KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[Alexoff]

On 3/4/2023 at 2:30 AM, Bej Kerman said:

It's not even a release title.

Both are sold on Steam, what year is the release expected? Almost two weeks have passed, there is not a single hotfix for the game.

On 3/4/2023 at 2:30 AM, Bej Kerman said:

It's not even a release title.

Irrelevant

Why not? There was also a roadmap and many promises.

[Bej Kerman]

3 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

On 3/3/2023 at 11:30 PM, Bej Kerman said:

It's not even a release title.

Both are sold on Steam, what year is the release expected? Almost two weeks have passed, there is not a single hotfix for the game.

On 3/3/2023 at 11:30 PM, Bej Kerman said:

It's not even a release title.

Irrelevant

Why not? There was also a roadmap and many promises.

You lost your 50 dollars already. You probably aren't getting them back assuming you've played more than a few hours. Let it go.

[Alexoff]

15 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

You lost your 50 dollars already. You probably aren't getting them back assuming you've played more than a few hours. Let it go.

No, I didn’t, T2 forbids me to buy the game, I only watched streams

[Periple]

6 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

No, I didn’t, T2 forbids me to buy the game, I only watched streams

Oh that’s too bad! Why are you so upset about the state of the game then if you’re not even allowed to play it? With any luck by the time you are, it’ll be in a much better state!

[LameLefty]

At least the Facebook posts haven't stopped.  

[Vl3d]

This took me a while...

 

[dragonart777]

5 hours ago, LameLefty said:

At least the Facebook posts haven't stopped.  

seen this today lol. 

[RocketBoy1641]

10 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Both are sold on Steam, what year is the release expected? Almost two weeks have passed, there is not a single hotfix for the game.

Why not? There was also a roadmap and many promises.

Because hot fixes are more likely to cause new problems that people will scream about.  Did you even read what Nate posted in this thread?

[Periple]

There's another thing about going to production that I don't think anyone's brought up yet. It's about release cadence. 

Before you go to production, you probably won't have dedicated QA on the project. Instead, the team is working on feature branches and syncing on the development branch, with code reviews on whatever's getting merged to development. You could have build automation that spits out regular builds, maybe even some smoke tests to check that they start up. You'll want to have unit tests integrated into your build pipeline so the automated build goes red if they fail. 

The advantage is that development is pretty quick as you're just syncing on one branch. The downside is that some of your builds will be badly broken and you don't have any mechanism in place to validate this -- you'll only notice when you try to play one. 

When you want to go to production, this process changes. You bring a QA team on board. Whenever you want to release a build, you branch off a release candidate from development. QA starts verifying the issues on the RC, while development goes on as usual on the development branch. If everything goes well, by the time QA has verified it, you can release it and cut a new RC from development, and the cycle repeats. 

This introduces a bunch of complications however.

First: any bugs that QA finds in the RC will need to be fixed both in the RC and in development. If there's good velocity on development, this may mean that it'll be so far ahead of the RC that automatic merges won't work anymore, and you'll have to do manual work to get the fixes in both branches. If this happens a lot, it will become a material drag on development. Overall velocity on the project will fall.

Second: if your dev team is faster at fixing/implementing issues than QA is at verifying them, you'll get a QA logjam. If QA can verify 20 issues a week but your dev team can implement 30, by the time the 30 issues in the RC are verified, you'll have 40 in the next RC and it'll take 2 weeks to verify rather than 1. The next one will have 60 issues and take 3 weeks. And so on. 

In this situation, you can do two things: cut corners on QA, instructing them to ignore anything that's not an A bug so we can get the RC out, or you can grow the QA team until it can keep up with development.

The trouble with growing the QA team is that even if you're working with a really good QA partner, it takes time. Even if they have the engineers available right now, it'll take them a week or two to get fully up to speed with the project, and they might not have them available now, or you might not have the budget to pay them and will have to get that sorted first.

I think it's quite possible, even likely that this is what's going on with KSP2 right now. They had a QA logjam which meant QA never got around to B and C bugs. They still have it, which means it's taking them longer than they'd like to get the first patch out. And they're expanding the QA team so they can get the logjam cleared, but that might take a while -- even a couple of months when you allow for the time needed to expand it, get it up to speed, and work through the backlog accumulated in the meantime.

Is this because Intercept are dumb and bad and don't know what they're doing? No. It just means they're struggling with the usual things related to getting a new product into production. In a perfect world they would have had the time and bandwidth to anticipate this -- getting QA on board three or four months ago, start doing internal releases as if they were already in EA, work out what the QA team's velocity is compared to the dev team's, expand it as necessary, straighten out the kinks in the build pipes, and so on.

