KSP Loading... Preview: Breaking Ground - D3 Weather Analyzer

[Guest]

Yeah @StrandedonEarth. I usually forget it since it has no water

It's the Dres of the atmosphere planets

[theJesuit]

26 minutes ago, Rejected Spawn said:

Funny how everyone likes picking on the kerbal personal inventory while nobody whines about their avatar in Minecraft stuffing a couple thousand tons of rock and a bucket of fresh lava in their 2D pocket and casually JUMPING around... 

Really? No one has? Okay. I'm off to play minecraft for the first time ever and set up an account in their forums to complain.  Who is with me? Oh come on people!  That sounds like a good time... 

Oh this feels like troll post.  Sorry.  One option is only to have objects that actually fit inside the bags.  With other boffer objects located on their hands. Didn't the Ultima series do something like this? Or am I showing my age...

Peace. 

[RealKerbal3x]

6 hours ago, RedSun Rocketry said:

I think that the "RTG" is actually it's own experiment because  of the way that the side bits are divided into lot's of seperate bits. btw, is it weird that the device on the far right doesn't have stilts?

Nope, that's what real RTGs look like:

Splitting the radiator vanes into sections increases the efficiency of heat dissipation.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, RealKerbal3x said:

Nope, that's what real RTGs look like:

Splitting the radiator vanes into sections increases the efficiency of heat dissipation.

I like buffy details

That was quick @RealKerbal3x

[Shamash]

11 hours ago, klesh said:

 

This is what I have been able to make out between the text based teasers and the pics they've put up:

 

So thats 3 deployable science experiments that require "power units", and the boom arm one we've seen on rovers (which I'm thinking is the only thing thats going to interact with the new surface features, save for maybe a Kerbal doing a traditional surface sample while standing next to or on them).

I, obviously, may be wrong, but I have a suspicion that the unit on the far right, the one labeled a seismometer, might possibly be the central station. I like the idea of it being a seismometer, it'd be consistent, I feel, with the lack of legs and pads to insulate it from the surface, but its the only thing here that looks like it has an antenna and it has quite a few ports on the side, more than we see on any other unit, presumably for plugging power into so it can be distributed it to the rest of the experiments. The small station behind the solar is, hopefully, an experiment (or a central station, as labeled, and I say hopefully as its plugged directly into the solar array and that could indicate power cables are indeed something that we can and have to run) but I have a suspicion, based partially on the fact that nothing else has been plugged in and on how difficult I, possibly naively, imagine it'd be to automatically generate a visual of cabling that looks good running between experiments placed at arbitrary distances and rotations, that it may actually not be a separate unit from the solar panels at all. I suspect it may be part of the solar panel unit's model and just be the controls for the panels so that the Kerbal setting it up can be imagined doing such things as tuning the sun tracking controller's parameters or ensuring its converting the output of the panels to the voltage and amperage that the central station wants or other things that would probably need to be done but KSP doesn't force you to worry about. Also, if we're tallying what we've seen, there are at least two more experiments (for a total of either four or five, depending on whether that one is a seismometer or central station), it looks like, that can be seen in the promotional image used to announce the DLC (I'm referring to the two being operated on to the right and left of the Kerbals in the fore ground, one looks like a cylinder with some foil on poles around the base, which may be the actual seismometer if the labeled one above is indeed a central station, and an upright box on the right... I've got no real idea what that one does yet) plus a dish antenna shown off in the same image.

More on the original topic, I really like the look of the new experiments and am excited both to see more and to play around with them once the DLC drops.

[JPLRepo]

13 hours ago, RedSun Rocketry said:

I think that the "RTG" is actually it's own experiment because  of the way that the side bits are divided into lot's of seperate bits. btw, is it weird that the device on the far right doesn't have stilts?

what you marked as seismometer is not a seismometer. and what you marked as a central station is not a central station.

[RedSun Rocketry]

I Didn't mark those things

[MechBFP]

Just now, RedSun Rocketry said:

I Didn't mark those things

I think that was the indefinite usage of the word you.

[RedSun Rocketry]

ok

[linuxgurugamer]

On 5/14/2019 at 4:26 PM, StrandedonEarth said:

Now how are we going to deploy that in Jool's atmosphere?

