MarcAbaddon

I have also tried the new version after I think last playing 0.1.2 and have to agree that it has improved a bit. My standard test of where KSP 2 is now at is to do a fairly simple Mun Landing mission with an overengineered rocket (close to 8k dv) to make it simple on myself. In the previous version I ran into game-breaking bugs each time, this time I was able to complete the mission without having to reload and with a fairly stable framerate. That's a good thing, and I hope the science update will start with a higher quality than 0.1.0 did. There were still some issues I ran into, I assume all of them will be well-known to people having played the game, but if not let me know and I can do a bug report. On first launch I didn't get any sound effects (for the rockets), just background music. Revert and relaunch fixed this. When staging I often had to press space twice to make it happen - I am sort of assuming this is due to me having deleted some empty stages in the VAB, but them still being active and staged through in flight? When I landed back on Kerbin, the ground was flickering strangely around my rocket.

I did in the first Early Access version. There were some things, but nothing that was even close to fully implemented. Some rudimentary code for delivery routes, some science stuff, some multiplayer stuff that seemed like they did just include basic unity lobby code, some minor references to colony founding as a part module. Admittedly there is some code related for modding in the future. But feature complete? Not by a far stretch. If anything the posts by Nertea show how much they are in the design phase on basic features.

I wouldn't want a hard limit on length that is simply artificially enforced by the game but not reflected by in-game physics. That'll place too many constraints on creativity. Doesn't mean there shouldn't be structural limitations on it in practice, just that should be ways around it with proper construction.

I agree with this take, but I also feel that if you decide to go with 1 from the start you shouldn't make claims about how you are going to or at least trying to slay the kraken. Another problem I have here is that I feel that it's something that should been tackled earlier in the Dev process. It's one of those central things you have to plan around early when you make another KSP using Unity physics. It'd be one thing if they tried a solution early on and it turned out a dead end, but it seems they are talking conceptually. Which again, seems a bit late.

I agree that there should be a lot of room for optimization here - in fact, I am surprised the impact is currently as high as it is since there is no heating at the moment & if the engines are off there is no resource usage either. It seems like you'd have to work at it to make the slow-down as large as what we currently observe, which is why people assumed it was due to running physics. Something must be very inefficient in the current implementation. This is another blow against the 'colonies and interstellar were almost completely implemented before forced EA' theory that sometimes floats about, as this behavior would make those almost untestable. On this bug about time warp orientation: I was assuming this is intended behavior or at least known behavior, so it is strange for me to see that it under investigating. But maybe it means investigating to see if it can be improved? It should definitely not be investigation about whether it exists! If it is a bug I would also like to note that thrust under time warp has other issues: for example it behaves incorrectly when thrust is not in line with center of mass by not sending your craft spinning. See my old post here: I think there is a fundamental issue to solve here, in that thrust under time warp won't work at all with the current system when you need to rotate the craft, as then you would need the entire physics for the craft to run.

Just my 5 cent, but showing that tool with a bit of explaining text and a few pictures would likely be much more informative than this talk was, which just repeated points that were made in the past. And it would be a more convincing demonstration that there is progress and not just talk - the issue with these talks is that people (rightfully or not, different discussion) feel that past communication hasn't bee reliable.

Personally I think science update will show if there's a chance to turn it about. The patches since release so far haven't been sufficient to make me more optimistic, if anything it was the other way around. The science update will show whether this was because the larger part of the team was busy getting science done well or whether the patches show that there are structural issues that prevent them from making progress at a decent speed.

I doubt that's true and I had a look at the code myself back then. There are some things about colonies (mainly delivery routes) in, but I wouldn't call it mostly complete. The multiplayer stuff was mostly standard lobby stuff, nothing super specific. From the latest sets of Nertea it seems there is quite a lot of work left to do on colonies. The state of the non-implemented features is one of the largest unknowns at the moment for me, and it's one of the reasons why some people don't have a lot of trust left, since there were interviews where the devs stated the new features were done and now it was just about putting them all together... On a different note Take Two remains the company who has the final say. Even if you trust the original team, as long as you think Take Two is completely untrustworthy there's no reason to be very optimistic.

Strong disagree with this - the reduced scale was one of the best and most important design choices of KSP 1. As Periple mentions, few players want to spend 10 minutes every single time just to fly a rocket into orbit. Or to take a few hours to get to certain parts of the planets even when flying at Mach 3. Sure, I have played with the real solar system mod too, and it is a nice additional way to play the game. But the reduced scale is a much better fit for the main game. Also - I don't really get the feelings things are super small. Maybe because Kerbals small too and I tend to compare to them?

