basic.syntax

The way they are presenting it, with so much concept artwork, makes me think they are announcing a new game earlier than they usually might, in this "kickstarter" age. How large numbers of people react to the trailer ("I think it is such-and-such type of game and it better let me do X") may have influence on how it turns out.

KSP is "realism lite" - I support this discussion's request for a more realistic implementation of engines and intakes, but I think we are stuck with back-end design decisions made at the start, (IMO, can't really call the issues "bugs,") any future official changes are likely to be incremental tweaks. In HarvestR's Aero post, he writes "...nose cones properly reducing the drag of parts stacked behind it." That sounds to me like an adjustment of assigned drag values for parts behind a nose cone, not a dynamic airflow simulation. (I wonder how much of a drag discount I will get for a small nose cone attached to the middle of a 2x2 panel, flying flat-face forward.) But I'm OK with what we have, most of the game play-space is in a vacuum, and that's where most of the focus is / has been. I'm with Red Iron Crown, on the stupid grin I got after hours of trial and error on an SSTO design, that let me put a 40t payload on a path to Duna, and then deorbit and parachute-land the now horribly off-balanced airframe (career mode, no mods: refund!)

I'm trying to add a Flag, (FlagTransform mesh) to a stock part, copying the convention I saw in another stock part where flag is present and working. (That part exports back to .mu with no errors.) But, I think I'm missing something in the attempt to create a new sub-object for the other stock part, because... Traceback (most recent call last): File "J:\blender-2.73-windows64\2.73\scripts\addons\io_object_mu-master\__init__.py", line 88, in execute return export_mu.export_mu(self, context, **keywords) File "J:\blender-2.73-windows64\2.73\scripts\addons\io_object_mu-master\export_mu.py", line 350, in export_mu mu.obj = make_obj(mu, obj) File "J:\blender-2.73-windows64\2.73\scripts\addons\io_object_mu-master\export_mu.py", line 342, in make_obj muobj.children.append(make_obj(mu, o)) File "J:\blender-2.73-windows64\2.73\scripts\addons\io_object_mu-master\export_mu.py", line 342, in make_obj muobj.children.append(make_obj(mu, o)) File "J:\blender-2.73-windows64\2.73\scripts\addons\io_object_mu-master\export_mu.py", line 323, in make_obj muobj.renderer = make_renderer(mu, obj.data) File "J:\blender-2.73-windows64\2.73\scripts\addons\io_object_mu-master\export_mu.py", line 294, in make_renderer if mat.mumatprop.shader: [B]AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'mumatprop'[/B] location: <unknown location>:-1 Would this be familiar to anyone...

This is a great idea, something deep in physics, that could be exposed to players with a simple drawing app window in KSP: Let us DRAW our own SRB in profile, (an SRB tweakable option) like the image shown by Capt Snuggler, and then observe the burn-rate results of our various doodles, patterns and shapes.

If I could only have ONE new stock part, it would be a larger SRB. I look at what nearly everyone is doing with stock parts in heavy lift projects - various Mk3 space shuttles - bundling 4 S1 SRB's in a quad adapter. That's 5 parts, plus fiddling with strut links to tie them together. Now I'm at 9 parts. And I need a pair of them... 18 parts against the parts limit (in career mode) - just to get off the ground.

Oops, my bad. I dumped the files in gamedata. Works just fine I'll make a folder. Still, unique names wouldn't hurt. Thanks again, its awesome to fight less with intakes and engines, and get back to building and tweaking COM / COL.

One idea I haven't noticed here yet: "wire up" the landing gear, with strut connectors. When gear is placed, it has just one point of attachment. (Idea is moot, if you haven't unlocked them yet.) If rear landing gear are strutted together, or braced to a center point, they are less likely to torque in different directions. Landing is hard. Set up for a long glide path, and watch rate of climb indicator at top of screen, aim for -5 m/s. Descending greater than -10 m/s usually makes a mess.

I think the RTG could be further balanced (if moved to tier 1) by making it more expensive so that players must make an early game hard choice between cost and its efficiency, versus solar panels that don't work on the dark side of orbits.

