Lisias

ANNOUNCE Release 2.2.1.0 2.2.1.1 2.2.1.2 is available for downloading, with the following changes: Finally implements Sky Undimming when on the dark side of a planet where the Sun is not visible! Fixes a potential glitch involving Kopernicus, discovered while implementing #31. Closes issues: #31 Check the SkyBox Dimming when looking on the Planet from it's dark side. So... Last year I chased my tail on this thing trying to do things the... hum... "smart" way: I computed the angular size of the Sun, then launched 3 ray casts (to the center, to the leftmost and to the rightmost, these two inferred by the angular size - in KSP¹ there're no planetary tilts, so I didn't had to check the topmost neither the bottommost). I wanted to know when the Sun started to be eclipsed, and when it would be completely eclipsed. Obviously, this performed like crap due the raycasts and extra trigonometry. Then I tried to be "smarter", computed the apparent size of the Sun, got the boundaries, cropped the damned thing using current viewing frustrum, and then tried to figure out if any planet also inside the frustrum would be eclipsing it. I realized the idiocy of this thing when I considered using a ray cast to see if there's anything between the camera and the Sun, what would just degenerate the "solution" on something like the first try. Then I tried to monitor the Sun's Coronas (there're two on Stock), trying to figure out if they were being drawn or not. Reading code around the World, I found one dude doing a similar check but using the GameObject's Renderer IsVisible attribute... And then something finally sparked inside my dull skull, and I just checked if the Sun's Renderer exists and, if it exists, if the IsVisible is true or not... (sigh) And finally I shoved all this code in the trash bin, replaced a min with a max and "implemented" the feature without collateral effects... Oh, the joy of fixing issues by removing code... The difference between humility and humiliation is... thin. Only to realize that such code were important to an important use case, and by "luck" I had tested the thing only on the very use case where it would not matter, and screwed everything else. Currently I finally managed to secure the Use Cases, and are currently debugging any mishap on the algorithm that could be happening on borderline situations. But the code is somewhat inefficient, and I will probably try to optimize it a bit before a proper release! This release will be available only as a PRE-RELEASE on github: https://github.com/net-lisias-ksp/DistantObject/releases/tag/RELEASE%2F2.2.1.2 I want to tackle out some more glitches before doing an update fest to the rest of the World. Ping @Errol, @Krazy1

