moeggz

@MechBFP totally possible, but then very odd to even come close to breaching NDA if you left on bad terms.

@PDCWolfyou forgot to mention them seeming to forget that they promised a reentry heating video 10 days ago.

I think there’s still some on both sides, who while they have strong opinions, try and voice them constructively. Both sides seem to get more agitated when the other side claims that they are arguing in bad faith or just commenting to shut the other side up. People want to share their opinions, positive and negative alike. As long as the opposing side doesn’t try and run you off the forums the discussions can still be productive.

Ok here goes… An account on Reddit claiming to be Paul Furio has said that he is shocked that science hasn’t come out yet. I’m also confident it’s him as the Reddit username is the name of the band he is in and is three years old, so a little hard to fake. His first post in Kerbal space program is a link to open jobs the same week as the launch of the game, he talks about floating point origins in video games with large spaces, everything likes up. So again, the account is openly claiming to be Paul Furio, I didn’t try to unmask an anonymous account I read the self claim (as in the account said “I am Paul Furio” and I actually first saw this on the discord) then tried to see if I could verify. And it seems pretty solid that it’s him, and he is ok with it being known that it’s him, so I’m sure he’s only saying what he’s allowed to with a presumed NDA. All his comments in r/Kerbal space program are very positive to the devs, and being shocked that science isn’t out yet isn’t necessarily a negative thing to say. But that would be our first confirmation that the update cycle is behind even internal expectations, specifically internal expectations after the state of the game at EA launch. If even the ex technical director is shocked at how long things are taking after knowing the state of the code at launch what exactly is happening?

question, if a dev posts on a personal Reddit account, “hey it’s me the dev x” and then says something else in another comment is that ok to share here? Im not trying to unmask a private account, this account openly claims to be a dev, would that comment be on to share?

Not much. Devs took the under promise and over deliver strategy but have yet to deliver… anything really. Hard to discuss the future features without knowing what science will even be like.

I hear you but “the reentry video will launch alongside/day after/ whatever/ the patch” would be a bit better to me. To be clear, I think their best strategy from this point is to go near radio silent until science. But that’s after you tie up what’s already been announced.

0.1.4 now moved from “early this week” to “this week” Also the reentry video that was going to come out 10 days ago remains completely unacknowledged.

Agreed, I want it to stay a sandbox a la survival Minecraft - build whatever you want, as long as you have gathered enough resources. The desire to build more things naturally leads you to deep mines and the nether and what not without a list of quests. So ultimately I would prefer just LS. There’s nothing in the game preventing you from time warping 1 million, but your Kerbals will die/go dormant so the player is naturally led to not time warp too much while they are still in the “gathering resources” phase. When enough resources are gathered for interstellar this changes a bit with the massive time frames required. As far as the “different play styles exist and therefore we can’t punish one style” angle, I agree with this too but this is where I think the comparison to the introduction of reentry heat is most applicable. Some peoples play styles was to slam into the atmosphere of jool and pull a 50 g acceleration to be captured. Introducing reentry heat did take away that, but it added a (to me) very enjoyable whole other level to gameplay that made it worth adding. Same with life support. The “time warp all the time sequential missions only, I don’t have to consider transfer windows” playstyle will be hampered, but the game will get a whole new level of depth that is worth it I think. No one complains about having reentry heat anymore, rather it’s absence is felt by how much simpler the sequel is without it. I think a similar story could happen with life support.

An idea i have is that colonies may occasionally need random missions. Say the Kerbal demand a certain “object” (in universe, idk more snacks, new carbon filter whatever) and sometimes these are small enough for a small cargo container, sometimes medium, and sometimes big and unwieldy that don’t fit in any container. These pop up from time to Tim wand all work at a colony stops until it is delivered. This would prevent the time warp exploits and reward players for 1stage reusable interplanetary spacecraft.

Adding life support would solve the “time warp 1 million for infinite resources.” Adding life support now is like when they added reentry heat the first time. A lot of protest but after we got used to it impossible to go back. It’s a necessary step to bring ksp to the new levels offered by the sequel.

That’s just work smarter and not harder, and unexpected delays happen. That’s true of every industry.

Define effort in a way that doesn’t include the concept of time.

Yes KSP2 has a broader scope. But they already know (or should’ve orbital decay still exists) how to program orbital mechanics. As far as your second point, sure. Maybe that’s the industry standard and everything takes a decade more I don’t see. That doesn’t excuse the marketing and or releasing the game in this state. If it’s really important to you that the devs are not at fault at all we can go that route. The game should have never been released in this state, and the marketing side lied to the community for years. Still a bad product.

