Hyped for 1.7, looking forward for 1.8

[Challyss]

I didn't really care about 1.7 until I saw the new manoeuver nodes system and stock orbital information.
It's a great surprise, because as many stated, we can now use less modes to have critical information. Hurray !
I expect there will be 1.7.1 for adjustement or hotfixes, but then....

Dear @SQUAD, do you already know the direction KSP will take for 1.8 ?
Parts ? Mechanics ? Visual ? New DLC ?

Thanks again for the quality of the game, the hundreds of hours of fun, and the interest for space exploration and aerospace you brought !

[MechBFP]

I would be surprised if they announce anything much on 1.8 for at least 2 to 3 months.

Based on the current trend my prediction is that they are adding all these Quality of Life features to the game because their next DLC is going to be something that essentially requires them in order for the user to be successful. 

 

Edited April 5, 2019 by MechBFP

[Gargamel]

Gotta wait for the first Hype train to pull out of the station before the next one can arrive.....

[Triop]

27 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

Gotta wait for the first Hype train to pull out of the station before the next one can arrive.....

Starting sales.

You get a ticket, and you get a ticket, and you ~

[linuxgurugamer]

Patience, little one.  Your time will come

[Loskene]

A graphical overhaul would be a nice focal point for the next update, since they're doing a bit of housekeeping lately anyway. There's a lot they could do to add resource-light prettying options for those of us with better hardware, as well as optimisations to let potato players eke a little more spit n' polish out of the low graphics settings. The parts and skybox updates are nice, on average, but the planets themselves that we spend most of our time looking at are really showing their age.

Stock volumetric atmospheric effects (clouds and dust storms) that are embedded deep enough into the rendering engine that they run smooth as butter please. It's the one part of EVE I still have to turn down if I want a steady green light, and they look so damn nice.

This game can be seriously beautiful, while retaining its signature style, if you give it the chance.

Edited April 5, 2019 by Loskene
examples

[Challyss]

I would really like a stock visual enhancement. 

@Loskene what visual mode are you using ?

[Loskene]

7 hours ago, Challyss said:

I would really like a stock visual enhancement. 

@Loskene what visual mode are you using ?

This is everything I use (ie everything my machine can handle since I'm RAM bottlenecked) for tweaking visuals. KS3P is a great though little known post-processing mod but you need to customise the config file when you install it, by default all the effects are cranked up for clarity and it looks filthy. I vastly turned down the lens dirt and vignetting and tweaked the depth of field until it had a nice rounded bokeh effect. Given the theme of 1.7 has been reducing the number of vital QOL mods that we need to wait for after each KSP update, you can see how a 1.8 (or 1.9, I'm not picky) visual overhaul would seriously cut into my waiting time with a list that long.

Edit: Forgot some. Add "Community Terrain Texture Pack" and "Engine Lighting" to that list. You can see how quickly this gets hard to keep track of, and how quickly the whole thing can be ruined if one or two of these mods ever stop being maintained.

Edited April 6, 2019 by Loskene

[ExtremeSquared]

In 1.8, all wheel bugs will be fixed.

[Pthigrivi]

The phrasing here is a bit premature being that 1.7 hasn't even been released yet, but if we're just talkin armchair roadmapping I'll play along.

1) I'm really happy to see some of the moves made since 1.4. It's a bummer the whole mission builder didn't pan out as well as some had hoped, because a lot of folks had been complaining about career mode at the time and asked to be able to define their own mission parameters and the capability to share those parameters seemed like a cool idea. Since then though some of the nuts-and-bolts quality-of-life additions like dV, burn time indicator and now maneuver node and flight data improvements are huge, and I'm also super appreciative of the long-needed art pass efforts.

2) I still think there are some flight-data pieces missing, most notably an alarm clock and a transfer-window finder to help players go beyond KSOI and further develop their space programs without resorting to mods. I've seen a lot of discussion about scatterer and new planets kicking around in the Suggestions section and while I'd love to see that I still think step 1 should be putting the tools in place for players to succeed. 

3) As we're thinking past all that it's worth considering that career mode does still feel a bit incomplete. Some things would be relatively easy to fix, others would take a bit more effort. I continue to believe the game's obvious Main Quest--Kerbals landing on other planets--is not being served well by the UI in mission control. You can of course fund your entire program in career by just adventuring out and achieving milestones, but there's nothing in the UI that informs you of that so players are entirely forgiven for thinking they are dependant on repetitive generative contracts to survive. There are other relatively easy moves like creating strategies for the Admin building that directly increase contract type probabilities--for instance "Space Tourism" or "Base Builder" strategies that increase the rate that tourism and base building contracts appear in Mission Control--that would give players a stronger feeling that they were in control of their own destiny while still taking advantage of all of Arsonide's hard work.

