Skorj

Paul's post on the cancellation was well written IMO. Seriously, public post-mortems on failed projects used to be a thing at GDC, and it was wonderful. GDC changed direction mostly away from the technical a few years back, and it hadn't occurred to me that the increase in NDAs over everything were a big part of that. Used to be that there were no secrets once the code was no longer of competitive interest, and we all benefited from that.

Pretty much how I see the hype train at this point (hope this akamai link actually works):

We won't know the prospects for a KSP3 until we hear how the plan to sell PD went. If T2 somehow found a buyer, that might not be announced for months. But in the likely event of no announcement by the end of Q3, we can conclude the Kerbal IP is dead due to T2 putting too high a price on it. However, I have not just hope but expectation that we'll get a future rocket-sim game with colorful emotive characters, just not green space frogs. While KSP2 was in development, it would have been silly to make another game with the same tone. But now the field has cleared, and so there's room for a new "have fun learning astrophysics" game with mechanics that balance realism with an appealing learning curve (and some normal game progression, rather than just a sandbox with missions)..

The only real news from Belular's vid from a week ago is that he's not at all a KSP channel. In fact, he released his own studio's game The Pale Beyond on the same day that KSP2 came out. So the news about T2's mismanagement moved beyond KSP fandom into a somewhat mainstream gamer news channel. I thought that was nice to see.

Well, there's always one in any crowd, but at least around here posters tend to be a bit more mature than e.g. the Steam forums. IMO the important thing for communication around a new KSP-like would be to be clear about what the point of the new game would be, and focus on that narrowly rather than promising a list of features. Sharing the abstract like "we want this to be a game with a real progression system, not a rocket sandbox like KSP1" or "this one will be a story-driven game, and while we'll try to keep the physics sim accurate, it won't be the focus of the game so don't expect KSP1-like play" or whatever the vision of the game might be. Not to give away one of the superpower secrets of senior engineers, but it's best to promise future delivery of stuff you already have working, and keep silent about details till the testing is going well. But now I've revealed too much.

While gamers do have a bad habit of taking a wishlist as a commitment, IG went beyond that. Maybe this was your point, but they crossed the line IMO (Nate especially) with over-selling what they already had working. The store page on Steam, where the wording should matter, is rather bad about this. The roadmap shouldn't be on the store page at all (that arguably violates Steam rules), but they really messed up IMO by stating this as "stuff you're buying" and not "stuff we hope we can one day maybe do, but no promises". This just reads as a description of the product you're paying $50 for, to be delivered over time. I've bought quite a few EA games, and can only think of one other game that made this mistake, and ran into the same vitriol when he couldn't deliver. But that was a one-dev team with volunteers, and when he found a decent publisher, the publisher deleted all the roadmap stuff from the store page right away. Other big "hype wavestate collapse" games made the same mistake of over-selling stuff they hoped to have as stuff you would definitely be getting. There's still a lot of hate for Randy Pitchford and Sean Murray over games that might have been well received had communication been handled differently (and initial bugs been fixed quickly and apologetically). It's really a surprising mistake from veteran publishers, who really should know better. Edit to add: In particular I think HarvesteR knows better, and wouldn't make the same mistakes. I really liked his pitch of making a working colonies game with minimal rocket sim elements, then adding to the physics over time. That way you start with a new kind of game at release.

It's nice that someone did that last bugfix patch. I guess it was too much to hope for another. The sad thing is, with the game-breaking bugs fixed and some sort of colony system, KSP2 would finally offer something KSP1 doesn't (beyond graphics). But if I bought the IP, I don't think I'd bother, would be rather hard to get players' attention at this point to change reviews back to positive, even if someone did make the game something reasonable. I do still think the Kerbal IP still has value though, for a KSP3, just not in T2's hands. That bridge is thoroughly burnt at this point. And as we've been discussing in other threads, it doesn't have to be Kerbals to capture the spirit of the game that many find lacking in Juno. Heck, maybe Dean Hall and HarvesteR will collaborate at some point. KSP2, though, seems like there's nothing left but the funeral.

Kerbals have a very distinctive look, though. Plenty of room for cute, emotive characters with a different design.

The big problem with KSP1 (and therefore KSP2) is the physics is just done wrong from an efficiency perspective, in a couple of ways. HarvesteR sorted out joint flex in KitHack, so that's halfway there. The other problem - making everything not being controlled "on rails" - is something anyone with a RL physics background could help him with. For a new game that does these things right, there wouldn't be a problem with either 1000-part ships or 1000 satellites in orbit for some sort of colony / large economic system play. I can't imaging HarversteR would just make the mostly-sandbox KSP again. He's been there, done that, got the t-shirt. And I think Juno will eventually be a very solid sandbox-with-missions game for those who want that. But a rocket sim with an actual game behind it, with a real progression system and some sort of story, that would be amazing IMO. Or lean into multiplayer and combat, which isn't my bag but would certainly find an audience.

Updates might be automatic, but it's likely PD has a support team for older software. It's common in the industry (if not so much game dev) to have a small support team that supports all the out-of-date software versions that still have users, in case of critical crash bugs or security bugs. Support teams get no glory, but they do some amazing work with unfamiliar codebases. If we get another bugfix patch, we'll know the support team is working, and probably did the last patch as well.

