RocketRockington

I'll be honest, despite the extremely nice tone of this, I almost reported it because yet again it's another post trying to tell people what they shouldn't be allowed to say, which is against guidelines. Instead, I'm replying because you seem reasonable, and I'd like you to consider where the fault actually lies, rather than blaming some.of.yiur fellow community members. KSP2 spent 4 years building hype. When in 2019 you're hyping a game for a 2020 release when it was clearly so bad that you had to release as a tech demo EA in 2023... That's not just optimism or marketting, that's bald faced lying in the extreme. Now, it's 2023 after all those years of hype. And of course, the community is fractured now. Some people are heavily invested in the project being good, to the point they'll latch onto any improbable theory of it being restarted, or all the features being nearly done but not quite ready - and I think a lot of it is just not wanting to be wrong after building thier hopes for that long, not wanting to admit they were fooled. Especially when many people will trash KSP1 in the same breath, having put all thier faith in KSP2. Some people feel betrayed by the hype, by devs who presented themselves as fans but went on to deliver what got delivered. Some people just want us to get along - but there's no way for that to happen when everyone talks past each other. However, since you seem reasonable. Think about this. The community for KSP wasn't good just because it was nice people - it's still the same people now. It was because the company who ran this game set a better model, treated its fans with more maturity. And the company that runs KSP2 set a model of lying to its fans - and now is starting to blame them for not forgetting past lies and accepting current garbage. As Vanamond put it, we demand "transparency" as if that's something to be scoffed at. This is the same model the most toxic game devs follow, the Call.of Duties and GTAs of the world: fans are immature excrements that can be lied to without compunction because they're entitled kids who just deserve to pay you for whatever you sell. So if you want to blame someone - feel free to blame toxic fans, I'm not gonna tell you what to post, even if it's the same community that was here during KSP1. But if you still can consider other perspectives - look at what changed. I don't blame the hyper optimistic fans, I blame Intercept management. PS: the walker challenge was awesome.

It wasn't based on nothing. Rewatch early videos of Nate Simpson talking about the project and you'll see why people had such high expectations.

If that was the case, we'd have seen more progress by now. It's just people spouting copium and moving the goal posts at this point who thinks that, imagining they're nearly done with all the missing features but not releasing them because they want to put the finishing touches on the game. They clearly are ok with releasing a lot of half-finished, mostly broken stuff, and previewing it to kingdom come before they do so - they haven't even previewed science gameplay at all, just a model of a part in the blender. But hope springs eternal - you can go back through the release threads here to see people talking about 'oh the roadmap will start falling into place fast' or 'we'll see KSP2 1.0 in 6 months'. It doesn't even seem like they'll have science mode out 6 months after the EA launch - time enough to have coded it from scratch.

Fair enough. Didn't realize lens flares were such a big perf hit that that was at the top of the queue. Last we heard it was the planet tesselation and rendering that was the key issue to address.

That's fair Jim. But even given that - we're also seeing paltry amounts of other development work happening. If only a few people can deliver key bug fixes - why not deliver those builds as they come, on a better pace, and not delay patches until some nebulous amount of other stuff gets finished. You were in KSP1, it didn't take 2 months+ after each update just to deliver each batch of hot fixes. You should be running on at least two branches, one for dev and one for bug fixing, with the bug fixing branch able to be deployed relatively frequently. Further, Mortoc is exactly one of the people who should be able to fix perf issues, given how many relate to graphics - why's he working on sun flares? That makes no sense at all.

Honestly speaking, do you believe the communications by Nate count as transparency? When he says everything is going great - and a large % of even the devoted who visit these forums, much less the broader community, clearly disagree? Does the mod team think everyone complaining is a whiner, as that comment might suggest?

When Nate tells people the patch is further delayed in a last minute statement, and that's good news? Ever hear the expression '(XYZ)ing in someone's mouth and calling it rain'? It's understandable people would be (XYZ)ed off. Nonetheless...I sense a lot more resignation in the replies here than anger. And not many replies given the contents of the post.

