GigFiz

Fair enough. While I still think public trading does more harm than good, I don't claim expert understanding, and know that was a simplified version of it, so thank you for the clarification/expansion. And I think, as far as the primary topic of game development and publishing goes, you and I pretty in agreement/on the same general page, anyway.

If this gets moved/edited for being too far off topic, well...fair enough. Anyway, I might regret opening this can of worms, but I think eliminating public ownership of companies (and probably capping executive compensation some way or another, as well) altogether would be a good step in that direction. Because, without even touching the screwiness of the fantasy world that is the stock market, the legal fiduciary responsibility to shareholders (as I understand it), at least in the US, means that if a company did "the right thing" and it hurt profits, they would be legally liable to their shareholders. Now, lots of big companies don't give a damn about customers or employees, and wouldn't regardless, but this setup means that they can't/couldn't even if they wanted to. Look at at any company ever that went from having a reputation for ethical responsibility and subsequently went to s***, and I pretty much guarantee that the turning point was the IPO. And I agree, I think the dream would be founder led, employee owned studios (maybe with some of them forming loose collectives together to help fund/staff bigger projects. That part is just an offhand thought, though)

While it's true that 100% sure bets are not common, that is simply incorrect: you can absolutely gauge the riskiness of a EA purchase. I've only bought 3 EA games that I can think of, and KSP2 was the only dud (It was also the only one I bought on hope, which says something about risky ways to judge whether to buy something EA, too). Satisfactory spent a long time in EA, but it's hitting 1.0 this year, and I bought it at a point where I was already happy with what was there, so I got my value out of it regardless. Hades 2 I bought the day it hit EA, sight unseen, as I always planned, and I am completely glad I did, and would willingly do it again with anything Supergiant makes, given their track record. If there is a paragon of doing EA right (it launched with more content than all of Hades 1, and was almost as polished already, and the first patch took 10 days), and a sure bet any time, it's them.

That one really falls in with the things I was wondering, so that was great. And thank you very much for the detailed answer! I've seen so much talk about how Unity was the wrong choice, that it makes you wonder why they used it in the first place, but the change in scope after starting in a place where it had advantages, does make sense, and seems like it certainly led to problems when they ended up at place where they were making something with an engine that no longer made sense for the project, but were likely in too deep, and probably couldn't get the time/budget/manpower approval for an engine change, even if that was on their minds as something they wished they could do. By the by, what do you think of their solution for precision at the scales of distance being dealt with? There was a dev diary about the problems with necessary floating point precision being impossible at the distance scales being dealt with, without resorting to methods that increase computation cost impossibly high, so essentially they had a little bubble of higher precision simulation around the craft being controlled, in order to get the precision necessary for things like docking. Judging from the explanation, and the overall logic of the problem, it seems like this would be necessary, and your answers would lead me to think you would go in a similar direction, but curious about if you think that's one they got right, or if there was a better alternative.

Out of curiosity, especially since you clearly have, likely, the most (and most relevant) experience in game physics programming out of everyone who frequents this forum: if this were your project and you were in the position were you got to make the decisions, what game/physics engine would you use (for sake of relevance, say, both if it was started now and for if it was started in the 2017-2020 range, like ksp2 was)? Since all we can really do now is talk about what ifs, and I (and others, I think) always value your insight, it would be quite interesting/educational to read. Also, If you want to go into what your overall approach would be if you were engineering and/or game lead, too, please be my guest (it would be quite interesting, I imagine). I know, though, that you've given aspects of that already (though putting it all together would still be of value), and it would easily be mass wall of text that you may or may not feel like like writing, so do what you feel like. (for a given value of force). But, if you genuinely WANT to, please do.