4) My greatest hope, however, would be a deeper dive into to the science mechanic and player exploration. The worlds just feel so empty now its hard for me to justify adding more empty planets. And a cosmetic upgrade just isn't enough, what we really need is to make the surfaces qualitatively varied in a way that impacts core game mechanics. What I'd love most to see is a layer of sciency surface features that a) look neat b) are mappable from orbit and c) give science and/or funds/experience bonuses for visiting. Right now a player can land any old place and it makes no difference. We need a reason to really develop our mission profiles, to do things like scout landing sites, precision land, and bring rovers to cover more territory on the surface.

5) And yeah, I won't lie, I love my mods. I love the way the game looks with scatterer. Much more than that I love the combo of Roverdude's USI life support and Nertea's SSPXr. Its more than some players think they need, but life support with habitation is a total game-changer. It's a gameplay framework for actually going out there and building stations and bases and real-feeling interplanetary missions and considering not just dV but time as a component of spaceflight and exploration. KIS/KAS is also great for when you forget to stick on ladders or rcs blocks in the vab and for career skills buffs. Maybe all that's better as a DLC, I have no idea the marketing economics of all this, but its something I'd love to see down the road. 

 

Edited April 7, 2019 by Pthigrivi

[Gargamel]

2 hours ago, ExtremeSquared said:

In 1.8, all wheel bugs will be fixed.

Whoa Whoa Whoa.... don't make me move this to the games forum now....

[klgraham1013]

10 hours ago, ExtremeSquared said:

In 1.8, all wheel bugs will be fixed.

This person dreams big dreams.

[HansonKerman]

Yeah I'm looking forward to using that cool new panel.

[Fraktal]

I hope that 1.8 focuses on quality-of-life improvements rather than a graphics overhaul beyond part texture/model improvements (which are welcome). In fact, as controversial as such a statement sounds in light of the vocal minority demanding stock visual improvements on a regular basis, I think any stock visual improvements beyond part textures/models should be DLC-only at best.

The reason for which is simple: KSP's system requirements are already high as it is. Not everyone (in fact, I'd hazard a guess that the majority of the playerbase don't) has the spare cash to buy a whole new PC just for this one game. KSP isn't, and never will be, a AAA killer app for high-end hardware, so stop trying to convince the devs to turn it into one. You have powerful hardware that could run the game much prettier? Good for you... but that doesn't mean the devs should frak over everyone who doesn't, just so that you can be happy. Raising the system requirements would lose more players than in would attract, ergo it would be financially unappealing to the devs to begin with.

And in case you manage to rein in your laughter long enough to ask why am I trying to play KSP on a laptop that can barely give playable FPS on below-average graphic settings plus EVE and PlanetShine: because my job requires me to occasionally sleep in the office and I can't quite carry a gaming PC in a backpack, now can I? KSP's graphics are fine enough for us common folk as is, thank you.

Edited April 7, 2019 by Fraktal

[Loskene]

4 hours ago, Fraktal said:

I hope that 1.8 focuses on quality-of-life improvements rather than a graphics overhaul beyond part texture/model improvements (which are welcome). In fact, as controversial as such a statement sounds in light of the vocal minority demanding stock visual improvements on a regular basis, I think any stock visual improvements beyond part textures/models should be DLC-only at best.

The reason for which is simple: KSP's system requirements are already high as it is. Not everyone (in fact, I'd hazard a guess that the majority of the playerbase don't) has the spare cash to buy a whole new PC just for this one game. KSP isn't, and never will be, a AAA killer app for high-end hardware, so stop trying to convince the devs to turn it into one. You have powerful hardware that could run the game much prettier? Good for you... but that doesn't mean the devs should frak over everyone who doesn't, just so that you can be happy. Raising the system requirements would lose more players than in would attract, ergo it would be financially unappealing to the devs to begin with.

And in case you manage to rein in your laughter long enough to ask why am I trying to play KSP on a laptop that can barely give playable FPS on below-average graphic settings plus EVE and PlanetShine: because my job requires me to occasionally sleep in the office and I can't quite carry a gaming PC in a backpack, now can I? KSP's graphics are fine enough for us common folk as is, thank you.

I think you're overselling the hopelessness of your particular use case a little. How many KSP players do you think regularly have to sleep in their offices and will need to play the game on a crappy work laptop while there? You're not exactly "common folk" lol.

KSP has remarkably low system requirements for a game of its kind, practically across the board (RAM usage could be better but w/e) but it makes barely any impact on the GPU really. The fact your tuber-based laptop can even run EVE and Planetshine with the onboard graphics chip is testament to that. Have you got the volumetric cloud layers turned on in that thing? Wowee.

Suggesting that something as fundamental to a video game going through an iterative multi-year post-launch development process as a graphical overhaul should be gated off as DLC is a woeful or wilful misunderstanding of how these systems work and would be impossible to lock behind a paywall without enormous headaches and player dissatisfaction to begin with. Where you even come up with these notions I'll never know.