Yep. And unless the user would be willing to play just a little bit some of the newer ones, why in hell he will waste money on new hardware? At very least, the user will buy a second hand one, the minimum needed to maxout the games they want to play. This is not too different from a egg and chicken situation, kinda what we had in early 80s and 90s with sound cards. Sound cards were hellish expensive on my country, besides not being a novelty. There're soundcards already for the Apple II, but... hell, who had the money to buy them? Everybody was trying to do anything they could to avoid them, from COVOX thingies plugged into a printer port to special device drivers to transform the crappy PC-AT's internal speaker into a PCM player. Heck, I played wave files this way my whole Windows 3.11 era. When the PCs got powerful enough to render Amiga's MOD musics at runtime, a lot of DOS games started to use it and with the PCM driver for the PC's internal speaker, heck, I soldered a cap and a resistor and pulled a wire into my stereo from the Speaker's connector. What I had done previously on my Apple ii, by the way. I just bought myself a Gravis Ultrasound way into the 90's, when finally a Killer Application for SoundCards became popular enough: Doom. I don't remember who authored that MIDI music, but, boy... That Soundtrack on a Gravis Ultrasound was simply something out of this world. It took me 15 years from my first computer (that already had SoundCards available) until I finally bought my first. And the reason was Doom. I think that we have a similar Modus Operandi nowadays. Hardware is not so cheap as people used to remember, we have way more expenses nowadays, rendering the tag price of the product not meaningful by itself to evaluate the real life cost of the thing. It's no joke, my electrical bill is two times the value I used to pay before the Pandemonium even by my consumption had dropped by half - so electrical bills are, well, four times the price I was paying a few years ago. And so it goes. I'm not alone on this boat. But they are preferring playing games that would run fine on older hardware, and since there are the other 30% still around, targeting such hardware will increase your target audience significantly, allowing you to expend more money on eye candies for that 70%, that so will show it off for that 30%, and since they already bough the game, perhaps would consider upgrading their hardware and so, in a few years, a slightly beefier hardware will be the new normal. Rinse, repeat. Keep your decisions around the Bell Curve, and your chances of improving your incoming will be probably better than otherwise. Sell games for your users of today, and let your future you worry about the users of tomorrow. It's about money. It's always about money. Most users see hardware as a way to accomplish something, not as a goal. Unless a new killer application pushes them into buying new hardware, they will stick with whatever they have until it breaks - and probably will try a second hand slightly better hardware before considering something really new. Draw a curve on games sales versus hardware sales - they are going opposite directions. Why? How? Well, one possible explanation follows: everybody and the kitchen's sink upgraded their hardware in 2020 due Pandemonium, since a lot of people had to work from home. So they ditched whatever they had and bought something reasonably good at that time. At somewhat premium prices, by the way, as the supply chain was collapsing at the same time the demand was rising. From that point, most people are facing higher costs of living, really higher costs of living (like me), and very, really very few of them (me included) are inclined to spend money on fixing what's not broken - or updating hardware that are still cutting it perfectly, even with some compromises. Last year my older MacCrap gone belly up - the fan died when I was sleeping while the machine was munching some numbers, the thing overheated and fried. Total loss. My options at that time: Buy a brand new Mac Mini. R$ 7900,00 (local currency) Buy a brand new generic but reasonably contemporary i7 16GB Mini PC. About R$ 2700,00 (no mass storage included) And expend days rebuilding all my workflow from scratch, as 80% of all I do is relying on MacOS. Buy a refurbished Mac Mini 2014 i5 16GB. R$ 3000,00 (hard disk included) - the shop was going out of business. And essentially duplicate the older HD into the new, and I would be working next day. Buy a refurbished MacMini 5.2 motherboard from China for R$ 700,00. Since I'm expending some really serious money fixing my home (and my son), what did you think I did? Obviously, I then bought the refurbished MacMini - only marginally pricier than the other MiniPC (pero no mucho, brand new 1TB hard disks costs R$ 250,00 around here, R$ 430 if NVME). People around the World are facing choices pretty similar to mine. This is the new norm.

Ah, now I see. Kinda a "gambiarra", but heck, why not? I got kinda conscience-stricken on the subject and I'm revisiting the code I wrote sometime ago and left behind. I had found some idiocies while handling Kopernicus, anyway, and frankly I don't know why nobody had complained before (or someone did and I forgot about?). So I have material to at least one more bug fix release. Anyway, I'll commit that trashy, really unforgivable way to handle the use case I ended up writing and got ashamed of publishing it before being dragged out of the task. Let's see if it would be good enough for your use case, I'm trying to make that thing not too horrible to be published as a EXPERIMENTAL release. I will add too the brute-force option (key binding).

The search, for obvious reasons, doesn't works. But the links for downloading the documentation in XML and HTML format are there.

Nothing that I would be willing to share. The last hack I tried backfired, run out of time for modding since then. If you have any hint of idea that you tried and worked, I'm listening!

As a matter of fact, my point of view is that it's exactly the other way around. The Industry is crumbling with people losing jobs everywhere exactly because they didn't it when they had the workforce to do that. I want to quote a previous post of mine: Dude, from all the time people have to play games, only 15% of them was spent in new games. 85% of the user's time was spent on games with an average age of 7 years. It's not a surprise that 4GB GPU cards are still used in such numbers nowadays, why buy new hardware if what you have already allows you to max out the games you play? Game Developers are rubbing users the wrong way, it's simple like that.