I agree with the first part mainly because IG/PD has to deliver everything in the most positive way positive for them, since the team has a vested interest in success and the game is (in the public's eyes at least) in a bad shape. For that reason, I am not interest personally in communication like "velocity is good" or "morale remains high" or "the publisher is really committed", but details about how features will work are always welcome. I think some skepticism about good news is warranted at the point, since the team overpromised in the past. Jumping to calling them liars would definitely be too much, at least without evidence arguments. But in the end I think at this point people aren't waiting so much for news, but for actual progress and features. Releasing a buggy KSP 2 without substantial new features/gameplay goals than KSP 1 was a huge mistake. KSP 1 may have been buggy at the start, but it could easily be forgiven since it offered something new. Had we gotten the same bugs but with colonies then the reception would have been more positive. The issue is of course is that there is room for a lot skepticism about how far along those features actually are, with people either assuming they haven't started or that they are almost finished implementing them in a separate branch. As always it'll be somewhere in between but the last post by Nertea (e.g. supply routes) seemed to indicate to me that there's a lot of design work yet to do, let alone implementation.

That's criticism doesn't feel convincing to me. To put it in generic terms, someone made the argument A and you reply with oh, but it could also been a1, a2 or a3... so why do you jump to A? But your a1, a2 and a3 are special cases of A. For example, 'lack of experienced talent' is just an example of something 'seriously wrong with how they are doing things', unless maybe you think talent retainment and effective hiring is somehow not part of the wider team's job.

Don't believe you can say that for sure. Given that the shape the game is in and the fact that's they are working for the publishers, they just have a strong incentive for being polite and positive at the moment. Is there still genuine niceness and positive feelings behind it? I don't think we are in a place to tell.

As mentioned previously: there is a lot to criticize about Unity's decision. And it was a terrible stupid decision to go after installs instead of purchases. But on purchases the 0.2$ charge would be entirely reasonable, especially if it goes into engine development. But the insider trading thing regarding the CEO is silly. We are talking about 80k $ in shares from someone in a position where sales have to be pre-registered. If anything look at the investors and not the CEO for this move. The CEO (even though he behaved terribly in the past) has been in charge for a long time.

Not much - but the Unity charge is really the least problem here. It's not even on the same order of magnitude as the other items.

I do have concerns about the change, especially the practicality, but it still seems to be cheaper than using UE, so I am not sure why people want to move to that? Until now Unity had no pricing that scaled in any way with game success unlike Unreal which takes a flat 5%. For the maximum charge of 0.2$ being equal to 5% you would need to sell a lot of copies at 4$ each. Only real issue really is using installs instead of sales. Tracking installs seems like a way to get around certain platforms potentially underreporting sales? But there seems to be a really tight rope to walk between collecting excessive information and run afoul of GDPR or having insufficient data to be able to really confirm that the installs are valid new installations.

I don't believe that the way KSP is designed that the size reduction makes the gamer easier. Sure, if you keep everything else the same, then using true scale sizes would increase dV requirement and make the game harder. But the engines and fuel tanks are all nerfed compared to real world parts, which offsets the effects of the size tweak. Lower stages real world engines have much higher thrust, upper stages have more ISP, fuel tanks have less dry weight, etc. With real world performances a single-stage-to-orbit rocket with a large payload would be very trivial in KSP.

I think my expectation on Early Access were in line with how they explained it: I was well aware of the roadmap & science and colonies not being in. But the core fundamental experience (how they term) it was a in much worse shape than expected and not in line with the "improved experience" they promised. I had SAS going totally crazy, vessels randomly disintegrating, super wobbly rockets, decaying orbits and vanishing orbit lines. The rare major new feature like burning on rails was implemented in what I feel is a very superficial and lazy manner. It's rare that I can even complete one mission near Kerbin without running into major issues and having to reload. Of course, you should expect tweaks to the core experience in EA. But it shouldn't have been as deeply broken as what we got. Also, I expected heating to be in a few weeks after EA launch, which I feel was reasonable as well based on the communications ('brief window'). In summary, I think it is very fair to be unsatisfied with what the team delivered at launch based on how they spoke about it. Ant nothing yet has happened to convince me that they will be able to turn the ship around. Updates come in slow and are decidedly of the two steps forward, one step back kind, where each patch also introduces novel bugs.

