Chilkoot

I've been telling my kids "3 more sleeps" It's worse than Christmas around here.

I was involved with some neurology research a while back, testing to see where people's "break point" was for discerning difference in frame rates. Two interesting points: 110Hz was where most people peaked for perceiving smoothness of motion (esp. with a strobed backlight). 120Hz ended up being the performance tuning sweet spot for almost every viewer tested. Most people at the start of the test were perfectly fine with 24 fps video. As they were exposed to higher refresh rates, their tolerance for lower framerates dropped, sometimes really dramatically. A real "ignorance is bliss" situation. One guy I recall was pretty upset as he was one of those human eye can't see faster than 30 FPS folks (utter nonsense, of course). There was nothing really much faster than 144Hz when we did our research, and even those 144Hz monitors were *very* expensive at the time, and we had to exceed the spec of the cables to hit 144 (dual DVI capped at 1080p/120Hz). I suspect the benefits of today's much-faster monitors are more to do with perceived hand-eye lag in twitch-type games and not perceived smoothness of motion. Not really relevant, just a tangent lol.

There was unfortunately further research in 2022 showing meta-stable hydrogen my not be a thing. Metallic hydrogen, yes, for sure, but stable in a way that it could ever be used as a propulsion... maybe not I'll see if I can dig up the paper - I saw an abstract for it maybe 3 or 4 months ago but can't recall what university published it.

Not sure if there are any other audio nerds out there, but now that we have real in-game footage from ESA, I have to say probably the most impressive overhaul noticeable in these KSP 2 clips is the sound design. There are few dev shops that will commit the resources to getting this exactly right, and hats off to Intercept for engaging a real professional to build an entirely new "sound universe" from the ground up for this game. I get that there's a lot of controversy over performance, visuals, features, etc., and I don't want to come off as a fanboi or simp here. But that audio foundation you can hear in the clips, everywhere from the VAB to launch to in-flight, creates a completely edifying - and completely Kerbal-feeling - atmosphere that sets the perfect emotional stage for the rest of game experience. Serious hats off to Howard Mostrom for designing what will probably be one of the most iconic, but sadly least-appreciated, components of the game.

I'd love to see how these numbers have evolved over time. There's been a noticeable down-tick in the combined total of "day 1" answers since the system requirements were published.

Honestly, yeah, a bit crazy. Photo-real visuals are such a tiny part of a game like Kerbal, its a waste of development time and client system resource to be forcing realistic clouds and other non-functional eye candy as fundamental features. KSP 2's promise was a core experience of liquid-smooth and stable physics simulation, ISRU, colonies, near-future technologies, multiple star systems... all the things that made KSP 1 crap the bed at scale. These are must-have's. Pretty atmospheric effects... not so much.

At least not until Take Two decides they want more juice out of that lemon...

Depends on which codec is used and how it's implemented. For example using the CPU's h.264 or h.265 hardware encoder and writing to a different drive should have very little impact on performance. Software-based encoding if the CPU is already pinned would have a huge impact. Some newer generations of vid cards have full hardware encoding, some older ones still use CUDA resources for some operations. Graphics performance impact will vary significantly from card to card. Bottom line is if people know their hardware and how to capture vid on it with minimal overhead, it should still provide usable results, or at least a strong rough idea. A matrix with suggestions for people new to it would be a good idea.

There's no evidence that the publisher cut bait and left all the assets, code and project work behind when they transitioned to their own studio - there was certainly no guidance like this to investors, who would have to be informed if previous investment in the property was being written off. I'd call this take on events revisionist frankly. None of us can accurately predict what the release schedule will be. All of our varied predictions are based on what info we're permitted to know, and massaging or re-framing the past doesn't really serve any helpful purpose here.

I think you will have a hard time finding anyone to take that bet. We're 3 years behind the original planned release with almost every new gameplay feature stripped out for an Early Access, sandbox-only release. Colonies delivered in 2023 sounds reasonable bordering on aspirational based on the current track record.

