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How does Starfield compare to KSP2 (ship & base building, environment, IVA, HUD)?


Vl3d

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3 hours ago, PDCWolf said:
  1. Make the biome system meaningful: More biomes, and actually visually different from one another, instead of random, arbitrary boundaries. The most visually varied biome collection, where you can actually discern you're in a different biome, is the KSC right now.
  2. Manually design planets with its geology in mind, PQS and other procedural systems are great to spam, but they've got a very limited number of planets, with even some gas giant wildcars they don't even have to model.
  3. Make landing challenging: If I can literally land anywhere with enough legs/SAS, then examining the geology of a landing site becomes meaningless. I'd prefer planets with obvious landing targets and accesible science on those than just rocket hopping, which again is only a choice because landing is no challenge.
  4. Planets shouldn't be completely identifiable at first glance. This has been "fixed" by many mods, you shouldn't be able to just look at a planet and chose a landing site with magic tracking center map data, you should need to at least send a mapping probe first.
  5. Meaningful atmospheres. Atmosphere density was barely played with in KSP, and there was no wind either, let alone clouds or weather. Those make landings and launches hard, as you can't just land or launch anywhere and anytime.
  6. Sample returns should be meaningful, and so should be probe science. Breaking Ground added some good changes to that system, the trend should continue.
  7. Life support. Not all planets are supposed to support life, most don't even give a place for grass to grow, sustaining anything from landed vessels to colonies should be a challenge, and this would greatly tie in with all the previous points.

 


Some of this was talked about in the Celestial Architecting video, especially about how the designers are considering the geological history of these planets as they set their orbits, surface topography, ground scatter, all that. Shana Markham mentions that they're also thinking very carefully about how different biomes are mapped onto really distinct geological environments, and how they interact with different landing challenges. I also believe that obscuring planets at first (at least for exoplanets) and using telescopes to learn more about them was confirmed at one point though I can't recall where. I completely agree on sample collection and return and unique surface features and how LS might pose some cool challenges depending on resource availability on different worlds. 

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39 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I also believe that obscuring planets at first (at least for exoplanets) and using telescopes to learn more about them was confirmed at one point though I can't recall where.

 

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23 hours ago, Master39 said:

NMS plus a full Skyrim worth of RPG into it.

Even at its worst (random encounters and radiant quests in Skyrim and babysitting settlements in FO4) Beth quests and stories are better than the best of what "traditional space games" like  NMS, Elite or X4 can offer.

Agree here, Starfield looks good, now I assume Fallout but in space and star trek level realism then in space including the teleporter as landing is kind of fast travel, More a question can you fly as an plane looking for locations? 

Not played NMS but it probably fit well but Starfield will look better and have much better quests, all the planets make me think lots of locations like crash sites and pirate bases is pretty random so you need to chase leads and scan. 
Huge fan of Bethesda and will  probably buy it, but fallout in space is not KSP. 

This is KSP at high level: Firebird 2 at hardbrake, 1 was the one with the resource scanner. 
Zmb10mAh.png
Set up an fast run to Duna, drop from Minmus down to an Pe of 100 Km, for a almost 2Km/s burn.
Found that the base would not survive the aerobrake so I had to simulate it a lot then move stuff around to make it aerodynamic stable at high g drag. 

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9 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

I think everyone will agree that KSP is not about graphics at all, compared to Star Citizen or No Man Sky, our game is outdated by at least 10 years.

No it's not, stock graphics have been upgraded in 2020-2021. Besides, we use visual mods, KSP looks great! It's ALSO about graphics.

Edited by Vl3d
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45 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

No it's not, stock graphics have been upgraded in 2020-2021. Besides, we use visual mods, KSP looks great! It's ALSO about graphics.

Looks great compared to what? Compared to KSP 1 from 2012? Besides one texture, multiplied to the horizon, and stones with the same textures, we don’t see anything else on the planets. There are cities on the planets in Starfield. The resolution of the surfaces of the planets corresponds to the quality of the textures in games 2005-2008. By the way, they also look great, crysis for example. Parallax is great, but the resource consumption of graphical mods is incredible, cyberpunk at max settings requires less.

