RocketRockington

Could not generate or did not? I haven't seen a single screenshot of KSP2 that has had anything that a KSP1 mod hasn't done. Of course, I haven't viewed every screenshot, so what thing are you referring to?

I'd guess it's probably a passive life support system, like many colony games do. Eg: you need this many farms, this many hab modules, to support this many Kerbals. Not moving food and oxygen around.

[snip] But you're right, they had a CM that early. @RayneCloud That was you wasn't it? Found an old tweet that makes it seem the case.

So you're claiming that a tiny group of amateur developers with no dedicated CM people at all didnt manage to update the community as fast as you wanted, so it's ok that a big developer who has as many CMs as KSP1 had employees at the time you're pointing it out can get a pass. Ok...

I didn't say it was. I'm just saying modders added triplanar mapping to KSP. Nothing about the old PQS precluded it - which is what Nate told us Claiming that it was 'impossible' to support a feature under the old system when modders, who don't even have full access to the code, added, is a falsehood. Especially because his explanation makes no sense to someone who knows the jargon he's speaking about.

I really suggest you consult with specialists before you make these posts then, because you're saying things that are on the face of it, not true. You've said PQS+ unlocks trilinear texturing. That's... just wrong. PQS is a subdivision system for generating tesselated surface detail from a height map. Triplanar mapping is a texturing system that will texture a surface based on its world space coordinates. Those are two different steps in a process. One is not dependent on the other. You can triplanar map a cube if you wanted to. PQS+ therefore didn't make this technique 'possible' - it wasn't impossible before. The parrallax mod I mentioned does it already in KSP1. [snip]

Your right, its not fair. One game we're being asked to pay $50 to endure a crashy mess, one game is stable and was oh... I dunno... free on Epic a couple months ago. Or you can buy it for $10. Sorry as a consumer I don't have to listen to a company's excuses and give them the benefit of the doubt. More importantly, as it pertains to this devblog, they are specifically saying they pushed PQS 2.0 to the limit and it chugs and doesn't look as good as modded KSP using PQS 1.0. (even your screenshot is not as pretty, though closer) . So either PQS 2.0 is worse than 1.0, or its not being utilized as well as it could be. So they want the community to wait even longer for the silver bullet fix, or just deal with uglier terrain on lower settings. Hopefully it'll be worth the wait - KSP2 in its much delayed early access state hasn't been.

Squad did do better-than-weekly comms right before/after a release. If you want to compare apples to apples, either compare Squad's comms close to a version update - just a version update! to KSP2's comms with this disasterous launch, where we've only gotten some reasonable details now 2 weeks later. Or compare Squad's comms to KSP2's during the development, which was at the best of times monthly, and usually worse. Squad was doing version updates every 3 months, and leaking some teasers about it over the course of the update . And then keep in mind that Squad was a smaller developer with a smaller CM team. Also Squad developers jumped on twitch streams and answered direct questions about updates after many of the last version updates - something I think the developers of KSP2 would be scared to do.

Btw Chris, sorry you have to be exposed to the fan maelstrom. Sucks to be on the job such a short time and have to deal with it. I've been there. At least none of it is your fault. We're not reacting to your work, just KSP2's long history of overhyping and underdelivering,

Guess which one of these screenshots is modded KSP1, and which is KSP2? Maybe KSP2 has more quads in scene, or is running more lines of shader code, but subjectively - I know which game's appearance I prefer. But even just looking for tesselation density, and not admiring how much better modded KSP1's scatter and lighting and terrain textures are - look at the horizon lines. I can see more visible poly corners on KSP2 than I can on modded KSP1. So maybe... KSP2 doesn't actually do that many more poly's, or maybe they just use them very poorly.

The problem is that Nate's big list is a list of low hanging, minor issues, mostly. They haven't tackled the key high priority bugs yet, or made improvements to the in-game performance, so releasing just that list would look like slapping a bandaid on a gunshot wound.

