Profugo Barbatus

Gonna land on the mun, play around with the new UI, maneuver planner (depends if we have the new burn controls yet or if we gotta wait to interstellar) and build a space station. Or twelve. I doubt I'll leave the Kerbin SOI, its tempting but I'd rather make that a colony mission. And once I've done all that, I'll probably go back to playing Sons of the Forest, since it comes out right before

I doubt its fixed in the sense that 'it will never be a problem', simulating on rails for these vehicles and tracking the background resources will still have some performance impact. However, the amount you can accommodate should have increased significantly, order of magnitudes is likely an apt descriptor. The tech that has been shown off appears to be much more scalable. Its also using a roughly ten year newer version of the underlying engine, which brings in fundamental improvements in asset streaming and memory management options - Likely more than ten years worth of improvements, since upgrading versions over KSP1's dev cycle wouldn't have inherently implemented all the new techniques. I doubt it will increase in a material way when colonies and interstellar launch, but only because the actual changes don't require those game mechanics to be implemented. The redesigned resource system is day one, and the rest of the memory/data management elements are core fundamentals. I strongly suspect the UI and being able to understand what you're looking at will become the bottleneck well before your satellite network lags out the game

The lore reason is that Methane is an extremely flexible ISRU fuel option - its not quite optimal for atmospheric flight/launches, but its relatively simple to synthesis in site, and is making up the 'basic' tier of fuels for colonial production as far as we can tell. So its less about lack of availability, and more about a rare amount of foresight from the kerbals

Ooh, now that is a beauty, I am glad I asked for it. There's something about the lighting and shadows that just looks a lot better than KSP1 for me. I am definitely going to have to get used to the new UI - I alternate between worrying about font readability and figuring 'I'll get used to it. Rest is probably personal pref. That'll be really nice, wonder if we will have the same for antennas? Hunting down the four pixels while the ships shaking from a burn so you can turn it on before your always-on ground antenna gets out of range can be a pain. I know its not there right now but might be a dynamic thing that only shows up when the part is relevant.

We know there's a VAB and an Orbital VAB, the former for ground launches is size limited, the latter for space launches is either uncapped, or at least bigger than the ground VAB. So if you can make a kilometer wide monster, its gonna be assembled up there, not on land.

Not entirely true. This community has an awful habit of getting really antsy over the slightest perceived imperfections and leading to a lot of mod cleanups and "stop shouting at each other" kind of mod messages following it. We can be a pretty ungrateful, demanding bunch. That's not really an attitude or environment you want to encourage. Yea, its definitely the case of a vocal minority, but its also the public image of the community regardless of the minority status - If every little bit is nothing but complaints and comparisons, the public perception can start to tilt negative. We spent months being salty over clouds, in a game about going to space. We spent weeks working ourselves in a tizzy about ground scatter and textures cuz we were seeing things on settings other than 'ultra'. I would not want to see the community reaction for vapor cones. If they're anything short of real time liquid condensation simulations, we're gonna end up with another "Concerned about quality of KSP2" spread of threads on 'em. That's not to say that we should somehow be more grateful or blindly praise either, just that there is a lot of pessimistic and adversarial attitude being taken to the whole thing, and at a certain point, the only way to realistically deal with it is let the results, IE the game, speak for itself. We've seen how radically the different launch conditions and computer settings can affect how stuff looks. Even if they turned around and offered us a live community gameplay stream, people would demand specs, and when its some 4090 rig the team pulled out to ensure it can handle the game on ultra and the streaming overhead, people would panic. We'd see mass freakout that KSP2 requires a supercomputer just to look ok, and look at all of these compression artifacts they're clearly rendering at 144p internally and AI upscaling, its definitely not normal stream compression! So all that's left to reasonably do is wait until people get the game for themselves. Anything else is likely to just cause more problems. This isn't unique to the KSP2 community by the way, I've seen other projects suffer from similar. Folks just get really involved, really excited, and really concerned about stuff when they're as passionate as we can be.

No questions asked day one from me, even if it won't get a lot of play initially. I am disappointed about lack of science day one, but beyond that, I'm excited to see the possibilities. I have 'most' of the planned KSP2 features in my current heavily modded KSP1 run, but what I don't have is them all easily accessible and well integrated. A lot of stuff is janky or workarounds, its laggy, its prone to quirks and erratic behavior, and a lot of aspects just don't acknowledge each other very well, if at all. KSP2 offering me the possibility of that being fixed, is alone enough to bring be onboard day one. I 'could' wait for updates, but I also know I want to mess around in the new Kerbal system and with the new VAB before having actual stakes to anything I do. So no reason to wait, and if I get bored, I'll mod, either my own or whatever else someone makes.

