ShadowZone

Definitely! In general this patch feels like they wanted to get rid of some of the most annoying bugs people have complained about for ages. It really has a "let's make the game as playable as possible before it rides into the sunset" kind of vibe.

Most definitely, but I always used the rocket icons in previous release notes. I guess since the community team (Dakota and Mike) were also part of the layoffs, one of them would have gathered this information and added it to the notes. Without them I could only guess.

Here are the statistics for patch 0.2.2, the smallest update in the history of KSP2 and also the one we had to wait for the longest (133 days since version 0.2.1, almost twice as long as the longest wait up until then, 71 days between 0.1.2 and 0.1.3). Version Total items Community % of total 0.1.1 281 42 15% 0.1.2 173 36 21% 0.1.3 165 17 10% 0.1.4 81 9 11% 0.1.5 86 11 13% 0.2.0 156 0 0% 0.2.1 68 14 21% 0.2.2 28 0 0% While many of the fixes and improvements are welcome, it's sad to see that this is the final set of things we are going to see, if this truly is the last patch ever for KSP2. I have to admit, I had hoped for more, especially since it was said that patch 0.2.2 was already signed off on weeks ago.

Nah, all good. I got it now. It was just Steam being funny.

Meanwhile there appears to be an embargo for YouTube creators Big /s of course. This is just Steam being silly.

Seriously, Steam? Now? Edit: now it briefly said "content configuration unavailable". Did somebody jump the gun and they pulled the update?

Yeah, the idea was to just take KSP1, freshen it up, stabilize the code base (no idea how they should have done that if nobody teaches you how it works) and add a bit more content. Think FIFA or Assassin's Creed franchise. The core mechanics remain the same, but some fluff around it changes. Then they got enamored with the "interstellar, colonies and multiplayer" vision but somewhere along the line neither timeline nor budget were increased to accomodate such a re-imagining. So, a bit more detail maybe: When T2 gave them the hard deadline of February 2023, everything was still in the game in some form (colonies, interstellar, multiplayer) to varying degrees of completion. Around May '22 there was the notion "it won't be pretty, but we might be able to ship this". The decision to go EA and rip stuff out again was made around September. They did try to get at least colonies in there, but somebody pulled the plug because the deadline was already close and they wanted some other thing in there (don't know which one). I am wondering about the time it takes them to release colonies as well. Apparently "For Science" took already multiple times longer than was expected. One of the issues I was told existed within Intercept Games was a lack of "okay, that's good enough" (and we'll make it prettier later) attitude. If it gets public, it needs to be as shiny and pretty as possible, was the mindset (at least this was how the story was told to me). In software development you always need to do some kind of tradeoff. Let's take re-entry heating: the mechanics of "part gets hot, part goes boom" with a simple heat gauge or flashing parts or something could have probably been integrated a lot earlier than what we got with "For Science" with all the pretty plasma effects etc. Of course it looks cooler, but with the simple "show me just a gauge of what goes wrong" mechanic you could have tested the math behind it and verify if your assumptions about how which parts will behave under thermal load. The way they did it was that everything had to be "complete" before shipping it. Also kind of misunderstanding what Early Access should be. I don't know who made these calls for re-entry heating. But I believe we could have gotten a stripped down version much sooner, same for science and colonies. Build the mechanics, test them, test them with the public, make them prettier on the go. That's how I would treat an Early Access development title.

Ah, maybe I didn't explain this correctly in the video: The "only hired junior people" part was during the Star Theory days when they still tried to do it cheap and quick (10 million, two years). I don't know what the compensation cap was at that time. The 150k was the maximum compensation for engineers at IG. They had trouble getting senior and lead people for that amount and more trouble keeping them. There was internal pushback against this cap, but corporate finance refused to budge. Again a decision that was made outside of the team directly and adversely affecting it. The 200k/employee is "fully loaded" costs (I hope I'm using the correct term, we call it something else outside the English speaking world), not just salary. So per employee you also need equipment (PC hardware, office chairs, desks etc), rent (office space) and other overhead (HR department, legal etc). While some of the latter was offloaded to PD, there's still a more costs that pour into employing somebody. For instance in my country, an employee that gets 50k a year into their bank account (what actually lands in their pocket) overall costs a company double that amount. The 200k/employee average was used as a rule of thumb number, but it was given to me by LGG as well as my sources independently from each other.

Less than 10 people were working on the second game according to my information.

"You cannot NOT communicate." The long silence was in itself a way to communicate corporate's disdain for our community. The silence also made people more willing to talk to me because they wanted the story to be heard. Had PD/T2 decided to be super open and transparent and honest, we would not be at this point.

I think LGG's stunned face when I told him says it all. Nothing beyond speculation, just as we all do.

You're welcome! If there are any questions I can answer, feel free to ask. I felt this needed to be made public after all the intransparency over the past 5 years.

Not really. I wanted to get last week's video out as quickly as possible after I got wind of the news. This week I chose to publish it to release one week after the WARN notice became public. Kind of a "why are you still silent after one week of this" statement. But I also have a "normal" video scheduled for this Friday, sort of a palate cleanser. And unless there is some major development, I want to return to my usual Friday 13:00 UTC schedule (looking at you, Take-Two earnings call on May 16...)

Reported Version: v0.2.1 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 10.0.22631 64-Bit | CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor (24) | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24340MB) | RAM: 65459 As you can see in the video, I started on the night side of Pol. I placed a maneuver node on the day side and time warped to it. There was some changes in illumination, for instance indirect lighting on the vehicle (light reflecting from Pol towards the "belly" of the ship), but the sun itself was gone. Switching to map view revealed the sun there, but it stayed hidden in flight. Logs, saves etc attached in the .zip file. Included Attachments: ForSci_Bug48.mov ForSci_Bug48__SundisappearsatPol_logs.zip .ipsImage { width: 900px !important; }

Reported Version: v0.2.1 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 10.0.22621 64-Bit | CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor (24) | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24340MB) | RAM: 65459 I encountered this bug at Pol. My vehicle was in clear view of the sun, the panels pointed at it, but the game said "blocked by Pol". This was persisting through multiple attempts to repack and unfold the panels. It only went away when I undocked my lander and then switched back to the original vehicle. Included Attachments: ForSci_Bug47.mov ForSci_Bug47.zip