Totally agree. I think KSP1's style is called Skeumorphism. What I'm saying here is that style was the overriding concern when updating KSP2's UI vs functionality. Rather than picking the most readable UI that can give the player the most screen space while conveying necessary information - and they applying a appropriate style to that - my guess is they picked this weird space-invaders/1980's Aliens movie UI and then slapped things into that

If PQS is such garbage that KSP2's 'PQS+' system that they optimized and reworked and 'pushed to its limits' is limited to taking 24ms on a 1060 then how come modders (Parrallax in particular) - who have work around both the limitations of the old PQS system - have managed to make the old PQS system on KSP look better than KSP2 & be performant enough to run on older hardware. Also - why wait till now to implement CBT (unfortunate acronym there). Even if we say KSP2 got a restart in 2020 - shouldn't they have learned from both KSP1 and KSP2 that PQS wasn't going to work out for them? Some of this is really good detail and I appreciate the engineer for writing it. Some of it feels like the standard KSP2 spin and nonsense to make it seem like the emperor is still wearing underwear even after they admit he's mostly naked. Guys, you've released the game. We know what it looks like. Please stop with the marketting spin.

@MoonsI mostly agree with you. I think there have been minor improvements, like the ones Shadowzone cites,. The KSP UI was put together over years and a bit slapdash but understandable given it was a 100% new type of simulation and everything has to be learned as the game evolved, and they never took the time to do a full redo of the UI. Modders also never did it so it was likely a very difficult thing to do, was.loelly too entwined with other code. I mean look at how airline UIs have evolved over the years. KSP2 had a clean slate and all that learning to be able to make improvements, and it came up with a few things that were better, like orthographic view in the VAB. But the amount of progress is...pretty damn low. So either KSP's UI was already close to ideal (unlikely) or improving viewability and functionality was not a key priority for KSP2. Remember when the Kerbals were front and center in the UI? Good thing enough people complained that at least that turd decision was changed. Amd some things are just pure face palm downgrades like the giant all in one part window. Given the nature of that team and what they've done with the rest of the game, I'm 100% certain that thier overall creative direction was much more style > function. And they 'stylized' the UI. I think that's what you're likely to get when the creative director is an artist rather than a more systems oriented developer. Hopefully this time they've made the UI more moddable, so that modders can do thier own version.

As a prank about a year ago, someone put KSP1 with some visual enhancement mods on their machines, and they thought thier jobs were already finished, so they took the last year off. Only realized a week before release that it wasn't KSP2.

lol I should have known you'd have a director title. My latest gig I talk to the CEO and CTO of the studio every week or two to keep them updated, since I concepted the thing. Also an 8 figure project. But I'm a lead so I actually still do real work too, while the directors fluff about. Wouldn't have it any other way. Director might as well mean 'chief waste of other people's time' at most of the studios I've been at. Not all, there's an exception to every rule, but most. Did you know that Intercept has 6 Directors? (or had, Paul Furio got the ax) For a 50-ish person studio? Another reason they're so far behind. And I've worked for a couple of the big 1st party publisher/devs. Shipped on more than one 100+ person, billion dollar revenue product. It sucked but I'm glad I got the experience. And also shipped on a couple facebook games that were barely worth the few months it took to get them over the line, and I don't even put them as individual entities on my CV.. And titles all the way in between.

Probably a symptom of the whole project "We couldn't get enough done to be worth releasing it in 3 days... let's do a patch in one week." "We couldn't get enough done worth release in one week - let's push out a patch in two weeks". etc, etc. "We couldn't make a game worth releasing in 3 years - let's push it out another year!" Maybe Take2 management will have to step in to force them to release even a patch. Then the KSP2 hopefuls can talk about the patch being out too early when that patch adds new bugs. Somewhat kidding with the above, More seriously though - if their processes are not good enough to release a reasonable EA, there wasn't much hope they'd be releasing patches at a high cadence. I guess we'll see what it contains when it actually lands - who knows, maybe it will fix most of the significant issues.