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Just now, Alexoff said:

Looks great compared to what? Compared to KSP 1 from 2012? Besides one texture, multiplied to the horizon, and stones with the same textures, we don’t see anything else on the planets. There are cities on the planets in Starfield. The resolution of the surfaces of the planets corresponds to the quality of the textures in games 2005-2008. By the way, they also look great, crysis for example. Parallax is great, but the resource consumption of graphical mods is incredible, cyberpunk at max settings requires less.

I agree with you. I was just saying I care about the graphics a lot, so I try to make it look as best it can.

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3 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Looks great compared to what? Compared to KSP 1 from 2012? Besides one texture, multiplied to the horizon, and stones with the same textures, we don’t see anything else on the planets. There are cities on the planets in Starfield. The resolution of the surfaces of the planets corresponds to the quality of the textures in games 2005-2008. By the way, they also look great, crysis for example. Parallax is great, but the resource consumption of graphical mods is incredible, cyberpunk at max settings requires less.

KSP is no longer an indie developed by an independent small studio. We need to do away with the lowballing.

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2 hours ago, Alexoff said:

We are just customers, not developers :/

First off, sorry, I quoted the wrong post, I meant to quote this one:

22 hours ago, Alexoff said:

I think everyone will agree that KSP is not about graphics at all.

Second off, I do agree with the statement if we're talking about KSP1, but definitely not KSP2, it has to at least live up to its contemporaries, they have one of the biggest publishers in gaming behind them, and a big enough team now as well. Those are my expectations as a customer obviously.

Edited by PDCWolf
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Somewhat related.. some new games that have KSP-like elements:

Astral Shipwright is a spaceship building game. As the captain of a small space tug, invest into more and more capable components and build your dream ship.

  • BUILD YOUR SHIP
    Add new compartments, fill them with new modules and equipment, and make your ship truly yours through a heavy coat of paint.
  • SET A COURSE
    Take advantage of orbital mechanics to build the most efficient ship. Fast travel or low fuel use - the choice is yours.
  • TURN A PROFIT
    Mine resources, trade products, or take up lucrative contracts to fund your upgrades.
  • EXPLORE THE WORLD
    Detect new areas and explore the orbit of an exoplanet. Be careful though, as you are not alone.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1728180/Astral_Shipwright/

Moon Farming

Tired from the same farming games on Earth? Now, take on the new role of a super modern farmer on the Moon! Explore new farming possibilities in a new Moon environment. Prepare land on Moon for your base and vertical farming inside of it.  Hop onto your Moon Rover with robots and speed up the tasks, but watch out or you'll run out of gas! For sure, it will be farming like never Before!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366840/Moon_Farming/

The last one has a really nice rover with dynamic suspension and the moon terrain / atmosphere seems ok.

Edited by Vl3d
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On 6/21/2022 at 2:02 PM, Vl3d said:

What do you think about the Starfield features revealed by the gameplay videos and photos - as compared to KSP2?

I'm not comparing genres - only "apples to apples", things that KSP also has: ship building features, base building, celestial body environment, ship IVA and third person HUD features.

Also remember: Starfield players cannot actively pilot their ships to a planet's surface

Ship Building (with details here & here):

  Reveal hidden contents

Starfield-ship-design-modules.jpg

starfield-ship-design-cosmetics.jpg

starfield-build.png

Base building and resources (details here):

  Reveal hidden contents

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Exploration & environment (details about planets here):

  Reveal hidden contents

First-Starfield-Gameplay-Teases-Planetar

yWtnEkxLBeekX9HUr6jsrf-970-80.jpg

AgvR7RQ.png

 

Ship IVA / flight deck / HUD (but no seamless spaceflight):

  Reveal hidden contents

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Starfield-trailer-screen.jpg

Clearly KSP2 is doing something amazing that technically has never been done before (even before speaking of the multiplayer aspects).

"An update on Kerbal Space Program 2 and how we're enabling players to travel from planet A orbiting star B to planet C orbiting star D, continuously, without any loading screens, pauses, faked out transitions, "warp drives", or other trickery. We're simulating a multi-light-year spanning 3D volume at a sub-millimeter level of resolution, and enabling players to travel to any point in that space if they can build a ship capable of making the journey. Unprecedented in gaming." - Paul Furio, the Senior Engineering Manager at Private Division

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paul-furio_kerbal-space-program-2-episode-5-interstellar-activity-6920089169021014016-J_5I

 

I'll actually try to answer the question, something which not many have done :D I'll make it very clear that obviously I haven't played KSP2, so there's a lot of assumptions for how it might do things, and I haven't played Starfield, so I'm basing this purely on the details in the original post of this thread.