As others have said, by development time. I agree they didn’t just copy and paste the code, but KSP1 did exist, there’s no need to interview scientists about orbital mechanics you have a much more narrow definition of the scope of the game because you know way more clearly where you are headed then the devs of KSP1 did. But let’s stop with all of this. Apples to apples KSP1 to KSP2 over the course of 6 months after release Ksp2: bug fixes. A few parts. KSP1: numerous parts and features added. Any one of the (several) updates included several more bug fixes than have been done to ksp2 over its lifetime. You’ll notice, that even with the rather broken game at launch most people were still optimistic. It wasn’t until nothing changed for months that people started to become pessimistic. I highly doubt this is industry standard. “Time” is what dictates cost and profit, if management cares about something the workers care, hopefully in a non toxic way. But if I got to measure my work in effort and delivered unfinished projects way behind schedule constantly I wouldn’t have a job for long.

Colonies were, but I don’t believe the sim city level of detail of laying electrical wires, building farms and housing, laying out roads, and such was promised. Promised colonies seem to be “build a rocket with a hab module. Land it somewhere and build a VAB, connect it to resources from other colones and build more ships.” Which sounds fun, but I would love a whole space program sim with a colony sim with a rocket sandbox sim in it.

@Stephensan I salute your passion and persistence.

This is by no means anything that was ever suggested by the devs, so I’m hoping for DLC or some mods but I would love for colonies to grow to the point of a mini city simulation per colony. Laying down infrastructure lines, adding landing pads, habitation, work and entertainment buildings while managing habitat with breathable air and farming buildings for food and such would be awesome. Nothing promised, so nothing expected, but I would love for Kerbal Space Program to be more “space program” than it is now. I still want the rockets, but building a meta game on top of that would be my dream.

Genuine question, how often did you have to start new saves? I couldn’t keep a save going with more than a handful of vessels. It would be difficult for me to put that much time into a game where little I did persisted and I had to keep restarting.

[Snip] If you want to discuss other things there are other threads you can join or make new ones, but there’s not much happening there because there’s not much to discuss until we have more info. The pessimists here are way more polite and articulate then the flood of the worst comments on steam and Reddit. The constant dismissal of the, by all accounts, majority opinion across all platforms on this platform in particular isn’t going to make that opinion go away. The Reddit poll had 2,000+ responses. Here less than 100. The forum numbers added to the reddit poll wouldn’t change the bell curve. I would guess that’s because most dissenting views are pushed away from this platform. For reference, more people on reddit responded that they feel that the game will be in 1.0 in 6 months (so optimistic that no one here selected it) than nearly all of the responses combined here. The bell curve in reddit is slightly more negative yes but way more wide. [Snip]

If the devs bring in science trust me most of the discussion will be on science. That’s more interesting for everyone to talk about. I’d like to talk about resources and asynchronous options for multiplayer but it’s hard to have those conversations not even knowing what science will be like. And, to keep this merry go round conversation going, KSP1 was much cheaper than KSP2, was a new idea combining Orbiter like mechanics into a sandbox game without any prior game to get ideas/solutions from, was made by far fewer people, and had more progress down its “roadmap” over any 3 month period than has KSP2 over its lifetime. When your game is less playable with less features than the prior entry in the franchise, is more expensive, and is progressing substantially slower than the first game yeah people are going to get grumpy. If you then apologize and try and start off with a clean slate and return to overpromising and either under delivering or never delivering yeah people will get upset.

From the announcement thread in 2019 Q: What type of physics can players expect? Advanced, realistic, etc? A: Realistic vehicle physics and orbital mechanics continue to be at the center of the Kerbal experience. We've focused on optimizing vehicle physics to allow for the smooth simulation of larger structures on a wider variety of PCs. Had EA just been that I think there wouldn’t be so much pushback. Nearly 4 years after that answer and that is still not the case.

That’s a fair point. And I agree with your conclusion, I’d rather they communicate less and do something then micromanage community sentiment. The other side, is, to me, that they already got 6 months and it hasn’t changed much. A decent amount of bugs got fixed but the biggest that prevent serious play without frustration remain. To you, words are wind. To me, if you just apologized for being misleading (even unintentionally)and then immediately do it again I feel a breakdown in mutual respect. But we have a clear poll now on the expectations they have set with the majority of the community. If they can meet or exceed those we will finally be out of this endless wheel spinning. If not, I don’t believe my love for and desire for a new KSP will be stronger than my irritation at having reality be so much lower than my expectations for a year.

I agree. That’s why I made it clear I think everyone who has interacted with the community is capable, intelligent, and is honest about their intentions. My ranting is against the company as a whole, not attacking any individual dev who I believe is doing their best and is hamstrung by bad publishing decisions.

I mean it when I said the apology meant a lot to me. I assumed this would be there MO going forward. If science took another 6 months and it dropped without fanfare I would’ve stayed happy. But they gave a date and some things to expect and then immediately didn’t meet those expectations. What you read as being pedantic (and I’m not arguing here, your view is fair and I encourage you to share it) to me is accountability. They have not shown accountability. Later they even apologized for that. And that made me happy. And then they proceeded to move ahead without accountability and that frustrates me. Their words aren’t trustworthy, giving dates only leads to anger, and yet they keep giving dates. I do try to be a forgiving person (as all other humans I always hope others are forgiving of me and I try and do the same to others) but there’s a fine line between forgiving and being gullible to the point of being strung along.