Looks cool though, for Kerbin, Eve, and Laythe. It should be biome-specific, I would think

A balloon or an airship

[micha]

1 hour ago, JPLRepo said:

what you marked as seismometer is not a seismometer. and what you marked as a central station is not a central station.

But this implies that what was marked as an RTG is, in fact, an RTG...?

[Superfluous J]

9 hours ago, Rejected Spawn said:

barely any game in history has solved "NPC carrying stuff visibly" in a satisfying way

KAS did it, years ago before they split KAS and KIS into separate mods that - like you say - do it in a less satisfying way.

Back then ship parts were either able to be carried or not, and they went on the kerbal's back like a (sometimes comically large) backpack. Easy peasy, no fuss required.

I still miss that KAS.

Edited May 15, 2019 by 5thHorseman

[klgraham1013]

2 hours ago, JPLRepo said:

what you marked as seismometer is not a seismometer. and what you marked as a central station is not a central station.

^ Notice how he didn't actually say what they were.   The PR is strong in this one.

Edited May 15, 2019 by klgraham1013

[KerikBalm]

I'm wondering if the thing marked as a "central station" is a battery backup. It seems to be connected to the solar panels... and it would make sense if solar panels need a backup battery to provide power through nights. The 2 experiments on the left have already been revealed, the RTG is obviously an RTG, and the solar panel is obviously a solar panel. So its just a matter of what those other two are. I'm in favor of a battery pack and a central hub... but only squad knows

17 hours ago, Rejected Spawn said:

Seriously though I find it ridiculous to go on and on about this topic when barely any game in history has solved "NPC carrying stuff visibly" in a satisfying way, because it's not anywhere near as easy to make it work as you seem to think.

Well, I think many games do. Arma 3 for instance, if you only equip a standard uniform, you can only carry a few magazines (weapons, such as a pistol, rifle/SMG, and launcher all show up on the character model, so you can see what they are carrying). If you equip a chest rig/tactical vest, you can carry more magazines, but still no rounds for a launcher. Want to carry more? then carry a backpack (they come in various sizes).

Its not hard to have backpacks of various sizes, and to have a "space value" for each item to determine when a backpack is full.

examples:

Spoiler

When you just need to carry ALL THE STUFF (never mind if your character can barely run):

When you don't need to carry quite so much (note other characters with nothing on their back except a camelpack with water):

Even less:

The one of the left here is just about the smallest, usefull when you just want to carry extra magazines (such as if you're an autorifleman) or grenades (particularly 40mm grenades for an underbarrel grenade launcher, or firstaid kits and medkits... or maybe some small explosive charges, etc.

You won't fit heavy AT missiles in that backpack.

I think they do it well enough...

I will often take a heavy backpack, and just put it on the ground when I expect to need to be able to run faster, longer. The uniform and vest can hold enough magazines and grenades to get through a fight, and I can pick up my stuff once the shooting dies down. If I've got a launcher, I can still access the backpack if its next to me, so I can fire and reload, but still run if I need to (of course, I'd need to come back to the back to reload the launcher again, I may drop the launcher near the bag too)

 

Edited May 16, 2019 by KerikBalm

[Rejected Spawn]

46 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

-- Arma 3 for instance, if you only equip a standard uniform, you can only carry a few magazines (weapons, such as a pistol, rifle/SMG, and launcher all show up on the character model, so you can see what they are carrying). If you equip a chest rig/tactical vest, you can carry more magazines, but still no rounds for a launcher. Want to carry more? then carry a backpack (they come in various sizes).

Its not hard to have backpacks of various sizes, and to have a "space value" for each item to determine when a backpack is full. --

Most people here don't even stop scrolling when someone posts a serious long answer to something so I rarely bother doing it myself nowadays, you seem to be an exception and I appreciate your standpoint so I'll make good use of this occasion to give the full version instead of that cut down half hearted stuff I said earlier.