Oh, hey. I'll jump in on this. 1. Maneuver node creation to be like Precise Maneuver mod from ksp1. The ability to make and tune maneuvers with numbers is so much better than than dealing with the fiddly handle things that are never precise, and hard to grab if you switch to a different angle, or focus view, and are super easy to screw up, but incredibly annoying to fix if you do mess something up or accidentally change something and want to go back to exactly how it was before. I could go on about all the ways that it's better, but really, I just want them to get permissions from the mod creator (if they need to do that, idk), and copy it pretty much identically (and just change the aesthetics to match ksp2) 2. Some kind of in game Transfer Window Planner (preferably like the ksp1 mod with that name), ideally with the option to use pork chop plots if you want/know how. Planning multiple interplanetary expeditions at once by guesstimating (and then fiddling with the damn maneuver planner), is maddening. I'm sure there would be mods and web tools to do it, like in KSP1, but as important/useful as it is for post mun/minimus level stuff, it would be much, much better to have it built into the game. 3. Last one based on a mod, I promise. I'm not the only one who's asked for better delta-v/TWR info. but yeah, a level of information on par with Kerbal Engineer would go a long way for mission planning: TWR and Delta-v by stage and by planetary body is really hard to do without for large, many stage, multipart, multi orbital body missions (missions with detachable landers, landing on Mun and Minimus in one mission, etc. Or, for example, a mission I once sent to Jool, that then detached off separate probes for each moon and a then main body turned into a massive comm relay. I would not want to deal with the hassle of trying that right now). 4. Condensed part management, especially fuel tanks and similar structural elements. There only needs to be one item in the part picker for each fuel type/size combo/structural fuselage size, and then a submenu when you click on the one you want that lets you select length. Not everything needs to be like that, but anything where there are multiple nearly identical parts with only one changing variable should really be done that way. I really liked good part mods in KSP1, and am a fan of lots of part options in general, but it gets exhausting searching for each one when you are making something large and/or complicated, and anything that can streamline and speed up the process of finding the part you want is good thing. 5. Option to sort parts by actual size, rather than arbitrary "size name". Small, medium and large are all well and good, but once you get past about 5, it's gonna start to get silly, and probably annoying (is Gigantic bigger than massive, or the other way around? You get the idea). I'm fine with s/m/l being the default, but having the option to switch to actual numbers .625/1.25/2.5/3.75/5/etc would be extremely desirable. A "radial" category would not be amiss either. YMMV, for sure, but I think the further in progression you go, the more desirable that will be. 6. No idea how many people this appeals to (at least a few I would think), but flavor parts for interplanetary/interstellar travel, even if they don't have an in game mechanic attached for them. Food production/hydroponics/green house/something, gym, lounge/rec space, etc. A personal flavor thing I always did for long missions or deep space stations, was require the inclusions of sufficient space, and something for long term food. There wasn't much from stock, but there were some great parts that I liked to use from the FFTech and NFTech mods by @Nertea. I don't know, y'all at IG may have heard of him. 7. Another vote for robotics, at least at some point. I never really went into breaking ground, but I messed around with Infernal Robotics enough (which, iirc, had quite a few more parts than BG did). It had some jank, sure, and I didn't do anything super high level, but I liked rigging up stuff like big unfolding sensor arrays, or even little things like rotating antennas on bases, so something like BG, scaled up to infernal robotics level, would be amazing. 8. Not sure the best way to phrase it but: the ability to make actual structural loops. Essentially, in KSP1, parts wouldn't connect all the way around in a looping structure, so if you ran structural parts in a circle, or whatever configuration, the last piece that ties it together would only ever connect to one side, so you had always had to work around it/clip stuff/etc, to keep it from floppy spacepart syndrome, or spontaneous unplanned disassembly, and sometimes the stuff you did to make it work would result in that anyway. A lot of cool design possibilities open up/get much more feasible if there was a way to actually make that last connection 9. Support for the ability to mod in additional star systems. Nuff said. That's the main stuff I can think of right now, so how about more absurd, pie in the sky/probably not even reasonable/feasible for the last, I suppose. 9. Non stellar, extrasolar objects. Being able to visit them would be phenomenal, but even just being able to observe them (though I guess this would require some sort of observatory mechanic, which seems unreasonable to ask for, tbh). Black holes, quasars, nebulae, rogue planets, etc, etc. And hey, while we are accelerating rapidly away from reality, how about the capacity to make low level megastructures, lol. Not like dyson sphere level, but a bunch of crazies making an orbital ring in multiplayer would be super cool.