 

Ship building

It looks like KSP2 has made a bit of progress compared to KSP1, but I still think the ships produced will be very generic. I don't know if we'll be able to make interesting looking ship through clipping parts, and having parts overlapping as in KSP1. If we can't, that'll make things even more generic. If we can, it's still a poor way to build things. I guess we'll be able to download mods which have new parts in them. But in general, I don't hold out much hope for ship building in KSP2.

The ship building in Starfield looks pretty good. It seems as though you're able to make ships that look interesting and cool, and it looks like you can colour them however you want.

I'd give the Ship Building round to Starfield.

 

Base building and resources

This looks like it could be great fun in KSP2. I know we haven't seen an awful lot of it, but it was fairly decent in KSP1, and it's supposed to be a major part of the game in KSP2, so I have high hopes for it.

This part of Starfield seems like it could be a bit simplistic? It looks like it's a basic 'select the building you want, then click where you want it'? It also sounds as though you wouldn't be able to set up a base near anything that isn't flat-ish terrain, something which doesn't look like it'd be a problem in KSP2.

Resources will probably be similar in both games. They're there, you have to collect them. Not sure there's much more detail than that for either game?

I'd give the Base building and resources round to KSP2.

 

Exploration & environment

This is an interesting one. I know people have gotten excited about something that was said in one of the KSP2 videos, about a pixel of light being a system you can visit, but I think that may have been misunderstood. I don't think every pixel of light will be somewhere you can travel. I think there will be multiple systems, and they'll be different and interesting, but I don't think travel between them will be very common. The fact you're meant to travel to a new system, and then set up a new space centre, means that once you're in a system, you'll use that space centre as you would use Kerbin Space Centre  for exploring the Kerbol system. I also expect resources to be available in every system, so you want need to transport stuff from one system to another. Again, I don't know this will be how it works, because I haven't played it, but that's what I think at the moment.

The planets that we've seen in the videos so far look amazing. I'd like some features that don't seem to be there, cave systems, flowing water, weather, different surface types and properties (ice should be slippery, boggy ground should be soft and have ships sinking....).

Having said all of that, I don't know what the planets in Starfield will be like either! It looks like there will be other species in Starfield, so that's a plus. KSP2 probably won't have anything other than some basic trees and plants. Starfield says it'll have over 100 systems, and over 1000 planets, so I guess there's some procedural stuff going on. The pictures look pretty good, but I don't see it as anything ground-breaking.

 

Probably the closest round, I'm going to call this one a draw.

 

Ship IVA / flight deck / HUD

I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment on this too much, I very rarely (if ever) use IVA mode in KSP. I'm just not interested in it. Not when in space, not when driving rovers. It just isn't something I care about. I don't take Kerbals out for walks other than to plant a flag, drop some experiments, or move from a base to a rover.

So I'll call this a 'no contest' round. Sorry.

Edited by WelshSteW
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26 minutes ago, WelshSteW said:

The planets that we've seen in the videos so far look amazing. I'd like some features that don't seem to be there, cave systems, flowing water, weather, different surface types and properties (ice should be slippery, boggy ground should be soft and have ships sinking....).

100% - also lava.. and hot ground should make ship legs melt.

Also I hope there's going to be a lot of unique and interesting stuff on KSP planets + functional and cool looking IVA that integrates the game HUD in 1st person view.

Something else I would say about the comparison: KSP is blessed with not having to waste time with making human faces and other first-person / RPG 3D objects like guns or indoor stuff.

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16 hours ago, WelshSteW said:

I'll actually try to answer the question, something which not many have done :D I'll make it very clear that obviously I haven't played KSP2, so there's a lot of assumptions for how it might do things, and I haven't played Starfield, so I'm basing this purely on the details in the original post of this thread.

There's a reason such comparisons doesn't make sense in the first place: The games are from different genres.

It's useless to compare features from different games in different genres, and it's usually a perfect recipe to over-hype and then over-criticize games.

KSP is mainly a build-and-fly vehicle sim, with a side dish of a bit of management, resource mining and base-building. Its resource and manufacturing elements are going to be simpler and more basic than games like Factorio or DSP,  its base building is going to be simpler and more basic than games like Astroneer or Space Engineers and its colony management side is going to be way simpler than Oxygen Not Included or Surviving Mars.

