectly reasonable suggestion-- but wanting to actually take the mod itself and put into the game, is generally not.

(Before someone raises the matter of Porkjet parts and Spaceplane Plus-- that's a parts mod, not code, which is a horse of an entirely different feather.  We're talking about code, here, which is very different.)

[putnamto]

+1 for having info, you can never have enough info, must have info, everywhere dangit.

the biggest hurdle in the game for me when i first started was trying to orbit, videos would say do this while your ap is @70k, and being a new pc gamer i would stumble on the keyboard to try and find the map.

things like ap, pe, alt should always be visible on every screen.

[putnamto]

On 2/8/2019 at 1:03 PM, Vanamonde said:

The thread has been pruned a bit because the argument turned personal. Please talk about the game rather than each other. 

i love this place, moderators that actually moderate.

a little off topic, theirs another board i go to that is basically a cesspool, its got rules but nobody enforces them, and if you talk excrements on the mods for not doing their jobs, or try to get them to address something, you get flagged instead.