This just isn't a perfect world, and while PD has been around for a while and Intercept have a lot of experienced developers and producers, this is their first rodeo too -- and an organization needs time to work out exactly how it's doing things, even if the people working in it have all the necessary experience and knowledge.

So I think that in the early parts of EA releases will be irregular and sometimes delayed, but they will get those kinks sorted out, and we will see their release cadence improve and stabilize as EA goes on. They will be targeting a cadence that matches their sprint cycles -- so anything between 1 and 4 weeks but most likely 2 or 3.

[The Aziz]

After that I think it's worth noting that adding more people to the project does not necessarily mean that the development will be faster.

[MarcAbaddon]

2 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

After that I think it's worth noting that adding more people to the project does not necessarily mean that the development will be faster.

That's nonsense! After all, 9 couples can produce a baby in a month.

Edited March 7, 2023 by MarcAbaddon

[Vl3d]

15 minutes ago, MarcAbaddon said:

That's nonsense! After all, 9 couples can produce a baby in a month.

How things are going nowadays.. you might be right.

[Periple]

41 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

After that I think it's worth noting that adding more people to the project does not necessarily mean that the development will be faster.

Often true! 

There are some areas that scale better than others though. Scaling up QA is pretty straightforward usually, every QA works on one ticket at a time, and when you add more QAs you get more throughput on tickets. Assets and levels are similar, you can throw more artists/designers at them, and they will produce more stuff in the same amount of time. Ditto for music.

Scaling up the tech art, programming, or design team is a lot harder, and it only works well if there's a clear hole that needs to be filled so everybody knows what'll get handed over to the new dev. It's a lot harder to work on multiple things in parallel because you'll often end up with people tripping over each other's feet.

[Haustvindr]

3 hours ago, MarcAbaddon said:

That's nonsense! After all, 9 couples can produce a baby in a month.

I... I'm stealing that to tell to our clients.  Sorry not sorry.

Maybe they will finally understand (yeah suuuuuuuuure).

Edited March 7, 2023 by Haustvindr

[Space Kadet]

On 3/1/2023 at 12:45 PM, 78stonewobble said:

Nothing.

True, but it's one of the advantages of being a small team deciding for yourself, that you can decide to do it that way. You don't have to ask others. 


To me a reasonable realistic expectation of early access is this:

Bugs, poor performance, lack of features and no guarantees. 

A state in the development in a project.



You guys seem to suggest that a reasonable realistic expectation for early access should be:

Bugs, performance, features and guarantees dependent on various factors such as eg. cost and development time ( and presumably also budget, company size, problem free development vs. troubled development).

Which means that early access will be wildly different from project to project ie. project A's early access will be entirely different from project B's early access.

That's a quite complicated calculation to do, not even considering that there might be information we know little to nothing about. 



I think my approach is much less confusing for both consumers and developers and will overall lead to less unrealistic expectations, unfulfilled expectation, regret, buyers remorse etc.

   

In any case, the wonderful thing about choice, is that you get to decide, how you want to see these things. You don't have to agree with me and indeed it would be a boring world (for me) if everybody did agree with me. You guys keep me on my toes and I get to keep you on your toes.  
 

Im not sure about your defination of reasonable.  we arent talking a small dev team from a startup on a 10quid game, we are talkign a real dev team from a AAA gaming overlord charging full price 50e on day 1.
bugs sure, but 15 fps on a 4070ti, and unlaunchable rockets because they come appart or bend like wet pasta, no! Especially when they did that 3 years ago on the first game play teaser from the pre alpha. 3 years to fix that.... Thats not acceptable
lack of features, sure acceptable if the priceing was lower, but paying full price.  Immagine byuing a car and they said, ok its full price but you dont get seats or a steering wheel until later after we made them, but feel free to ddrive it now.
"A state in the development in a project." pencil on paper qualifies as this, i dont think you mean that.

for your info, ksp in its current state dosent actually meet the STEAM requiremtns for an early access game. e.g. these 2 points below

2. Do not make specific promises about future events. For example, there is no way you can know exactly when the game will be finished, that the game will be finished, or that planned future additions will definitely happen. Do not ask your customers to bet on the future of your game. Customers should be buying your game based on its current state, not on promises of a future that may or may not be realized.

6. Don't launch in Early Access without a playable game. If you have a tech demo, but not much gameplay yet, then it’s probably too early to launch in Early Access. If you are trying to test out a concept and haven't yet figured out what players are going to do in your game that makes it fun, then it's probably too early. You might want to start by giving out keys to select fans and getting input from a smaller and focused group before you release in Early Access. At a bare minimum, you will need a video trailer that shows gameplay. Even if you are asking for feedback that will impact gameplay, customers need something to start with in order to give informed feedback and suggestions.