With Metallic Hydrogen engines, my ships will be able to pain anyone and anything on this side of the Stellar cluster.

Pretty. Shadows are expensive to do 'right' so I'm not really bothered by the 'close enough' slightly floaty ones. The Suit looks great, and the ground texture only looks bad when you really lean in and squint, I'm not usually playing KSP with the camera shoved in the dirt so I doubt I'll notice most of the time. Although I'm not blind to the clever angling to hide draw distance What are the odds we can see a space station next? Not a colony, but just someones orbital station, lit up, maybe in the shadows. A large ship works too, just wanna see some of that lighting on ships again

There's no reason to believe that Kerbin will be free of resource limitations. We've only seen snippets of the VAB and resource implications, but it appears to be quantity, and not availability. While the absolute bottom tier of resources will probably be functionally limitless - Steel, methalox, etc, I wouldn't be surprised if Kerbin is resource poor in a lot of other early game materials, either low output or completely lacking. Stuff like nuclear fuel and the like are good examples of what I'm thinking would be short. So while you could just wait a long long time to build a ship with six NERV drives to ferry colony stuff right out to some prime spot on the moon of Jool, the game will probably heavily encourage you to instead go and colonize the mun, minmus, and other closer targets just to get access to more of the stuff needed to build fancier tech. So I doubt we can early game rush the biggest stuff out, we just won't have the materials to make it happen without exploring and colonizing first.

Almost certainly, there will be a EA launch video. It'll probably drop the same hour the game releases though, it will quite literally be a 'launch' video.

I think "Orbital and Extraplanetary Launches" could just as easily qualify as 'More interesting'. There's more to them than flare and show, interesting comes from gameplay too. I would imagine you don't want to take a ship out of the shipyard on full 100% torch drives, unless you consider the colony a consumable launch asset.

Nah, that'd slow down the pace of gameplay for no real gain. Rocket go boom when you press space bar, that'll never not make you smile, and no reason to put anything between you and it.

Honestly, the tower is probably decorative, same as the tower used to be in KSP1. They just got rid of it back then because it made some rocket launches impossible by getting in the way of absurd scale creations. Now that we can build pads theoretically everywhere (I haven't heard that we can't build colonies on Kerbin) it can come back, huge scale launches can now do their thing right from space.

Man, I was just landing probes on Minmus yesterday, so this view is absolutely night and day for me. I don't play with any graphics mods for stability/performance reasons, so it really makes me excited. Whole reason I started this save was to tide me over, and have a fresh comparison point. And what a comparison this is.

The sound will be both 3d simulated and fully volume controllable

Yes, it looks like someone tried to ground launch with some Spherical fuel tanks, which are usually supposed to just stay in space That much fuel will give you a majestic explosion though.

I am a fan of Blacks and Olive Drabs. I will probably have some fun with it with 'civilian' missions for colony transport routes, mining ships, and satellite launches, those can be plenty colorful.

I think its important to remember these aren't part of a coordinated, specialist ad campaign where everything is preplanned and carefully reviewed. This is just a few sneak peaks for some extra social media engagement, comparable in concept to interns posting screenshots about a game in its lead up to release. They're not here to drive mass interest and excitement among new audiences, they're here to drip feed us some fun little tidbits over the few weeks before launch. Set expectations accordingly, this isn't a budgeted campaign so much as it is marketing taking advantage of the community interest, and its budgeted accordingly. Someone probably gets a couple hours paid to play and run little missions to get sneak peak clips, between meetings and email blasts. Yea I'm partly to blame for this lol, my original point was to explain why we're seeing wildly fluctuating quality in the content - major videos have buttery smooth, 60fps gameplay with high quality textures and full AA/Lighting/Reflections, and sometimes we get something that looks like KSP1 put on High with a few hiccups. My explanation being the people making sneak peaks may just be running the game on standard office computers and not anything built for gaming, even mildly.

