Jump to content

What does Sandbox mean to you?


Pthigrivi

What features would you prefer in default stock Sandbox?  

66 members have voted

  1. 1. List all applicable:

    • All vehicle parts unlocked
      63
    • All colony parts unlocked
      61
    • All KSC buildings fully upgraded
      61
    • All Kerbal skills/abilities unlocked
      56
    • All planetary/stellar visibility unlocked (no hidden planets)
      47
    • All resource maps unlocked (no scanning required)
      31
    • No money required for building (or any abstract resource)
      56
    • No money or resources needed to build on Kerbin
      54
    • No resources needed to build at colonies
      36
    • Can spawn colonies anywhere in kerbol system
      23
    • Can spawn colonies anywhere
      24
    • Can spawn vessels or stations anywhere in kerbol system
      24
    • Can spawn vessels and stations anywhere
      27
    • Can spawn new crew for free at KSC
      52
    • Can spawn crew for free at colonies
      35
    • Can spawn crew anywhere
      25
    • Am I missing something? (Please specify)
      11


Recommended Posts

I was about to non-chalantly answer, going down the list, but in all honesty, when you start getting to interplantary colonies, it becomes quite tricky.

The only certainties are all parts being unlocked, KSC being fully upgraded, and all Kerbal abilities unlocked; all the same as KSP 1. After this, how do you define "sandbox" for colonies beyond Kerbin? Is there a small starter colony on every world? What about orbital colonies? What about the fuel requirements on colonies? ISRU plants in KSP1 don't get free resources just because you're in sandbox; that's just outright cheating.

To make my confusion more brief; What's the limit between "sandbox" and cheating"?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, intelliCom said:

I was about to non-chalantly answer, going down the list, but in all honesty, when you start getting to interplantary colonies, it becomes quite tricky.

The only certainties are all parts being unlocked, KSC being fully upgraded, and all Kerbal abilities unlocked; all the same as KSP 1. After this, how do you define "sandbox" for colonies beyond Kerbin? Is there a small starter colony on every world? What about orbital colonies? What about the fuel requirements on colonies? ISRU plants in KSP1 don't get free resources just because you're in sandbox; that's just outright cheating.

To make my confusion more brief; What's the limit between "sandbox" and cheating"?

I think this confusion may come from a fundamental disconnect of what a 'sandbox' is. :O 
Hear me out: normally in other games, sandbox is a testing ground for wacky ideas or just preparing a design beforehand, generally other games put """cheats""" in there to facilitate said testing, design and creative expression. If I wanted to test say a manufacturing process in factorio, Id just spawn the buildings and resources in, place down an infinite power source and just, test it. If instead I wanted to test the viability of a solar powered base on eeloo, I cannot simply spawn a base on eeloo, I have to design a rocket, plan a route and everything. If it blows up mid course, then screw me I just wasted an hour without having even tried my idea. If I wanted to test how my station handles ore processing in orbit around duna, I have to bring my thing to duna, and mine ore from a nearby surface with another ship I have to also design build and ship. Its incredibly tedious.  In this sense KSP 1's sandbox is a stunted sandbox that is more of a 'easier' progression gamemode (where the progression is your skill in designing rockets to go where you want) then anything, and unless you use mods that fulfill the rest of a true sandbox's functions (e.g. teleportation) you arent really playing 'sandbox'.  Saying spawning resources is 'cheating' in sandbox is indicative of this mindset of KSP1 ""sandbox"", ideally any of the above options in the poll that facilitate an easier time with creative expression and testing would be a good thing to have in a proper sandbox.
And i don't think they'll spawn a colony somewhere on every world, maybe instead you'll be able to open the base editor from literally anywhere and spawn base parts, resources and kerbals for free like you can do in the sandbox VAB. :D  That way you can just have a colony wherever you like for those photogenic locations.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Xelo said:

