MarcAbaddon

I've been fairly critical, but the music is on point as is most of the sound (excepting decoupling, that needs a proper sound).

I've been part of a few EA's and closed beta. They have bugs, sometimes serious bugs. But they rarely have the kind of interface and performance issues the KSP 2 early access has. For it to be running smoothly it would be a general boost to about 4 times the current performance. I haven't seen that in any of my previous games, at least not across the board - only in very specific scenes/situations. The performance is bad enough that it impedes the ability of testers to try out the game. Going a bit of optimization right now wouldn't be at all premature optimization.

A lot of the disappointed fan feedback is not productive. But statements like this (while obviously true) are not productive either. You don't need to have worked on a game before to have seen other Early Accesses and make comparisons about the quality. There's nothing that will hurt KSP 2 more in the long run than being flippant about justified criticism.

I am on the disappointed but somewhat hopeful side. In order, the reasons for my disappointment are: Devs promised they slew the Kraken. But the physics bugs (wheels, kraken, falling through the ground) are all back, probably even a bit worse than in KSP 1. I get it's hard, but they explicitly promised otherwise. Many parts of the UI feel like the Devs are not playing their own game. A lot of people having written about how bad the maneuvre editor is, and I have to agree. The performance issues are not acceptable. Sure, it's EA and if they were in some specific places it would be ok. But it can't be that just being clear a planet slows everything down so much. Promised new features such as burning on warp doesn't really work well. The fact that you can't adjust your heading means it isn't usable unless you have a long orbital period. In summary - it's EA and I accept there are loads of unimplemented features and bugs. But there's really no significant value proposition over KSP 1 in the core parts of the games that are already released, namely flying and building crafts. There are lot of bugs in those parts and the UI for performing critical tasks has become worse. Even in an unpolished state it needs something to show me the extra value over KSP 1. As for giving useful feedback, the prioritization needs to be: Improve performance around planets. Don't optimize the hell out of it at this stage, but enough to make it more playable. Even give us a low fidelity planet shader if it helps. Give us a usable maneuvre editor. Fix critical bugs with vessels how vessels work, e.g. struts.

I think a lot of things are working and there are some improvement. At the same time there are things that make me really upset: Who thought the terrible maneuver node planner was a good idea? 'We have slayed the Kraken' - this was not an ok statement to make. All the KSP physics issues are still there: bad wheels, planes veering on the runway, noodly space ships, falling through the ground, rapid unplanned disassembly... you name it. There is really very little evidence that the underlying physics model has improved at all.

Playing in 3440x1440 on 5800X, 32 GB Ram, 3080 GPU. FPS can go down to is 20-30 while going to orbit, depending on the direction the camera is pointing. In orbit it is fairly smooth.

Is that simulator running on CPU only or does it use GPU? If it is CPU only you can't really compare it to KSP. This being said performance definitely needs to go up, and the main limitation seems to be the GPU atm, with loads of lighting overhead.

I think the workspace system is an improvement we need for certain large builds. So it is good that they exist. But maybe the default should be the KSP 1 version of one vessel at a time (save vessel only, no workspace), with being able to turn on workspace as an advanced mode instead. When you get started with the game, workspaces are mainly making the situation more complex than needed. You won't care about them at the start, but they may confuse you.

I feel the concentric blue circles are fine in principle, but they are clashing with the rest of the orbital indicators which are all very minimalistic. I'd add that you really need to see your post-maneuver orbital characteristics while adjusting the node. You can see it, but only when deselecting the node.

As good as could be expected after the initial videos, maybe yes. But all in all I think there is justified room for disappointment. Sure, bugs can be expected and we knew a lot of features would not be in. You can definitely expect some crazy bugs in EA, and I don't think either Scott Manley falling through the ground at the Mohole or Matt Lowne taking the KSC with him into orbits are a big deal, those are the kind of bugs you can get when actively working on a game. But other things like the terrible maneuver node system, the SAS system going totally haywire or the lack of vessel stats like TWR... those feel like the Devs not thinking about the basics and is quite disappointed IMO.