That's great, but you can understand why people are dissappointed to hear that a patch that was expected in 4 weeks, then delayed to 6-7 weeks (because that's more efficient?) and now to 8-12 weeks, when there are major bug issues and major features missing? Even putting in a few new parts isn't going to make people that happy. 12 weeks would be barely less than KSP1 did some full version updates, as you know. Did science have no development work at all done before EA launch? Is the full team at Intercept working on KSP2 now?

Kinda odd that the same few developers (Mortoc, Alex M, Chris A) keep getting mentioned. Are other people not doing work worth mentioning? Or maybe much of Intercept has moved on to whatever project requires level design and when Nate says the velocity is good, it's meant to be caveated with 'for the 10 people still working on the project'. On the one hand - it would make sense for how the project is staying funded despite low ongoing sales. And explain why the patches are coming out slower. And why much of Intercept has great morale. On the other hand...wait, no, it just makes sense.

Given Intercept's past, doing anything in the predicted time window counts as a win - even if its just writing a message to announce further delays. Unfortunately it seems like patch 0.1.3 can't land in the predicted maximum of 7 weeks after the prior patch (4 weeks + 2-3 weeks more would have put patch 0.1.3 at most at May 31, previous dropped April 12) But at least now people know not to get their hopes up.

Now we found out IVA wasn't the core vital feature, grid fins were, should have been obvious to everyone.

The engineering lead yes. The production leads came from Uber and went to Intercept. I think the engineering lead is a scape goat for mismanagement, since Paul Furio, who had nothing to do with Uber, was also laid off.

I thought that was already happening, with modders delivering big fix code to Intercept.

For point #1 and #2 - KSP1 is very much capable of doing those things. Proc part mods exist and work very well, for being mods. No doubt if they were part of the game, they would work even better. It was simply a design choice not to do them for KSP2. I haven't even seen anywhere from the KSP2 team that the issue is technical complexity, anything you might have read about that being the case is likely uninformed fan speculation. Custom scripting language for automation - it's like KAL was a start at this that didn't get far enough because that DLC was churned out fast. The breaking ground mission creator is also a custom visual scripting language, albeit for a different reason. In this case I think it's a feature KSP2 doesn't want because they're focusing on streamlining/dumbing down the gameplay from KSP1 for new user accessibility, vs adding more complex stuff for power users. Point #3 - that one is baked into the KSP engine, afaik. You can't dynamically load a new planet (or any new asset). And they use prebaked assets for planet textures, height maps, etc. Clearly it's not an impossible thing either, several games do planet gen now, but KSP2 is not doing it (opinions follow) because of several factors. 1. It's not a core feature they decided on early, because they thought things like multiplayer would sell better. 2. They decided to have a story mode, likely about finding alien artifacts in pre-planned locations and following them to different star systems and then the alien homeworld. They probably thought proc planets don't work/aren't needed for this. 3. Proc planets are for people who are going to play the game a lot. KSP2 is more focused on getting your $50 with early glitzy features, and maybe eventually modders will provide extended challenges for the game.

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Oh man I forgot about that video. Prime example of the sort of untruths Mr Simpson found so easy to share. Goes beyond just the standard 'talking things up for PR' Just utterly making things up, spinning it like it was working internally. That video would be a huge sack of lies if it was posted today, much less whatever state KSP2 was in 3 years ago.

It's not the communication style that bothers me. It's because the communication itself is completely bogus. PA was a flop. Nate was talking up a team that dropped the ball, really badly. Every time people put their faith in Nate's words that KSP2 was going to be this grand thing - eg that the core systems would be a strong foundation for KSP2 (back on topic, sorta), all those years of saying, essentially, that it was going to be better than KSP1 in every way, has utterly no basis in reality. From the contents of his other posts, it seems he would say the same thing about literally any game/company he was working with. And he made himself the face of KSP2. If you total up the face time of everyone else from Intercept, I doubt you'd have half as much comms as from Nate. Heck, Squad never featured some guy over and over - acting like he was the second coming of Will Wright. They just made the game and let it speak for itself.