While I'm not really arguing with your point either way, I would just point out that they did tell us that with summer and people taking vacations and such, there was going to be a temporary reduction in communication, (I disagree that it has been total silence about important things, though, but you are allowed your own views, of course). So hopefully it is just that, and they will return to that level of frequency and transparency soon.

Not going to dive into any of the debate right now; just want briefly weigh in on the original question: I am very in favor of resources over money. I like having having extra goals/limitations to work around & overcome, and this has good potential for interesting gameplay and stories, as well as helping giving some direction and goals beyond the very beginning. In KSP1 there is lots of cool stuff you can make, but the purposes and limitations around most of it has to come from a created headcanon for that save, because the game doesn't really give you any. And, let's face it, in KSP1, money was meaningless 99% of the time, outside of maybe trying large ambitious projects very early on. I also have no idea how reputation worked or what it did, because I literally did not have to interact with it in anyway, not even once, in all the time I've played KSP (almost all of it in career, too)

Earlier on, I got the impression that there was going to be the potential for vessels/stations with truly massive part counts (far greater than KSP1, which would choke really hard on larger craft), but, as it stands right now, optimization is not at the point yet where you can go very far with part counts. Assuming I was not misunderstanding, is this still going to be a thing eventually, at least by 1.0? What was the transition like going from being a modder (or, more honestly, a pillar of the modding community) to working on the development team?

Hmm, I'm not sure that even falls under confirmation bias. Because you may want it to be true, but if it is lining up with what you would have hypothetically mapped out at the start, and you have the experience that makes you well prepared qualified to analyze the situation, that would suggest that maybe you would be inclined to interpret ambiguous stuff more charitably, but that's probably about it. The fact (I strongly suspect) that any major red flags would probably jump out and scream at you much too loudly to be ignored also makes it less likely to get overridden by bias and hope. So I lack any of the industry relevant experience that you bring to bear (and the insight from that is always really interesting and useful), but a similar-ish (in the expectation/reality side-by-side sense. Very -ish, I know) kind of analysis, in the generalized sense, based on reading between the lines of the messaging and the overall vibe of the communications/interviews we've had direct from the devs along the way, has largely kept me in a standpoint of cautious optimism (along with totally staying off the hype train, but that's not anything specific to this; those just pretty much never end well) and, while the launch didn't go quite as well as I might have hoped, I still feel fine about the stance I've taken, and do not see sufficient evidence yet to stop hanging out there

Yeah, I've been a bit puzzled by statements that seem to say how bad it is, because this is the state things are in, which is fair, and that we have practically none of the promised content, which doesn't necessarily say anything about how done the rest of the game is, just that it hasn't been released to us yet; it's enough to be cautious, certainly, and maybe even a bit pessimistic, but the "end is nigh"/all is doomed" is kinda over the top or, at the very least, premature. Stuff we've seen over time, such as the dev diaries, show and tell segments, and whatnot pretty clearly indicated, usually with photo or video evidence, that all the systems that they were telling us about were actively being worked on, potentially at solidly progressed stages (not possible to make a definitive statement here. There was enough evidence to solidly make that argument, but also little enough of it that the counterargument of "maybe that's all they had, and were just cherry picking to make it look further along" is, at the very least, still a valid possibility, which should not be dismissed. I do think it is likely that a lot of the game is further along than many people fear, and they went the route of starting with just releasing the core piece, and getting it stable and performant first, then adding another and doing the same (which also gives more time to work on the unreleased stuff in the meantime). I imagine that if a larger percentage was released at once, at this stage of stability, having that many more pieces at once would exponentially increase the complexity of the the job and increase the time between updates, so they opted for stabilizing a piece, then adding and repeating, rather than trying to do it all at once. Sort of like (for a sloppy metaphor) taking a knotted tangled rope and starting at one end, doing a piece at a time, then moving to the next, rather than just dumping the whole mess in front of us and trying to untangle all of it at once. I am absolutely not saying the complaints and issues are not valid, or trying to dismiss the many, real concerns, but also I suspect that early access is going to progress more steadily, and faster, than many people think (I'm not going to guess, just...faster than expected, especially with how pessimistic estimates have gotten. Call it a reasonable and steady pace, not an interminable morass), especially once they get the core pieces sorted out. Now I may be totally wrong, but for what it's worth, the datamining thing here is at least another piece of supporting evidence (not proof. Just another little piece of evidence). Time will tell; the pacing and scope of the first few EA patches and updates will be very telling about how things are, and will go, I think.