I think this confusion may come from a fundamental disconnect of what a 'sandbox' is. :O 
Hear me out: normally in other games, sandbox is a testing ground for wacky ideas or just preparing a design beforehand, generally other games put """cheats""" in there to facilitate said testing, design and creative expression. If I wanted to test say a manufacturing process in factorio, Id just spawn the buildings and resources in, place down an infinite power source and just, test it. If instead I wanted to test the viability of a solar powered base on eeloo, I cannot simply spawn a base on eeloo, I have to design a rocket, plan a route and everything. If it blows up mid course, then screw me I just wasted an hour without having even tried my idea. If I wanted to test how my station handles ore processing in orbit around duna, I have to bring my thing to duna, and mine ore from a nearby surface with another ship I have to also design build and ship. Its incredibly tedious.  In this sense KSP 1's sandbox is a stunted sandbox that is more of a 'easier' progression gamemode (where the progression is your skill in designing rockets to go where you want) then anything, and unless you use mods that fulfill the rest of a true sandbox's functions (e.g. teleportation) you arent really playing 'sandbox'.  Saying spawning resources is 'cheating' in sandbox is indicative of this mindset of KSP1 ""sandbox"", ideally any of the above options in the poll that facilitate an easier time with creative expression and testing would be a good thing to have in a proper sandbox.
And i don't think they'll spawn a colony somewhere on every world, maybe instead you'll be able to open the base editor from literally anywhere and spawn base parts, resources and kerbals for free like you can do in the sandbox VAB. :D  That way you can just have a colony wherever you like for those photogenic locations.

Well, I suppose if I have my understanding of a sandbox divorced from KSP 1, I'd probably go with "all of the above". But is that KSP though?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, intelliCom said:

Well, I suppose if I have my understanding of a sandbox divorced from KSP 1, I'd probably go with "all of the above". But is that KSP though?

If really the only reason for a worse sandbox is just because 'the bad game design is just baked into the identity of KSP' then I think that might make it a more convincing reason it should be superseded? That's not to say I am vehemently against just putting a button with the label of 'Classic sandbox' in the game somewhere, for those that just want the rocket engineering skill progression but not the resources kind. That would be great for those that enjoy the 'creative expression within realistic limits' kind of gameplay.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sandbox should allow you to play the game as intended without progression or costs, to the free for all that the crazy contraptions are born. 

PS. I will remind you that the new star systems will be locked in the sandbox mode. (Initially at release anyway.) They will have to be discovered first. Nate did say this will be the case in one of the early interviews for KSP2. Something about internet points and ruining things for other people.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/12/2022 at 10:21 AM, Xelo said:

I think this confusion may come from a fundamental disconnect of what a 'sandbox' is. :O 
Hear me out: normally in other games, sandbox is a testing ground for wacky ideas or just preparing a design beforehand, generally other games put """cheats""" in there to facilitate said testing, design and creative expression. If I wanted to test say a manufacturing process in factorio, Id just spawn the buildings and resources in, place down an infinite power source and just, test it. If instead I wanted to test the viability of a solar powered base on eeloo, I cannot simply spawn a base on eeloo, I have to design a rocket, plan a route and everything. If it blows up mid course, then screw me I just wasted an hour without having even tried my idea. If I wanted to test how my station handles ore processing in orbit around duna, I have to bring my thing to duna, and mine ore from a nearby surface with another ship I have to also design build and ship. Its incredibly tedious.  In this sense KSP 1's sandbox is a stunted sandbox that is more of a 'easier' progression gamemode (where the progression is your skill in designing rockets to go where you want) then anything, and unless you use mods that fulfill the rest of a true sandbox's functions (e.g. teleportation) you arent really playing 'sandbox'.  Saying spawning resources is 'cheating' in sandbox is indicative of this mindset of KSP1 ""sandbox"", ideally any of the above options in the poll that facilitate an easier time with creative expression and testing would be a good thing to have in a proper sandbox.
And i don't think they'll spawn a colony somewhere on every world, maybe instead you'll be able to open the base editor from literally anywhere and spawn base parts, resources and kerbals for free like you can do in the sandbox VAB. :D  That way you can just have a colony wherever you like for those photogenic locations.

Sandbox is also a genre of games, and KSP is a sandbox game, even in career or science mode.

KSP Sandbox came when they started adding progression stuff, for people that wanted to continue play as they always did.

Problem is which ones of the new KSP2 features are "progression stuff" and which are instead just new game systems like IRSU or reentry heating that should be left enabled in sandbox?

 

Out of 23 people that voted as of now there's not even unanimity on "All vehicle parts unlocked" and "No money required for building (or any abstract resource)" has less votes than one may expect given that money and contracts grinding seems to be one of most disliked things in KSP1 progression.

From there it goes downhill.