Picking up and putting down things visibly is excruciatingly difficult to program and animate in a convincing way if the object in question can be located anywhere at a range of distances and heights, this is why most games don't bother with that part at all and you'll see a legion of games where things vanish from where they are and magically appear in the hands (or other holdy thing) of who or what ever is picking up the object. The development resources needed to implement this tiny detail into KSP are hard to estimate but I'm confident it would cost multiple times any increase in sales of the current game, the DLC and sales of future DLC and games based on the impression it made on people.

Visibly carrying things in exact volume containers is a separate matter and Can be done easier, however Arma is one of very few games that makes me say "Most" games don't do that stuff instead of "All". While it would look more realistic it still is a thing that comes with development cost and doesn't pay off for more than a few niche games where this stuff is so present it's pretty much right up in your screen at all times - like Arma. Then we have the fact that Kerbals are anatomically hilarious rather than biologically plausible, some realism with the rockets is to be expected and I think the majority of us really appreciate it when that stuff is done quite well but the Kerbals themselves are the jokey part of the game that makes it NOT a realistic simulator to get you on the NASA hiring list but a game that can be casually played by millions and puts a smile on their face.

Third point, this is also about the volume of their backpack being much smaller than the object inside it: Gameplay convenience. Now if they only ever pick up and drop off the gear on flat ground and all that, fine, something the size of their body stuck to their back isn't a problem. I'm betting it would be a huge problem getting that backpack through tight gaps however, not all of us drop a naked capsule right on the ground and step out of the door. There is also the jokey aesthetic and simplification to take into account here, several generally "detailed" parts are vastly exaggerated in size to make them interesting to look at rather than realistic, the new stuff would be horribly dull if it was shrunk to be movable realistically because we wouldn't even be able to see what we're deploying - plus we'd lose the Kerbal part and just be a Space Program if all the unrealistic stuff went away.

This is all summed up when I say the short version: "Good as is, looks Kerbal."

[Flibble]

1 hour ago, Rejected Spawn said:

Picking up and putting down things visibly is excruciatingly difficult to program and animate in a convincing way if the object in question can be located anywhere at a range of distances and heights, this is why most games don't bother with that part at all and you'll see a legion of games where things vanish from where they are and magically appear in the hands (or other holdy thing) of who or what ever is picking up the object. The development resources needed to implement this tiny detail into KSP are hard to estimate but I'm confident it would cost multiple times any increase in sales of the current game, the DLC and sales of future DLC and games based on the impression it made on people.

Not so much difficult to program as computationally expensive to do a ton of IK or the like so that the hand / appendage reaches the object correctly without anything clipping and without physics kicking in and smashing the object across the level. Time consuming to get all the edge cases ironed out too. I can see why they wouldn't bother.

I still find it ridiculous that a lot of games do it so poorly even in controlled situations like cutscenes where you can just place the object in a convenient place and play a pre-canned anim though.

[KerikBalm]

1 hour ago, Rejected Spawn said:

*snips for brevity*

Picking up and putting down things visibly is excruciatingly difficult to program and animate in a convincing way if the object in question can be located anywhere at a range of distances and heights, this is why most games don't bother with that part at all and you'll see a legion of games where things vanish from where they are and magically appear in the hands (or other holdy thing) of who or what ever is picking up the object. The development resources needed to implement this tiny detail into KSP are hard to estimate but I'm confident it would cost multiple times any increase in sales of the current game, the DLC and sales of future DLC and games based on the impression it made on people.

Visibly carrying things in exact volume containers is a separate matter and Can be done easier, ... While it would look more realistic it still is a thing that comes with development cost and doesn't pay off for more than a few niche games where this stuff is so present it's pretty much right up in your screen at all times - like Arma. Then we have the fact that Kerbals are anatomically hilarious rather than biologically plausible, some realism with the rockets is to be expected and I think the majority of us really appreciate it when that stuff is done quite well but the Kerbals themselves are the jokey part of the game ...

Third point, this is also about the volume of their backpack being much smaller than the object inside it: Gameplay convenience

4 minutes ago, Flibble said:

Not so much difficult to program as computationally expensive to do a ton of IK or the like so that the hand / appendage reaches the object correctly without anything clipping and without physics kicking in and smashing the object across the level. Time consuming to get all the edge cases ironed out too. I can see why they wouldn't bother.

