Snark

Either that, or else you have a different headcanon from tater's, difficult though that may be to imagine. The point is that different people have different ways of looking at the game. Just because they're different from yours doesn't mean that they (or you) are wrong.

Moving to Add-on Releases.

Okay. I like the basic mechanic, I don't care all that much what it's called. I kind of prefer "contract" because that feels to me like a more accurate description of what it is, i.e. a "deal" of doing something for a client in exchange for money. "Mission" isn't a good term, for me, since to me any launch I do is a "mission"; it's too general. I wouldn't enjoy that, myself, because I'd find it too much of a straitjacket. If I have a pool of money, I want to be able to do with it as I please, and let the need to economize (or not) help to drive that. Sure it does. It gets money. Whether that's enough to justify them is a matter of taste, of course, but it's not zero. Well, babies and bathwater aren't the same thing. Like I said, I certainly agree that the specific nature of the contracts could use some improvement. e.g. the lucrative rewards for solar-orbit stations are far disproportionate to the trivial amount of effort required, and so forth. I'd love to see contracts that have a better match of effort to value, and more interesting, sure. But the basic idea of "present me with things I can choose to do, which will generate money and perhaps nudge me to try new or difficult things", I'd like to keep. It would, if one's purpose for career mode is to be unpredictable. If yours is, fine, nothing wrong with that. But different people like different things. Not sure what your "purpose" of career mode is, but mine is to enjoy myself in what I find to be an interestingly constrained situation. And a predictable environment is one that I enjoy more, because it lets me do the things that I like to do. Plenty of games have predictable environments where the same thing happens every time-- doesn't stop people from enjoying it. I like playing with Legos, too, and those are about as predictable as one can get. Tastes differ. I like novel problems. I don't like things I don't expect. In my case, I satisfy the "novel problems" by choosing different approaches per game. I'd love it if the contract system could provide meaningful novel problems, too-- I'll grant that the current one doesn't. But I'd contend that the current contract system's issue isn't the fact of contracts per se, but rather the nature of the contracts that it provides. Because that would eliminate constraints that I want to keep. Sandbox has infinite money; I don't like that. Sandbox has all kerbals at level 5 experience; I don't like that. Sandbox has the whole tech tree exposed from the start; that robs me of much of my enjoyment of the game, because I love going out there and getting science to unlock stuff, and the interestingly constrained problem of building ships when I don't have every single snazzy piece at my disposal. Not saying that my way is "right", any more than anyone else's-- but neither is it less, either. It's a perfectly valid way to play. ...that not everyone likes the same things you do? It really is a diverse community. Most players never go interplanetary, and (at least based on the sample I saw at PAX) most never even make it to the Mun. Which completely blows my mind-- it's hard for me to conceive of that, because to me going to those places is what the game is about. And yet here is not just one or two, but an actual majority of the community-- so clearly my way is not the only way to look at things, there. Some people swear by MechJeb because the game is too tedious and boring for them if they can't automate launches to LKO and so forth. Other people don't want it, because for them getting to orbit is fun and using a tool like MechJeb would reduce their enjoyment, not increase it. One person's tedious chore is another's fun pastime. Some people enjoy spending hours driving rovers for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers across planetary surfaces; trying to do that would rapidly drive me kerbicidally insane. A lot of folks like flying spaceplanes-- enough that the game has made a major investment in them. But I have very little use for them, myself. And so on, and so forth. Yah, I'd like to see more of that myself-- some way for cost to matter more, without turning things into a money grind. One thing that I think is encouraging about KSP2, based on what I've heard thus far, is that they'd like to make it so that you can have multiple ships flying in atmosphere at once, and allow continuing accleration after switching ships. That would make reusable boosters and so forth a lot more practical-- KSP 1's one-ship-at-a-time on-rails approach makes doing that awkward and difficult, and/or requires specialized mods. Having a game where reusability is something you can actually design for would make this more of a thing, which I think I'd like. ^ This sums up my own experience just about verbatim. I mean, the whole darn paragraph, every single thing, word for word. (Well, except the bit about "Kerbol", which I actually like.) Sandbox bores me to tears. I use it when I'm testing out a new mod or something, for example, so I'm really glad it exists; but other than that I simply have no use for it, it's not something I'm going to spend significant time in.

