herbal space program

It's an incredibly demanding physics simulation, that only gets harder the more demanding you make the rendering pipeline behind it. It may very well be true that the world of consumer-class PCs is just not ready for it yet.

Based on sales estimates, the KSP2 IP still has the potential to create about ten times more revenue than it already has, even if nobody new adopts it. They just need to get it right, and some of the elements required for that are there IMO, but others are still very much lacking. And the fact that you think HarvesteR could somehow save the day shows you don't really consider it a lost cause yourself.

The bottom line is that he was pretty clear he had no interest in such a project in his most recent interview, so I don't know what the point of even discussing this is. And what he actually did that was amazing is come up with a great game concept and get it (mostly) working, in a very admirable but ultimately kind of slapdash sort of way. Porting that concept to the world of high-end, highly produced, multi-title franchise games was never going to be an easy task, and it's pretty clear he's neither particularly well-suited to that role nor particularly interested in it. What he wants to do, and is good at, is coming up with solid basic game concepts and developing them to an advanced prototype stage. What the KSP2 team was tasked with is a very different kind of challenge.

In a recent interview, HarvesteR basically admitted that the entire KSP1 code base was not really in a state that could readily be ported to a new version, so no, it appears that they did not try to use it as a starting point. As to it having some of the same bugs, based upon what I have gathered from various sources here I think those are inherent to trying to do an iterative simulation of an utterly unsolvable set of differential equations using single precision floats rather than double.

Well, there could be some disgruntled modders in the mix here, but in general absolutely. As a player, I certainly don't feel like KSP owes me anything.

Personally, I have picked KSP up and put it down on multiple occasions, generally picking it up again after a long hiatus whenever some significant new thing like robotics came out, and then playing it until I ran out of fun new things to do. I hadn't played KSP1 in several years when KSP2 finally dropped, and although it could be so much more, it still gave me a few hundred more hours of (mostly) fun before I got bored with it again. If there is ever a colonies update, I'll probably play that for a similar amount of time as well, but in between there are endless new things to try. Currently, I'm leaning into Factorio, and I don't expect I'll get bored with that for quite a few more hours.

If that turns out to be true, they'll have destroyed both of my two favorite computer games, and I will never, ever buy anything from them again. But in the case of Civ, I have to say I'm willing to bet my $60 to find out.

I believe we'll get news some time between this June and when the last black hole evaporates, probably later in the year when they've actually decided what to do with the KSP IP. As to what that news will be, I don't think they actually mean to abandon it, but putting my finger into the wind I suspect we will be waiting a good while before there is any update that contains new content and not just bug fixes. Still, I think they will eventually go on to create a game that has significant new content before they walk away. I agree in general terms, but it's going to be hard for me to turn my nose up at Civ VII!

I'm not measuring anybody's worth as a human being by their post count, just the value of their opinion of me in a weeks-long debate in which they have not ostensibly participated. That and my suspicion that they are in fact a ten year-old sock puppet that has been dusted off to be used by somebody who feels they need a little virtual backup. As to outranking me, I only lay claim to leadership of the Chimpanzee division! I would never challenge your clearly higher rank among the Kerbals.

Immediately jumping to conclusions? I have been reading the endless doom propaganda getting posted [snip], replete with belittlement and ridicule of any who disagree, for weeks upon weeks now, and I am tired of it. Anybody who makes utterly false statements like the one I called out above in bold allcaps with multiple exclamation points is peddling disinformation, not just misinformed, period. And I am in fact a scientist, and do care very much about the truth, although I don't really give a hoot what 95-posts-in-ten-years you thinks of me.

So you don't know what confidence intervals are? Do you know what a normal distribution is, or a T-test? [snip] ridiculing my statistical reasoning is all I can say! They arrived at that confidence interval by imputing a normal distribution on those data, including the major low outlier you guys cherry-picked, which is why it is so broad. If they had eliminated it, as they should have on methodological grounds, the distribution would have been a whole lot tighter. Again, please stop promulgating disinformation!

I understand his basic reasoning, and I think you could perhaps have marketed that as a separate title with some vague future promises of integrating it with the original, but I also think that approach (if called "KSP2") would have had just as many detractors as the current one, due to a failure to incorporate the physics simulation that made KSP1 so fun in the first place. It's actually a very tough kind of judgment call to make IMO. Now that I can totally agree on! I would have loved it if some expansion of the KSP universe had included an option to start your tech tree at the dawn of aviation rather than at the beginning of the space age.

What we have is an egregious outlier, with a reasonable hypothesis to support why it is that and so might legitimately be excluded. But even setting that aside, as you so superciliously pointed out, those numbers in the parentheses are the 95% confidence intervals, even with the distorted distribution caused by the outlier, and what PDC Wolf claimed was outside of even those. Riddle me that. They just apologized and called it a rounding error, LOL. How about you just stop promulgating disinformation?

