Sky_walker

Discussed through about five pages in this topic: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90612-0-25-Update! Plenty of arguments from both sides.

So you say that performance isn't a problem based on your high school experience? Come on Ippo, you can do better than that. KSP already has a performance issues with a single body physics. Look: First random large space station. And you argue with me that adding N-body physics wouldn't cause any performance issues. Oh come on....

I haven't seen it posted yet, so there we go: An interview with ESA Astronaut Alexander Gerst - if you never seen an interview with the astronaut than it's definitely must-see. If you did see some of those - well, people ask plenty of usual, almost mandatory questions, but it's still nice hear about it from a different perspective.

Performance. Fact that something is done in a mod, doesn't mean it works well on a fully deployed game. I believe that that's exactly what devs mentioned as a reasoning for why n-body physics will never be in KSP. And that performance limitation is directly a problem with the engine - Unity 5 seems to migrate it (multi-core physics) though we don't know when or if at all KSP will be ported to Unity 5.

Cost isn't a problem. Economy is purely ascetic matter - it doesn't limit you in any way unless you intentionally impose limits to yourself. There is no game-over due to bankruptcy in KSP (going close to 0 money is pretty much like opening infinite source of cash) and you get flooded with money pretty much all the time.

Try to watch this, it'll give you some vague idea of how huge challenges did developers met with the Unity engine: It's the video where KSP developers, including Harvester, explain various internals and behind the scene processing that goes on in the game. It's hardly everything, I'm not even sure if in that video they talk much about the obstacles they couldn't jump over (I'm pretty sure they mention at least the n-body problem), but definitely gives you some better idea on how challenging KSP development was. Than we agree with each other

~800k. Testing my asteroid capture spacecrafts (yea, more than one, but still a single objective). Next would be most likely a docking arm for fuel tanks on my asteroid station.... ~600k in total, not too painful, but.... that produced way too much space junk. Anyway - after completing that thing I have ~15 FPS near my station - and still haven't used it for anything particularly useful other than "science on orbit of Kerbin" contracts. :/

That's quite an ambitious project - it'd require adding damage system to the game (as in: progressive damage, cause currently we have just 3 states: Good, Damaged (eg. wheel) and Destroyed) and that will have by far more implications to the game than just enabling devs to add damage from the atmospheric effects. For example one logical and pretty much implied consequence would be to add damage on collision that depends on mass and velocity, damageable docking ports (instead of flexible hyper-magnets they are now), visual cues to the damaged parts (what means: new models and new textures) and so on, and so on..... It'd be a huge development project. I doubt devs would go for something so ambitious.

US invasion force? Operation Europa Freedom / Ice Storm?

Sorry boss! I guess the matter of multiplayer keeps on reoccurring again and again. For now multiplayer discussion focused in the 0.25 Update! topic - so let's let it stay there So, to get back on topic: What you guys think are the chances to get the fancy cockpit from SP+? People wrote that it's based on a mod made by some other guy - so... either devs will implement their own cockpit, or they'll replicate the mod functionality in their own way? This cockpit:

TBH: I can't be bothered by small massless radial parts as much as I am bothered by massless engines (mostly due to the infinite TWR problem).

Yep, KSP still doesn't qualify, no matter the amount of mods. Putting stuff into an abstraction layer - which is what your example does - is completely different from being fundamentally wrong in some of the key aspects - which in some cases is something forced by Unity engine, and a reason why I'll never call KSP a simulator. From reading his list I would say that he is perfectly aware of that and already accounted for what can be done by who. He did mention that too. Everything on his list is his "personal choice" and not a devs choice - that's why he composed this list. For him - it might be. For you - it's not. Simply put: Personal bias. Don't accuse someone of that when you're doing it yourself. Either you appeal to core audience or random audience. KSP grew up to what it is by appealing to it's core audience, not by trying to appeal to BF3 players, Space Engineer players, Minecraft players, or Microsoft Flight Simulator players. Whatever stopping a development of the multiplayer would be helpful or not depends on how you - and more importantly: devs - define audience for this game and a major game appeal. As far as I see, from all of the discussions - major game appeal is focused around single-player experience (that does include exchange of ships / screenshots / mods / etc) anything that's about multiplayer is somewhere between would-be-great-to-have-but-not-sure-how-it'd-work-or-if-I'll-have-fun-with-how-devs-want-to-do-it and don't-care-at-all. My opinion on the multiplayer can be summarized with this: KSP is missing way too much from it's core experience to start working on a multilayer when the game clearly wasn't designed from ground-up with multilayer in mind. IMHO multiplayer belongs to DLC/expansion pack/post-1.0 features. First get the core right, then implement additional toys. I can't see how you could possibly come up with that conclusion. Even more so as he didn't even made his list in any particular order. It was a pointed list - just stuff he would want to see - not a numbered list - an order in which he would like to see them. Quote contrary. He is asking to have a proper concrete plan of a development that appeals to the core audience and adds more value to the building. In terms of educational value, simple gameplay fun and "meat" that every game requires to progress and sell. Nothing he talks about requires any fundamental redesign of a game - it's all just building on top of the existing features - as modders have perfectly proven in many examples that regex himself gave. (And here I'd also want to highlight that some of the features he mentioned are probably already planned for the future versions of the game, like improvements to the aerodynamics are, or more content and points of interest on a planets)

