JoeSchmuckatelli

Thanks! That was interesting. 3/4 of the presentation was all about how they've done what they've done up til now - using the PQS+ system they got and tweaked from KSP. Moving into the CBT gets mentioned, if not talked around, in the section of the video labeled "Early Access - Tool Plans". It's the shortest segment of the video. Given that we got Mortoc's Dev Insights # 18 on the 10th of March and the GDC presentation happened 10-15 days later... it sound like the artists and engineers on the panel are new to the whole idea. They like it ("super pumped") - but it doesn't read like something that's been in the pipeline for a year - rather something that they only started maybe in February, if not March itself. The actual phrase used was "Investigating a new terrain system". A few other tidbits: "Science mode - which will introduce a campaign" "Gurdama... Introduced during the Interstellar update" "[they were using a built-in render pipleline right up to EA Launch and did not have access to HDRP]" but they do now - or will have moving forward. Given some of what the Engineers and Artists said before... there may be some additional time spent by the engineers building out tools for the artists with the new capabilities, or to match what they did using the old tools - before they can get started. The note here, is that there are four biomes per planet and four textures per biome (currently) - and the artists are excited that HDRP and CBT might give them more freedom, both in increasing textures per biomes, but also biomes per planet/ CB. They're shifting to a coordinate system called S2 (developed by Google) that is supposed to be considerably faster and lighter on storage. By comparison, the PQS system uses Cartesian with double precision. (Not pretending I understand all of this... but someone will). Tides are not going to be a thing. Blocky shorelines are a problem - mostly an artifact of rendering and how that scales with distance; it sounds like it will continue to be a problem, but one that can... time allowing... be fixed - it's just not a high priority at the moment. (lot of interpretation on my part)

They would know!

They've explicitly stated no console work until after 1.0.

According to an ESA post - they kick off their water deluge system 6 seconds before launch. In this video - the SS Flight test - the system seems to kick on only about a second or two before launch In the Booster Test, the deluge system seems to have been active for quite a while before they kicked off ignition: But looking at the system itself - it just seems almost notional rather than measured against the expected energy of the rocket: Compare that to what NASA had planned and implemented for SLS: Water Deluge Test is a Success at Launch Pad 39B | NASA Not saying that a proper deluge system would have made a whole lot of difference - but it seems like the implementation SX chose was to just mitigate against unplanned fire, rather than actually absorb and dissipate energy - which NASA seems to do.

There are a whole lot of people who apparently really enjoy building crazy crafts

Having thought about this a moment - it's also not the same thing as 'completed purchases' - or whatever you call purchases that were not refunded. All my number speculation above is moot, given I did not even consider that people might have bought it, tooled around for a few hours then returned the game. I have no idea how we can even know how many people bought it and shelved it or refunded it. Kind of a rough place for them to be. ... On another note - I went back and re-read the DevBlog about updating the planet system to HDRP and CBT. One of the Reddit responses was from a guy who worked on CBT and has doubts about the efficacy of CBT with planetary sized structures. However - the HDRP aspect is one big thing that will help out those of us with better machines. That said - the porting over of current assets to HDRP is likely an ENORMOUS project in itself... but apparently only a very small portion of the overall code for the game. They plan on doing it in stages to keep from breaking too much all at once.

I've seen the same on a PC, no mods and a pretty good system. It's something in game.

On the one hand - that's good. If your number is correct, they've made $15 mil on the game; likely a small profit or around break even. (I arbitrarily chose 40 people x $100,000 x 3 years.) OTOH 0.2% is ouch. Peak daily players is a weird number to be going off of, but it's what we've got. That first few days after Release it was in the 25k range and given that it's counting concurrent players? Yeah, the number of sales is likely higher - but what number higher we can only guess. I'd speculate 4x higher is a decent floor, given time zones, work and sleep cycles and human nature (people like to play with new toys). The thing that can't be ignored is that whatever the number... the shine wore off the new real quick. EDIT - I say this as someone who keeps hoping they'll polish it up nicely in the next few months and it becomes something fun to play.

I got 3-5 on average - but I'm running at 4k. The work they did in the immediate environment of KSC was noticeably improved - but orbit looking at a planet? Not much better But if you think about it, going from 15 to 20 frames is a significant percentage increase

So - what explains the series of changes we saw? e.g. ESA MN, Release MN and Patch 1 MN (with ESA and Patch 1 being virtually identical, but Release a mess)? Also - is there any likelihood that they had to break the game to arbitrarily present it via EA stages, and that it will get better as they 'put it back together again' via adding stuff back in as we move down the Roadmap? Or are these core feature problems likely exactly what they seem - problems with core assumptions and systems that would be problematic at this stage of development, no matter what?

So - if I recall the Dev Blog about it, correctly, there is a Big graphic rework going on; totally different system. It's a good read, but it really does only tickle the interest - and leaves us wanting more info. Still - there are a host of associated discussions in the thread where they talk about planets being better optimized - but also a lot of new tools to make places more interesting, to boot. Re: adding features... I'm making a huge presumption based on a couple of things from the AMA that suggest that they had to strip out a LOT of the work they'd done to follow the EA Roadmap. Basically, up to the point the decision was made, they were making a singular, complete game. Once EA was decided, they had to strip parts out / hide / deactivate - whatever the correct term is - to present the game in stages. I'm hoping that this turns out to be a self-correcting problem... but it's just a hope. The only 'refractor' (if I understand the term correctly) vis systems is stuff like fuel flow calculations, heat modeling and other features that were not quite ready for prime time or gobbled up resources. From Nate, that's a separate parallel process. But the need to keep marching down the Roadmap is that EA is flat boring. Unless you REALLY like legos, I guess.