I still find it ridiculous that a lot of games do it so poorly even in controlled situations like cutscenes where you can just place the object in a convenient place and play a pre-canned anim though.

To be clear, I'm not complaining about the backpack size here. I'm just saying that I disagree with this part:

"barely any game in history has solved "NPC carrying stuff visibly" in a satisfying way, because it's not anywhere near as easy to make it work".

I don't care if the kerbal backpack is too small for the experiments, just like I didn't care where the kerbals were pulling those flagpoles out of :p

I'm just saying, in general, all I think that you need for it to be "satisfying" is that you have a container that seems to be an appropriate volume for what one carries.

Early shooters like Doom, halflife, you'd have a plethora of weapons available, with mostly generous ammo capacity (half life 2 some of the weapons you could only carry a few magazine for, but you could carry about a dozen weapons IIRC). Then they started to limit things, like Halo: you could carry only 2 weapons at a time... but like 10 magazines per weapon (plus one in the weapon, like for a Pistol+AR combination). By a later halo, I think the weapon you weren't equipping was visible on your character model (like a holstered pistol or rifle slung over the back).. by halo 3, for example, you could only carry 4 extra magazines for the battle rifle... it seems reasonable (although they still don't show where MC carriers ammo, it wasn't going to take a lot of space) that you could actually carry all the equipment that you had.

We seem to be in agreement, as you said "Can be done easier"

The pick up/put down animations.. I'll agree, those aren't done very well most of the time (I consider it separate from carrying). Arma 3 just plays an animation of your character reaching his hand out towards the item, and the item on the ground disappears. A few have better animations for placing them on the ground (like mines/explosive charges)

 

Anyway, I was only disputing the technical difficulty in general terms. I do not care one bit if the experiments are bigger than the kerbal packpack, within reason. I don't want a kerbal to pull out a 3.75m rocket from his backpack of course... but these surface experiment packages are fine.

 

[Rejected Spawn]

10 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

To be clear, I'm not complaining about the backpack size here. I'm just saying that I disagree with this part:

"barely any game in history has solved "NPC carrying stuff visibly" in a satisfying way, because it's not anywhere near as easy to make it work".

-- list of games to disagree with the quote --

Well you're referencing many games where this stuff mostly applies to the player character, NOT to general NPCs and there was good reason I said NPCs in the first place.  Every game you listed is a first person shooter and none even feature any significant reliance on gameplay other than "go around and shoot things". Now I get that people tend to play similar games to ones they already like so it's no wonder if you've been on the fps track for a very long time (I loved them too until I damaged my wrist, can't play those for long these days) however your statistics are going to be massively skewed by not playing much of other stuff. I've only been a gamer for around 18 years but I have health issues and have been playing for several thousands of hours every single year due to unemplyed boredom, I've gone through a horrifying number of games in almost all genres except sports and keep going through new ones and I've learned enough programming, modeling and animation to not only notice when games cut corners on a ton of stuff but it's also very often obvious to me why they do so. The statistics from these hundreds of games pile up to say exactly what I said in the quote and stand by it completely. Doing anything more than what's done in the KSP preview is a MUCH bigger investment than people here seem to realise, it is nowhere near worth it for a studio to use a wildly unpredictably large span of development time to add an unimportant detail that's completely outside their area of expertise, it would have been one thing if Squad had a couple of Arma developers in their storage closet ready to jump out and whip up some code and stuff in an afternoon but this seems a little bit unlikely to be the case.

Btw, just want to say that my post wasn't exclusively out to just sit here and disagree with You specifically, I just took a very rare opportunity to really share what was on my mind because someone actually bothered reading it for once which makes me happy regardless of our differing stances in the matter.

[Flibble]

There's no technical reason it's harder to do for NPCs, other than that NPCs tend to have less dev time spent on them (FWIW I do this for a living).

I don't think it's that far outside of Squad's expertise, but on the other hand, character animation is not really the core experience of KSP. Even if they had a couple of ArmA programmers, there are more useful things they could do than make the pickup and carry animations pretty.

[JadeOfMaar]

On 5/15/2019 at 3:23 AM, Rejected Spawn said:

AND there is already a way to connect base-power to the "wireless" experiments?