OK, so if you cherry-pick the data you can make what @PDCWolf said only a fourfold exaggeration rather than a tenfold. Do you think I was born yesterday? I'm a scientist, with 35 years of experience both trying to demonstrate what the truth is and trying to bust people who distort what the truth is to their own ends, having reviewed countless manuscripts in my career. It could not be more clear to me that both of you are playing fast and loose with the actual data to support your predetermined conclusions. What I want to know is: why? Don't bother with any more obfuscatory nonsense. I am many times over wise to all of that. And since I made rather a strong claim, here is more data to support it: SteamSpy: 16.4%, Gamelytic: 21.2$%, VG insights: 12.1%, Playtracker: 3.85%. Average: 13.4%. Which of those is the outlier, eh? And why? I can offer a reasonable hypothesis: Playtracker is not based on actual sales at all, but rather models sales based on concurrent player numbers. A game like the KSP2 EA will of course look particularly bad by that measure, because a lot of players who bought it have since set it aside to wait for more content and more bugfixes, if and when those come. And of course that's 15 months of total sales vs. ten years. A thoroughly dishonest representation of reality, no matter how you slice it.

That statement is demonstrably untrue: https://steamdb.info/app/954850/charts/. Estimated KSP2 sales were about 10% of the similar estimates for KSP1, not 1%. Still nothing to crow about, but I have to ask myself, why the tenfold exaggeration on your part?

Well, since everybody else appears to be weighing in here, I'll reiterate my position that I think they will pare down their operation substantially, perhaps integrating it into a different studio in the process, and then continue at least until they have some version of colonies out. I'll optimistically add that I don't think they'll call this 1.0 and head for the hills, but will rather wait for a while after that to see if any more of the 90% of KSP1 players who have remained on the sidelines until now buy in to EA. If there are enough, they'll keep at it, if not, they'll fix a few more bugs, slap a 1.0 sticker on it, and hand it over to the modders. That way, they can somewhat preserve their reputation by producing a game that has at least some new content in it, and also try monetize what I think is probably quite a bit of colonies-related work that has already been done. If on the other hand they just pull the plug now, they will have as many as half a million deeply dissatisfied customers who will largely avoid their products going forward, as well as a large amount of negative publicity from the gaming press that will impair the prospects of any future EA releases they might bankroll.

I happen to think, after playing at least a couple hundred hours of the latest release, that provided there is a significant amount of colonies content nearly ready, they will end up with a better bottom line trying to get that out in some form before closing up shop entirely. There is a lot of latent market out there waiting for a better reason to buy the game, and provided it runs OK I think a decently performing colonies release would be just that.

I was assured by at least one fellow forum member above that they were never timewarping when it happened, so why they are afflicted by it and I have not been is a bit of a mystery. It's not like I haven't experienced a bunch of other bugs along the way, but this one has never plagued me through countless parachute landings, in spite of a significant number of reports in the forum.

I wouldn't exactly say that chutes worked fine in KSP1 under physics time warp. If the forces on them weren't too strong they'd often be OK, but on quite a few occasions I'd have them rip off if I deployed them under time warp but not if I did it at 1X. The main chute deployment at 1000m would also sometimes yank either the chutes or the parts they were attached to off if it happened under time warp, so I would always slow down to 1X when crossing that boundary.

Now that I can believe, and you were no slouch getting it all done in that amount of time either! Some of those missions were pretty tough.

You did all those missions in only 100 hours? Wow! It must have taken me at least twice that amount of time.

Deploying chutes under physical timewarp was often a recipe for death in KSP1, so I always avoid doing that. I also have been using fairings very little, so maybe that is part of it for me.

Windows 11, Intel Corei7-11, 8 physical cores, 64gb RAM, RTX 3060 card with 12GB RAM. Obviously this is in fact a problem for a significant number of people, but I swear I am not lying that my parachutes have pretty much always deployed properly. I have had issues with laggy staging on complex vessels with a whole bunch of chutes, which has caused me to hit space twice and thus prematurely execute the next staging step. but the chutes outright not deploying when safe is something I have not encountered.

I didn't dismiss it as such, I merely did not dismiss the possibility that it was in fact user error, because I flew a whole lot of missions without any such problems. Two different things. And again, a lot of the people here with the harshest criticisms of the game seem not to have played it very much.

All I can say is that I flew a few dozen missions in FS, many of which required multiple landing attempts with up to 78 parachutes, and not once did I have a parachute fail to deploy because it was bugged. I landed with parachutes on Kerbin, Duna, Jool, Eve, and Laythe, and in all cases they behaved as expected. So maybe your problem is platform-specific, or maybe it was actually you who was doing something incorrectly. Either way, I don't think three successive bugged parachute deployments is something any of the fairly large number of people who like me played through all or most of the FS mission tree experienced, so your representation that this is the general state of the game at this point is plain wrong.