Skorj

What I did in KSP2 today: Went to the Mun. Too many bugs. Just can't play this mess in its current state. Uninstalled. Maybe it will be good one day. But today is not that day.

Indeed, refunding is my current plan. Given the game a week though, maybe they'll be on the ball with fixing the most basic functionality. It could happen.

Other games being broken is never an excuse for this game being broken. KSP1 was released by a tiny indie dev team, trying to invent a whole new genre. Now the genre exists, and there are standards. No major studio game should launch in a worse state than KSP1, or Simple Rockets 2, or the other major players. (Talking basic functionality, not "amount of stuff to do in the game" which they were very up front about.) $50

EA is never an excuse for issues. If you sell a game for money, the game you sell must actually work. Just like any other product. EA is for what we were promised "a solid working game without much content". I'm on the fence about refunding, myself. I've stopped playing, and will probably give it 10 days to see what gets patched before giving up. As launched, it's just another cashgrab broken launch IMO. But maybe the basic broken stuff gets fixed in the first week, costs me nothing to hope.

Yes, please all of this. The absence of patched conics - how did that ship? And I'm still chuckling that the "Burn Time" box doesn't show burn time. Jeb's been coding again - we told him to stick to flying.

Yes please, all of this. Also, show burn time and "PE/AP after burn" in the maneuver node once a burn is planned.

Bad PIDs were one of the key things that needed fixing from KSP1! C'mon, there's a point at which you abandon the PIDs and just point the craft the right way and kill rotation - this should happen whenever the craft is nearly at the correct attitude with low angular momentum. Let the PIDs work the simulation to get it close, and then cheat and make the UI actually work.

Maybe, I can't tell. I mean, I certainly didn't deliberately change the root part from the capsule I put down first to some random fuel tank, but with this UI? Who knows, I might have.

The maneuver node / burn timer isn't calculating burns correctly. Anyone else seeing this? I did my trans-Mun injection burn, and it was way short, had to keep burning for a minute or so after the node said I was done. This is game breaking as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I liked the early days of KSP where you figured all this out with the Hohmann transfer equation and a calculator, but that's not the game KSP2 was supposed to be. I'm just so disappointed today with the state of KSP2, between this stuff and the VAB. I knew it would just be the basic sandbox, but I expected a good sandbox. Heartbreaking.

More after Mun landing: When warping to maneuver, when timewarp stops it has the wrong message "timewarp cancelled due to proximity to celestial body" The font in the burn timer box (manuever node) is very small. Basic accessibility fail. Use a consistent font size please, some of us aren't so young. The burn timer doesn't show burn time. Seems rather important. When planning a Mun intercept with the maneuver node / burn timer, I can't see the planned flyby path with that maneuver (as in KSP1). Focusing on the mun all I see is SOI entry and exit bullseye thingies. Not good. But maybe that because the maneuver mode doesn't work. The maneuver node / burn timer doesn't work. Really? Really. Executed the planned TLI burn, and needed to keep burning for another minute or so to actually get my planned orbit. Do better, guys. Do better. Double-clicking on the Mun does nothing. Again with the basic UI stuff: double clicking takes the default safe action. C'mon. Double-clicking on the Mun should focus it. Stopped playing after Mun landing. Sadly, I don't want to exceed 2 hours play time. Can't believe it has come to that, but here we are.

OK, the VAB has confused me to the point that I'm out of patience and frustration tolerance and have to stop for a while. what is going on here: Here's my ship before I click on the side-attached tank on the left: And here's the ship after I click on the tank: Why did clicking on the tank part delete the symmetrical part, but select the whole rocket? Seriously what? Note that the part is still attached, not like KSP1 where it detaches and you're holding it.

Very first impressions before I stop noticing the problems. Don't take this post the wrong way, just posting the bad things b/c that's the useful feedback: Why is there a AAA game launcher screen. Ug. Literally no one likes these (except corporate management I guess). I shouldn't have to skip the intro movie every time I launch the game. Well, at least it's skippable. A lot of pop-ups and text in my way. Go away, I want to explode Kerbals, not read a novel. KSP2 breaks the lighting on my Logitech keyboard. Whatever you did for clever integration, was too clever by half. Why? Makes it very hard to play. I can't even with the font in the VAB (OAB?). Worse than comic sans. Is there an accessibility setting somewhere to get a font I can actually read? Serious question. Can't figure out how to scroll up and down in the VAB. Why doesn't shift-scroll wheel work? Did I change the default in KSP1 and forget I changed it, or did KSP2 change the default keybind for some reason. Can't find it in the keybind list. To be continued after I can see my keyboard keys again. OK, continued after orbit and return: OK, this Logitech keyboard integration seriously needs to go. Basic flight UI: no bad first impressions. I eagerly await modders though (my heroes). Where's my KER post-burn PE? But that was always mod stuff, not base game. P.A.I.G.E.? More like C.L.I.P.P.Y. Seriously, needs a big 'X' in the corner to make it go away. I like the color coded part sizes, but red and green for the basic two sizes? Really? Have we learned nothing about accessibility? I can't figure out how to slide/adjust individual part locations at their attachment points - another VAB thing that was changed and the new way confuses me. Edit for more feedback: Pressing F9 from the base game menu (not the launcher) should load the most recent save. Double-clicking saves doesn't load them. Double-clicking save ships in the VAB ship load menu doesn't load them. C'mon, this is basic UI stuff. VAB: button to show delta-V has an arrow that points left, but the menu slides up. Expanding right was the KSP1 behavior, so the right-facing arrow used to make sense, but it's just confusing now.