As for "wireless magic" we're talking a short enough distance here that there actually are real life ways to transfer power without extreme energy loss. I'm unsure if magnetic induction works at the distance displayed and it would probably mess with the equipment in a horrible way but beams of microwaves and radiowaves can "easily" be used, in which case the portable experiments need a receiver and we have the solar panel that comes with a transmitter and there is a transmitter that can be stuck to a base to share that power as well, which is what the RTG uses.

18 hours ago, Shamash said:

The small station behind the solar is, hopefully, an experiment (or a central station, as labeled, and I say hopefully as its plugged directly into the solar array and that could indicate power cables are indeed something that we can and have to run) but I have a suspicion, based partially on the fact that nothing else has been plugged in and on how difficult I, possibly naively, imagine it'd be to automatically generate a visual of cabling that looks good running between experiments placed at arbitrary distances and rotations, that it may actually not be a separate unit from the solar panels at all.

I expect that physical cables (just like SEP) are where Squad is going (as implied by the connector ports) but also abstracted (Squad's not going to be bothered to implement an actual pipe module like in KAS or we'd already have seen it)... however that does not explain the solar panel having visible cabling to the "power station." Perhaps they are altogether one part. The device could just be a controller for the solar panel. It could also be an experiment that monitors fluctuations in the solar panel's operation.

I'd like to draw your attention to the obvious pairs of apparently male and female connectors on the Go-ob ED (1) and the "seismometer" (3) and propose these questions:

• Do the numbers of ports imply there's a limit on how many experiments can connect or operate at once?
• If one is for power (assuming the power cable is not implemented as 1-way/ car battery cables) what's the other for?

Side note: About the weather experiment poofing when finished, it's safe to assume that some experiments have a setting to put themselves away when finished.

Edited May 16, 2019 by JadeOfMaar

[Pthigrivi]

The other thing about the carry capacity issue is it might be nice if Kerbals were able to carry more than one deployable experiment at once so they could retrieve several of them from the main vessel and set them up without making 5 or 6 trips. That in itself would be worth abstracting the carry volume in that backpack. Same with cabling. It would look neat, but having to manually pull all the wires might get old quick (unless it were automatic somehow).

[Xavven]

Most games do inventory very poorly, but for the most part it doesn't matter because that's not the focus of the game. I think KSP falls into this category. Personally, I don't think I'm going to enjoy the game any more or less if the backpacks are appropriately sized or if kerbals have inventory limits based on inventory slots/stacks, weight and/or volume.

 

RPGs have the silliest inventory systems IMO, with allowing similar items to stack, but dissimilar items still take up a full space. For example, I can carry 500 iron ingots in one inventory slot, but it takes five inventory slots to carry 1 green mushroom, 1 red mushroom, 1 purple mushroom, 1 blue mushroom, and 1 yellow mushroom But again, does it really detract from the game when that's not the central focus of gameplay?

Edited May 16, 2019 by Xavven

[Flibble]

1 hour ago, Xavven said:

Most games do inventory very poorly, but for the most part it doesn't matter because that's not the focus of the game. I think KSP falls into this category. Personally, I don't think I'm going to enjoy the game any more or less if the backpacks are appropriately sized or if kerbals have inventory limits based on inventory slots/stacks, weight and/or volume.

 

RPGs have the silliest inventory systems IMO, with allowing similar items to stack, but dissimilar items still take up a full space. For example, I can carry 500 iron ingots in one inventory slot, but it takes five inventory slots to carry 1 green mushroom, 1 red mushroom, 1 purple mushroom, 1 blue mushroom, and 1 yellow mushroom But again, does it really detract from the game when that's not the central focus of gameplay?

Just place everything in your bag of holding. Problem solved.

[Xurkitree]

Everyone's talking about carry limits, yet no one has mention that even in KIS, Kerbals can carry a 300l backpack on any world, and can liftup any object weighing upto a ton...

[MechBFP]

21 minutes ago, Xurkitree said:

Everyone's talking about carry limits, yet no one has mention that even in KIS, Kerbals can carry a 300l backpack on any world, and can liftup any object weighing upto a ton...

And yet they can barely jump at all.

They must really hate leg day at the gym.