Adopting a new player perspective, my eyes bug out when I look at the proposed gigantic in-game tech tree. Of course you don't see it all at the start, but, going back later to review it... I think it becomes just too dense, and some grouping of very related parts is quite all right, and would save sherkaner some of the headache trying to make all stock part techs fit into a fixed-sized area, on a nearly individual basis. [Edit: posted before i'd seen released version: tree is now finished and not as crushingly dense as I worried it might get.] I definitely think KSP needs more things to spend Science on (setting aside the debate about collecting moon rocks being used to unlock better parachutes) since the explosion of new Science sources in .90. And spreading the parts into more groups is a great way to do it. Maybe to go as far as doubling the stock number of groups, but I don't think the current tech UI is up to the task of displaying nearly per-part research unlocks, that is being attempted here.

I've been annoyed by this, usually in flight. (i5-3570, 16GB, nVidia 660, SSD, Win8.1 64bit, 32-bit KSP) From taking off in airplanes (under power, SAS/RCS, lots to calculate), to fairly passive parachute landing at KSC with less than 200 parts in the scene. Only mods i'm using are 2 of Claw's fixes (AnchoredDecouplerFix, EVAEjectionFix) Sadly yes .

Tried 0.4 on 0.90, not mixing up engine or intake types, keeping it simple so far, and loving the result. F7 ("fix everything") is my new friend Instead of the window-less result message, perhaps just highlight every intake (blue default) and engine (red default) at once, to inform the user that something happened. (Perhaps Text could be written to an external log file, with more details and exception messages, for technically inclined users to parse through.) Please consider changing all filenames to include the word "IntakeBuildAid" - players may have other mods in GameData folder with the name "readme.txt."

The description for the S1 SRB encourages players to try to save them. "This super heavy booster is designed to be recovered after jettisoning. Once recovered, it is refurbished and refueled for another launch." If the laws of physics can't be changed to accommodate the suggestion, I think the text needs to be changed. (I'm actually MORE interested in saving expensive engines and tanks from heavy first stages. Sadly, this seems to be a "cost of doing business" you just have to accept - in real life, and in game.)

Just wanted to relate my space plane experience with .90 before reading these last two pages, that, you can have beautiful symmetric flameouts... far to early... if engines are placed in symmetry, but intakes are [alt]-copied. (Full agreement with AlexanderB. And thanks to Kasuha for a great thread and pix making things clear.) I had much better results with the annoying, tedious process of alternate careful placing of intake/engine, intake/engine - all 'new' parts, for 14 engines. (140 ton fuel lifter.) Several times I was thinking "rockets are far easier to work with, why am I still messing with this..." then I arrived here and started to make progress I hope that Squad may come up with a fix that changes how these types of parts are evaluated and sequenced, behind the scenes.

Agree on satellite clutter! As your rep increases, the complexity & pay increases... when you get to the Mun, you start getting Mun satellite offers, and on and on... my Solar System view is a mess of orbit circles. Agree with pandaman, I think the contract should remove player control after the orbit is matched ("Thanks, we'll take it from here"), and clean them up, after a few days have passed. On the "endgame" - once you have completed the tech tree, you're kinda done. I wonder if it should be made more difficult to complete (spread the parts into more, smaller groups; make the tech map taller, not necessarily wider) given that we now have biomes everywhere. The solar system has been painted with a huge new pool of science points. But once it IS all unlocked, KSP is now sandbox, with endless random contract missions. Squad has opted for an open-ended design, where every player decides for themselves what "done" is, instead of "Mission 31." (Then we would argue if "Mission 31" was a fitting end, for what came before it. One thing I do like about scripted missions, is players can try the same thing again in a later play-through as their knowledge improves. Online, you can compare how others did, with your solution to the exact same problem.) KSP is a puzzle-solving game, with a huge pool of parts and near infinite combination of ways to assemble them, I think that's most of the fun. An official story campaign mixed in with the random contracts would be very nice, but I'm happy with what we have so far.