KSP will never become a simulator. Ever. Not even with all the mods there exist in the world for KSP. Unity engine isn't build to handle that in a first place. I'm just trying to make a point that orbiter IS a game. It's very realistic, by far more than KSP with even best mods installed, but still - it is a game.

Orbiter IS a game. Here you can see how the simulator looks like: http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/vehicles/soyuz/photos.asp

1. Don't use excessive font formatting. 2. Using bold and purple on text doesn't make it right. Underline doesn't help with that either. 3. Repeating something doesn't make it right. 4. Noone said anything about turning KSP into a fully-fledged simulator. We have Orbiter for that. Next time - before jumping on people with gigantic fonts and capitals - please, learn how to read carefully.

Yep. There was plenty of suggestions how to improve the situation. Probably the easiest one would be to have a reputation penalty each time you launch LV-N and another, this time a huge one, if you'll dare to crash LV-N anywhere but into the sun or gas gigant (contamination). Though even that barely scratches the issues with nuclear engines. Current implementation of LV-N is one of these things that "KSP teaches people wrong thing that's then horribly difficult to unlearn" - that Nukes are borderline the best thing under the sun for space flight.

Let me repeat one sentence that nicely sums it all up: Battlefield will teach you more about shooting than KSP about space flight. If you think you know "stuff" about spaceflight just from playing KSP - you know less than a random BF player does about shooting. Brilliant post. That pretty much sums up all of the major things in KSP I'd love to see fixed / changed / what I consider to be better priorities in KSP dev.

I don't know about you, I'm hardly an expert in that field, but from the only 2 stargazing maps I have: one is designed to work perfectly fine with red lighting, another one glows red itself (iPad app - night mode). If you're stargazing - you want your eyes to be as sensitive as possible. Using red light allows it far better than the white light does. Of course you are free to use whatever you want and whatever you feel comfortable with (red lighting can be disorienting if you're using it first time in your life) never the less - once you run it for several times and adjusted yourself - it's much better than white. Yep. Proper lighting is very important to day-night cycle and that - is essential for performance, especially in long term missions. So filling a spacecraft with red lighting would be very counter-productive. It needs to be as close as possible to a daytime sunlight on a surface of the earth.

We get it, we get it, no Ion drives for you. But... that doesn't have anything to deal with the topic.

Again? Seriously? Guy is going to be pissed off....

Beautiful! Great to see someone recreating B5 ship!

Strouts. Strouts and fuel pipes hate these decouplers.

Good post. +1 to fixing that Though I'm not sure if it shouldn't be in a bug reports?

No idea what this sentence means. Development and the amount of devs update / communication with the community are two different things. Don't mix them together.

Humans can observe and make decisions in an instant. Robots at a very best can navigate on their own and collect some basic data, but for anything more - they need input from earth introducing significant lag and - due to limited amount of observation done - decisions made on earth are not always as good as these made by a person in place who can instantly change a point of view, focus on one subject or another, move stuff around without preparing days for that, etc. Movement speed isn't everything. Even in an area 2x2 meters - human would be MUCH faster than automated rover in "doing science" and he could discover things that rover never would have (humans can improvise to find something interesting - robots are very limited in that, even for a safety reasons).