And KSP2 somehow broke the RGB lighting on my KB, not an auspicious start.

They completely re-wrote the core game physics to fix the performance problems in KSP1. It wasn't an engine problem, it was an architecture problem. Also, Unity is no better or worse for multi-threaded code when used by experts. All game engines are single threaded for the main render loop, and any given engine's multi-threading plug-ins may or may not be useful - you're oftenrolling your own. At least in Unity you have the C# library for thread creation and management to work with, I found far easier than C++ (though I haven't messed with C++ 20 and the language is moving fast). But then, you may be right, since the dev team is likely too small for a specialist in this area, which would make it more of a struggle. Certainly doing physics in a separate thread pool is a lot easier than anything that directly manipulates game objects, like procedural world generation. I mean, we'll see, but from the first communication we ever had with Nate: "they fixed that".

This sounds like pretty core mod support: to be able to add systems without an over-arcing mod that replaces everything. Depending on how they handle mods, it might not even need C# code. If you can add or even modify systems through just dropping in some XML or the like, then that could probably be managed easily through Steam workshop or something CKAN-like, even if the devs don't build a voting system for as long time. Well, not everyone is fully loaded at every stage of a project, much as that would make management easier. If all that's really needed is an external website or game UI to handle the voting, and the rest is more-or-less already there, that's the kind of work that makes a great intern project for example. I know we were always struggling to find isolated bits of work that interns could do and point to afterwards. Just in general, I strongly suspect the size of the team and their ability to deliver will depend on how well the game sells in EA. They could surprise me in either direction.

Does the forum eat links posted by new members or something?

I just wanted to add: also brakes! Well, to a point I made earlier, everything should be both stage-able and bindable to an action group, and every action group should be bindable to hardware switches. I'd really like, on just a low end flight stick, to be able to choose that any button can either Toggle, Enable, Disable or Hold anything, through a control group if that's the easiest way (which I suspect it is).

I love this idea. Gives you something more fun to do with comms networks! Have the music fade in and out with signal strength.

The fix for high CPU in calculating landing in an atmosphere is to make it a separate button. Just dragging the node around doesn't model drag, but have a button that does, until you move the node again. Would be a bit awkward, but better than nothing if you'd start dropping frames like crazy trying to do it in real time.

At first my thought was "there's no way the dev team is going to re-invent git", but then I realized they could just use git. Still need a UI for it, which isn't trivial, but is at least approachable. As far as automation, the game could never guess right, but that's no problem, you just need 2 UI controls: "save" and "save as new version". Have the latter default to bumping a version number, but give you the choice of a more informative name. That way a new version can just be 2 clicks if you don't need more than a version number.

Of course I hope there will be a forum or thread or some system for bug reports when EA drops. However, I want to talk about UI problems more generally. KSP1 has a lot of bad UI design choices that we've all learned to live with, especially in the VAB. It's not worth cataloging them all, since KSP2 isn't starting with all that baggage. But can we please have a place to report UI problems/suggestions that aren't classic bugs? I know in my days of dev work, there were always UI choices or known issues that we just set aside as release approached, because it's hard to know if the users will actually care about some issue that one dev or QA guy thinks is awful, and you have to prioritize. But after release, we always wanted to know what was actually annoying real customers, to remove the "friction". Hopefully We'll get a pipeline for that (and hopefully the EA release is instrumented enough to see what features players actually use, but that may be wishful thinking on my part).

For those worried about the radiation damage from beamed power: there's a heck of a lot of radiation in space. It's that giant unshielded fusion reactor at the center of things. And of course the faster you go, the worse it gets, at least at interstellar speeds. The beamed power to a ship designed to receive it is just not much danger compared to the general environment.

Pretty sure this was a thing in the interstellar mod at some point. Obviously, if there's a laser + solar sail system for propulsion, then the question about tracking has been answered. Otherwise, if there's no speed of light delay, there's really no difficulty in tracking.

"Exit to Desktop" is the usual wording. Should update the persistent save and exit, vs Alt-F4 which should exit cleanly but not save.

I am very disapointed that the official name for liquid fuel isn't "explodium". You will always be explodium to me. "To sail on explodium seas ..."