Just did my first Mun landing and managed to touch down successfully. But I had a bug with my fuel, in exact order (relevant) this happened: I noticed the bottom right indicator showing my dv at 0 even though I had about half my fuel left (the fuel bars were showing correctly) and the engines worked correctly as landing I saved the game on the ground To test what's up with the dv I re-engaged the engines (worked) and spent accellerated to about 500 m/s (my dv remained at zero, the fuel bars were slowly going down as expected) I reloaded the game Now both my dv and the fuel gauges were at zero and I was unable to use the engines again, stranding me on the moon Please fix.

Wouldn't be surprised, there seems to be something whacky going on there. Other people actually reported it underestimating instead. So it's a bit strange what exactly is going on. To be fair, you don't need to overburn by very much to go from Minmus intercept to leaving the SOI.

Technically there are patched conics, it is just that they seem to stuck in what used to be mode 3 in KSP 1. See

Just built my first plane and it flies ok - without SAS. Once you have SAS enabled the control surfaces start rapidly flapping up and down like the plane is a Kolibri - and this in turns leads to a wildly fluctuating lift-drag ratio. Not good for handling the plane. I also had a case in orbit which I could not easily reproduce, where I had a medium sized vessel in orbit with a Poodle engine and the small 1 kerbal pod, without RCS or an reaction wheel. Once I throttled up my engine (which has decent gimbal) even though my craft was already oriented pro-grade it started spinning very rapidly out of control with the gimbaling engine wildly changing angles. So in summary - I think the current SAS implementation has serious issues both for planes and spacecrafts. For spacecrafts I did a total of 3 flights so far and it only happened on one, so it's definitely not as bad there as for planes. As a more humoring aside, when it tried landing my plane it literally hopped up like bunny when touching the ground.

Just played a little bit, there are quite a few things I like. But the maneuver nodes need some serious love, they are worse than in KSP 1 and much worse than if you used a maneuver node mod. Please consider the following: I need to be able to see my post-maneuver node orbital characteristics at a glance without having to deselect the maneuver node. It's especially unreadable when trying to intercept another celestial body like the Mun. Please give my trajectory relative to the other body not Kerbin. Maybe there is some way to switch between various patched conics like in KSP 1, but if so it is hard to find and relative to the new SOI should be the default. Those blue glowing circles showing where you cross into the sphere of influence are a nice graphic effect, but insufficient to plan trajectory. It would be nice to see the burn time before you start your burn. Wish-list: Please have post-maneuver apoapsis and periapsis clearly visible at all times. Including numbers. Show the ones for the target if you plan an intercept and the one for the current body if your node is not leading to a change in SOI. Add a setting to also show other parameters like inclination or eccentricity, but just apoapsis and periapsis are fine for the start. Please allow me to enter exact numbers for the nodes like you could with a maneuver node mod in KSP 1. Allow me to precisely put my node on the apoapsis, periapsis, ascending node, etc. I don't want to eyeball to have to eyeball that. For orbital lines of bodies please show me the direction as in KSP using the color strength. We currently have it for your vessel, but not e.g. the Mun.

I am going to disagree; I believe the weirdly strong reaction wheels were good for KSP 1. Now, I a readily admit that real-life reactions wheels have a lot of important limitation, but I would agree that the maximum force they can exert isn't one (saturation would be). Imagine flying a space craft in KSP without RCS and very weak reaction wheels. Assuming you have a gimbaling engine (which is a fairly safe bet) it won't really matter that much for ascent and descent. So where it might matter is when you are trying to do an orbital maneuver. Once in orbit your activities are very very rarely time critical, so weaker reaction wheels still allow you to do everything strong reaction wheels do. It just takes up more of your time, You might have to align to the maneuver node 5 minutes in advance instead of 30 seconds. Ergo, you can still do everything with reaction wheels. It's just takes more time and is more boring.

I am most excited about the chance to have more meaningful progression mechanics (instead of old career mode) in KPS 2 with colonies and a new science system.

With the lower density of Hydrogen we can probably also expect nuclear powered vessels to be fairly large. For reaction wheels we'll just need to see how well the extra ones do. For simple vessels and missions you can also just rely on engine gimbaling. If you don't go full thrust you can usually turn your vessel to the around pointing without wasting too much delta-v in unintended directions.

