t_v

yeah, it feels like the trees have two rough blobs, light and dark. What I actually think is that they aren't noisy enough - we need more noise to make it seem like there's leaves, instead of a solid color. However, too much noise can also produce a negative effect, like this (I remember this specific example, there's probably way better ones) When panning the camera, these trees would sometimes create a really bad static effect usually at the edge of the screen. I think anything far away with enough noise will do that. But there needs to be some to make it look good in the first place.

To be fair, this screenshot is most likely recent, as it seems to have been a relatively casual process to put it into a meme. Which is absolutely fine by me. Overlooking data is a serious issue though. If you want to speculate about the upper end of graphics, look at some of the screenshots that haven't been confirmed to have low settings. I don't even understand why it would benefit someone to do that, since it just makes whatever point they're trying to make not applicable.

Oh absolutely. I'll be the first one to advocate for better graphics, and I think that KSP 2 definitely has the potential to look better. All I'm saying is that this: means that the graphics were turned way down, and the person who took the screenshot was not worrying about them. So the level of graphics in that screenshot does not correspond to the level of graphics you can expect from medium or high settings. I just found it funny that @Alexoff's guess was actually reasonable: Developing the emote system is a valid thing to do after all, unless you think the game will be single player and not need those? I am in no way "making excuses" for the level of graphics in that image, I was just mentioning that the graphics being low doesn't mean the game's overall graphics are low. I don't need to, since we already know why they are lower fidelity. We have already seen the high-resolution textures on other planets, being seriously concerned that Ike, specifically, will have vastly lower resolution seems a bit silly.

Hey, that’s a great explanation for what that screenshot was about! It is almost as if a dev was working on kerbal animations or flag deployment and after doing what they needed to do with an old or low graphics build of the game, they saw that the shot looked nice and snapped a screenshot. After getting explicit confirmation that this dev was (a) just getting a screenshot and not worrying about PR and (b) not working on graphics so they probably don’t even have max settings to enable, it is kind of silly to expect them to go back in time and retake that photo on a different version of the game.

For the question of “why not use the advanced engines we brought?” it is for the same reason that we don’t use space-grade (higher efficiency, even accounting for atmosphere) solar arrays for solar power plants on the ground. Less efficient or powerful technology can be easier to produce at scale, and when that colony needs capacity to lift 1000 tons to orbit, there might simply not be enough metallic hydrogen production or nuclear engines to fuel the first stage tanks.

Oh sure you can retrieve them, there’ll probably be good deposits to build up production on a nearby celestial body. Now you just need rockets to ferry the cargo, and enough fuel to supply the new supply route…

It does if wood, rubber and metal simply aren’t there. There will absolutely be situations were colonies cannot manufacture metallic hydrogen and don’t have any uranium for nuclear engines.

I think that’s their point, you won’t have access to the materials required to build or fuel these engines, and so you will need to use methalox. If you are wondering why you wouldn’t have the resources, it is because not every resource will be abundant everywhere.

If you aren’t careful you will probably intersect with some of the more extreme rings by accident and collisions might matter. I’m actually pretty excited for that as you need to fit your orbit into specific altitudes and get specific timing, but I just hope it comes early in the roadmap. Maybe the collision on rings and collision with scatter on planets are running on the same not-yet-optimized software.

If anything, the opposite should happen for non-punitive life support. If losing life support means you lose capabilities that you had at the beginning of the game/mission, then that feels punitive. But if you never had LS before and then it unlocks new capabilities or productivity , then it is a bonus. This could be used to naturally gate activities until after going outside Kerbin SOI, like requiring snacks to work in labs (and making sure that players can’t get both LS and labs while in Kerbin SOI), or just deliver bonuses. In the end the impact of LS is the same: you get less from your missions without it, but going without LS to begin with frames it differently.

I'l pick an identifying color to use as a highlight, then split the main color according to the role of the craft. Cargo ships in red-gray, scientific vessels in blue, inter-colony transport in white, exploratory craft in black, etc. Ships that are small enough to fit inside bays of other ships will remain unpainted and interstellar-class ships will have paint associated with their functions, with green paint overriding the others if the ship is going to found a colony.

More than just Hogwarts - for someone who isn’t familiar with either Steam or this ranking site, why is the number of followers sometimes decreasing moving up the rankings? ARK 2 has less followers and places higher than KSP 2, for example.

I think the “misalignment” is intentional here, if you are talking about the wing tips. The end wing goes past the center one on both the front and the back, so even if the front side was aligned, the back one would go further back. It is more likely that the plane was just designed with big control surfaces.

Well… I’m probably going to ogle at all the new vistas for many hours, because alongside the much improved (read: less buggy) gameplay, the sights are going to look better than KSP 1 when controlling for performance. I don’t really know why people are going to extremes about graphics, it is true that you don’t necessarily need good graphics to have a good and successful game but good graphics aren’t a negative thing that should be discouraged either. If developer time is being spent on graphics, that is still creating a better experience; saying that gameplay should take absolute priority is like saying “don’t do this good thing at all when you could do this more good thing instead.” Both are valid ways to develop a game.

I have coded before and am coding now, and I am not trying to minimize the amount of work this would represent. There is no way to add this functionality (assuming it isn't possible already) without replacing a serious amount of code that impacts other parts of the game. However, it isn't impossible to keep things from breaking; you can update foundations and keep the rest it working, as long as the code behaves the same way under the conditions it was previously in. Similar to how you can add functions to a class or parameters to a function as long as the behavior doesn't break everything relying on it. This is in no way a quick easy "oh yeah, let's just replace the textures and update the normal maps and add new scatters and everything will be fine," but it is not an impossibility either, just a large and difficult update.