By the way my computer is pushing 8 years old, only the graphics card has been replaced recently, to a 4GB GTX1050Ti. Usefully enough someone posted a hardware statistics survey showing that the average PC player has at least... a GTX 1050 or equivalent. Funny that.

Edited April 7, 2019 by Loskene

[Fraktal]

3 hours ago, Loskene said:

I think you're overselling the hopelessness of your particular use case a little. How many KSP players do you think regularly have to sleep in their offices and will need to play the game on a crappy work laptop while there? You're not exactly "common folk" lol.

KSP has remarkably low system requirements for a game of its kind, practically across the board (RAM usage could be better but w/e) but it makes barely any impact on the GPU really. The fact your tuber-based laptop can even run EVE and Planetshine with the onboard graphics chip is testament to that. Have you got the volumetric cloud layers turned on in that thing? Wowee.

FYI, I'm using my 2.5 years old personal laptop for KSP, not my work laptop (that one has a telemetry service that logs the title of the active window at all times, so no way in hell am I using it for personal business). While it does have a GeForce 920MX in addition to an Intel (I wouldn't have bought it otherwise), it's bottlenecked both by RAM (4 GB) and CPU (1.1 GHz quad-core), as seen by the <20 FPS during launches and guaranteed memory access violation crashes after a dozen or so reverts. Anyone more picky than me when it comes to playability would've ditched KSP - and the fact that I didn't is from a combination of how insanely addictive and fun KSP is, as well as the fact that this laptop is the best hardware config I ever owned (my previous one was a 2.0 GHz dual-core with half the RAM and a Radeon HD3470; I used it for ten years). Every single computer I ever owned was way below average spec for gaming and ran everything less than five years old like crap, so I've gotten used to it - but that doesn't mean I won't speak up like above, as running like crap is still better than not running at all.

[Loskene]

18 hours ago, Fraktal said:

all that ish

Okay mate, I didn't ask for your life story thanks.

BTW if you read my first post you'll see one of the benefits of a stock visual overhaul would be not just adding shiny bits to the high end but getting a bit more performance out of the low end too. You say you run EVE on a craptop, you obviously care about the appearance enough that an overhaul in the next update or two would be welcomed, no? If you're just worried about being left out for one update cycle because your hardware won't let you take advantage of it, I can assure you that's unlikely to be true. The low graphics settings can still be made better looking and performing while working on the high ones. Having seen long lived games go through similar processes many times, they tend to go hand in hand.

Edited April 8, 2019 by Loskene

[AngrybobH]

My hopes for 1.8 are for making the landed state of a vessel actually stable(I mean really this time) and fixing the spring dampers to actually work like like spring dampers instead of the physics breaking things we have now. sure, dampers are better than they used to be but they still need work.

I like the idea of adding more science and planet surface exploration. I really do want a reason to visit places other than for the f...fun of it. I'd also take better graphics because ,apparently, I'm weird in that I built a computer for KSP(well for the...uh..fun of it too).

[Dropbear67]

I'd like an overhaul of the science system, so that we can send probes and have them collect science over a period of time and transmit it back periodically, much in the same way that the manned science pod works now. Make probes great again. I enjoy building and sending probes a  lot more than I do manned missions.

I'd also like to see a slight rebalance of the tech tree so that antenna are available earlier in the tree. For those of us that play with the hardest com-net settings, it's often the case that we don''t have suitable antenna to go much further than the KSOI before we've been, well, further than the KSOI and already collected the science there.

 

 

 

 

 

[FreeThinker]

On 4/5/2019 at 7:58 PM, MechBFP said:

I would be surprised if they announce anything much on 1.8 for at least 2 to 3 months.

Based on the current trend my prediction is that they are adding all these Quality of Life features to the game because their next DLC is going to be something that essentially requires them in order for the user to be successful. 

 

Good thinking. You usually going to need it whenever going further than minimus. My guess is that they will add something that focuses on exploration and settlement further into the Kerbal solar system. The most logical candidate will be Duna where you will be tasked of setting up a permanent base. 

Edited April 9, 2019 by FreeThinker

[mrclucks]

On 4/7/2019 at 3:01 AM, ExtremeSquared said:

In 1.8, all wheel bugs will be fixed.

And 1.8.2 will fix all the bugs that 1.8.1 created trying to fix the bugs that 1.8 created

[Gargamel]

On 4/5/2019 at 5:21 PM, Gargamel said:

Gotta wait for the first Hype train to pull out of the station before the next one can arrive.....

Ok... now you all may begin hyping.   Officially. 

[Lisias]

2 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

Ok... now you all may begin hyping.   Officially. 

What's planned for 1.9?

[klgraham1013]

1.10 is gonna be epic.

[Gargamel]

Sigh.........