If the gains overweight the costs, this is exactly the way to go. It used to work in the past - there was a time in which most people didn't had a GPU card, so most games had to provide a software rendering pipeline and an OpenGL/Glide/whatever. It may sounds silly compared to nowadays technology, but at that time they had to do exactly what you described above.

That's the whole point: in order to some have the most beautiful graphics the money can buy, you also need to sell the game to people that don't care about them in order to make the whole enterprise affordable for everybody. And to be able to convince people to fund a game with features they will not be able to use, you need to really excel on the features they will. No one is telling people to do not add volumetric clouds into the game. We are complaining about not being able to run the game without it, and (adding offense to the injury) dragging the feet on essential features that renders the clouds irrelevant if not made right.

Well... This game was originally made for the BBC Micro B: But Acorn was also selling a way more limited machine, called Electron, and they ported Elite to it too: Granted, the main difference is that the Model B one has more colors on the wireframes. But, hey, both fo them were already an huge advance: non visible wires were being hidden, most games of that era couldn't do it even on more colourful machines: But, yet, they also released a year later the Elite Enhanced, for BBC Models B with a thingy called The Tube, a coprocessor (in reality, a whole new independent processor with its own memory, transforming the machine into a de facto and the jure dual CPU solution!): Now, a few years later Acorn launched a new 32 bits computer called Archimedes (one of the first ARM computers in history). And, yes, they ported Elite to it: Quickly followed by Atari ST and Amiga 500 versions (that had, well, some more powerful graphics but weaker processors, so the rendering window is smaller, did you noticed?): Look! Shading! Elite had sold approximately 1 Million Copies on the most different platforms, including ZX Spectrum: In the 80s, when entire industries that managed to sell 500.000 computers were considered a moderated success. And how they managed to sell 1 Million copies on a time in which selling 100k to 150k were already considered a great result? Well... Trimming the game to fit in whatever computer the user had at home, instead of expecting the user would buy a new computer each time they launched a new version of the game. Anyone willing to see how they accomplished this, they released the sources for most of these ports here: http://www.elitehomepage.org/archive/index.htm For the sake of comparision, Donkey Kong - a stupendous success in the early 80s, sold about 15M copies in multiple platforms over the decade (from gamewatches to famicom). The Atari 8bit version of Donkey Kong sold 25.000 copies.

What means that hardware sales is on a retraction. The Nominal GDP of the World increased from 88.1T (2019) to 106T (2023). And we don't have 2024 yet. If after an increase of more than 17.9T (we don't have 2024 numbers yet), the hardware sales are still the same, then we have less people buying hardware. Way less people, because the population had grown too.

What means that supporting 4GB would increase the market to 65.86% + 11.83% + 7.31% = 85% of the potential user base. Interesting... the Bell Curve is working... Now... Perhaps you may be talking specifically about the USA market, and not the World's? If yes and you are talking USA only, you may have a point. But, yet, please note that USA currently it's less then 20% of the total Steam Traffic. 4% less than China. https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/ (As from February 2025). Fun fact: Antarctica had a 58.2 GB traffic on this chart! Dude, there's gamers everywhere - I'm looking forward for the Moon's data in the future! I invite you to sum up Eurasia and South America, the continents that are going to get some economical backslash in the near future (dude, Germany is done...). Even if you are right on USA, USA have nowadays less then 20% of the gaming traffic in the World. It's absolutely unwise to bet only on this market. Of course I'm assuming that traffic == sells, what's almost surely wrong. But, still, it's a good enough heuristics.

Because the 1060, the most popular GPU a few months after KSP2 launch, was a curiosity, and not the core of the argument. Please read the post again: the argument is that lowering the bottom line to 4GB GPUs would potentially increase the sells from 80K to 95K - of course, in the statistical World. So, and again by using 8GB as the bottom line, a game would potentially reach about 50% of the total user base. Lowering to 4GB, today, would potentially reach about 18% more people, or almost 70% of the total user base. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam As from January 2025, we have: Perhaps you would be working on a market in which one could ditch 18% of the potential market without consequences. Good for you. IMHO, the Game Industry is not there anymore. And exactly how do you plan to sell games to them? I hope you did noticed that the grey line, Gaming, is plummeting...