Presumably because if you take them there, you get money and/or prestige that you consider to be worth it. Or else you don't think it's worth it, so you don't take the contract. Are you saying you don't want optional tasks-with-rewards in the game? It's a mechanic I happen to like, myself. I'd like it if the tasks themselves were more interesting, and also if there were more challenging tasks (with commensurate rewards), but I like the basic idea itself. Fair 'nuff. Some people like predictable, some like unpredictable. Different folks, different tastes. I know, it's great! That means I have a completely consistent environment, so the new and different things that happen in my careers are that way because I chose to make them that way. Which of course is just me, but that's my point. Different folks like different things. The challenge for a game like KSP, which has a very diverse audience, is to come up with designs that cater to different people's needs. Well, at least you have to deal with aerodynamics inasmuch as what you build needs to be aerodynamically stable. And if you choose to build something that's very non-aerodynamic, it can have performance implications. (And I have no use for spaceplanes myself, either, though I understand why they appeal to other folks.) From what we've heard, it sounds as though that's kinda what colonies are.

There ya go! Moved to Add-on Releases.

Fair 'nuff, but I probably wouldn't have any interest in a feature like that myself, so for me it would just be an area of the game that took up developers' time without giving me something I'm interested in playing. It's worth noting that the "firsts" contracts in KSP are really just milestones for the player. "You launched a ship!" "You made it to orbit!" "You accomplished a rendezvous!" A player working their way through a career is going to hit a lot of milestones along the way, and these contracts are simply a matter of calling those out and recognizing them, which not only gives an explicit nod to what the player has achieved, but also provides an injection of cash commensurate with the accomplishment. So there's nothing about those contracts that implies a "space race", really-- at least not in terms of how it works. It's basically just a "rewards for reaching certain milestones", which I don't see any problem with, seems pretty reasonable to me. Having a more detailed milestone-rewards program such as you describe could work, too, I'm not opposed to that. Just saying that the mere existence of the "world firsts" contracts doesn't imply "space race" to everyone-- at least, it never has to me. Ah, sorry, missed that. Nice idea! In that case, no objections, it would simply be a feature I wouldn't get any use out of. It wouldn't get in my way, it would just be an unused feature that occupied developers' time that I, personally, would have preferred be spent on my own pet peeves. Yep, really. A simple and friendly way for the mechanism to acknowledge and reward the player for achieving certain milestones in their career. Don't know, don't really care. All I care about is that it's a thing to do, e.g. rendezvous with something somewhere and bring it back. I never really thought about it much, I suppose my headcanon is that it was KSC that did it, i.e. they flubbed a mission when I wasn't "on shift", so now it's my job to undo the damage they caused. No, it just implies that there's an agreement to do something, voluntarily entered into by both sides-- commonly, an exchange of goods or services for money. It happens to be the case that IRL government organizations generally have a competitive bidding process, yes, and all the rest of that. I suppose one could model things that way... except that would require competition, which I absolutely do not want when I'm playing KSP. I mean, it's just a gameplay mechanic that's common in all sorts of games: optional tasks that the player can choose to do, with some reward for doing them, which allows the player to decide whether the reward is worth the risk / effort / investment. In fantasy RPGs, they pick the word "quest" for this, since that meshes reasonably well with that metaphor. KSP has chosen "contract" as the term, and it's as good as any as far as I'm concerned. I want the game not to have competition, at least not in single-player mode-- I want the only "competition" to be me versus two things only: cold hard engineering realities, and my own personal goals that don't need to be modeled in-game. And I like the idea of the game presenting me with optional tasks-for-rewards. I don't particularly care whether they choose to call 'em "contracts" or "quests" or "schneezlemoppers", it's the underlying mechanic I care about. That said, I'll certainly grant that the actual contracts in KSP aren't especially interesting, which makes them more of a grind. Would love to see more love given to that department. *shrug* They are what they are. As a gameplay mechanism, the idea behind them is a way of "tuning" the game, i.e. make one thing easier as a tradeoff for making something else harder. I see nothing at all wrong with that, as a gameplay concept. Games do it all the time, and I think it can work great, when done well. I just happen to think that KSP didn't handle that aspect especially well-- at least, not in a way that's at all compelling for me, in my own gameplay. Whether they're called "strategies" or something else, that's just a word; I don't care much what they're called. I'll agree that "strategy" is maybe not the best name for it, but then I'm not sure what else I'd call them in this context, so as far as I'm concerned it's as good a moniker as any, until I hear something better. I play a lot of careers-- I'm not one of those folks who makes one KSP career and plays it year after year. My typical KSP career lasts a month or two, depending on ambitiousness and how much play time I have available. I start with a story arc and end-goal in mind, and when I reach that end-goal, I call it "done" and start a new career. So "first landing on the Mun" is something I've gone through many, many times. And I enjoy it every time. Maybe other folks wouldn't, but I do. Partly that's because I have a fairly high tolerance for repetition ... but also because I generally try to do things a bit differently every career, and try different designs, and so forth. So I don't have a problem with this, myself. Oh, sorry. I was simply responding to your comments (in context, it sounded to me like you were unhappy about this) that it's not possible to "lose" career mode. To me, that's synonymous with "there must be something outside my control" because "losing" career is not something I would do voluntarily. I may have been misreading your intent, apologies if so. i.e. it kinda sounded to me like you were complaining about the fact that career is predictable. Depends on the player, I suppose. Not for me, but then, I tend to play fairly short careers with predetermined end goals, so I don't spend super long periods of time with the tech tree maxed out. Yah, me neither. The one aspect of KSP that I just can't stop myself from mentally roleplaying is that I'm very jealous of the kerbals' calendar and just about every career goal comes with an implicit "...and get it done in short total calendar time", so I multi-task a lot and never have just one mission running at a time, except in early career. Yep, I remember being disappointed when I discovered that was possible, on my first KSP career (though I can understand the rationale behind it, given the diversity of the player base). So now I don't do that, mainly because the "hop all over Minmus" isn't all that fun for me, so I finish off the tech tree with the rest of the solar system. Well, only in the sense that everything involves rockets, and rockets have dV. There are other considerations as well (aerodynamics, TWR, stability, etc.), not to mention personal goals / "house rules" / etc. -- the interplay of all these tradeoffs is what makes KSP so enduringly fun for me, and why I haven't gotten bored of it after five years playing.