The fuel tank part section is definitely a magnet for tons of unnecessary clutter. I posted a similar idea to this in the last few months, though I didn't have the bit about the trusses. The additional thought I'll from that is that even if they don't want to give us 100% granular control of tank size, they should still do it this way and just make the minimum increment step much larger. Heck, even if they weren't procedural at all, it would still declutter the part list a lot to have just one entry per diameter/type combo on the list, and let you change the length in the build space, or have it so when you click the fuel tank in the part list, you then get a quick pop up menu to select the size.

Yeah. I honestly don't care about the state that it is in, as far as ordering it now. I was going to buy it eventually, no question, so why not now? I don't care if there is an EA discount or not, either; at this point, I'd rather give them the money, really . Heck, just think of it as a indefinitely long preorder, with a continually evolving demo . This is very important; they haven't told us everything (and very likely can't, legally), but there has never been any of the "nothing to see here, no problems, everything is 100% planned and normal, go about your day, citizen" attitude or vibe; they have been honest and open that there have been difficulties, and things haven't always gone according to plan, but also always emphasized that they are just setbacks and they are still passionate about things and working hard to give us the best game they can. To me, that is an extremely good sign, especially compared to ways other studios and games have dealt with it in the past.

And you know what, y'all are allowed to be disappointed with things are at the moment if you like, that is y'alls own lookout, as long as at least some judgment is reserved for the official release, but how angry and hateful people can get is just over the top. Obviously we all care about this game, and we will be sad if it ends up a disaster somehow, but it is a game, our lives will not be ruined, and things will move on. Furthermore, the pace of early access will be far more telling than the start of it. If it goes dark for long stretches of no updates and communication, that will be a bad sign, but if we get reasonably regular updates (even minor ones), and they are transparent, with a consistent presence, than I will not be worried. Yes, we had hoped to wait less, but I would rather have it better than sooner. Exactly! That is the real reason it is happening this way: It is tradition

With a nice hefty dose of confirmation bias

That's a really cheap question: for one, we hear about the disasters far more than the successes, and two, that's a monstrous amount of work to go look up development lengths, one by one, for any decent percentage of modern era AAA games. And really, dev time is massively dependent on size and scope of game vs. budget and team size. So development time alone, without context and additional info, tells us very little. Now, I will be fair and say my random made up example of 8 years was probably too high and saying that 'most' games do that is most likely overstating it, though it really isn't even a 1:1 example, because AAA titles have much higher budgets and much bigger dev teams (do we know how big the KSP2 teams is? Genuine question), generally. That said Starcraft 2: 7 Years Doom (2016): 9 years TF2: 9 years RE4: 6 years FF15: 10 years

The wild card there is the studio switch and how much was redone from scratch. Many (most?) major games have been in development for many years by the time they are announced, and we just see the last year or three of development. I can't name specific titles without going and looking stuff up, but I have distinct recollection of reading plenty of AAA game announcements where says something like: it'll be released in two years, but also, it has been in development already for the last 6. So if they had to pitch a lot of the work already done, or especially If they had to do anything remotely close to starting from scratch after the changeover, it would be more like seeing the full eight years of my nebulous example, rather than what usually happens, where we don't even know about it until it is quite far along. It would also mean that the first couple years that we are considering, from before the switchover, don't even count. I'm no expert, but I suspect many people underestimate greatly how much time development can take, because we usually don't focus on (or even know, quite often) how many years of work go into titles before we even know they exist. 3.5 years from announcement to release is a long time; 3.5 years from work starting to release really isn't, at all.