It seems pretty clear to me that not 2 people here have the same idea of what sandbox is supposed to be.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

28 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Out of 23 people that voted as of now there's not even unanimity on… "No money required for building (or any abstract resource)"

I think this is because of the way people interpret “not required”. Say you are testing a colony and trying to see how long it takes to gather the resources to produce a given ship. If resources are completely removed, you can’t test that because, we’ll, there aren’t resources. Instead, sandbox should be like other games’ sandboxes, where resources exist and can be consumed and produced, but the player can just make infinite of those resources (and infinite rates) when and where they want. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Master39 said:

"No money required for building (or any abstract resource)" has less votes than one may expect given that money and contracts grinding seems to be one of most disliked things in KSP1 progression.

I do not consider Sandbox Mode a proper fix for a broken progression mode. I consider it as a thing on its own.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

I do not consider Sandbox Mode a proper fix for a broken progression mode. I consider it as a thing on its own.

This is valid for every single player taken on its own, but when a lot of people start playing the "same game but without X" gamemode you start wondering what the problem with "X" is.

Even a thing of its own, half of the features in the pool will turn Sandbox in an outright cheat mode, we can argue about which ones, but we sure can agree that if you enable all of the options from the pool you're left with little more than a physics playground.

My point is that I want the cheat mode, I want the "everything enabled, but the tech tree unlocked" mode, I want the one with only the building upgraded at the start but everything else enabled, I have a use for every possible combination of the options offered by this pool.

I want sandbox to be this pool, when you start the save it shows you that list of check's and you pick your own sandbox.

If this were to be a literal sandbox I want the ability to choose which toys I want to bring in it with me, at every time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Apologies again for the dueling threads.

I think @Master39Is right that we've got a broad spectrum of expectations here and somewhere in the difficulty settings it'll be wise to include toggles for some or many of these options. I think though we can probably loosely categorize reasons people are interested in Sandbox:

1) As a test bed for developing and deploying various designs into the field to see how they perform before employing them in Adventure mode proper. - This can probably be better solved with an in-game simulator tool allowing you to test various designs without needing to close and reload saves and copy craft files in between.

2) As a fully separate game mode with no locked parts or abilities or abstract resources like science or money, but with mineable resources and resource part costs outside of KSC. The game would essentially function as if you started with it "beaten." - This perhaps is what you would properly call "Sandbox", and might run into problems with essential game functions like increasing populations. 

3) As a purely freeform, god-mode design environment with no costs at all and the ability to teleport whatever you design wherever you wish so you can make crazy things. - This might be a separate default start option called "Creative mode". 

And of course it would be really nice if when you started either of the second two you could fine tune your experience by toggling options on or off. In many instances it would be nice to toggle them on and off even after you'd started the save in case you decided 'actually I do or don't want to mess around with xyz'. 

Edit: or maybe Master is right above^ as well (you ninja'd me ;) ). Maybe there's just two modes listed: Adventure Mode and Sandbox and the latter automatically takes you to the advanced difficulty settings menu to select what you want. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, Master39 said:

Out of 23 people that voted as of now there's not even unanimity on "All vehicle parts unlocked" and "No money required for building (or any abstract resource)" has less votes than one may expect given that money and contracts grinding seems to be one of most disliked things in KSP1 progression.

I feel like the forum multiple choice poll's percentage numbers may be very bugged, it seems like the poll is weighting each choice/ (the total amount of choices chosen) rather then /(total people voted) as if every time you selected a choice it were counted as a different person.
like say there;s a hypothetical poll with three choices: A B C
If only you voted on that poll and picked A & B, the poll would read 50% for A and 50% for B. Even thoh it should be 100% for each, because you arent two people that voted for two different options.
Likewise with this poll, all vehicle parts reads at 9.03% currently
The total amount of choices people have made excluding people who chose nothing and submitted is 321= (29+28+29+25+20+14+24+23+13+13+12+13+14+23+20+16+5)
if my hunch is correct the poll would read 9.03%, (29/321)  which it is exactly.

Ok so I went out and tested this on a old poll (so I can be more sure noone has selected an answer while i was clicking each option), and selected every choice in it. You'd except every choice's percentage to increase, but it does not.
image.png

Another way to check is by adding up all the numbers of this poll 
9.03+8.72+9.03+7.79+6.23+4.36+7.48+7.17+4.05+4.05+3.74+4.05+4.36+7.17+6.23+4.98+1.56
and seeing that it equals 100, which just should not happen on multiple choice unless everyone really did just select only one choice.