Close, but not quite. First, saying "github" doesn't automatically mean "source code"-- it's perfectly possible for people to host files on github without putting source code there. So please just say "source code here" rather than "github here". Second, please make a link to the actual source code, not to a releases page. Not everyone knows how to navigate their web interface. That is, use this link: https://github.com/zer0Kerbal/ODFCr ^ that right there's to the code, which is what we're after. Take care of that and we're happy to move it across.

Yep.

No, that's career, too. I play career exclusively... and I very much set my own plot and storyline. What I meant is: Different people can hear the word "goal" and ascribe very different interpretations to it. For example, you can have a general goal (like "get out there and explore", without being too prescriptive of exactly what or where), but you could also have a very specifically assigned goal, such as if they had a "campaign" with a specific storyline where you're given specific missions to do and it eventually takes you to some final cutscene. The latter is what I was cautioning against. I've seen some people ask for a "campaign" mode in KSP that would be something like that... and there's nothing wrong with wanting that. Might be interesting to play... once. But for myself? If the game's "career" was something like that, I'd probably get bored of KSP and wander away within a couple of weeks, because the open-ended nature of deciding what to build and where to go lets me be creative with it, which is pretty much the game's entire appeal for me. That's all. All sounds perfectly reasonable, and I don't have any disagreement with you there... ...with the proviso that what you've said doesn't hold true for all players. For example, if it worked like you describe? I'd hate that, and it would be a major dealbreaker for me. Would make me not want to play the game anymore. It would force me to either play sandbox (which I'd hate), or else force me to put up with randomized physical properties of planets (which I would also hate, it would be a total showstopper for me). And that right there is the crux of the design problem for someone in the position of Squad or Star Theory. They're making a very "open ended" game that by design lets players set their own agenda to a fairly wide degree. That's a major part of its appeal. So anything they do to constrain things in one way, will please some people and alienate others. So they have to target according to the whole player base, which is a heck of a design challenge. Glad I'm not the one who has to make that call. Anyway, thank you for the explanation-- helps to have an idea of what someone has in mind! I suppose there's nothing in the game that forbids a "space race" interpretation, but that's certainly never been how I've viewed any of it. I don't see anything in KSP at all that implies "space race" to me, nor would I want it to-- I want this game to be about my creativity, and what pace I decide to set. Having it set up as a "space race" against some rival nation or space program would ruin it for me. If I wanted competition, I'd play a multiplayer game. Like I said, nothing wrong with wanting that... just that not everyone wants the same thing. Sure, but matters of nomenclature aside... what exactly don't you like about the "contracts" paradigm? "Here's a list of optional tasks you can perform, in exchange for money", and you get to choose whether to take on those tasks or not. That seems pretty reasonable to me? Is your issue with the contracts themselves (i.e. the specific details of what they ask and the size of the rewards), which I'll admit can be kinda silly sometimes? Or is it the basic premise of "optional thing you can sign up to do, to make money"? I'm not reading your statement here as saying that you're opposed to the general idea, but other than the naming, it's not clear to me how you'd like them to work instead? I'm with you about not having much use for the "strategies". I used them once, found them to be un-good for reasons too verbose to go into here (executive summary: made things too easy, didn't give me the "interesting tradeoffs" problem that I wanted), and have basically never touched that building since. I'm not opposed to the idea of strategies-- I like the idea of having some sort of policies that let you tune the tradeoffs of career mode (i.e. making something easier at the expense of making something else harder), like spending skill points in an RPG. My beef with KSP's strategies is in the implementation, not the fundamental premise: I don't care for the actual, specific strategies (and their effects) that they've picked. Fair 'nuff. I don't, myself. I don't want "losing" to be part of KSP-- I want "this was harder than I expected, so now I have to go back to the drawing board and try something else". My individual missions absolutely can fail, I love that about the game and is what keeps me coming back. But for my career to fail, in ways outside my control? Nope, that would be an enjoyment-killer for me and would push me to drop the game. Not my experience with KSP. Yes, when I'm at the top of the tech tree, I can land on the Mun a lot easier than I could when I was at the bottom... but by that point I'm going to harder places than the Mun. For me, advancing tech doesn't mean the game's any easier, at all. It just means I can go further and hit different challenges. The game always has exactly the level of difficulty I want, at all times. If I'm finding it too easy, then I set myself more aggressive goals to make it harder. If it's too hard, then I scale back my ambitions a bit until I've developed better tech and/or climbed a learning curve farther. It's kind of like the old joke about "the better the four-wheel-drive, the farther you are from home when you get stuck." So for me, I'm totally fine with the "better tech means more capable ships"-- that's what the game's about. What's important to me, rather, is to ensure that the design of the game universe is set up in such a way that there are plenty of escalating challenges out there, i.e. a logical progression of harder places to go to. I could see something like that. Make it a bit less one-dimensional (i.e. not have one-size-fits-all "science points", but different kinds of stuff that provides different kinds of benefits).

Yes, but for a compiled language like C#, at minimum you at least have to recompile. They're clearly super busy trying to get things working, over there, so I think it's pretty safe to assume that they wouldn't take the time to build a thing unless they were pretty darn sure that the payoff outweighs the cost of building it. From chatting with the engineer who was describing it, it was clear that having an interpreted language that didn't need recompiling was extremely valuable to them for rapid iteration-- it's nimble. Also, for certain very simple types of logic, the fact that it's lightweight (i.e. "just insert a few lines of text here", without having to go through the entire process of implementing and building a C# assembly to house the mod) can also be a win.

Because? Why is this not a good thing? Grumbling tends to be more helpful if it comes with a "why" or a "what would you like better" along for the ride. Was pretty much my own take on it as well.