That's what happens when you have a development process and release planning schedule that's functional. It's clear KSP2s release was pushed out in whatever state they could manage to get it in, rather than any PR they posted about wanting community feedback and this being a considered move. EA for KSP2 is a fig leaf to be able to release anything by the demanded FY2023 date by T2, rather than a real plan, and keep some of the fans on side despite its buggy and badly performing state.

As long as we're giving each other the impressions we have, it's clear you're fairly naive and hopelessly optimistic about the rest, given the amount of experience you claim to have now, but I was giving you the benefit of the doubt... my mistake. Also my engineering days are.long past, but I do keep reasonably up to date on the tech side, no way would I claim to be an SE anymore. I think anyone who has hope in KSP2s management and development, given the facts available, has very little true industry experience, not at large studios or publishers. Were you nibbling around the edges of indie dev maybe? Or maybe you're just blinded by hope. If you've been to board meetings, you know the last thing a company wants is the embarrassment of failing multiple public announced deadlines. It looks bad to the fans and to the shareholders. T2 was hyping KSP2 heavily in it's investor relations comms just recently... thats going to look awful for them now. You should know that KSP2 is on extremely thin ice unless they can demonstrate ROI from further development spend. Heck, all of Private Divison is, given that all of their higher cost projects have hit big stumbling blocks lately - Outer Worlds new DLC is being planned massively (just featured on T2 investor relations), KSP2 is bombing (the article before that), and their project with Moon Studios is also likely up feces creek (should have never got in bed with that leadership team). Ed Tomaszewski (founder/business head of dev of PD) got out of PD when the getting was good November 22, he knew its a sinking ship. Anyway, feel free to reply, but I'm done with what had started as a reasonable discussion, but now I'm pretty sure you're taking on airs and blowinblowing.

Onion staging has at least been in real world blueprints. Falcon heavy was meant to have fuel crossfeed that would have been that -scrapped for complexity and reliability. The UR-700 was a rocket that saw significant development but never made it past the design stages for.. Soviet reasons and because it would have been a toxic disaster when it (inevitably) had pad failure.

"The food at this 3star restaurant took 6 hours for you to make! You told me it would be ready 3 hours ago. You told me it would be the best meal I ever had! That's why I kept sitting here waiting! And it's undercooked! And overpriced! And its worse than I can have right going to the food stand that has the food ready already!" is a more apt analogy. It comes down to whether the expectations are not justified. And the people who think it's ok to charge $50 for the garbage that got released after the years of delays - enjoy the slop that you got.

I've never seen one that was in good shape that got cancelled for development reason - always because a publisher has financial issues, or decided the market wasn't there. I've been on cancelled projects that looked good internally too. Thats not what happened here, because T2 had faith in the product - just not Star Theory. They essentially went on to try to make the project that got described in 2019. We know the team got pulled over - not that the game was in good shape. T2 may have misidentified where the problems are. People who are good at spinning are often very good at self promotion as well. Yeah I believe this is what happened. No need to question my credentials. I've worked on projects with absurd internal dates. Those dates just don't get announced because often everyone knows they're absurd and knows there will be slippage, but the business end is trying to put the situation in a pressure cooker. A public announce of a date typically means someone has (unwarranted)confidence in it. Multiple date announces with massive slips in-between point to severe dysfunction to me. That happens much more rarely - and ai don't think you'd want to be compared to the projects that do it, like Duke Nukem Forever or star citizen.

That's a very reasonable design, except... time warp. It makes sense if time is a real commodity in the game, but in KSP it typically isn't since missions can be of such widely divergent game clock times. One of the reasons that 'playing against the clock' in KSP1 career was really boring is because you'd end up grinding really boring contracts in Kerbin SOI over and over vs more difficult/interesting ones on other planets. So yeah - if you add some sort of time constraint, that design would track. But if you can 100,000x time warp and fill all your resource buffers, it falls down as a gameplay loop. Maybe something interesting to do with resource caps? That still has the issue that you'd never build anything but the biggest sizes your caps allowed for. Its all speculation of course, but this is at least more interesting speculation than my typical one with KSP2