Example here. You can read more of what he posted on reddit under that account. Unfortunately I don't know if the hypey stuff posted to the Kickstarter still exists anywhere. This is him hyping the PA team after he barely joined Uber Entertainment and had almost no basis for this.

If there's one bright side to how bad things are - it's that the modding community for KSP1 is still going and isn't fractured. It was going to take a long time anyway even if KSP2 was good for my favorite stuff to move over to KSP2. Now...well, I'm glad development of stuff like RP1 is going to continue without those devs or thier player base even having to consider a change. A better situation than if KSP2 was better but not good and the mod community was teetering between the two - worse than if KSP2 was actually really good though of course.

This actually isn't the truism it used to be. It depends a lot on what kind of optimization you need. For instance, if you're making a shooter that needs to run at 60fps on a console, you don't want till the last 3 months to try to make your game run at 60fps on a PS5 when it's running at 10 on a 4090. You make it run at 60fps from the start and you keep it running at 60fps. What its true of is you don't do fine-grained, code-obfuscating optimizations until the end. But if you need to cut your frame time by 50% to reach your target framerate - you better not be counting on fine grained optimizations to get you there, especially in a game where there's a wide variety of time sinks rather than just one or two trouble spots. With a game like KSP - their ideal strategy would have been to focus their prototyping time on getting a better, cleaner version of KSP1's key systems working to build from. I don't think any such approach was taken, based off of the screenshots/bullshots from the early days of the project, both during the Star Theory days & Intercepts time, it seems like they focused on building stuff they could demo/hype instead.

Unfortunately I have 0 faith in Nate. I've worked with people like him - they profess enthusiasm for everything, they get over+promoted based on their hype rather than their competence, they oversell everything they work on hard to upper management and let other people try to deliver on their baseless promises. If you channel them right, they can get you more money for your project, help build buzz. But what you never do is put them in charge, they're toxic for building good product, they focus on the appearance of the thing vs the reality. That's one reason I've been mentioning Nate's history of failed projects - if you go back and read his posts about PA and Human resources(which bombed and failed to launch, respectively), you'll see the exact same kind of language that got the KSP community on-side with him during the early days. I think at this point T2 must know this - but they're concerned that ousting Nate would rock the boat too much. Which is why it seems he's more in charge of writing marketting copy and coming up with community challenges and playing the game as an extremely overpaid QA tester.

I didn't mean to imply that with my post, just that modding support could be a better forcing function for a strong foundation. Ultimately KSP2 is in a no-win situation now because of thier past delays and decisions. They can't build back a user base without more features. They can't work on features exclusively because the game is so buggy. They can't only smash bugs because they're bugfixing ontop of a shaky foundation, patching a building that's made of the same cooked spaghetti that the rockets are. And they can't just take the time to do all of those properly because T2 was sick of giving them extensions and less and less of the fan base is willing to believe their excuses. I feel bad for the Squad devs and the recent hires who joined up into this mess in just the last year or so, and have to deal with this, but unfortunately Star Theory/Intercept wasted the chance to build a good solid game, and now the best we can hope for is they make the spaghetti work somehow.

It's because of the limitations of the technology. Making cliffs that are based on a height map look good is difficult for a variety of reasons to do with both texturing them and how the geometry of the cliffs is generated. KSP1 mostly went with the 'its ok to be ugly, just make the mountains challenging'. KSP2 is much more focused on visuals, especially visuals at a distance/from above for pretty vista screenshots, and as such they decided to reduce the mountain heights to make those look better.

Threads get padlocked not because of displeasure - but because threads that discuss KSP2s flaws invariably draw in people who want to complain about the complainers, post sarcasm, and people who fight back, etc, which gives the mods the excuse to padlock. My suggestion to everyone who's interested in the topic - just don't engage with anyone who's being awful or sarcastic. If you don't engage, it's not a fight, the mods can clear out the negative posts and the topic can continue.