They do, in fact, have colliders. (At least, the ones that you'd expect/want to. For example, they showed us a scene on Kerbin that had trees, rocks, and some patches of grass. They said that the trees and rocks have colliders... but the grass doesn't. Which makes sense.) Yep. They were showing us that stuff and we were all "cool! So 'Neil Armstrong trying to find a safe landing spot is a thing, now?" and got knowing nods. They probably will be doing this. I asked Nate Simpson at PAX: Whether that's a good or a bad thing is subjective, of course. For myself, I like the current model and always have-- it's fun for my gameplay, it's straightforward to use, and it follows an "explore more to unlock stuff that lets me explore more" model that I find very appealing. Doesn't mean it couldn't use a little tuning here and there, but the overall concept works well for me, and I suspect for a lot of other players as well. If it's not your personal cup of tea, no one's in any position to argue about that, of course-- folks like what they like. But if you don't like it... and if "just play sandbox" doesn't appeal to you either (which I'm guessing, from your above statement)... then how would you like to see it work, instead? Sure, I agree with that-- with the proviso that I think the game shouldn't straitjacket players too much into one particular "goal" too specifically, since much of the charm of the game is allowing players to set their own agenda and tell their own "story". The overall "goal" of KSP 1's career-- at least, as expressed through the R&D and tech-tree mechanic-- seems to me to be "get out there and explore places". That seems like a reasonable goal to me, for a space-exploration game. So... if you don't like that, what don't you like about it? You've made it very clear that you seriously dislike the current system, but it's not clear to me what you dislike about it. Do you find "get out there and explore" to be a bad goal? If so, what goal do you think would be a better one? Or, if you like the goal but dislike their implementation of that goal... what sort of mechanic do you think would work better for servicing that goal?

Hi @zer0Kerbal, Looks like a fun mod! In accordance with our add-on posting rules, however, can you please add a source code link to your OP above? Thanks!

Moving to Mission Reports.

Correct, you don't find that out until you show up there and see it. Doesn't really matter what kind of craft they're in, though. Well, you never need to bother putting a docking port on a rescue ship, because the stranded kerbal's ship never has a docking port on it that you can use. There are basically two situations: Contracts to rescue a kerbal. For these, all you have to do is rendezvous with the target and park next to it (i.e. under 2.3 km) in orbit, then ferry the kerbal across on EVA, as mentioned above. Contracts to recover a kerbal and their vessel. For these, your ship needs to be equipped with the Klaw, a.k.a. Advanced Grabbing Unit, so that you can grab the target (you need the Klaw since the target has no docking port to dock with).

Yeah, that's KSP all right. So, for rescuing, you have a couple of options. One way is to land another craft reasonably close to where you've landed this one, with a spare crew slot available. After it's landed, Jeb can just go over to the craft and board it. Note that when I say "reasonably close", I mean "within a few dozen kilometers"-- kerbal EVA packs are great for flying around on the Mun, so Jeb doesn't have to walk. So it's not like you have to do a pinpoint precision landing. The other way is to launch Jeb to (very) low Mun orbit from the surface, using only his EVA thrusters. Then your rescue craft only has to rendezvous with him in orbit, and doesn't have to come down to the surface to land. Either way can work: The former way needs more dV for the rescue vehicle, plus of course there's the hazard of actually landing (i.e. you don't want the same thing to happen to your rescue ship as happened to Jeb's!) The latter way makes the rescue ship's job easier... but be advised that kerbal EVA packs can just barely get to Mun orbit from the surface. They can do it... but it's a nailbiter, and you should F5 before you try it so that you can re-try a few times, takes some practice to get it right. And even when done perfectly, it can only get you into a very low orbit, like under 10 km altitude, so be prepared for some drama.

^ Very much this. The wise company knows that it's far better to say "no comment" than to give a definite statement that something will/won't be the case, and then later turn out to be wrong. At this stage of development, there's still a whole lot of stuff that's in flux and won't have been finally decided yet, so they're just being prudent by no-commenting a lot. A bit more clarity on the Lua thing here:

Hello, and welcome to the forums! I don't recall anyone at Squad, Star Theory, or Private Division mentioning this one way or the other. However, my guess is that no, you wouldn't get it for free. It's a whole new game built from scratch, my guess is that it would not be included as a "free update". It's a sequel game, not an update to the current one. Like I said, that's just my guess and I'm not in any position to actually know the answer.

Though in KSP 1, at least, that's a configurable setting. Not in-game, but air intakes have an actual disableUnderwater flag (in config files) that defaults to false. It bugged me, so I made a little ModuleManager script to make intakes not work underwater (just switches all of them to set the flag to true). No word yet, of course, on how KSP 2 will handle underwater stuff. I'm a little bit torn about it, myself. On the one hand, I'd love to have some water-exploration parts to play with... on the other hand, to me it's Kerbal Space Program, not Kerbal Submarine Program, and given how much stuff they've got on their plate, what matters most to me is that they totally nail the "it's about rockets" part without getting too distracted with other things. Whatever they end up doing, though... they've made it very explicitly clear that the game is about designing and flying rockets, and that's the philosophy that's underpinning all their decisions, so I'm not inclined to worry too much.

