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Kerbal Space Program 2: Master Post


sh1pman

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7 minutes ago, TBenz said:

Personally, I think that's for the best, as any KSP game should focus more on exploration and expanding horizons. I don't really want to get bogged down with micromanaging colony logistics and the like. That was always the biggest hurdle I had when playing with any of the colonization mods. 

And that’s the same reason I didn’t use any LS mods for long. I didn’t want to get bogged down running resupply missions. Although it was fun, when realizing the life support would run out days before my Minmus mission made it back, starting to plan a high-speed rendezvous before realizing I could just burn the rest of the fuel in the return craft to make it back much faster and do a blazing reentry (pre-1.0)

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1 hour ago, TBenz said:

Being able to spin those failures as a community meme helps Kerbal Space Program. It prevents many players from getting discouraged, or feeling inadequate, or thinking that they can't ask others for help with their problems and mistakes. It reinforces that these mistakes aren't shameful, and that we as a community don't take ourselves too seriously.

Would someone who wouldn't normally click like on this post, please click like on it for me? I want to give it 2 thumbs up and the forum won't let me.

59 minutes ago, NitroThunderBird said:

Around when will this be coming out, though? Thanks. 

Around 2020.

56 minutes ago, NitroThunderBird said:

When is this coming out, though? Thanks. 

2020.

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47 minutes ago, TBenz said:

Personally, I think that's for the best, as any KSP game should focus more on exploration and expanding horizons. I don't really want to get bogged down with micromanaging colony logistics and the like. That was always the biggest hurdle I had when playing with any of the colonization mods. 

I think this is kind of the difference between managing logistics and micro-managing logistics. There's still the implication that growth will enable new kinds of resource gathering, presumably fuel sources at the very least, and Im hoping whatever might go into LS and habitation would be as dead simple as it could be while still being something worth having. I guess what I'm saying is it's no fun to come back and find your colony dead, but it's also no fun to have empty game mechanics. There needs to be something going on, some carefully balanced system of trade-offs so players can chose to, say, stick with a low-population LFO mining operation or scale up to support bigger and better tech--or better yet--have parts and pieces to swap between different strategies, converting fuel to life support or vice versa to enable more colony growth or more fuel output. If there are no trade-offs there's no game and it's just a zero-stakes sandbox sculpture. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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So everyone's adding their opinions on what they want to see in the game, so I guess I'll put in my 2 cents.

Pretty much everything I wanted to see added to KSP1 (new star systems, interstellar travel, colonies) are already coming, but ther are a few things I'd like to see that haven't been specifically confirmed:

1. Start from scratch and build up to large space colonies. I want to still be able to start from your first space mission like in KSP1 and work all the way up to colonising multiple star systems.

2. Reason to keep getting science after completing the tech tree. I always ran into a wall with KSP 1 which was that I had basically unlocked everything before my forst Duna mission, and didn't really have reason to gain all the science from the rest of the solar system, I'd love to see something that makes this still relevant in the late game.

3. (and I know this one is pretty far-fetched) The possibility of building megastructures. Orbital cities, maybe even space elevators? I don't think we'll see this, but it could be cool. I'm very excited to try the colony builder.

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Its going to be always online.

Its going to have DRM.

Its going to be on some knockoff platform (origin, epic, etc), even if it is "on steam". That'll just be a link to the actual launcher, plenty of games do this.

Its going to have lots of intrusive microtransactions.

Its going to be for Windows/Console only, despite Unity targeting macOS and Linux.

At least its going to look pretty. Doesn't matter how much respect your developers have for the original, they don't make decisions. We've seen enough of the people up top to get a good idea of where this is going.

 

I look forward to being proven wrong.

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Um those of you listing off what you want to see in KSP2, there isn't much point to the activity. If they plan to release next year, they have a completed design, are fully in the execution phase, and are probably not too far from first outside of team QA. They thought about all of this and made all of the relevant design decisions quite some time ago. 

They'll only open up their ears to input once it starts testing with external people. But that will be all about making sure all of the features work as intended, they're not going to suddenly change direction because someone posts in the forum that they want all of the Imperial walker thingies from Star Wars in the game.

Edited by vossiewulf
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7 hours ago, KSK said:

I hate to be a downer - and I appreciate the link - but that actually makes it worse. Without some kind of FTL mechanism, we're doing interstellar flights at sub-light speeds. Even assuming that we can get to a respectable fraction of c using one of the advanced engines (which, incidentally has the side effect of making travel around the Kerbol system rather trivial) and even assuming that we're playing in a scaled-down KSP1 like universe - interstellar journeys are going to take a long time.