You are paying for what is there, not for what is coming. and on the 3 seperate high end rigs i have avaliable its not playable.  The people paying for this are just making sure that ksp will be full of crap content behind paywalls like every other take 2 game releasd in recent years. 

oh and that fps issue is a big signal of whats to come because if they havent figured whats wrong by now.... its such a core problem they havent figured out but funny for those that know where the issue is.

Edited March 7, 2023 by Space Kadet

[S13ontap]

This....  

This is what I just did to be able to play KSP2.  I wonder if the Frame rate will get better than the 2080TI let it.

Ah just kidding.  I bought the card, but I'd play KSP without it.  Hoping for an update soon, It's soul crushing to build something over and over just to not be able to launch or glitch out.  

This probably wont help that, but I'll let you guys know what frames I see on the pad.  (truth be told, the game is more fun with the FPS counter turned off)

 

[Bej Kerman]

5 minutes ago, Space Kadet said:

Im not sure about your defination of reasonable.  we arent talking a small dev team from a startup on a 10quid game, we are talkign a real dev team from a AAA gaming overlord charging full price 50e on day 1.
bugs sure, but 15 fps on a 4070ti, and unlaunchable rockets because they come appart or bend like wet pasta, no! Especially when they did that 3 years ago on the first game play teaser from the pre alpha. 3 years to fix that.... Thats not acceptable
lack of features, sure acceptable if the priceing was lower, but paying full price.  Immagine byuing a car and they said, ok its full price but you dont get seats or a steering wheel until later after we made them, but feel free to ddrive it now.
"A state in the development in a project." pencil on paper qualifies as this, i dont think you mean that.

for your info, ksp in its current state dosent actually meet the STEAM requiremtns for an early access game. e.g. these 2 points below

2. Do not make specific promises about future events. For example, there is no way you can know exactly when the game will be finished, that the game will be finished, or that planned future additions will definitely happen. Do not ask your customers to bet on the future of your game. Customers should be buying your game based on its current state, not on promises of a future that may or may not be realized.

6. Don't launch in Early Access without a playable game. If you have a tech demo, but not much gameplay yet, then it’s probably too early to launch in Early Access. If you are trying to test out a concept and haven't yet figured out what players are going to do in your game that makes it fun, then it's probably too early. You might want to start by giving out keys to select fans and getting input from a smaller and focused group before you release in Early Access. At a bare minimum, you will need a video trailer that shows gameplay. Even if you are asking for feedback that will impact gameplay, customers need something to start with in order to give informed feedback and suggestions.


You are paying for what is there, not for what is coming. and on the 3 seperate high end rigs i have avaliable its not playable.  The people paying for this are just making sure that ksp will be full of crap content behind paywalls like every other take 2 game releasd in recent years. 

oh and that fps issue is a big signal of whats to come because if they havent figured whats wrong by now.... its such a core problem they havent figured out but funny for those that know where the issue is.

You're basing this all on what?

[Space Kadet]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

You're basing this all on what?

not sure what part you mean, the steam documentation for early access,  the 3 computers that are 1 i5 and 2 i9's  11th and 12 gen, or the fact the fps on the 2060 super is 2 frames slower than the 4070ti, which its self is the same as the 4090.

that fps cross 3 systems, with physics issues on unity shows a core problem that isint gpu related, not for the most part. and if its been there since their pre alpha and is still there years down the line that shows a lack of knowledge, hoppefully. Because the other side is they know where the bug is and havent fixed it fallout 76 style.

If you want more info study unity.

But that line in the EULA about owning anything made for the game, i.e. they can steal anyones mod code. I got no interest in helping a company pull a WotC on their fan base. 

 

[The Aziz]

15 minutes ago, Space Kadet said:

Customers should be buying your game based on its current state

Devs were open on what they were releasing. The didn't hide anything. In the end, it was the customers' decision whether to buy or not.

17 minutes ago, Space Kadet said:

If you have a tech demo, but not much gameplay yet, then it’s probably too early to launch in Early Access

Define not much gameplay, because there's plenty of gameplay.

[Stoup]

6 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Devs were open on what they were releasing. The didn't hide anything. In the end, it was the customers' decision whether to buy or not.

Define not much gameplay, because there's plenty of gameplay.

I just, don't know if I agree with that first point. They were open about a few issues being present with the release, but nothing on the scale of the number of issues that were actually present. If the issues mentioned in this brief paragraph were the only issues people were dealing with right now, surely there would not be anywhere near as many complaints.

[Space Kadet]

20 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Devs were open on what they were releasing. The didn't hide anything. In the end, it was the customers' decision whether to buy or not.

