Wheehaw Kerman

Also, why, after several weeks of some people calling Nate a liar, incompetent, and borderline fraudster, does a post from him telling us nothing that we shouldn’t have expected (that they’re working on the bugs and the roadmap according to a well thought out plan) and telling us to expect some new parts (which should not be a surprise, really) suddenly make these same people start posting like rational if somewhat condescending adults? Not that I’m complaining: I hope it lasts, in fact, but given that all the vitriol changed nothing beyond Nate telling us that IG was doing the predictable thing, was all the hate necessary? Was all the making negative tsunamis worth it?

So the point is that Nate’s post revealed that, guess what, IG was doing exactly what anybody who knows anything about how projects work, and who wasn’t going full conspiracy theorist, knew already: that they’ve been systematically planning and executing bug fixes, adding parts and features, and progressing the roadmap. Heck, all we had to do was listen to Nate in the first place. Did anybody seriously think that they wouldn’t be working hard on the trajectory bug? All the hissing and venom-spitting was completely unnecessary and only pointlessly turned the forums into a toxic snake pit for the mods and everybody else.

Drag was already being looked at. The only difference that Nate’s post has made is that the June update’s been delayed by the number of production hours diverted to making it. On the one hand this level of transparency and detail are nice to have, and would have been great during the pandemic, when I was checking the forums a few mornings a week for news, but pandering to the negative toxic members of the forum may come back to bite the team. It’s just going to encourage them, and make things around here even worse. They‘ll use this post as ammunition the second Nate doesn’t respond to their entitled demands or they find something to complain about in the update…

Player count-wise, I haven’t played more than a half hour or so sine April. On top of work, it’s spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, and I’ve been busy de-winterizing the back deck and back yard, fly fishing, turkey hunting, going bankrupt buying ferns and flowers for my wife, getting the veggie garden in, and explaining No Mow May to the neighbors. It’s for the pollinators. I will confess that I’ve never looked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if all games took a player count hit when the weather gets nice. A lot of people only game when the weather is too bad to do anything better.

Awesome. Hard to tell around here these days, when we simultaneously aren’t getting any comms from the devs and all the comms we’re getting from the devs are bad news.

Not sure that I should be asking this, but what exactly do you think “you”, whoever that is, “approving” a list of things you think you were “promised” will accomplish?

What’s wrong with DLC? I bought both KSP DLC’s - they were great, and cost me practically nothing per minute of entertainment. Great deals.

Not at all surprising to hear that the clickbaity title was just the tip of the iceberg…

How so? Is there another Unity-based rocket-building orbital-mechanics spaceflight/space program management game whose development hasn’t taken years in EA? I mean, you can worry pointlessly if you want. It’s your headspace, not mine. I’m just saying that it’s a bit early for worrying.

Dude, it’s been what… three months or so? KSP took nearly a decade. Given that KSP2 is being developed by a much larger, more professional tram that KSP was, I’ll start worrying in a couple years. Just because some people yell the same thing over and over again does not make it true, whether it’s flat Earthers, antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, or angry gamers.

I’m pretty sure the devs aren’t listening to the naysayers at all. When you get people complaining about the lack of updates and then stating that the updates are proof positive that the devs are doing everything wrong, in the same post…

I’d hardly call a few people having repetitive meltdowns on here a good will problem or a comms crisis. It’s a failure of moderation at worst, but frankly I’d rather the mods have a light hand, so I wouldn’t even call it that. They’re just going to fade away over the course of EA and won’t have any impact on the game. They’re irrelevant, and I expect that at this point the IG CM team has got their measure, and IG management doesn’t care a bit about them. They’re not a problem for IG - they just make the forums toxic for us if you can’t discount and ignore them. To your last point, the game is in EA. IG is going to continue improving and expanding it, and eventually drop 1.0. I wouldn’t worry - as the game gets better the drama will fade.

Thing that I wonder is why the negativity? It’s been months. If people really believed that Nate’s a lying psychopath and the game is doomed, why stick around? I wonder whether there’s a blocking function on the forums… It might be useful for those of us who can’t tune the anti-hypers out.

Well, that’ll get better with time. IG will drop updates. The game will get better. The toxicity and hissy fits will dwindle. The meltdowns will get rarer. Already it’s down to the point where you have a few people just constantly pushing the same narrative. They’re easily ignored. Things can only get better.

Oh, I’m definitely looking forward to science. I likely won’t have the time to really get into it until late fall, but I’m still excited.

Having a look around is pretty fun, though. The F2 and observe the prettiness for a while thing is not getting old for me.

So you really need to be careful to distinguish between facts and supposition, assumption, and groupthink. Internet fora are deadly for fostering the latter three, and accepting them as fact can lead to wrong conclusions. In this particular case, the wrong conclusion will just lead to me being annoying and sad until things get better, at which point I’ll feel silly. Not as bad as, say, the consequences of running off and joining ISIS, putting my retirement savings into crypto, or rejecting beneficial health care because the 5G microchips will let our Reptiloid overlords mind control me, but still something that I’d rather avoid. And frankly, there’s no real point in it. All the negativity in the world won’t save the game if the… let’s call them “anti-hypers” are right. Generally, the more angry, wild-eyed, breathless and aggressive the proponents, the less credible the alleged facts. This isn’t to say that you personally are coming across as a raving ISIS antivaxer who’s upset that his crypto is tanking again, just that the anti-hypers are leaning real hard into that vibe and aren’t coming across as credible. Until somebody with the same level of credibility starts dropping believable doom bombs, or things go objectively and incontrovertibly pear-shaped, I’m going to continue assuming that the game will eventually be released in a form that reasonably approximates IG’s plans. It’s the most likely hypothesis and is better aligned with observable reality.