Hi! We have yet another one of that questions that are not questions! It came to my attention that the KSP API in https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/ksp/api/ isn't online yet! If by some reason this would be a easy fix, I would like to request the new owners to put it back online as soon as possible. Otherwise, please advise and I will try to publish it temporarily on my site.

Uhhh... o.O

Agreed. But it's good enough for a discussion on a Forum. And even by using dumb approximations, it gives us pretty interesting numbers, like that matemagical of mine when I ended up calculating that could be possible for KSP2 had reached about 95K sells instead of the 80Ks if they had allowed the game to run fine on a GPU with 4GB of VRAM. Being the precise reason the game must support both of them seamlessly instead of using the money to add every single possible eyecandy possible to please only the top tier and rellying only on modders to support the others. It's years that people (like me) are warning, and this just don't sink on some heads - the World is developing on a very, very harsh economical crisis. Anyone relying on top hardware are going to be out of business, including hardware sellers. The Game Industry already fired an awful amount of people, so the workforce is terribly handicapped and unable to deliver enough to satisfy such high demands. Let's talk about something else: is anyone following the Windows 11 adoption rate? Had anyone noted that, by the first time in History, the adoption rate is shrinking, with users rolling back to Windows 10 in greater numbers than updating to 11? Had anyone noted that this happened exactly as Microsoft tightens the grip over demanding new hardware? Had anyone tried to plot that curve over the hardware distribution normal from Steam? Interesting conclusions are waiting you. I have some monstrosities available to me, one of them futurelly having 24 cores and 192GB of RAM. But, guess what, I can't afford having it running the whole weekend for playing, the electrical bill would kill me. So my best hardware are used only on tasks where I make money. Gaming is done with whatever I have left around here, and as long it doesn't consumes too much electricity - that right now is [a machine] pretty bigger than a Steam Deck but... it's also disassembled because I prefer to play on Steam Deck nowadays, I can do it on my coach or bed, and can just pause the damned thing instead of having to save/load the whole game every time I find some minutes to play. And so I'm postponing buying the component that is broken on that thing, because I always have better things to do with the money, like my son's health care. Interesting enough, I'm playing more nowadays with my Steam Deck that I used to do with my nice powerful (and currently disassembled) gaming rig. Guess where are that missing component on my priority list? Definitively not on even on the first page. The absolutely majority of people will be more or less like us: not affording the hardware, or even affording it but for profitable tasks only because electric bills, who would guess?, are also on the rise together food and renting costs. And when both is not a problem, the poor stand-up guy just don't have time to play. Money is going to be a pretty scarce commodity in the next years, the World is going into a recession. Point.

Anyway aiming for the average is automatically alienating half of the potential user base. Anyone minimally intelligent should be targeting their audience using the Bell Curve. You should aim, at very least, the central 80% of the curve, from the bottom 10% to the maximum 10%. Anything below, or anything above, is wasting resources because such resource should be had allocated on something that would maximize the chances of selling a copy to that 80%. Had anyone, at least once, wondered why the average age of the games played by 47% of Steam users is 7 years old? For 37% of them, it's even older. https://www.cbr.com/players-spend-15-percent-steam-time-games-from-2024/

No. It runs on KSP, not on CKAN. But if you want to know if it's added to CKAN, yes: https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/NetKAN/blob/master/NetKAN/AtmosphereAutopilot.netkan

No joke, I still play this thing on my retro-computers now and then. It's incredible how the guy managed to add volumetric clouds on an Amiga 500 machine without screwing the frame rate... If we at least could do the same nowadays... Jokes aside, I really found these clouds pretty beautiful. It only happens that I can't run it on my puny hardware - but I don't mind the game having them because I don't mind people having computers better than mine. As long as I can deactivate the thing in order to make it to run on the hardware I have now, I'm fine. That said, Elite Frontier is a hell of a good game, this thing is legendary and Frontier Development managed to fund Elite Dangerous exactly due the game being legendary, with dated graphics and all. You see, the key selling point is: good game, not nice volumetric clouds. If you don't have a good game yet, wasting resources on adding volumetric clouds is just... waste. They had way more important things to do (as freaking colliders for the whole KSC, damnit, they left the main landmark of the whole game lagging behind to add volumetric clouds?).