Good call, I didn't totally clock that one. But yeah, No Man's Sky has, by this point, become arguably the greatest redemption story/turnaround in game development history. That level of persistence and amount of continued support and major, free content additions and updates...yeah, I'd be totally fine with that, too. I mean, you are most likely right. It's more of "that would be awesome", not actually something I think will happen. And I don't need free major content updates. If we get what we were told we would get for V1.0 release, I'm totally good with getting paid dlc/expansions

Regarding the assertion that it reflects badly on Intercept for not communicating better (or at all) about things, especially these (types of) issues, the question it raises for me is: do they have a choice? I cannot answer this, I am not in that industry or an adjacent one, but it seems to me that Take Two could/would assert some level of control about what information they allow Intercept to release. Especially if money is the driving force, it seems quite possible that Take Two has prohibited them from telling us anything that might look too negative/drive people away/hurt sales/etc. Radio silence creates its own issues for sure, but they could easily believe that no information is better than bad information. And sure, it's coming up now, but that is mitigated by the start of early access: these are definitely valid concerns, but it seems likely that it would be even more of a publicity hit if this conversation was happening while release was still nebulous, or had been pushed back again. Not saying this exonerates everyone/everything, but just thought for food, because who knows what their contract actually allows them to say

Regarding mods, this was on the steam page (and probably a bunch of other places, that's just where I read it) In general, every feature goes through the following steps: Get it working Get it stable Get it performant Get it moddable So it sounds like, while basic modding will happen early, it will probably be rather limited for a while as they do the primary stability and optimization work

While this is not an invalid argument, in this case I totally disagree. KSP is a wonderful game but there are tons of under the hood quirks, problems, and bugs, an inconsistent art style, and tons of underdeveloped gameplay elements and many clear potential gameplay systems that are absent entirely. Taking the core of it, improving and tuning it for performance and qol, and improving, adding, and building out gameplay systems and loops (not to mention interstellar travel, which is huge), which is, by all appearances, what they are doing, is pretty much exactly what KSP2 needed. And complaining about the engines and parts being the same (which, we will see once it's out. YMMV, I suppose) would be a much more compelling argument if they weren't adding a ton of engines and parts, and if we didn't have EA for them to take feedback and tune things. Plus, they fill valid needs, so even if they got rid of them, they would still need new ones that filled the same approximate roles, just with a different look, and then then the issue just rolls back around to tuning. For sure, and being reluctant about getting hopes up is totally valid and understandable. People are not obligated to be excited and optimistic. Be cautious, even a bit pessimistic if you must; be sure to refrain from boarding the hype train, totally fine. But saying the game is ruined, or awful or blah, blah blah, because you don't like one of the screen shots or something like that, is just as absurd as the kind of folk who will pretty much see a preview screen of a game they are hyped for and are pretty much ready to declare it game of the year. And that's a great point about people not really comprehending how game development works, how much time it takes, and how complicated it is; we have members with serious game dev knowledge and experience, and you see exactly that when they chime in and actually explain what is going on and why something is/looks the way it does (and often why people are freaking out over essentially nothing), and plenty of people will do everything they can to gloss over, or ignore it, so they can stay on their negative/angry train.

I am excited to play and to discover the new things, and changed and improved things, and just to see what it is like.