Some very rough and ready figures.  Assume a 4 light year journey (comparable to a trip to Alpha Centauri from Earth). Assume we can compress that to a 4 light month journey because of Universe scaling. 

An Orion style nuclear pulse drive will get you to about 0.035c. Lets be generous and scale that up to 0.35c, for gameplay balance and to allow for the fact that there may be more efficient engines than Orion. 

That's still a 1 year journey. Not allowing for acceleration or braking. And making so many generous assumptions that it kind of makes a mockery of the 'rooted in science' thing.

...

Anyhow - we don't have anywhere near enough information for this to be an informed debate, so I'll stop here. As I said, I want my pessimism to be unfounded - we'll just have to wait and see.

I agree completely and wanted to add that if they're designing gameplay to be deeply rooted in real science, time and length dilation becomes significant when a craft approaches c. While this would make it much more reasonable in terms of time scales and warping, it also opens a whole can of worms in terms of gameplay and complexity that I'm sure that they wouldn't want to tackle. Relativity is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp in physics, so I'm convinced that they'd want to simplify that or leave it out entirely - leading back into your (very) valid concerns :)

Edited by Chezburgar7300
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1 hour ago, DanielCXT said:

I hope my computer can run KSP 2

As most new games (of significance) you can almost guarantee it will NOT be Windows 8.1 or below. I say 8.1 as Microsoft were very quick to dismiss 8.0 and 8.1 was one that many people tried to avoid (general rule, avoid every second Windows). As Windows 7 will no longer be supported from Jan 2020 you can guarantee that Windows 7 will not be a minimum, 8.1 possibly a minimum but I'd go as far to say Windows 10 will be the min requirement. It gives developers more room to move into the future if Win 10 was set as minimum..

Microsoft were quick to try and get people onto Windows 10 by offering a free upgrade to Win 10 from July 2016 through to Jan 2018.  So if you missed out on this free upgrade, then start saving to purchase Win 10 (if your system can cope with it).

CPU - x32 or x64. Given KSP 1 moved away from x32 and moved to x64, and Windows 10 majority being x64, I'd say x64 will be required. Adding x32 support for KSP2 would be going backwards.

Memory. As I have dismissed x32 bit being considered, and x32 was limited to around 3.5 gb ram, the push now for many games is x64 and 8gb, I'd say you will need 8gb minimum here.

GFX card. The push for smooth, reflective, DX10 / DX11 graphics, you would need to consider a graphics card with DX10 or 11 as minimum. So Nvidia GeForce 8 series and above. ATI's 3400 / 3600 series and above. I wouldn't be surprised if DX11 will be the requirement however.

HDD - I'd use 10gb as a rough number. I wouldn't say minimum but could well be. So for now, I'd say 10gb would be a safe bet.

Edited by Radar
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5 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

I found that attitude a recipe for missing out on big parts of KSP1 when I shared it and weaned myself from it.

No fair setting up a ballparking scenario and then retracting it if it doesn't turn out how you wanted.

Both fair. I retract the ballparking comment. 

I never did teach myself to like long time warp flights. I made it Duna, Eve and Moho without them. Went to Jool once, warping all the way and found it unsatisfying. Your mileage clearly varied.

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4 minutes ago, KSK said:

I never did teach myself to like long time warp flights. I made it Duna, Eve and Moho without them. Went to Jool once, warping all the way and found it unsatisfying. Your mileage clearly varied.

In one save I started experimental missions to every other planet. None of them arrived because I was too busy doing Mun and Minmus shots in the meantime.

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1 hour ago, bx2m2 said:

Its going to be always online.

Its going to have DRM.

Its going to be on some knockoff platform (origin, epic, etc), even if it is "on steam". That'll just be a link to the actual launcher, plenty of games do this.

Its going to have lots of intrusive microtransactions.

Its going to be for Windows/Console only, despite Unity targeting macOS and Linux.

At least its going to look pretty. Doesn't matter how much respect your developers have for the original, they don't make decisions. We've seen enough of the people up top to get a good idea of where this is going.

 

I look forward to being proven wrong.

You will almost certainly be proven wrong on all of those.

Why would it be always-online? That makes no sense for a Kerbal type game. How many games are always-online these days? Most of the ones I play aren't.