Just like the rocketry in all those games is not up to par with even the earliest playable alpha of KSP.

Edited by Master39
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1 hour ago, Master39 said:

There's a reason such comparisons doesn't make sense in the first place: The games are from different genres.

It's useless to compare features from different games in different genres, and it's usually a perfect recipe to over-hype and then over-criticize games.

KSP is mainly a build-and-fly vehicle sim, with a side dish of a bit of management, resource mining and base-building. Its resource and manufacturing elements are going to be simpler and more basic than games like Factorio or DSP,  its base building is going to be simpler and more basic than games like Astroneer or Space Engineers and its colony management side is going to be way simpler than Oxygen Not Included or Surviving Mars.

Just like the rocketry in all those games is not up to par with even the earliest playable alpha of KSP.

The fact that you can build quite realistic rockets in the KSP is a definite plus of the game, without this the game would not exist at all! But there are some principles for creating generated planetary surfaces in other games. Somehow the developers were able to create them? Why not make it at least as good in KSP 2? Does the presence of real realistic rockets somehow prevent the grass on Kerbin from swaying in the wind? Such conversations are reminiscent of stories that you can not compare Cyberpunk2077 with GTA 3.

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23 hours ago, Alexoff said:

But there are some principles for creating generated planetary surfaces in other games. Somehow the developers were able to create them? Why not make it at least as good in KSP 2?

Planetary surfaces an map-making are not the thing I was thinking about, that's pretty comparable if we keep just to the map side of things, if you instead start to get down on what we can do once we are landed then it all stop making sense, in KSP is a matter of biomes, resources and scientific experiments, Starfield will probably be more a matter of bases, dungeons, random encounters and, yes, probably a small portion of exploring and resource gathering.

But that's not what I'm talking about, what I'm talking about are comparisons like your last example:

23 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Such conversations are reminiscent of stories that you can not compare Cyberpunk2077 with GTA 3.

This, is my point, you can't. Or rather, yes, you can  compare the two, GTA 3 has a better crowd reaction system (with 1/10 of the crowd) and a better police system, but it sucks compared to Cyberpunk at combat, quest design (all GTA are basically glorified mafia taxi driver simulators), shooting gameplay, storywriting (again, all GTA games feel like they are written by an edgy 13 years old kid), map design (have you seen Night City?).

We can demolish all games if we pick one feature at a time and compare it with a game dedicated to that single feature. GTA 5? Have you compared its shooting with CS:GO? Its story with [insert here your favorite RPG]? Its driving with any GT game? Its flying with X Plane?

Sandbox and RPG games are the easiest to demolish this way, since it's their nature to have a bunch of options that are usually not there in dedicated games, pick combat as an example, there's always, always that guy that start a rage on how much the shooting sucks in [insert here hated RPG of the year]. Completely disregarding the fact that, in an RPG, you can choose to go stealth, melee, ranged, with bow and arrow or with a power armor. It's quite natural that none of those options are going to be as good as a game explicitly dedicated to a single one of them.

For Starfield we're going to see a bunch of comparisons with the likes of NMS and Elite, and I bet that all of those comparisons are going to forget that in Elite and NMS you don't have an entire TES/Fallout worth of RPG to play with. They won't consider that its not designed as a Space game but as an RPG with some space game features tackled on as a side dish.

I don't want to make it sound like I hate the GTA saga, it's one of the funniest OW sandbox games and I've spent way more hours than I care to admit doing stunts and messing around, but the game ends there, yes, the police systems of GTA3 are better than those of Cyberpunk2077, and they'd better be, since they're basically the only worthwhile element of gameplay in the whole saga.

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3 hours ago, Master39 said:

Planetary surfaces an map-making are not the thing I was thinking about, that's pretty comparable if we keep just to the map side of things, if you instead start to get down on what we can do once we are landed then it all stop making sense, in KSP is a matter of biomes, resources and scientific experiments, Starfield will probably be more a matter of bases, dungeons, random encounters and, yes, probably a small portion of exploring and resource gathering.

