Chilkoot

Looking better and better all the time. Two big thumbs up for including near- and "almost-far-" future tech in the base game, and also giving us something to do with it - new solar systems and meaningful progression. The only thing I consider quite a design blunder is their recycling of the existing Solar/Kerbolar system. It's not going to be easy for vets to get excited about yet another Duna mission, and we've all landed on the Mun so many times it's going to be quite a stretch to make that feel special again. Building a fully operational *base* on Duna - with a launchpad - that doesn't require 20 mods and run at 8 FPS is going to be special though. Baking outposts and EPL-type stations into the base game is finally going to give us a real outward progression path, and not just "there and back again" like with KSP 1. Tons of great new stuff to look forward to, for sure. Game can't arrive fast enough.

The old folks here are pr The old hands in here are more likely to think of Star Division. Though I doubt many in these forums were around for that standoff, it was a very prominent name for a decade and more. Star Office was the great white hope for those railing against the growing MS monopoly, hoping for competition and a fair market for consumers. If anyone has heard of or is using LibreOffice in 2020, you can thank Star Division for both the code base and the underlying movement.

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but I'm using the beta build from the OneDrive repo in KSP 1.9 and it's running great so far. Love this mod - thanks so much for keeping it alive!

My bad - should have been more clear. Spring 2020 is *possible*, being in the newly disclosed window, but the release is no longer slated for spring 2020. It could very well launch before June 21 this year (though I personally am skeptical that will happen).

This is a real head-scratcher, isn't it? If they've done a complete physics overhaul, maybe they've found a way to offload some calculations to the GPU and help overcome the CPU bottleneck we see in the current version. Time will tell, I suppose.

Spot on. This is the ONLY firm guidance to date. The original release of "Spring 2020" is off the table per the announced delay, so until further info is provided, the official release window is anywhere Apr. 1 2020 through March 31, 2021. Hopefully we'll hear more during PAX!

Bro, I gotta say that if budget and playspace permit, grab a pair of controllers and setup as big a room as you can for "roomscale" VR (min 3m x 3m, bigger if you can manage). You'll never look back! I am a lifelong gaming enthusiast, and roomscale gaming in VR was one of those "quantum leaps" in gaming for me that only happen once every decade or two - maybe the biggest advancement since the 70's. I'd go so far as to say roomscale qualifies as much as a "new medium" as this generation has seen, and a lot of directors struggling with storytelling in VR would agree

It's possible they've been planning this as a game feature since day 1. We just don't know. Certainly they've built in a few of the components that it would require, such as the physics framework for multiple players and custom-color parts for your whole fleet. Since the systems in the base game are fixed, it's possible that the AI could be largely "on rails" and you need achieve milestones before the AI does in the race. I do seriously doubt it's in there, but it may be more plausible programmatically with the base multiplayer features already in place.

Before Star Theory rebranded, they had released I believe 2 VR titles, so it's probably not off the table. Kerbal has a *lot* of different play modes though - think of how varied it is vs, say a first person shooter. There's a VAB, piloting operations, planet-side EVA stuff, docking maneuvers, KSC facility management interface, etc. I'm a big fan of VR and I'd love to have support, but I'm skeptical that it can be done well universally in this title without major time investment and possibly interface compromises in the core (pancake version) game. Obviously I'd be very happy to be proven wrong on this

I find with career mode that - as much as a promise myself I won't with every fresh start - I purposefully avoid advancing so that I can just game the near-Kerb tourist industry for a few dozen 4-passenger launches. That plus cheesing the KSC biomes usually seeds me enough to set up some kind of mining loop to make infinite money and forget about contracts. Yes, I feel bad about myself for always doing this, but the progression mechanics are just so... tedious. I *love* the milestones in career mode and receiving funds and science for those, but the contract and science gathering system needs to either be completely revamped or binned entirely. That reminds me: anyone know if the deployable science stations are working now in 1.8? I had to blow all mine away in 1.7.x due to the alerts bug.

This kind of bums me out, actually. I would love to have a whole new, beginning Kerbolar system to explore as default. Sure, we're getting all new distant star systems, and yes there are always mods, but I don't know how motivating it's going to be shooting for Duna the 47th time as my first KSP 2 playthrough. We've already got the new high-res planets as stock with 1.8. What's going to make landing on the same surfaces feel special this time around?

We don't have any definitive ansewer on it yet, but the impression I get from the interviews is that Star Theory has thrown the entire science gathering and contracts framework out the window in favour of a new system (just called "Progression") with a series of milestone unlocks as the new core mechanic. They've stated rather clearly that this is how offworld bases would progress, with some hints that the design principle will be game-wide. That doesn't mean something like "establish a geostationary comms satellite" or even "return a sample of mun rocks to KSC" are not milestones, but I think they'll be presented to us as goals of the space program in general, which will unlock things for us when we achieve those goals. Getting kind of speculative at this point, but this is my impression based on an array of hints spread over several interviews and statements.

I've followed most of the interviews and reveals pretty closely, and as far as I've heard there is no word on cross-platform one way or the other yet. Really the only thing we've heard about multiplayer is that it will likely require authentication (like Minecraft servers by default) where single player may not. Oh also that it generated a lot of laughter among the group while under development. Personally, my biggest question is whether we'll have dedicated servers. Needing to have a host player logged in to complete builds, etc. would be a big detriment to the experience.