I will point out on the performance front, that its very likely these are taken from a marketing teams machines, not some core devs as far as I know. Which likely means they're running the game on business craptops or hand me down hardware from the core dev team. Possibly even personal computers what with WFH employees, which again may just not be super powerful, just cuz you work marketing/community for a videogame doesn't mean your into PC gaming. It would be nice to get a clip of the game cranked 'just for show' on a machine that can handle it. The earlier concerns over textures, scatter, etc may just come down to the machine/settings, potentially the autoscanned defaults (which tend to be conservative). Please do correct me if I'm wrong and these are confirmed coming from maxed hardware already. Along with that, if a team member does know that I'm in fact correct, then use these complaints and confusion as a business case to get the marketing team some top tier hardware

Good 'ole one way trip. Its always so nice that the random kerbal in the recruit queue is happy to be involuntarily deported to another worlds colonization program. Hope he brought some snacks. But seriously, this looks pretty. It feels like there's a lot of nitpicking lately on the graphics chasing an idea of perfection, when its design goals seem more of just what feels/looks good in the moment while being realistic 'enough'. Inspired by reality, but not constrained by it. Those clouds look pretty nice in motion. Terrain scatter is a bit lacking, but otherwise I like this. Maybe I'll do more than one lulz session with the pre-science EA launch, if its got sights like this for me.

Assuming there is no official platform with comparable features, I'll probably just use the CKAN successor, whatever form or name it takes. Community already knows it, and its got good functionality regarding dependency tracking and suggesting additional supporting content. The one advantage any community option has over an official one, or 3rd party platform like Curse, is that the community has absolute control over it. Old games see online services die, Curse can drop or add or restrict games at will (Nexus too), but something community ran like CKAN or Spacedock goes as long as there's a handful of people willing to pay for server costs. If I were to wishlist something for whatever the future client would be, I'd want a collections/modpack feature like Nexus offers. Pressing a button to instantly go out and gather a bunch of supporting mods and stick them in with adjusted configs and patches makes large mod assemblies so much easier.

On the whole "Realistic Terraforming" aspect, surprised Per Aspera didn't get a callout, especially now that the latest expansion is full on "settle humans in open air settlements" level. As far as KSP 2 goes, I find it endlessly amusing to see calls for DLC before the Early Access even drops. Doesn't hurt to dream, but we're still years off from DLC content even being concepted beyond an idle "wouldn't that be cool" lunch break convo between two designers. It'd be neat to have, but we don't even know half the aspects it could actually influence as the mechanics they might even influence aren't even known.

Correct, and this is my general concern as well. It is justifiable, but its not reassuring. Not to beat this horse too much, but no. 'Community Feedback' is taken as a generalization and a nice marketing term to make early access releases sound nicer, we're mostly here as testers who'll pay them to do it. Wide feedback sentiment will be taken, and obviously broken balance choices will be taken, but we're not gonna see 400 devnotes back and forth constantly retweaking the same community complaint, and we're not gonna have devs spending 6 outta 8 working hours reading forum threads. For the most part, the people actually building the game will barely know we exist, they'll just have general sentiment filtered through the Community Managers or whatever middlemen handle it for them. This is always the case, even if the game launched fully featured, regular game updates would break mods. The exact architecture can also seriously influence this, forward thinking decisions like the resource management system already show promise for modding resilience, and I wouldn't be surprised if other systems held true to that as well. That being said, while modding is a focus, individual mods are not, and its unrealistic for the devs to give much concern to not breaking them at any given point, so long as they preserve the overall ability to continue building them. Expectations were already sky high, rumor is they already expanded the scope heavily after how well received it was, to meet those expectations. And if they are really missing expectations from the wider audience, EA gives them an opportunity to adjust. As I mentioned, while they won't be running individual complaints, they will be tracking and adjusting to community sentiment. I'll be buying it day one, no questions asked, I will play it exactly once, and then I will put it down until Science is in because frankly, its an absolute excrements state to launch in a lower feature state than the earlier game, especially a core feature like that. Rest of the roadmap gets a pass from me, but science is my salt point

Love the architecture discussion going on, but a lack of Mac support is likely to continue late into Early Access - Dealing with OS bugs while also trying to work out new EA features is only going to muddy the waters and make things more difficult for the devs. We're all but certain to see Mac support arrive (Assuming a mac release is coming at all) once the core is all in and they're doing wider bug fixing instead of feature implementation. Sucks for some people, but the more variables you can remove from the mix, the better.