But that's not what I'm talking about, what I'm talking about are comparisons like your last example:

And what exactly do biomes, scientific experiments and resource extraction mean in KSP 2? I don't remember the details from the developers. If it's like in KSP 1 - getting numbers out of thin air, then this is a fairly straightforward mechanic that developers will spend very little time on. And cities, caves and other places of interest in Starfield will spend a million times more time and effort.

3 hours ago, Master39 said:

This, is my point, you can't.

I think that we can compare some large parts of the gameplay. Starfield will have huge beautiful planets filled with all sorts of different things. Will the planets in PCB 2 have anything other than the same surface textures to the horizon and one boring easter egg? We do not know. But I haven't heard of any interactive objects in the game. The fact that the game was postponed for almost three years greatly increased expectations. And there was the same problem with cyberpunk: the living world is no worse than in GTA, the developers told us. In The Witcher 3, the world was not very alive, but no one cared because of the lack of incredible expectations and the presence of a beautiful story and a million good quests. Of course, in KSP 2 there will be something so interesting that it will outweigh the lack of graphics on the planets and we will not pay attention to this either. But it is not forbidden by law to compare parts of the game.

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3 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Will the planets in PCB 2 have anything other than the same surface textures to the horizon

We've already seen many planet sneak peaks and we know they're going to be way better than KSP1.

3 hours ago, Alexoff said:

If it's like in KSP 1 - getting numbers out of thin air, then this is a fairly straightforward mechanic that developers will spend very little time on.

KSP1 is the baseline, you can't get much worse than that unless you remove science as a thing altogether. 

Same goes for resource gathering and producing fuel and stuff, 1 "ore" and 1  irsu module is a s basic as you can get, and we already know KSP2 will expand on that.

 

3 hours ago, Alexoff said:

And cities, caves and other places of interest in Starfield will spend a million times more time and effort.

Difference in size, budget and studios involved accounted for the amount of attention Starfield is going to put in the planetside activities is probably the reason the flight model is going to be barebones, we already know there won't be a seamless transition from space to the surface, for example. And the official reason for that is that the amount of time and resources required by such a feature was not worth for the role that flying has in the game.

KSP2 on the other hand is going to focus hard on the building the craft and traveling phases. 

 

4 hours ago, Alexoff said:

And there was the same problem with cyberpunk: the living world is no worse than in GTA, the developers told us.

With a whole lot of RPG elements more.

Compared to Cyberpunk no GTA game has a story or a combat system worth mentioning.

 

4 hours ago, Alexoff said:

In The Witcher 3, the world was not very alive, but no one cared because

... Because of the lack of guns, cars and urban environments.

Fantasy games gets a free RPG pass. When you add those elements then the comparisons start.

4 hours ago, Alexoff said:

But it is not forbidden by law to compare parts of the game.

No, it's not, it's just meaningless.

You can say that in Cyberpunk you can't talk with everyone and most people are just lifeless puppets while in previousa RPGs you could talk with everyone and everyone would have something to say. 

It's true, but it's meaningless, if you keep in mind that in Cyberpunk you have hundreds of people on screen at the same time while in Skyrim the whole population of the capital is a few dozen people, guards included.

Same will go for any comparison between KSP2 and Starfield. 

The first is a space travel and veichle game that in the sequel will have a bit more ground activities, the second is a RPG from a Studio that only previously had horses as veichles dipping their foot in space travel for the first time, there will be a bit of overlap between the games, but they are focusing on opposite sides of their gameplay systems, every conclusion you can get from the comparisons is just obvious from the get go.

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Making planets actually interesting has to be one of the biggest challenges in KSP2. I think there are 3 basic layers here: aesthetics, topography, and resources. In the best of worlds these would all dovetail together, where aesthetic changes and topographic changes would marry together to look both compelling and believable but more importantly would signal regions of scientific value and or potential resource abundance. Its all great to have beautiful vistas and Im sure KSP2 will have no shortage, but what would really make it for me would be to look across a given crater or ridge and think ‘hey I bet there are volatile compounds here’ or ‘that terrain looks high in metals’. It be backed up by orbital scans and mapping of course but some subtle indicators that tied the aesthetics to the gameplay would be great. I also think breaking ground added something interesting with unique scatter, but Id really love to see some level of fully unique hand crafted design in the way anomalies are expressed. Just few truly special regions on each planet that both hold big scientific rewards but also tell a story about the planet and the overarching story of discovery deeper and deeper into the universe. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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