FTL travel/special relativity

[Guest]

Arguing against having options is crazy talk

[Guest]

36 minutes ago, Terwin said:

Not everyone who might like to play with launching rockets(which does include some <5 yr olds) will understand that re-entry heating can generate plasma, and that plasma can block radio signals.  Instead they will just think the game broke and killed their ship, get frustrated, quit playing, demand a refund and rant about how broken it is to all of their friends.  Therefore, PD will not want plasma black-outs if it is not switchable.

What if Andrey Kerman pops up in the hint bubble and goes "Hello Comrade Kerman, you see that glowy stuff? That's plasma. It blocks radio signals! Your probe should get the signal back once it slows down a bit."

38 minutes ago, Terwin said:

I am not saying it is right, only that if KSP2 does not have any difficulty options, then the only option will be easy mode, as that will make the game accessible to the greatest number of potential players, as more players = more money and more money is the only thing T2I and thus PD really cares about.

That's directly counter to what the KSP2 team said: that they don't intend to dumb the game down, but rather make better tutorials.

Obviously I'm not developing KSP2 so I don't know how they're going to go about it, but I certainly hope it won't have all the configuration toggles KSP1 has. They're a right royal mess and a source of frustration in and of themselves. Advanced Tweakables for example -- how many times have you seen someone rage about wobbly rockets, and when somebody tells them about autostrut, go "...oh?" 

1 minute ago, Dale Christopher said:

Arguing against having options is crazy talk

Do you prefer a bunch of half-baked features that half-work, and make a whole bunch of related features unwieldy, unnecessary, or unworkable? Because that's the trade-off. Cf. CommNet and the various antennas KSP has. 

[MechBFP]

5 minutes ago, Dale Christopher said:

Arguing against having options is crazy talk

 Crazy smart is right. 

[Guest]

@Brikoleur please stop, “good options” or “crap options that don’t work” are subjective opinions. That’s the whole reason options exist, so people can tailor their game to their tastes because everyone has different likes/dislikes/feelings/opinions etc...

Edited February 25, 2020 by Guest

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Dale Christopher said:

@Brikoleur please stop, “good options” or “crap options that don’t work” are subjective opinions. That’s the whole reason options exist, so people can tailor their game to their tastes because everyone has different likes/dislikes/feelings/opinions etc...

No. Features can objectively work well, or not well. Making features optional will make the combinations harder to test, balance, debug, and polish. That means that for any given feature set, the more of them you make optional, the worse the overall quality will be (still assuming that resources spent developing them are constant). 

This is a fact, not an opinion or a preference. 

What is an opinion or preference is which one you'd rather have: a set of optional features that work badly, or a set of standard features that work well. I know which one I prefer. How about you?

[DStaal]

Can we agree that options cause developer work, and that therefore the value of the option should be considered by the development team in relation to how much development work it will cost vs. perceived player benefit?

In other words: Just because it will cause more work isn't a reason to say *no* options, but it is a reason to be selective about what options to include?  That is, only include the ones that have a high benefit to the players in relation to the amount of work they cause the developers?

[Dirkidirk]

5 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

 They're a right royal mess and a source of frustration in and of themselves. Advanced Tweakables for example -- how many times have you seen someone rage about wobbly rockets, and when somebody tells them about autostrut, go "...oh?" 

At this point I am starting to agree with you, just a little bit. 

Of course that doesn't mean Private Division does.

Spoiler

While there are things that shouldn't be optional, there should still be options for some things, because some players don't want to find a mod for every thing they don't want to be a thing.

 

17 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

What if Andrey Kerman pops up in the hint bubble and goes "Hello Comrade Kerman, you see that glowy stuff? That's plasma. It blocks radio signals! Your probe should get the signal back once it slows down a bit."

That sounds fun 

 

3 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

No. Features can objectively work well, or not well. Making features optional will make the combinations harder to test, balance, debug, and polish. That means that for any given feature set, the more of them you make optional, the worse the overall quality will be (still assuming that resources spent developing them are constant). 

This is a fact, not an opinion or a preference. 

What is an opinion or preference is which one you'd rather have: a set of optional features that work badly, or a set of standard features that work well. I know which one I prefer. How about you?

Well it depends on how difficult it actually is to make things optional

Just now, DStaal said:

Can we agree that options cause developer work, and that therefore the value of the option should be considered by the development team in relation to how much development work it will cost vs. perceived player benefit?

In other words: Just because it will cause more work isn't a reason to say *no* options, but it is a reason to be selective about what options to include?  That is, only include the ones that have a high benefit to the players in relation to the amount of work they cause the developers?

Yes.