Two problems in one; Every separation the engine shuts down - and every separation turns off the probe. It's just like when undocking and the ship you switch from (that you left in SAS lock, or something) is now drifting uncontolled.

Yeah. I'm choosing to believe (based on virtually no evidence) that they had to break the game to parse out the disparate parts in an EA development track... and that as they start adding in (or unlocking) certain features the whole game is going to come back into focus as something playable. If I'm at all right about this... they need to hit Science NLT the second week of June. Which they might be able to do if we see Patch 3 in the next week. I'm basically on the 'wait for the patch, then check it out again' track. If Patch 3 can succeed in not liquiding me off within the first hour of gameplay - that alone will be a success. I'm not even sure I made it to a full hour with Patch 2

I know what you're saying -- and there is quite a lot 'right' going on. Music is consistently appreciated. The largescale restructuring of the various planets (even if we quibble about certain details). The general direction of the game and feature set they want to introduce. Many of the ideas are solid -- procedural wings & other parts. The Burn Timer (when it works). Maneuver Nodes (when they figure out what functionality they/we want), Colonies & Resource Management. Some of the questionable ideas, like 'Science is not much changed from KSP' is a total missed opportunity and questionable design choice that totally shows they were not listening to us. BUT. It's all the little 'what' moments; non stable orbits, untuned docking and destructive separation, Part Manager and Flight Report, the flight model, control surfaces going wonky, and all the other, many, many problems with just doing the basics of what KSP did, and not doing it well. As it stands, there is no predictability of when, where or why things are going to go catastrophically wrong. That's gotta change. I think the sideshow is the 'lack of optimization = small pool of available players'. Its the real, fundamental problems that is the problem. Fixing Optimization at this point only exposes more people to the frustrating mess that the game is currently. Yeah, there's a loud crowd demanding better frames... but to what end? So if we strip out the performance issues - we are left with a weird flight model, no thermals, wonky parts not working as expected, fundamental systems (orbits, MNs etc) not working as expected, SAS that turns off when you switch ships and a bunch of questionable UI choices (PM and FR). That's the stuff they need to fix Mid week average is about 2% of purchasers

Cabling to the arms of Mechzilla?

I must have missed it - but I don't recall seeing the water deluge system going off before launch. Did it?

My concern was the pilings themselves - if the base structural components are compromised... can such a thing be fixed/ patched?

Yup

The most detailed images of Mars' moon Deimos have been unveiled after a probe flew just 100km (62 miles) from its surface. The "unprecedented" high-resolution pictures, captured by the UAE Space Agency during a series of flybys, include a glimpse of areas on the far side of the moon which have never been observed in such detail before. The moon - which NASA describes as "small and lumpy" - takes 30 hours to orbit Mars and is just nine miles long (15km). The flyby images are part of the UAE's wider Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) to study the Red Planet. Now that is one weird looking space rock! Most detailed images of Mars' moon Deimos unveiled | Science & Tech News | Sky News

I'm starting to get that. I used the phrase because I'm painfully unaware of how the industry operates - and thus, enjoying the discussion. Trying, then, to understand some of what i've seen with KSP2. I could go photo hunting - but the clearest indication is the ESA Maneuver Node, the Release Maneuver Node and the Patch 1 Maneuver Node. Release was a blobby mess that looked nothing like ESA - and once it dropped, Patch one did look like ESA event MNs. Patch 1 MNs were graphically different and felt different, and with Patch 2 they're acting different from Patch 1. Additionally, the Burn timer - it also changed from not great with Release, working quite well in Patch 1 and then being graphically different and having disagreements with itself in Patch 2. So how does something like that happen? My pure guess is that there's some kind of Build A / Build B thing going on and each patch is coming from a different, albeit parallel build - rather than having a single build that is getting branched off of each time.

If they also trench out the spaces between the legs and allow to fill with water (b/c of water table is literally right there) - would that help? I look at your design and the amount of damage done to the legs themselves and wonder if they don't want to get some of the force into an area below the legs in a way that's not directly blasting everything past them. Guessing water should reduce some of the energy - although I don't know what happens when it flashes to steam - but I'm guessing there's some measure of dissipation of energy that is going to go the path of least resistance. Something like this? (Thanks, MS Paint!)

They could gather it together and sell it as 'Stage 0 Regolith'. I'm certain folks would buy it. RocketAsh? Volcanic Ash - Etsy Grin!

I clearly don't understand how projects like this work; although I have worked on multi-author projects and do find it frustrating to try to incorporate everything into a single document that doesn't have internal conflicts or random assumptions that don't flow with everything else. I'm just picturing the section of the code that deals with the Burn Timer (for example). The BT was kinda functional during Release, worked really well during Patch 1 -- but lacked some functionality that people desired - and then in Patch 2 added that functionality (DV calc)... but then the various timers stopped agreeing with one another and the 'system' got wonky. Similarly, the MN style and functionality of Patch 1 looks markedly similar to the ESA event videos; but notably different from what we got on Release. To me it looks like someone grabbed a whole bunch of code related to one style or the other and dropped it into the patch, rather than something that was coded anew or revamped during the period between iterations. Ultimately - I'm wondering how studios handle a situation like this - where presumably some teammembers are working on Science and Colonies content - at the same time that basic functionality is getting tweaked during SB updates. At some point they have to have a merger of the two, right?

You could request this be shut down / merged into a new poll framed the way you prefer it. I've had to do that before when I thought I'd put together a genius poll, only to discover it was actually 'jenius'.

Some of the dust Guess they did not do a FOD walk?