Not having a campaign at the start of early access is fair to the customer and I won't complain about fairness. But I do think it's a bit of a strategic error to not have a very simple progression mechanic at release. One of the things they want to focus on accessibility - you can see this focus by them actually having quite a few of the tutorials in already. But it's fairly overwhelming to see all those parts from the start. You get overwhelmed by the number of choices. I think what should have been optimal for EA is something very simple milestone based: - First flight -> unlock couplers and a new engine/larger fuel tank - Leave atmosphere -> unlock simple heat shield and vacuum stage engine - Orbit - Unlock all small parts plus some medium parts - Land on Mun - unlock all chemical rocket parts - Get to Duna - Unlock advanced engines (nuclear and ion) They need the technology to detect the conditions being met anyway for the tutorials, so it probably would have been easy. Just as an additional help to the player to show them what engines they need for what. And not have them choose between 20 engines.

Yeah, Take Two has it's own problems, but people see it as a mega-studio so they are less likely to take it personal. The same way WoW didn't care about any issues with Activision, it was a scandal directly within their studio (Blizzard) which caused issues. As long as there's nothing on Intercept Games specifically they should be fine.

The engines may be rebalanced to some degree, I don't think we have seen all the stats yet? The NERV stats definitely changed, Rapier seems to be very similar in terms of ISP but the ground speed seemed very high in air breathing mode, so maybe there is a small thrust increase or at least a more convenient thrust-speed profile?

Don't believe it will happen, or if there are going to be negative reviews they'll most likely be by people honestly disappointed by the game. Review bombs usually happen for one of the folliwng reasons: If the game somehow gets dragged into the culture war (and KSP is one of the most genuinely non-political games) If there's some kind of obvious cash-grab with loot boxes or NFTs When there's a huge scandal involving the mother company (think Blizzard lately)

I'd rather have the game late than having them released a buggy game. But blanket statements like 'delays are good' are seriously wrong. A 4 year delay (until open access instead of a full release at that!) is not a sign of good planning and speaks toward severe management issues and a completely lack of understanding the scope of work. It's not the same as delaying by about 6 months to polish the game more. Of course, by now we know about those issues and can hope they got resolved, but that doesn't make the initial delay a good thing. And while it's easy to sympathize with the hard-working programmers who want to polish their game over the finance guys, the finance guys have a point too. Every year of added development time costs a lot of money. Which leads to every delay increasing the pressure on the Dev Team to release things, which isn't a good thing either. If I look at some famously hugely delayed (counting multiple years here) a lot of them didn't turn out well in the end. There's a Ultima 9 as a famous example from the RPG genre. A delayed game can be good, but all in all a game getting delayed by multiple years isn't a good sign. I'd say it's mildly negative, in that it may still be good but has a slightly increase chance of being underwhelming. There's this wild phenomena on the internet where games claim that delays are a proof of quality. But it's not justifiable with actual data. The delays are a sign of trouble and whether they are able to turn things around is a open bet. EDIT: Also yes, I agree stating that KSP 2 is already better than KSP 1 is a wild claim. You haven't even played it yet. It's lacking a lot of KSP 1 features at the moment. Without trying it out it is really hard to say whether the new features make up for that. Just as an example, wheel physics seem to be as bad as ever. So we don't even have solid evidence for the broken parts of KSP 1 being fixed.

The game won't be using the loading screen to prepare the CPU Cache, it'll be all about loading things from your drive, processing them and putting the processed data into RAM and GPU memory. Of course, the CPU cache will get used while processing said data, but the idea that'd you specifically load things already into the CPU cache for gameplay while just loading the game is a bit far fetched. If they mostly stick with Unity C# for their code I doubt they are doing low-level cache optimization anyway. But maybe the have some external libraries where they do, e.g. for the orbital mechanics.

Yeah, I feel the same. He seems like a nice guy, but it's not as if he has delivered yet or been involved in KSP 1 as far as I know. So keeping an open mind, but I wouldn't say he has particularly earned our trust (or distrust) yet. If anyone, I'd say Chris Adderley/Nertea is maybe the Dev who has already earned trust with the excellent work on KSP 1 mods.