[kerbiloid]

1. Doesn't @Brikoleur play console?

2. If so, can his console set options?
(Never had one, can't imagine how they play without a keyboard).

[Guest]

It’s pretty tiring seeing this same thing come up over and over again in the forum. Where if some idea or feature doesn’t matter to that specific person then they don’t want any work put into anything else out of some perceived longer wait time to receive the game. It boggles the mind.

Just now, kerbiloid said:

1. Doesn't @Brikoleur play console?

2. If so, can his console set options?
(Never had one, can't imagine how they play without a keyboard).

I vote for no console option 

[Dirkidirk]

10 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

1. Doesn't @Brikoleur play console?

2. If so, can his console set options?
(Never had one, can't imagine how they play without a keyboard).

We just do

Spoiler

Never had a computer. I Can't imagine how you control ships when you can only turn it in 4 directions

And yes, it can.

Edited February 25, 2020 by Dirkidirk

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, DStaal said:

In other words: Just because it will cause more work isn't a reason to say *no* options, but it is a reason to be selective about what options to include?  That is, only include the ones that have a high benefit to the players in relation to the amount of work they cause the developers?

That's fair. 

It is my considered opinion that most of the customisation toggles in KSP1 add no player value, or actually detract from it.

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

1. Doesn't @Brikoleur play console?

No, never had one.

[kerbiloid]

(The hypothesis considered false).

[Terwin]

25 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

That's directly counter to what the KSP2 team said: that they don't intend to dumb the game down, but rather make better tutorials.

And then PD took them out of StarTheory and put them in a new studio which is directly under their thumb.

PD will insist that all of the 'low barrier to entry' options are available(and probably default, at least in easy mode), so the only way for the devs to keep to their stated intent is to make them switchable.

If you want to claim that T2I will not demand 'widest possible audience' type requirements, then try to convince me that the people responsible for micro-transactions in GTA(and many many other games) are not all about profits. 

... great, now I'm thinking about KSP2 having 'grow your colony faster!' type micro-transactions/DLC.(ST made claims about no micro-transactions, and now they no longer have KSP2...)

[KSK]

3 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

Because making something configurable makes it more complicated to test, which makes it flakier, more buggy, and generally of lower quality. (Or more expensive and for a slower release cycle, in the unlikely event that a game studio would actually prioritise QA.)

It also makes it easier (everything else being equal) to design a deeper and more interesting game if you can rely on a set of features always being there. That way you can use them as a foundation to build other features or bits of gameplay on. It's kind of hard to include AwesomeFeatureX if it depends on optional features A B and C to work.

Put another way, I'd much prefer to have a deeper, more interesting game where different gameplay features work with each other than have those features all siloed off into individually toggleable minigames.

I think it's fair to say that @Brikoleur and I have our differences of opinion about what makes an interesting game but I'm right behind him(?) on this point.

Edited February 25, 2020 by KSK

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Terwin said:

PD will insist that all of the 'low barrier to entry' options are available(and probably default, at least in easy mode), so the only way for the devs to keep to their stated intent is to make them switchable.

If that's the case, then KSP2 is doomed from the start. No amount of options will rescue it (if modders don't).

3 minutes ago, KSK said:

Put another way, I'd much prefer to have a deeper, more interesting game where different gameplay features work with each other than have those features all siloed off into individually toggleable minigames.

Very well put. Great, complex games have systems that synergise. When they work together, they create space for emergent gameplay, stuff the developers never even imagined when they were making it. KSP is a great example of such a game -- it just could be so much greater if all the subsystems in it were even better integrated, and there was even more gameplay built on them. But they can't be, because they're siloed off into optional feature sets and DLCs.

[Dirkidirk]

21 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

If that's the case, then KSP2 is doomed from the start. No amount of options will rescue it (if modders don't).

possibly, probably, maybe.

 

anyway, what were we arguing about before this thread derailed, oh yeah, special relativity and communication delays.

5 hours ago, MechBFP said:

Time delay is annoying. Nah

yes, it is, and most of the playerbase (including me) agree. it should be left to the modders to add it.

 

relativity however, could be in the game, because it isn't annoying, probably isn't that hard to implement (might be, and if that's the case it should be added after the game is released), and... well there isn't really a reason to implement it, except for it being cool, but what feature of the game wasn't added because it was cool  (*all of them)

Edited February 25, 2020 by Dirkidirk

[Curveball Anders]

1 hour ago, Dale Christopher said:

Arguing against having options is crazy talk

No.

Every single option creates a permutation of possible bugs and complicates validation of the code.

I think that anyone who's ever coded has learned to hate options.