Does KSP snap into proper screen/mouse alignment, in normal configuration, latest drivers, windowed mode? ( [Alt]+[Enter] ) You may be stuck with that for now, if performance is OK. This could be an obscure bug that goes away by itself, in a subsequent update of KSP. I missed that you wrote "forcing OpenGL: I did try that and it solves the problem at the cost of making the program run unbearably slow." That is very interesting, but I'm not sure where to go from there. Some graphics cards and CPU's with 3D graphics, do poorly with OpenGL. The first thing folks would look at dxdiag logs for, is what graphics card (if any, many current CPU's perform basic 3D graphics functions) you may be using. On DxDiag display tab: what chip type? Better still, if you can post pictures on an imaging hosting service (imgur seems very popular here) screenshots of the first two tabs (System and Display) of DxDiag would be great. [Alt]-[PrintScreen] cleanly captures the current window, to the clipboard. It can then be pasted into any image editing app, like mspaint, saved as jpg.

Seems like something with display driver, KSP's interpretation of screen coordinates when it starts. Have you tried changing windows screen resolution? Try something smaller than current, even if its distorted for your display size (aspect ratio) and run KSP. Not to stay that way forever, but to force KSP to look at new numbers. if KSP fills a smaller resolution properly, then go back to normal size and see what happens. Separately, in KSP toggle between window mode and fullscreen with [alt]-[enter] to see if that helps. Does this happen with other games? Get two full-screen games running, and [alt]-[tab] between them.

I have no trouble strut-reinforcing fuel tanks and other SRB's, but the biggest SRB gives headaches. I can easily see all strut placements on TOP of the SRB, but the end points often get buried below the surface, when placing on the side. That makes it hard to move or remove strut connections on the large SRB. I've borrowed a picture from this unrelated post, that shows strut connector endpoints are more visible at shallow angles. The second endpoint down, on the SRB on the right, is not visible. Is this a known issue, perhaps something to do with the collision model not aligning with the textured surface? Is there a work-around, that doesn't require rebuilding / recompiling the model in Unity? (A bit over my experience level, at this point.) Taking inspiration from Structural Wing Type A does not attach properly [workaround inside] I tweaked part.cfg node_attach values for the SRB, successfully increased the SRB's attach distance from other objects, but strut endpoints seemed to ignore that.

As you complete contracts, reputation goes up and contract quality / pay go up. It does seem a bit grindy through the first 20 contracts, but that impression also depends on if you think working with the first level VAB and 30 parts is a "grind" - or an interesting set of puzzles to solve. (I'm not using any mods.) I was reminded of a scene in the movie Apollo 13, after a big accident knocks out C02 scrubbers, the guys in mission control dump a box of random parts on a table: the sum total of what the returning crew has available, and come up with an ingenious solution. Once you start getting orbit contracts, and figure out the method of matching orbits, funds start rolling in. Those plus some aerial surveys (that I did by launching a parachute-plane attached to a clamp above the runway, because I didn't have wheels yet) brought me to the first VAB upgrade. Then I was offered an orbit contract of *the sun*, that would pay out 4x the typical Kerbin orbit... and decided I had met my personal limit of challenges for the day, and let it go

The Kerbals are... cartoon characters. They set the tone for an endless tug-of-war between a hand-made space program that's full of jokes in the IVA's, parts descriptions... and a desire for more realism. I think having a cartoon aesthetic to the barn tier and some kinda hokey cartoon riveted plates is just fine, it is metaphorical exaggeration of the progression from kid stuff, to grown-up stuff, when you get to the final VAB and plug in some NASA parts.

Great points - agreed! I think its cool that funds / rep / science are displayed in distinct ways, but, sometimes you just want to see a clear number.

I doubt they will redesign VAB's at this stage, except if it was something easy like grabbing whole building and scaling it down... which might make some of the proportions look wrong, depending how much it was shrunk by. I want to see my "space program flag" somewhere tacked up on the wall in all the VAB tiers, not just the last.

The new Mk3 is perfect opportunity to introduce a set of double-size (in all dimensions) wing parts, will help us get parts count down on large planes. This could be simplified by a tweakable option as others suggest, so the toolbox doesn't get cluttered.

Homespun humor is all over the place, in the IVA's and every part description. KSP is "sim lite" and meant to be equal parts fun (or funny) and educational. It will probably not take long to start upgrading from the "barn" tier, when it's finalized. Fits perfectly with the can-do, carefree attitude of KerbalKind. They started with duct tape and bailing wire, and never stopped trying

It is possible to adjust payout percentage of normal values, up to 1000% during new game setup, if you want to cut down on the "grind."

Barn tier is delayed but still expected to appear... sometime. Its mentioned in the FAQ here.