Yeah, KSP is and should be a gentle introduction to orbital mechanics. Not taking itself too seriously, not an engineering sim, but not just a joke either. The humor in the first was more subtle, often found in part descriptions, not "in your face". Patched conics is IMO fundamental to the brand. You can have stable orbits around planets with moons without station keeping. Orbits can be "on rails." It's a simpler approach, that is still plenty complex for most players. And of course it was a good enough approximation for the Apollo missions. Giving up two unstable Lagrange point is a fine trade (especially as there's no station keeping, so you couldn't keep a satellite there for long anyhow). That being said, I think RSS / RO / Real Scale would be a great DLC, for players who have mastered the base game and want a harder challenge. Much like life support: KSP1 is too hard already for most players, but that added challenge is fine for an optional extra.

If PD is ever sold, maybe I could get excited for KSP3. Would depend on the buyer of course, another AAA studio would be pointless. I'm open to a lot of directions KSP3 could go, adjacent to KSP1 gameplay. It doesn't need to be KSP1 all over again, but it sure would be nice to start with that as a base! As has been discussed at length, all the tricky bits of the code are optional to the core experience: multiplayer, 3-body physics, and fancy terrain generation could all be sidelined if needed for a solid base game. Lots of ways to go from there once you had a rocket sim to build on, lots of ways to add an actual game to the sim.

The thing about taking over a clearly failed project: you're a hero if you fix it, and it's merely expected if you don't. Though if I bought PD I'd say "sorry all, the KSP2 code is unfixable, see you in a few years with KSP3." Everyone would be excited again with a few years' distance.

Last we heard, T2 is shopping for a buyer for PD, so T2 can just claim "we're hoping the future owner of the IP carries it forward" until either it's the new PD's problem, or everyone has forgotten about it.

Steam has done this before, but only in cases of licensing disputes AFAIK.

My favorite song for when a job goes wrong. Cracker added this to their next album after being fired by their label, so it's heartfelt.

I think as far as Steam, the store page can just be left as-is forever. Steam doesn't do much to police its rules, and abandoned EA titles are common. As far as European consumer protection laws, we'll probably never get any official announcement that IG is closed or that development has stopped; I expect T2 will just go silent. Leaving the Roadmap section on the store page seems sketchy to me, as it reads like a promise, but perhaps T2 legal has made a call one way or the other, or perhaps T2 doesn't think it's even worth the cost of their legal team's attention. But I don't think they'll change anything regardless while they're looking for a buyer for PD, wanting to leave all options open for a potential buyer.

I think it would be a lot easier to go with option 4: build a jump gate. Any solution is going to involve some science fiction component and huge construction. Just bypass the problem with high timewarp for a large ship. Instead of a SF engine, we have a SF jump gate. Still a huge and intricate construction in orbit, so lots of fun to be had launching/building it, but this way we can use a small number of very large parts, and no need for high timewarp. Exploring the new system is the same either way, and this approach works within the limits of what KSP1 can reasonably do.

Does anyone have experience with running (unmodded) KSP on integrated graphics on laptop CPUs from the past few years? I'm trying to hook my brother on the game, and he doesn't have anything like a gaming PC. Integrated graphics keep getting better, and KSP without visual mods is fairly low demand, but I'd love to hear from someone who's actually done it, especially with laptops that aren't latest-gen.

Given the forced re-use of the KSP1 codebase, KSP2 reminds me of Windows 95. Probably a lot of cleverness under the hood to make it work at all, but the result can only ever be a buggy mess.

Better said as "someone with access to Nate's account was online". We have so little idea what's actually going on. Hopefully we'll get some more leaks in a couple of weeks.

For the rusting cybertrucks, my money would be on bimetalism. Wonder if they cleverly connected the body electrically to something more cathodic. Never understood the irrational fervor around Musk in both directions.

"Goodwill" is a technical term in finance, and as such should not be confused with any ordinary meaning. Goodwill is the intangible value of an acquired company, more-or-less what you pay for a company less the value of its physical assets (after debts and other things). Take2 has bought a lot of smaller game companies, and so a lot of money went on the books as "goodwill". Goodwill is treated as an asset to make the accounting balance. It can be written down when the acquired company are no longer considered valuable, though investors rarely care about that paper loss.

Most likely IMO, it's not the IG team who pushed out this patch. If this layoff went as usual for big corporations, almost all the IG staff were effectively terminated by the first week of May, just given pay and benefits through the end of June as a severance. Work would have transitioned to a support team at PD who does critical bugfixes for all the older games they support. It's normal at large software companies that after work has stopped on a released product (or major version), there a common support team that does any needed bugfixes to keep those old products working, or at least able to launch. We can't be sure of anything, of course, but the codebase transitioning to a support team would be a very usual outcome (with maybe a couple people from IG giving them advice through the end of June). If nothing pops up on any of PD's other games needing a fix, we might even get another bugfix patch one day. Sure would be nice to get the remaining parachute bugs and the "fall through planet" bug fixed, and anything else on the top-20 bug list the support team can figure out.

These were some of the more annoying bugs, so it's great that the fixes got pushed out before the end. It's doesn't look like they fixed the "fall though the planet" bug, though, or the delta-V inaccuracies. I can only hope the support team keeps pushing out bugfixes.