It probably won't because they've openly stated that they will be opening up more of the internal code for modders (or words to that effect, I don't know coding)

It. Will. Be. On. Steam. They keep saying this. There's really no legitimate reason to think otherwise, just fear and cynicism. Keep on them about this I guess, just to make sure, but I'd be massively surprised if it moved to Origin or EGS or whatever.

No it won't. Again, there's just no reason to think a Kerbal game would ever have microtransactions. How would that happen. Maybe small DLC with extra parts or cosmetic things, but that's all I can imagine for this. What kind of microtransactions are you expecting? I'm actually genuinely curious as to what people think will happen here.

Nothing on this yet, but there's no real reason to think it wouldn't also be on Mac and Linux. It'll probably start on just PC though, sure.

 

I know you're worried and I know that Take 2 and Private Division maybe don't have a good track record, but the actual tema making this seem to really know the game, and the community and they have a good understanding about what makes the original work. I know it's easy to be cynical about sequels, but I've got a really good feeling about this one. And hey, if it turns out I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will eventually be able to Mod KSP1 to give it a similar scope to what they're promising for KSP2.

Edited by PunkRockZoologist
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4 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I think this is kind of the difference between managing logistics and micro-managing logistics. There's still the implication that growth will enable new kinds of resource gathering, presumably fuel sources at the very least, and Im hoping whatever might go into LS and habitation would be as dead simple as it could be while still being something worth having. I guess what I'm saying is it's no fun to come back and find your colony dead, but it's also no fun to have empty game mechanics. There needs to be something going on, some carefully balanced system of trade-offs so players can chose to, say, stick with a low-population LFO mining operation or scale up to support bigger and better tech--or better yet--have parts and pieces to swap between different strategies, converting fuel to life support or vice versa to enable more colony growth or more fuel output. If there are no trade-offs there's no game and it's just a zero-stakes sandbox sculpture. 

Exactly! This is very much the sort of thing I had in mind when I commented about the game hanging together in an interesting way or just being KSP1 with some extra shinies bolted on and a longer tech tree.

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1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:

In one save I started experimental missions to every other planet. None of them arrived because I was too busy doing Mun and Minmus shots in the meantime.

Well, nearly the same here. In my career games, I've never made it to Jool or Eeloo ... only in sandbox when I had nothing else going on. What was I thinking when I had a career game with OPM?

I had *sent* missions to outerplanets, and a large colonial enterprise to Jool, but they never got there with all the other stuff I was doing in career. I did make it to Duna and to Eve, but not back. The only body outside kerbin's SOI that I went to and returned from in career was Moho, because of the frequent windows and fast transfer times (even if its a high dV budget).

There's always too much going on with training flights around Mun/minmus just out of Kerbin SOI to get crew for the next mission to send (it seems that there's always new departure windows opening before anything arrives), orbital construction of the next mission to *send*, sending it to Mun or minmus, topping up orbital propellant depots around Mun/minmus, etc).

9 hours ago, KSK said:

I hate to be a downer - and I appreciate the link - but that actually makes it worse. Without some kind of FTL mechanism, we're doing interstellar flights at sub-light speeds. Even assuming that we can get to a respectable fraction of c using one of the advanced engines (which, incidentally has the side effect of making travel around the Kerbol system rather trivial) and even assuming that we're playing in a scaled-down KSP1 like universe - interstellar journeys are going to take a long time.

Some very rough and ready figures.  Assume a 4 light year journey (comparable to a trip to Alpha Centauri from Earth). Assume we can compress that to a 4 light month journey because of Universe scaling. 

An Orion style nuclear pulse drive will get you to about 0.035c. Lets be generous and scale that up to 0.35c,

...

"There is a population of Kerbals locally in any colony that you build, and that population does increase organically. And as that population increases, the colony's abilities increase as well. But not it's not the sort of situation where if you don't tend to the colony, it collapses or something bad happens."

To me, this smacks of 'we don't include life support because it makes things too hard'. Which is undeniably a popular view on this forum but personally it's not one I subscribe to.

Anyhow - we don't have anywhere near enough information for this to be an informed debate, so I'll stop here. As I said, I want my pessimism to be unfounded - we'll just have to wait and see.

We don't have enough information, I agree. However, I really hope we won't see speeds of 0.35c... Then it will need to model relativity. If we're instead talking 0.035c, we can mostly ignore relativity, and just rely on the tyranny of the rocket equation to keep things in line.