Something apparently removed from the elevons the ModuleControlSurfaces, the thingy that makes control surfaces to behave like control surfaces. Or perhaps something is "killing" the mentioned code? Send me your KSP.log and ModuleManager.ConfigCache and I should be able to pinpoint exactly what's happening.

They told me the same about Terminator and Planet of the Apes. And I really starting to worry about Omega Man and Zero Population Growth - but I think we still have some decades before Soylent Green.

Steam is powerful exactly because they succeeded in being a middleman. Don't ever forget that, they ARE a middleman and this is the source of their power. That said, this doesn't mean necessarily they are a evil middleman. Please note that on the statement that yourself quoted I said "added value", being a extended store guarantee one of them. That it's very important to me because, as I had said, my GoG's Inventory is four times the size of my Steam's one. But, still, I still have some games on Steam - and not always because GoG doesn't have them (most of the time don't, but...), but because for some games, Workshop and Steam Deck seamless integration talk louder than an extended guarantee - as a matter of fact, it's not usual I ended up buying the game again on Steam (on a discount, of course) due the Workshop and easily Steam Deck integration. Again, added value.

Of course, they are a Store, right? This is exactly the reason we buy things from stores! Store Guarantee someone? Stores with better guarantees usually sell better, my GoG's Inventory is FOUR TIMES the size of my Steam one for a reason. Why bother buying from a Store if not by added value? Otherwise it's better to buy directly from the developer and save 30% of the fee...

Multiple channels pushing the same narrative concurrently rarely, really really rarely, aims to promote exactly what described in the narrative. The wave of layoffs will flood the market with seasoned (or, at very least, minimally skilled) professionals on gaming. These guys are not going to sit in their armchairs eating junkfood and drinking beer until the money ends - they will pursue ways of making money at any costs the way they can. Whatever can be done to make EA games less viable to any indie developer will be less competition for these AAA stand-up guys - as you said yourself, these very stand-up guys are failing upwards, what means that this is way the cookie will crumble from now on. I suggest a quick research on the commercial practices engaged by Microsoft on the 90s and early 2000. I don't expect less from this point. Abandonment means that no one is looking for the asset, what means that no one is making money from the asset. If no one is making money from the asset, it's not a problem because there will be no one filing complains about copyrights - it's a grey area of the Law, but it works exactly this way. If the author/owner is making money from the asset, and if you risk getting sued by redistributing the game without authorization, then the asset is not abandoned and I highly recommend people to avoid using this term. This narrative will only play havoc on the really abandoned games (as we have them on homeoftheunderdogs), whats - how interesting - it's also something that would help the new status quo by associating really abandoned games to games "falsely" tagged abandoned and that people can get sued by redistributing without authorization. ---- POST EDIT ---- It's about money. IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT MONEY. The incompetent sociopaths also have to eat. It's up to us to decide if we are going to feed them or not. Apparently, most people is willing to do such.

Uh... me? Late?? Just a little bit... In time, pinging... @Royale37

Nope. As a matter of fact, only 2 casualties (pilot and co-pilot/owner). AFAIK 6 people got hurt (one more or less seriously, but not fatal - everybody walked into the ambulance) on the ground, but - being absolutely frank about, this is a God Damned miracle, the plane tried a crash landing near one of the most crowded metro stations in the country! That pilot demonstrated an almost paranormal pilotship, he could had saved thousands of lives in this final moments: the plane didn't crashed, it landed on the very single spot in his reach where the least possible amount of damage would happen.