This all means that there's literally no way to tell if one person picked both A and B or two people picked A and B separately because they would give the same polling result.

So yeah, not to be offtopic, but I dont think multiple choice polls on this forum are a good way to go, going forwards.

Edited by Xelo
math mistake, which made up for the weird error.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Xelo said:

I feel like the forum multiple choice poll's percentage numbers may be very bugged, it seems like the poll is weighting each choice/ (the total amount of choices chosen) rather then /(total people voted) as if every time you selected a choice it were counted as a different person.
like say there;s a hypothetical poll with three choices: A B C
If only you voted on that poll and picked A & B, the poll would read 50% for A and 50% for B. Even thoh it should be 100% for each, because you arent two people that voted for two different options.
Likewise with this poll, all vehicle parts reads at 9.03% currently
The total amount of choices people have made excluding people who chose nothing and submitted is 321= (29+28+29+25+20+14+24+23+13+13+12+13+14+23+20+16+5)
if my hunch is correct the poll would read 9.03%, (29/321)  which it is exactly.

Ok so I went out and tested this on a old poll (so I can be more sure noone has selected an answer while i was clicking each option), and selected every choice in it. You'd except every choice's percentage to increase, but it does not.
image.png

Another way to check is by adding up all the numbers of this poll 
9.03+8.72+9.03+7.79+6.23+4.36+7.48+7.17+4.05+4.05+3.74+4.05+4.36+7.17+6.23+4.98+1.56
and seeing that it equals 100, which just should not happen on multiple choice unless everyone really did just select only one choice.

This all means that there's literally no way to tell if one person picked both A and B or two people picked A and B separately because they would give the same polling result.

So yeah, not to be offtopic, but I dont think multiple choice polls on this forum are a good way to go, going forwards.

It's not bugged, its working "correctly".

If i have 5 jars and only 1 jar has a marble in it then that jar has 100% of the marbles. If I then place a marble in every jar, that 1st jar now has 2/6 of the marbles. So the percentage went from 100% to 33%.

I personally just feel like the multiple choice voting display mechanic is dumb here as it mirrors the single vote display mechanic. But in single voting the choices compete with one another where as in multiple choice whats normally looked for is how many people agree.  So from my earlier example I think the jar with 2 marbles should show 100% as 100% of people agree and the other jars each show 50% as 50% of people agreed with those.

 

As is though, don't look at percentage, look at the number on the far right and compare it to the total responders. As it is now it compares against total responses.

 

EDIT: There is a way to tell how many peicked the same responses but it requires voters be selected as public instead of private and I've tried doing so before, but the forums community doesn't appreciate that as it can make things "political"

Edited by mcwaffles2003
Link to comment
Share on other sites

31 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

It's not bugged, its working "correctly".

Its a bug not because there is a math error but because it is not intentional behavior. Much like how clipping through the wall in Portal is a bug even if the math works out perfectly that in the specific velocities and positions the player is going the physics engine """correctly""" determines the player should enter the void. 
 

34 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

As is though, don't look at percentage, look at the number on the far right and compare it to the total responders. As it is now it compares against total responses.

And no. If the poll says 50 people chose A and 50 people chose B, there could anywhere between 50 and 100 people answering that poll. You dont know if 50 people chose both and A and B or 100 people chose A and B separately, or anything in between. This means that both A and B has a value anywhere between 50% and 100% of votes but it only shows 50%. This makes the poll number rather useless for determining the true proportion of people that agree with the choice.
In this poll, the people that agree with "All vehicle parts unlocked" at the time of this comment could've been all 33 out of 33 or 33 out of 347**, or anything in-between so really you only know a vague 'popularity' metric from this, somewhat useful only relative to the other options. We have to just go with the assumption of "Im pretty sure everyone who answered this poll wants every part unlocked" or something like that.

In future an option like "PLEASE ALWAYS CHECK THIS OPTION IF YOU ARE DOING THE POLL" would be needed for the MC polls until this is fixed, so we at least have an approximate value for the total respondents. 