Define not much gameplay, because there's plenty of gameplay.

is there gameplay ? seriously? i couldent see it behind when the ships kept falling appart, the repeated crashes, the 15 fps  a corrupt save in the first 20 minutes, vab glitching etc etc....  my favourite one was when the rocket fellappart and landed on its side and the kraken started dragging it all over the place and the game became unresponsive and wouldent quit even when ctrlaltdeling it....

i played kerbal when it was released after 6 months, these guys have had YEARS and are building on an already completed game, and still this is what they deam 50euros worth of game. battlefield 4 cost me 23 quid. cyberpunk was 35.

and the devs where not open. not 1 single time, and no where on steam did it say if you have the the lates gen pc will kerbal run like ****, no where did they mention the craft just falling appar, nor the broken saves, or that every craft you launch will get klanged. 

what they said, is 'we know its unfinnished but we are playing it all the time in the office and want you to be playing it too', which leads me to ask what in the fornicating  bagobo si their defination of playing.  

I was expecting the fillowing things, 

• Buy the game (by the eula you dont own the game, an actual thing then shoved in there that is illegal in the eu, uk and several states)
• make some ships (the vab bugged on me several times)
• launch some ships (some launched some didnt at all 1 just hard crashed)
• fly ship to space (the floopy noodle kracken or the dissassembly kraken shot that horse in the face)
• repete with second ship, and connect some together ( see above dead horse's grey matter)
• and lastly but not least fir it to run at a rate that dosent cause me a migrane ( that flickering cause one that made me wish i was said horse witht he noggin ventelation)

So you tell me, do you think that was too much to ask from a sequal made by a tripple a company charging full tripple a price?
 

[The Aziz]

5 minutes ago, Space Kadet said:

i couldent see it behind when the ships kept falling appart, the repeated crashes, the 15 fps  a corrupt save in the first 20 minutes, vab glitching etc etc....

Well, not my problem, I've seen people building spaceplanes, interplanetary vessels, space stations, landing on celestial bodies...

7 minutes ago, Space Kadet said:

this is what they deam 50euros worth of game. battlefield 4 cost me 23 quid. cyberpunk was 35.

Oh good you got them on sale, because that wasn't day 1 price, was it? So why didn't you wait for sale here?

[Bej Kerman]

7 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

19 minutes ago, Space Kadet said:

i couldent see it behind when the ships kept falling appart, the repeated crashes, the 15 fps  a corrupt save in the first 20 minutes, vab glitching etc etc....

Well, not my problem, I've seen people building spaceplanes, interplanetary vessels, space stations, landing on celestial bodies...

Not my problem either, I've done plenty of experiments and I've only come across a couple of mission-ending bugs.

[Vl3d]

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Reports Results for Fiscal Third Quarter 2023

February 6, 2023

Cost Reduction Program In light of the current backdrop and Take-Two’s strong commitment to efficiency, the Company is implementing a cost reduction program expected to yield over $50 million of annual savings, which it will begin to realize in the fourth quarter of its Fiscal Year 2023. The program includes personnel, processes, infrastructure, and other areas, and will primarily focus on corporate and publishing functions. This cost reduction program is in addition to the over $100 million of cost synergies the Company expects to realize from its combination with Zynga, and is not expected to impact the delivery of its robust multi-year pipeline. Take-Two believes these actions, combined with its focus on profitably growing its scale, will enable the Company to maximize its margins as it delivers on its anticipated growth trajectory over the next few years.

https://ir.take2games.com/node/29371/pdf

It was announced a month ago.

[Space Kadet]

11 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Well, not my problem, I've seen people building spaceplanes, interplanetary vessels, space stations, landing on celestial bodies...

Oh good you got them on sale, because that wasn't day 1 price, was it? So why didn't you wait for sale here?

that was the day 1 price on cyberpunk 36,99euro and battlefield offered a preorder. for a fully working game. 

and as for the other part.... well yeah, thats what the company thinks too "who cares about the players if we are happy"

not sure if you saw, but im a massive kerbal fan, thousands of hours, multiple modded installs, and i spent a fortune on my big rigs so it would be the best for this game going with lastes gen I) over threadripper because unities physics engine runs on a single core so i9 is faster that a 20k$ threadripper for this game.

i made a new youtube account, got dedicated recording hardware etcetc, and the got the game on day 1 hour 1 of release to start a whole new channel making kerbal video series on the new  game. 
that was my plan, but then this... and trhe fanyboys that are supporting a company that did this. Ironically in the process making sure they never get the game thats promised becase as with every big tripple a game with major starting glitches, they dont get fixed because it will take the dev's time away from  making the shineys that people buy to ass more money into the shareholders pockets.

Edited March 7, 2023 by Space Kadet