@K^2 Your argument above does nothing to explain why the game was restarted. If internal people looked at what Star Theory had done and said "Hey, good job, you did well' and then wanted to make a bigger game, then nothing that happened after makes sense. 1. If you have a working mid-production game you don't scrap it and start over. There's nothing in the 2023 roadmap that wasn't announced for the 2019 game so there should have been nothing that needed to be redone completely. If you're just expanding the game - fine, give it more time - This is backed up by the fact that the current KSP2 doesn't do anything that even the KSP1 foundation wouldn't support except multiplayer and *arguably* interstaller. Both were 2019 features, so presumably if it was a 'good game' in 2019, it had the foundations for multiplayer there. - The current KSP2 is awful. If the 2019 version was good - then why the restart? Likely the 2019 version was not on track to be shippable at all.. 2. If you have a company that's done good work, you don't gut them and force yourself to be in a place where you have a year-long lull rebuilding a team just because you want to expand the game. Even if they want a bit more money for it - that isn't done. 3. You don't announce you'll be shipping in 2021 if you had a full restart because you insanely gutted the team that built the good version in 2019 and then also had nothing you carried over from it so you had to restart the project - ESPECIALLY if you're expanding the scope of the project. So with all those things making your pet theory highly improbably, I'll propose my own theory, as developer with a decade and a half in the industry. 1. Star Theory was failing to deliver. What was shown in 2019 was smoke and mirrors, chewing gum and duct tape. Nothing that was the foundation for success. They were meant to be shipping in early 2020 and they had at best a prototype. Reporting about the breakup says that they were also asking for more money and time, so this version has some credence and Take2 looked at a failing developer that also wanted a payday and said 'Nope' 2. Take2 took it over and took some of the team, gave them an extra 1.5 years to ship in late 2021, because they at least had that prototype working, and the team sold them on the idea that with that extra time they would be able to ship what they'd originally promised - Take2 likely did this because at least they wouldn't be essentially blackmailed by Star Theory. 3. The project leadership was the same as Star Theory's though - while Take2 thought they were solving the problem (the owners of Uber Entertainment/Star Theory out of the loop) they just transplanted it. So even though they had this working prototype, essentially the same feature set as the target from 2019, and more time - they failed to get far enough. But T2 owned it now, so they gave the team more time. Hence the delay to 2022. Likely at this point not too much progress had made because its hard to staff up a dev team, they only got their Tech director in late 2021, who would have been doing the engineering hiring 4. More delays, more slow development, more spin. Another delay to 2023. 5. Take2 gets fed up with Intercept's delays, tells them they have to ship something, so Intercept scrambles - they know their big features aren't ready, but they're a dysfunctional developer, can't manage scope, are perpetually too optimistic about their capabilities, and are only really good at selling a vision, not executing on it. so they dither on things till relatively late - what to remove from the build, what not to, etc. 6. Finally they make the call, and they had to cut out a LOT to get something functional - and that didn't leave them enough time to debug the release build. Hence why we got the KSP2 EA in the state it's in. The only part that really makes me wonder here is - what happened to the Star Theory engineers. T2 carried over from ST the design, production, and art leadership from some LinkedIn sleuthing. And much of the staff. Not the engineers though. And this is weird even in my theory where Star Theory had been doing badly (its even weirder in your theory where they'd done well). KSP2's core need is good engineering - both because its a very systems-driven game, and also because engineers are hard to staff for, esp. in the Seattle area. Not many of the Star Theory engineers had been at Uber that long to be Uber loyalists. Not so they'd be people who'd stick with what was clearly a sinking ship. So, even in the case where they'd done poorly, you think T2 would have taken some to maintain knowledge of the code. My only guess here - supported by how high the turnover for engineering in Intercept has been, and how the end result has the majority of its problems in the state of the software vs the assets (the design is hard to judge because so little new is present) - is that the Intercept leadership, for whatever reason, really does not work well with engineers.

@Jacke I'm pretty sure the best strategy is to ignore, and, possibly, report, this isn't normal discussion anymore, it's just unhinged ranting that doesn't deserve attention.