Absolutely agree. Constructive criticism and feedback is a good thing, (and knee-jerk mindless defense of everything isn't helpful, either), but it has kinda felt like things around here have been degenerating a bit as we get close to release, as people get antsier and overanalyze every little bit more and more to pass the remaining time. The negativity and hatefulness that this forum has felt largely free of has seemed far more widespread. I was too busy to post much in the system requirements thread but, holy cow, there is some vehement anger, and tin foil hat level stuff in there: people saying they hope the game fails and the studio closes because the system requirements were too high (for v0.1 of EA), or that this clearly means that they have been systematically lying to us and manipulating us all along, stuff like that. Heck, the continual recurrence of the thing about clouds, and stuff like atmosphere scattering and graphics in general, is reaching comedy levels. It's certainly reached a level where I feel like they could have pretty much stopped reading social media and forums for the last month or two, and not really missed anything productive. I really enjoy the thoughtful conversations and debates I've seen, and been a part of, around here as we have waited for KSP2, and this has been an...unwelcome change of pace. Even the repeated pushing back of the release date over the last couple years has always felt like a dev team that cared a lot being allowed to do "feature creep" in a good way, and being the time to do so properly. Despite the occasional naysayers and trolls, I have never worried that it wouldn't come out (and that sentiment never managed to take hold here, thankfully); obviously I can be wrong, but I've seen what development hell looks like, and it never looked and felt like that. Sure, the studio change was a cause for worry in that initial period where we didn't have much info and we were waiting to see how it all shook out, but it turned out fine, as far as can be seen, and may well have been for the better (we'll probably never have enough inside information to definitely say about that one, but it's most certainly a reasonable assertion). I am definitely hoping that it will return to that once EA gets solidly underway, and that this is just the years of build up in the pressure cooker of hype blowing out bursts of overheated emotional steam, because this is just yucky. I'm not a big fan of the whole "go touch grass" comment (I agree with the sentiment behind it, but I find most uses of it to be too condescending, and it feels like it's that way on purpose. I prefer that sentiment to be delivered in a less sarcastically laconic, and more useful and productive way), but there have been an increasing amount of threads and posts where, while I didn't say it, cuz there is no way it would actually improve the conversations, it certainly felt like an appropriate response. I'm not even saying emotional reactions are invalid. Be excited. Be disappointed when things are not as you hoped they would be. Raise your concerns, in a thoughtful manner, as they arise. Be critical, in a constructive way, when it is needed (and it will be needed plenty, I'm sure. Honestly, if they didn't think it did, it would probably not go through EA). Raise your voices, if valid concerns are being ignored, and if it is truly called for (but that should a higher bar then many seem to think, and is not the same as just angrily yelling). But also reserve some judgment for when it, y'know, actually comes out, and some more for the real v1.0 release. And remember that this is a game, you don't have to buy it (you can even say why you aren't, if it is done constructively) and those are all real human beings (who really seem to want to make this the best it can be, and really care about it) who are making it, and that this forum is a better place when we stay rational and, above all, civil.

This is one reason why I think EA will be helpful: as far as struts, wobble, and joint rigidity, and the like go, they can only test it so much on different craft (cuz, y'know, they are still working on developing the game and only have so many man hours available for test launching lots of different designs under countless different launch conditions); opening the game up for this kind of public beta testing allows the the sample size, and variety of designs that are tested to go up by several orders of magnitude. This will give much more info about the effects and unforeseen quirks of the joint settings, and make it much easier to tune it to the place where they want it To me, that's what the "we'll think about it" probably means: if they can get to a good place with the physics and joint systems they have in place (presumably a nice, and realistic, middle ground between kraken attacks and and rigid indestructability), that would be ideal, but if, for whatever reason, it proves more difficult than they are hoping it will be, then autostruts will re-enter the conversation.

Since I have a compulsive tendency to name things with terrible puns based on their destination and purpose (ie: one way trip to Duna could be = I Duna think you'll come back, Moho space station could be = Mohome away from home) I will have to wait and see, since it will depend on the names of the planets and star systems.