For all we know, its not interstellar travel like we think of it, but like some mods do now... just having the kerbal system be part of a binary or trinary star system like alpha centauri A, B, and Proxima centauri.

It may be that sending an interstellar mission begins a new save that splits from the main save, and you have to arrive on a colony ship and build colonize a new system, so that the travel time is ignored - but then how would it handle launching a flotilla to the new system?

As for the colony stuff, I'm imagining something somewhere between a city building game, and base building in some RTS games. My guess is that to expand the colony, you'll need to build habitats with life support systems, and gather/gain access to appropriate resources. My guess would be a tiny colony that lacks resources to expand just has a closed cycle life support system.

So my guess is it would be something like: if you have a "farming dome" and a "water recycler and waste reclamation dome" linked together, your colony is stable and won't collapse, but is limited to 50 kerbals. You'd need to gather more resources and build more domes to have it continue growing.

I'd be Ok with that.

However, these advanced drives do seem that they'd make getting around a system too easy. I already play at a 3x rescale because I find it too easy to get around. I really hope that KSP 2 bodies are on a larger scale than KSP 1

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I think that as it is not being developed by SQUAD I am not as hyped as everyone else appears to be. Plus, I don't really like interstellar travel because I am the kind of kerb who always builds gigantic missions, sends them off to Duna or Jool and then spends time messing around on the Mun & Minmus and doesn't actually let them go anywhere. I have done about 5 Duna missions (about 3 were flags-and-footsteps) of which 1 returned, and 1 Jool mission (but it was a Jool5).

In conclusion, with colonies around I will probably putter around in Kerbin SOI with the occasional excursion to Jool or Duna (made infinitely more beautiful with @KerikBalm's Rald mod, if indeed all the mods work in KSP2, which they probably won't). At which point I really don't see why I should buy a new game.

In short I am an old young fogey and do not want this game to die a slow death with people deserting it for KSP2. I like KSP and more importantly the unique community which has sprung up around it.

Edited by fulgur
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9 hours ago, KSK said:

Please read my earlier post as to why I think interstellar flight is a bad idea. And I really don’t care what modders may or may not add to the game over time.

Depends if you’re okay with warping through months at a time and ignoring everything else in your game for that time. I never was myself but others may reasonably differ. Also that 1 year journey is making a lot of extremely generous assumptions.

Oh I see, that's true.

Having played on OPM, I already find cumbersome to have a ten years journey do Neidon by Hohman transfer...  And already use Warp drive for a Outer system transfer...

We will see how the game is set, as of now we know nothing about gameplay and balance and many things are likely to change until then.

I hope the Helmets won't change since I like those shown in the trailer,

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2 hours ago, KSK said:

a longer tech tree.

If anything, I hope for no, or a shorter tech tree with bigger blocks. It made it feel more like just another game. It makes sense not to have fusion engines right from the start, but I don't think it should continue to be earning wheels by landing on the Mun, or whatever order it's unlocked these days.

 

I'm not sure about other solar system - I like that it sounds they might be keeping the familiar system the same, just with  a lot of polish, so there's that. But do we know if things are still small scale? That would put nearby systems at under a light year away. Also, could perhaps the Kerbolar (apparently what it's officially called now) system be near a dense part of the galaxy? 

It does seem weird to leave things alone, but if we're thinking big. maybe there will be the ability to automate, or subcontract out some sort of resupply missions.

Edited by Tw1
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1 hour ago, fulgur said:

In short I am an old young fogey and do not want this game to die a slow death with people deserting it for KSP2. I like KSP and more importantly the unique community which has sprung up around it.

I agree with you too.  The trailer for KSP2 looks amazing.  I don't know if my computer can handle that.  Beside visual, there aren't that many new features that we can't do on KSP1 with mods.  I am worried that when KSP2 releases, people including modders will leave KSP1.

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1 hour ago, greenrolf said:

I agree with you too.  The trailer for KSP2 looks amazing.  I don't know if my computer can handle that.  Beside visual, there aren't that many new features that we can't do on KSP1 with mods.  I am worried that when KSP2 releases, people including modders will leave KSP1.

They have talked about continuing support for KSP 1 by Squad, so hopefully that does continue and KSP 1 doesn't become antiquated with the release of 2. Ideally, IMO, they will run concurrently, sort of allowing players to choose between having an experience of the past to now, or the future from now. I agree as well. Hopefully modders and players stay around for both games.
All we can do is wait and see, and hope for the best.

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