 

[Dirkidirk]

8 minutes ago, Curveball Anders said:

No.

Every single option creates a permutation of possible bugs and complicates validation of the code.

I think that anyone who's ever coded has learned to hate options.

 

So the guys over at *insertnameofthatnewcompanythatismakingKSP2* will only make a feature optional if they feel like it is worth the extra time and resources to make it optional.

Spoiler

28 minutes ago, Dirkidirk said:

anyway, what were we arguing about before this thread derailed, oh yeah, special relativity and communication delays.

 

 

[sturmhauke]

23 minutes ago, Curveball Anders said:

No.

Every single option creates a permutation of possible bugs and complicates validation of the code.

I think that anyone who's ever coded has learned to hate options.

Professional web developer here. Yes, more options means more work and more bugs. But sometimes you need them anyway. The trick is figuring out which options are worthwhile to bother with, which ones might be cool but take special care, and which ones are just dumb ideas that don't actually add any value.

I happen to agree with most of @Brikoleur's ideas about how probes and comms should work, but I'm not in favor of such a hardline "no options ever" stance. I do agree that what we currently have is a bit of a mess and needs to be cleaned up, and I hope that the KSP 2 devs take greater care with what they add.

[Guest]

56 minutes ago, sturmhauke said:

I'm not in favor of such a hardline "no options ever" stance

I may have omitted a qualifier or two to underline my point. Sure, there may be a situation where an optional feature really does add value. Right now though KSP is way too far in the opposite direction, and it will be better even if KSP2 overcorrects in the other direction.

There's a lot of "but just make it optional, everybody's happy" type argumentation here with very little apparent awareness that making something optional carries a cost: in implementation, in quality, and in the way the various systems can be integrated and made to synergise with each other. As @KSK so aptly put it, if a system is optional, it's going to be a lot harder to build upon it because you can't rely on every player having it enabled. That makes for a poorer game.

[Chilkoot]

5 hours ago, Terwin said:

And then PD took them out of StarTheory and put them in a new studio which is directly under their thumb.

My biggest concern when that happened is that it gives the producers an "out" on any previous announcements or commitments made by Star Theory.  Some of the most contentious areas that were addressed by ST in the past:

• Distribution platfom (ST said "Steam and others")
• No real-money microtransactions
• Moddability
• Multiplayer

If the new studio says something like "Hey we have great news for all you KSP fans... we've made some changes under the hood to make KSP 2 even moar awesome!" that when I'll start to worry about the above...

Edited February 26, 2020 by Chilkoot

[sturmhauke]

42 minutes ago, Chilkoot said:

My biggest concern when that happened is that it gives the producers an "out" on any previous announcements or commitments made by Star Theory.

Not really. Take-Two has been the publisher and IP holder ever since they bought the rights from Squad, and any of those kind of decisions would have been up to Take-Two regardless.

[Guest]

I think that @Brikoleur has a point in saying that KSP has too many options, but he's totally wrong about options being always bad.

An example of otions that should be fixed are pressure, G force and re-entry heating (maybe a on-of switch on this last one, but a slider is definitely too much), on the other hand things like Life Support and Networks could be highly customisable without damaging the game, as already is with the comm network in KSP.

 

On the signal delay I think that we should separate reality from gameplay, IRL no mission is manually piloted and everything is programmed in advance, tested for months and then tested again for some years before launch.

I absolutely want programming to be a core component of base KSP, but plementing it beside signal delay and forcing people to use it instead of piloting their own crafts would turn KSP into the best tool to make people hate programming.

A programming language with both a visual and a text based interface should instead replace action groups, enabling everyone to do very powerful things (conditional staging alone would be a huge thing) without having to learn any programming at all while permitting already experienced programmers to do far advanced things like complex autopilots or completely automated missions.

If you ever used smart parts you already programmed in KSP, you've just done it in a more complex and convoluted way.

Once you have the programming/automation part of signal delay into place and the comm network component the signal delay itself becomes irrelevant if not in science transmission times, but you can already have those without disrupting the "you are impersonating the probe's programming" mentality and so would just ruin the game for people who have no problems with abstraction layers.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

Again, as numerous people have said by the third page. There's a number of facts that have been established.

#1- KSP2 Ships WILL NOT get to significant enough speeds for time dilation to be a factor

#2- KSP2 Ships WILL get far enough for Signal Delay to be a factor.

So from this information; it seems that the entire point of this thread is null. We don't need relativistic time delays in KSP2, and the developers should focus on building their best build of KSP2 they can.

Signal Delay is another separate question, and should be handled in a separate thread.

[kerbiloid]

Wherever you can replace a constant with a config value, just do it.