I suspect they (Squad) may be stuck between a rock and a hard place on this. The biggest impact right now is per-piece physics and the interactions at every joint. If they re-code the physics from the ground up to permit much larger ships and bases, it will almost certainly break existing structures and saves. I don't think there's a real "win" situation for them here that offers both major performance gains and save compatibility. I would love to be wrong about KSP 1's future optimization potential, but I think KSP 2 was really the only long-term way forward for the franchise in general to let people build bigger and go further.

In the Virtual Reality gaming segment, performance is paramount, yet about 75% of virtual reality developers to date have chosen to build on Unity. For reference, low-end VR resolution is 2160×1200 @90Hz, and there is zero tolerance for stutters, so pretty much every VR game dev must focus first and foremost of visual performance. The engine of choice for most developers has been Unity, as Unreal-based VR titles have no performance advantage over their Unity counterparts, and Unreal's VR tools were late to the game and generally provide poorer visuals. As others have made clear, KSP's performance problems are related to CPU-bound physics calculations, not rendering. The way those calculations are made has nothing to do with the engine, and everything to do with developer choices. Modern versions of Unity hold their own with anything on the market, and with mod developers supporting the choice, it sounds like Unity was the best possible direction for Star Theory to take.

Star Theory has said that they don't want to "punish players" for just leaving a colony on its own and focusing on some other undertaking, so I suspect any KSP2 in-game life support will be rather minimal and automated like requiring production and reprocessing modules in your ground bases. Adding life support in general to KSP 1 changes the game *completely* and usually introduces a ton of micromanagement, which isn't for everyone. Without cryogenics, some longer missions are essentially impossible. Personally, I don't want strict life support in the base game, but I would at least like to see engine-level support for survival and resource processing loops as we see in quasi-overhaul mods like the USI suite. Being able to implement these features via mod without bringing the game to its knees would really open the door to some fun mechanics.

I don't believe the plan for KSP 2 is overly ambitious, in fact, I think the core framework that Star Theory plans to deliver is just right. It will provide us with built-in, efficient game mechanics to cover probably the top-5 (non-visual) modded-in features used in KSP 1: Landed Base Building and ISRU (MKS/Pathfinder/KPBS/etc) + Orbital Bases (SPE Redux, OKS) Advanced Propulsion Technologies (think Near Future, Far Future, Interstellar, USI Orion) Off-World Rocket Construction and Launchpads! (EPL, Ground Construction) Extra-Kerbolar Systems and Moddable Primary System (Kopernicus, KSS, etc) Multiplayer! Yes, we could do all (well, most) of this in KSP 1, but anyone who's tried to build a self-sustainable interstellar launch facility on Io in career mode knows the performance and stability were *brutal* with all the required mods and a station with enough parts to be self-sustaining (esp. with life support). Not to mention the game-killing Kraken problems with larger bases or ark-level ships. Star Theory is giving us the tools and systems built-in with KSP2 to do all of the above and more as part of core, efficient game play. The real benefit of the upcoming release will be to open the door to modders to expand on all these elements with new worlds, new parts, etc., and not kill performance in the process. I do expect KSP 2 will be a complete game experience when it ships, but I'm more excited about it being a far more robust platform for content creators. EDIT: The one extremely popular mechanic I left out of the list is Life Support. I know a lot of people consider this a must-have game function and we'll just have to wait and see how KSP 2 supports it as both a core feature and moddable add-on.

This was just an off-the-cuff example. Yes, people on this forum know it's a simple save file edit to change Kerbal names. Probably >95% of KSP players don't know how to do that. *Any* digital content extras will be something that can be replicated with mods. Whether extras will be appealing to the broader market is a completely different question.

Two opposing thoughts: Given the cult status of the first game, it would follow that a "Collector's Edition" with physical swag (eg. statuette, mission flag, art book) would be released in the $90-$100-range. I could see it also including a key for a uniquely-named in-game Kerbal and a skin pack for parts. The shift to all-digital distribution for games has hampered the market for physical game swag. 10 years ago, a large Collector's Edition box next to the standard box was a more appealing impulse upgrade/buy than the digital content offered with most Collector's Edition releases today. I don't think we're going to see a Season Pass made available until the first DLC for KSP2 is announced. They will likely hit the store at the same time. Offering a purchase tier that includes all future DLC isn't uncommon, but typically that goes hand-in-hand with some kind of news related to actual DLC in the works.

Sadly, there is more money to be made and more votes to be gained by bombing the hell out of each other here on earth. The future looked bright and starry in the earlier days of the space program.

^ Sound advice. Refurb/off-lease machines are cheap and generally pretty reliable.

No lie - I'll be using a few vacation days when it hits the market.

As per title. I was happily liking away until the other day my little thumbs-up button disappeared. Any ideas what would cause that?

You know, it makes pretty good intuitive sense that we can't push something up to or beyond the speed of light mechanically. It also seems to make sense that if we were able to modify space, we could transplant something from A to B faster than it would take light to travel through the regular space in between. But messing up causality... that's the one that really bakes my noodle. I think if you asked 5 different Cosmologists about it, you'd get 5 different answers, and I don't have nearly a strong enough intuitive understanding of it to even hazard an educated guess.

There's also the whole breaking causality problem... Whether causality is immutable in this universe remains to be seen.