I can give you a bit more than that. Yes, they have fidelity if you get close, and yes, there are rocks. When we were at Star Theory's studio last Wednesday, among the demos they showed us was a closeup of the rings. When you get up-close-and-personal with the rings, they resolve into a swarm of irregular rocks of various sizes. It's gorgeous, like watching a scene from The Expanse. Naturally, immediately the first thing we asked was "do those rocks have colliders?", to which Nate's answer was "no comment." So it looks like there will be eye-candy rocks, at the very least. No word yet, however, on whether they'll just be eye candy, or would have actual gameplay effect such as colliders.

We asked. "No comment."

Yep. And when he then followed that up with "...and who's blown up?" most of them raised their hands, with a certain amount of sheepish laughter. And then he said "c'mon, everyone, be honest" and then everyone's hand went up and there was a lot of happy-- and less sheepish-- laughter. It's hard to describe to someone who wasn't there, but there was a lot of we're-all-in-this-together sort of camaraderie. It was clear that some folks did feel sheepish admitting that they had difficulties... and were happy and encouraged when other people shared that, too. And that sort of encouragement is what I think the "failures" in the trailer are about. "Yeah, stuff's gonna go sideways. But no worries. You got this."

So, an anecdote. At PAX, I wanted to go in and see the KSP2 presentation at their booth. Not because I wanted to see new stuff (because at this point I'd already seen everything they were showing, from when we visited Star Theory's studio a couple days before). Rather, it was because I wanted to watch people watching it. So there we are, about 20 people watching some videos, interspersed with a Star Theory rep giving the spiel. And I got to see the reactions of people who were seeing this stuff for the first time. And... they were enraptured. They loved it. There was one young man, in particular, who watched the whole thing in a state of childlike wonder, with a smile on his face that I can only describe as "beatific". It was incredibly touching and I just wanted to hug him. So... yeah. I agree, I love the cinematic, myself. And I can give a data point that 20 people walking in off the floor of PAX loved it, too. (Bear in mind that they've got to be at least fairly interested in KSP to start with, just to be there, because they had to stand in line quite a while to get in to see this-- probably the better part of an hour, for most of them.) ^ This. Actually, no, it wouldn't, at least not for me, and not for most of the 20 folks I watched, who clearly really enjoyed that bit. Naturally, tastes differ, so of course nobody's in any position to argue with you if that's your taste. However... I don't think it's about "LOL explosions", really. From watching people's reactions-- and from listening to the Star Theory rep's patter with the crowd-- I think it's more about this: KSP is intimidating to a lot of people, at least at first. Perhaps most people. It's hard. Yes, that's right. But players are, at least to begin with. We all are. This stuff is literally rocket science, and the learning curve is steep, painful, and frequently explosive. KSP, more than most games I've come across, is about failure. And learning from failure. And building on it, in order to triumph over it and go on to bigger things. A new player is going to blow stuff up. A lot. And not on purpose, either (well, not unless they want to). That can be... dispiriting, if you don't have the "failure is okay, it's part of the learning process" mindset. So I view these little bits of "oh gosh, it fell over and exploded" in the trailer as a nod to that: as a way of saying, implicitly, "look, you're going to blow up a lot... but that's okay, because you're also going to succeed, and go amazing places." That scene where they land on the Mun... well, yes, the lander falls over and goes boom. But it clearly doesn't bother the kerbals too much, as they gaze out in awe across the crater at Kerbin looming on the horizon. They take the failure in stride and get on with things. For me, I thought the trailer hit a nice blend of triumphant exploration and sense-of-wonder, with a wry nod to the goofs that we're all going to run into along the way. I view the fall-down-go-boom bits of the trailer as a form of encouragement to players... and I gotta say, watching the people watch it, that they seemed to take it that way.

And the publisher was in the room at the time. There were Private Division folks there too, not just Star Theory. Which implies to me that the publisher is on board with this and the decision has been made. Well, they have specified that there will be "multiple", meaning "at least two". Beyond that is speculation at this point.

It also looks not unlike the pillars/footings they've shown us for colonies, so might be something like that?