I think we should pay more attention to the 'recurrent spending' line and them mentioning it together with games (including mobile) that rely a lot of in-game purchases. That should be worrying for us, and deserves clarification as it contradicts what we were told before about the business model of the game.

I think if you really want to develop that part of the game you'd need resources and money. With resources only there are basically two options: Resource availability is binary, you either have it or not Resources are quantified and you can have a different amont If KSP 2 goes with the first option, then it will be really a simple progression mechanic. Go to Place X to get resource Y which will unlock parts Z. That's relatively simple but not super deep. However, if you go with quantities there needs to be limitations that makes sure that you do not get an effectively infinite amount the moment you find it. If you look at games with have more complex economies like Anno (one of the early one suffices, no need to look at the complexity of 1800) those constraints usually one of the following: extraction speed or costs in term of other resources and/or money or exhaustible deposits.

Of course, it's mostly pointless and will not achieve anything. Just the same as complaining about them - that's exactly equally pointless. So is probably me pointing it out. Maybe they want to vent or want to warn people off because they regret their purchase and emotional investment and do not want others to do the same. But if your goal is to "achieve" something you should probably not hang around internet discussion forums.

Don't really get that point. I think from what we have seen so far, whatever improvements there are compared to KSP 1 they are fairly just incremental and rather small. All the big additions are later in the roadmap. Right now we just don't know how good their from-scratch gameplay systems will be, especially as they did not reveal much about them yet. At the moment my guess is that science will unfortunately be fairly similar to KSP 1.

I think there will definitely be some optimization, but at the same kind we will have more code always running in the background and larger vessels in the future, which colonies and interstellar being a thing. So with more demand on PC resources at the same time it isn't clear that there will be a large net gain in the future. Generally, in my experience you can get some more performance out of games, but gains are rarely huge after a game has been released (even in EA). It's not just that there is a code already in place people can't easily replace, it is also that it is the same programmers working on it. I know the KSP 2 team seems to have a new person responsible for the graphics engine, so maybe it will be different here.

They didn't. Generally, they don't go into any kind of detail on gameplay systems. They might show some parts, but don't talk about the systems behind them. Even on colonies we only have the very old information that there are some kind of population boom events and that milk runs will be automated, but no details on anything.

I think the 2 day delay is totally reasonable, with only weeks between patches you can't really plan for much buffer time. On wobbly rockets I actually agree something with dev perspective - wobbliness is a better and more visual failure mode than sudden structural failure, even if the latter is more realistic. And there are too long and thin designs that should fail. This being said, I agree it is too much wobbliness at the moment, but I think one item that is forgotten here is that it's the interaction with the SAS straining to keep the point of control in line that really tends to amplify the wobble. Maybe that's something to look at, especially as SAS has many other issues for me as well, especially with planes but in some cases also with pretty standard orbital burns. And I think auto-strut is actually a decent solution, just think of it as an internal reinforcement. Should maybe have a small mass penalty. The not-so-great part of this update is science for me. There's been a feeling for a long time that we are going to get a KSP 1 rehash, and this update doesn't change my impression here. Sure, there's a new "collection and transmission system" but zero details - for all we know, it is only talking about the technical implications. The distinctive science part sounds cosmetic to me, when what we would need is some gameplay variety. One of the more interesting science experiments in KSP 1 was when you put a seismometer on the ground and had to create impacts by crashing vessels into the planet. In summary, I would appreciate a bit more information here, like: What do the devs think were the flaws with the KSP 1 science system and how to improve on it How the new transmission system will work (in principle) One example for an interesting science part One example of a mission you can do for extra science I don't think this would spoil much, since it is still just an outline with 2 examples. But it would give us some actual impression on how science will actually play out. By the way, personally I would not like transmission returning 100% of science even if realistic. It makes getting planets from bodies like Eve too easy.

Can't speak towards all cases, but generally KSP 1 handles this in a very solid manner, with no random orbital decays but 'pushing' vessels with Kerbals on EVA working (the physics breaking parts of pushing Kerbals was the effectively infinite fuel, not that pushing works in principle). Decoupling also worked ok and changed your orbit a bit. Is it only me remembering this, but was there talk earlier about the orbital decay having to do with coordinate system switches? Was this incorrect, or are there two issues with orbits?