Life support was mentioned in at least 2 of the 7 interview/reveal segments. We don't know yet if it exists in flying-type gameplay or just colonies (Nate did mention it specifically in relation to colonies*). Is it food? Something else? Who knows... but the word "snacks" came up a lot more frequently than you'd expect in a typical interview. * This was in one of the v. early ca. 2019 interviews. It was in the same context of colonies not needing so much micromanagement as to be tedious. We can only guess how much the design has changed since then.

Rescue Beacon I

Tough call. I've been on the Dev side of this one, and feature/scope change mid-cycle based on community feedback can be a slippery slope. It's a balancing act b/w fixing things that surface and changing tack to an extent where necessary, but also sticking with funding-mandated deliverables and being careful not to pander to a vocal minority. You can't design by committee (i.e.player input) - it's a never-ending development black hole. In this case, it would be smarter for Intercept to stick with the plan, and take feedback on what's broken rather than try to insert features unless the Dev gauges they are missing something critical. Probably a million people will buy this game during EA, and the roadmap is a promise the developer makes to them about what features are coming in a reasonable time frame. Putting that on hold to accommodate new incoming requests breaks that trust and I would say makes it a bad decision.

Agreed, and all kinds of technical challenges involved in maintaining the planet's momentary state and having that state accessible to all clients in multi-player. It sounds fun in theory, but when you get down to the weeds, it's a really difficult thing to implement.

OG rescue mission right here.

I don't mean to whack a hornet's nest with this question, but I'm curious if the idea of terraforming has ever come up in official interviews/reveals. I guess the underlying question is whether the planet framework in general supports dynamic changes in parameters like atmospheric composition, surface temp, and also dynamic surface features such as the introduction of vegetation or other life - if "other life" is part of the game, even. Nate's recent comments on Gurdamma really caught my attention. Specifically the dense CO2 atmosphere and prevalence of liquid water - sounds like a great recipe for the chemistry of photosynthesis and a even a full carbon cycle supporting oxygen-breathing life - with a little kickstart from enterprising Kerbal colonists... Anyone heard of such a game feature at all? I think it would be completely BA to descend on new star systems and interfere recklessly with their natural progression.

I mod for a few games' official forums and have CM'd in the past (there can be lots of overlap depending on the size of the dev house). We usually have a pretty good level of access to the internal roadmap and frequently the designers/developers, and there will be firm gates around what can/can't be revealed. A pretty hard and fast rule though is that you don't answer anything regarding features unless you're 100% sure and it's not embargoed info. If an official channel mod posted something like this, it's either pretty solid, permitted info or they likely won't be a mod much longer.

For sure. That was an *extremely* uncommon offer, and one made by a tiny dev shop who were happy to see sales of their hobby project. KSP 2 is of course a whole other kettle of fish. Full for-profit model with risk and market assessments, projections, etc. We'll get what we paid for, but any additional content (DLC) will be extra cost.

Guaranteed storefront visibility is exactly what Epic has been using to lure some titles over as exclusives (on top of the licensing incentives). In fact, storefront visibility was cited as the primary decision factor by Piranha when releasing MechWarrior 5 on Epic a while back. It's definitely a big consideration for publishers, and even with Take 2's clout, they'll need to plan their release around the big dogs, even though KSP2's ever-expanding budget seems to be nudging it closer and closer to A-list territory.

A little trick (depending on what you're aiming for) is to use targets and waypoints, as those show up in the navball, and you can adjust your approach so that the target is very near your surface retrograde. Eg, if you drop a flag on Mun/Minmus and call it "Land Here", then set that as your target, it shows up on your navball and you can use that to fine-tune your approach. With a little practice to get an intuitive understanding of how that works, you can usually drop a rocket within about 10m of the flag/waypoint, though it's harder on bodies rotating very quickly like Minmus specifically.

I... I think I need a cigarette now..

It's extremely unlikely that that level of precision landing will be required for anything in KSP 2. There may be bonuses or benefits for dropping something dead smack on the button, but alienating 99% of the player base via difficulty is not something developers typically strive for.

I think the Kraken has had its day. It was frequently funny in the early days of an indie KSP, but with a fully funded and polished game like KSP 2, Kraken attacks will more likely be perceived as bug. I don't expect a lot of tolerance for quirky, game-breaking physics sim mechanics in this release.

This just means you're not trying hard enough.