**Its probably upper-bounded by the fact that there's 208 views currently.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Xelo said:

I feel like the forum multiple choice poll's percentage numbers may be very bugged, it seems like the poll is weighting each choice/ (the total amount of choices chosen) rather then /(total people voted) as if every time you selected a choice it were counted as a different person.
like say there;s a hypothetical poll with three choices: A B C
If only you voted on that poll and picked A & B, the poll would read 50% for A and 50% for B. Even thoh it should be 100% for each, because you arent two people that voted for two different options.
Likewise with this poll, all vehicle parts reads at 9.03% currently
The total amount of choices people have made excluding people who chose nothing and submitted is 321= (29+28+29+25+20+14+24+23+13+13+12+13+14+23+20+16+5)
if my hunch is correct the poll would read 9.03%, (29/321)  which it is exactly.

Ok so I went out and tested this on a old poll (so I can be more sure noone has selected an answer while i was clicking each option), and selected every choice in it. You'd except every choice's percentage to increase, but it does not.
image.png

Another way to check is by adding up all the numbers of this poll 
9.03+8.72+9.03+7.79+6.23+4.36+7.48+7.17+4.05+4.05+3.74+4.05+4.36+7.17+6.23+4.98+1.56
and seeing that it equals 100, which just should not happen on multiple choice unless everyone really did just select only one choice.

This all means that there's literally no way to tell if one person picked both A and B or two people picked A and B separately because they would give the same polling result.

So yeah, not to be offtopic, but I dont think multiple choice polls on this forum are a good way to go, going forwards.

Good thing in my post I didn't talk about percentages then, I'm not even reading them. Not needed when I have the real data here:
wVufxSr.png

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Master39 said:

Good thing in my post I didn't talk about percentages then, I'm not even reading them. Not needed when I have the real data here:
wVufxSr.png

 

oh man that text is literally invisible, who designed this website. xD
And no this wasnt intended as an attack on your argument since the relative percentages were convincing enough (disregarding the fact the KSP forums is not a representative sample of the majority of people who will be playing ksp), just something I had to bring up because people kept using these polls for some reason even if the numbers were dodgy and I wanted to know why by attacking the poll itself.
But in general I do agree that customisability would be nice,  I didn't really argue on the basis of every feature in the poll being forced into your game either, just that they be available, whatever form that availability would take. Even if every 'cheat' feature were in sandbox whether you liked it or not, having them would beat not having it, as at least you can just personally limit yourself on what you can do as opposed to waiting for mods that can be unsupported at any time and janky hacks.

Edited by Xelo
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Xelo said:

And no this wasnt intended as an attack on your argument since the relative percentages were convincing enough (disregarding the fact the KSP forums is not a representative sample of the majority of people who will be playing ksp), just something I had to bring up because people kept using these polls for some reason even if the numbers were dodgy and I wanted to know why by attacking the poll itself.

The pool is reflecting of the people that are discussing about Sandbox in the other thread.

We now know that not everyone means the same thing when talking about "Sandbox", now we know that whatever that gamemode is supposed to be it's not as obvious as one may think, that we don't even all agree on some of the basic points of sandbox like "Free parts" or "unlocked tech tree".

Know that we know that the conversation can proceed with way less misunderstandings.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/14/2022 at 5:50 AM, Master39 said:

We now know that not everyone means the same thing when talking about "Sandbox", now we know that whatever that gamemode is supposed to be it's not as obvious as one may think, that we don't even all agree on some of the basic points of sandbox like "Free parts" or "unlocked tech tree".

It doesn't help that the term "sandbox" for games is so broad. I mean that games like SimCity, GTA3, Gary's Mod, Minecraft all fall under the sandbox definition for games. (It's funny that the Wiki didn't cite more "modern" games like Space Engineers, KSP, Empyrion, Scrap Mechanic, Terra Tech, Factorio, DSP, Cities Skylines, Surviving Mars, Satisfactory, Valheim, Icarus, etc.)

With so many games that fit the sandbox definition, everyone will have a different opinion to what sandbox means in the game sense.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/14/2022 at 6:50 AM, Master39 said:

we don't even all agree on some of the basic points of sandbox like "Free parts" or "unlocked tech tree".

Those who don't agree on some things may have reasons for such. For example, I'd prefer to fill out my own tech tree and select which parts I want available to me so I don't have to filter through and find the stuff I do want in the junk I don't. Of course I could play science mode to the same sort of effect, but that just feels like Sandbox mode with extra steps to me. The only things that should unanimously be seen as a sandbox stable in KSP is unlimited Money, Science, Kerbals and of course the inclusion of a cheat menu. Note however I said "unlimited" and not "absent". 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...