So back in early 2020, I concluded that the global medical establishment would gear up, deal with COVID, and everything would be back to normal in a few years. I was right, and I didn’t waste any time arguing with the angry folks who were doing their own research. If you really care about being right on this, check in with me after 1.0 drops, or if the game gets cancelled. If it turns out you are right, I’ll concede you (and the other naysayers) one (1) Internet Victory each. It’s not a biggie - those aren’t worth much. I might even do a certificate in MSPaint that you can frame or something.

I’ll just point at Artemis, the Lunar Gateway, the new lunar EVA suits, all of which we developed using science and engineering lessons learn since Apollo to further the policy of going back to the Moon to do more stuff once we get there. We didn’t go to the Moon in 1969 to learn how to build the SLS.

Well, that’s exactly the point - we didn’t go to the Moon (almost spelled it with a ü) to learn how to make bigger rockets. We made a series of bigger rockets in order to get to the Moon. We also did a lot of science in order to learn how to build the bigger rockets and not die along the way. And then we did some science when we got there, and we’re using some of that science to get better at not dying and doing stuff up there, which in turn is going to drive us to develop better parts, etc…

I don’t write code, but believe me, the early discussion drafts of what I do usually get significantly improved through stakeholder input by the time I stamp the final version. The game has been in EA for a bit less than three months. It has some bugs. It runs slowly on older machines. The first patches didn’t magically bring the game to a finished state in advance of the roadmap. A dozen or so gamers, none of whom have any inside information, are having prolonged toxic hissy fits over it on the forums. All this is pretty normal - large, complex projects take time to properly complete, often things look bleak along the way, and gamer culture is unfortunately what it seems to be. So I’m not going to cast aspersions on IG’s work based on the opinions of a few angry disappointed people who’re having a hard time dealing with mild disappointment. If the game is still in bad shape at 1.0 I may wind up agreeing with the naysayers, but right now the prophets of doom are less credible than Nate is.

There may be a spark of hope in Nate’s post (the science package design) and something in the intro video to the EA. Your quote is absolutely bang on in how the science/tech relationship during the Space Race worked. We had very little idea of what the conditions were up there, but we lobbed instruments into space so the scientists could observe them (remember the discovery of the Van Allen belts? I don’t - not that old, but radiation protection has been a big deal since). The engineers took the science, designed the hardware to do what the program leaders wanted, we went farther, learned more, lather, rinse, repeat. There was a heck of a lot of testing, too, which is something that KSP Career mode frankly made a hash of. Expanding on something I wrote earlier, I could see the Adventure Mode Science/parts loop involving the player picking exploration or policy goals - launching a rocket, zooming around in planes, making it to orbit, Münar exploration, going interplanetary, etc. The game would then unlock tech allowing you to reach that policy goal based on the missions flown: if you’ve managed to get an instrument package into space, it’ll unlock early capsules. If you’ve managed to cobble together enough small tanks to hit a milestone (a certain altitude, into space, etc.) it’ll unlock larger tanks. And some sort of test flight mechanism for new parts might be appropriate too. Science would also reveal resources, which would in turn unlock early extraction and colonization parts, if your exploration goals were set that way. Building early colonies and ISRU would then unlock more and better colony and extraction parts once you discovered newer deposits and types of resources in new environments. So in short, you’d pick policy (as the new leader of the Kerbal Space Program as per the intro vid), and fly stepping stone missions to get the science and experience needed to develop the hardware needed to hit your policy goals. This would be compatible with the gameplay @JoeSchmuckatelli sketched out, be a little truer to the Human Space Program model, and would get away from some of the issues people raised with science in KSP.

And frankly, the devs’ communication is fine, IMHO. I’d rather they take their time and do it right, I don’t feel any entitlement to constant updates, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over not getting weekly progress reports. I’m already well past the sub-dollar-per-hour play:pay ratio - a good entertainment deal by any sane measure. If we get more and better (which I expect we will), fantastic. The deal will just get better. We’ve waited three years for KSP2 already - another year or two is nothing.

Amen. What Science is going to look like and how it’s going to tie into the other roadmap milestones is much more interesting. Realistically, a dozen or so people on the forums getting all worked up probably doesn’t even hit their radar. Toxic gamer culture is sadly a thing, and I expect that as professionals the devs are too busy executing to waste any time on speculation and meltdowns on the part of people with no real knowledge of what’s going on.

No surprise there. As I have been saying for a while now, the odds of TT pulling the plug on a project like KSP2 over a handful of gamerz being really mad because the EA version has bugs and runs slow on older hardware are vanishingly remote. The studio execs aren’t even laughing at the haters and naysayers, they don’t even think of them at all.