Save file backwards compatibility takes extra work, but I explained how the amount of work put into the DLC isn't as big of an issue compared to putting in that much work for small features. As for mods, having this more customizable system would increase mod-ability and while you can't reasonably code to preserve mod backwards compatibility, I'm not sure it would break as much as you might think. I addressed the possibility that the game becomes full of micro management through this, but by the same logic if there were no other way to design systems, then the colony system itself would also be full of micro management. If you can make a well-designed colony system that doesn't rely on micro management and emphasizes building and flying (which you absolutely can), you can do the same with terraforming, as it is just an extension of the same concepts. Much larger scale, yes, but that is what makes it a final challenge to work towards.

KSP 1 with EVE and Scatterer and stuff, yes. Honestly, aside from config stuff and the KSP 2 craft, it’s difficult to spot any differences.

I think those are a prerequisite for VR support. As for the main question, i think both building and flying would be nice. I don’t have VR myself, but people I know who do say that NMS gave them a better feeling of space travel than anything else they’ve tried, simply because of the immersion. Having KSP in VR might be the best representation of space travel as a whole in that medium. Sure there are very realistic space walk games and probably others that cover different aspects of space, but I bet that none deliver the combined realism, scope, and fun that KSP has to offer.

For anyone with concerns that this is going to be more difficult and complex than changing a few textures, you are absolutely correct. But this isn’t a small feature request like making kerbals smile at sunrises, it is an idea for a full DLC where anything goes (because it is essentially a full update where the features are being directly funded). With technical concerns aside, comes the question of if this would fit. I think it would, as a super end-game goal. First, terraforming isn’t something you can do to every celestial body; some are too small to hold an atmosphere or way outside of the temperature range, even accounting for the changes in atmosphere. So you would end up with one or a few “home worlds” in each star system, with the rest being unterraformed. No concerns of homogenizing the planetary bodies and making them all identical to explore. Second, terraforming is a very complex task which can produce a lot of gameplay and be a massive goal to work towards. The first big challenge is getting water, and enough of it to run a water cycle. This could mean importing immense quantities of it via comets or simply creating giant blocks of ice to transport. Then the atmosphere needs to be changed; there is a certain range of pressures, temperatures, and compositions that life can work effectively under and focusing on a small area won’t work as the original atmosphere mixes back in. This creates another huge logistics problem of supplying plants (in both senses of the word) with the necessary resources to convert atmosphere in controlled conditions across the planet. There is more potential gameplay and actions players can take, but the gist of it is that this will not lack in depth, and will still be about rocketry. And lastly, is this kerbal? I can certainly imagine ways this could be implemented that detract from the spirit of the game and make it much more serious and optimized than it should be. But there are also ways to keep the dynamic between the serious accomplishments of the kerbals and their goofy nature intact. Just like with colony building, keep it informal. No progress counters towards “terraformation,” just buildings and a gradually changing planet. Supply routes that are managed the same way they are between colonies, with the player driving between the start and end destinations and setting their own paths. With the right implementation of features (or lack thereof), terraforming can feel exactly like setting up the biggest colony ever, which decidedly fits in the game.

This applies on bodies with atmospheres. Decelerating in a vacuum is just like accelerating in a vacuum, the reason being that your propellant doesn't care about the direction or speed it is traveling without an atmosphere to slow it down. The problem will probably come when you get too close to the ground and your landing site decides to pack up and leave under the bombardment, and the ship is hit by a lot more energy than when under normal acceleration. A sort of "ground effect" but for explosions. Hey, I'm perfectly reasonable for wanting to have 1 engine on a 1000t lander

I don't think we've seen anything yet. Most likely, we'll find out when the game goes into EA.

If there isn’t any scattering at all on Kerbin but there is on other planets, that you’ll look pretty visually inconsistent. Even if the scattering effects we have seen are for denser atmospheres, there should still be a lesser degree of scattering for Kerbin. I’m hoping it is just a matter of making the materials compatible with scattering (and lighting, that top photo looks amazing) but even if it isn’t present at launch, it’ll probably be put in before 1.0, potentially due to asking why different planets look split between high and low graphics settings.

Colored lighting would Indeed be nice. I think I remember some shots of a kerbal being lit in green because the planet shine from Jool was casting that color light on the landscape, so I bet that it wouldn’t be infeasible to make the light change based on the atmosphere’s color at different times of day. I hope that this is one small polish feature that gets included - if not at EA launch, then over the course of development prior to 1.0.

Whenever there is a user-hosted option, or there is also the option to host on a server which can accommodate more players. But your point stands that we are probably not looking at a system where you can bring the resources you cheated into a sandbox save and put them into an Exploration mode server. You can exploit new players using any tradable resource system, but in small servers, this activity is going to be either accepted (at which point that server is just not for me) or dealt with using moderation tools.

Not necessarily a pulsar. The accreting star could either be a white dwarf or neutron star, and then if it is a particularly fast rotating neutron star, then it could be a pulsar. One thing to note is that the camera is either really close to its binary companion or the two stars are orbiting ridiculously close together (even in the kerbal scale). In this second case, the two bodies could be at their closest point in a several year orbit or could be constantly at that distance, with orbital periods of a few hours or days. Regardless of this, the amount of matter that the smaller object is consuming will lead to a type 1a supernova if it is a white dwarf and potentially a black hole forming if it is a neutron star. Both of these are one-time non repeatable events, so if they are in the game, I wonder how they will be handled. The alternative is that they are not in the game and we are making wild hypotheses about one of the many artistic depictions of this exact scenario that you can find by looking up “binary star system.” Having space imagery can probably help with composing music about space…