Wheehaw Kerman

With all due respect, it’s all in how one frames it. Spending eight months in an echo chamber where nobody has any real knowledge of the development process, almost everyone is overstating every possible negative point, understating and omitting the positive ones, getting personally invested in being right about how everything is awful, and losing sight of the big picture would get anybody inferring the worst from any news. I wound up spending most of August through October away from the game and forums for work and travel reasons, and then I got a bit distracted (and disappointed) by Starfield. Coming back to 1.5 after a few months, I’m seeing remarkable improvements in most respects. Regardless of how one characterizes how they got there, it seems pretty clear that the devs are making progress both in terms of fixing sandbox and on the roadmap. My frame was always optimistic for long term, and 1.5 is reinforcing that impression. For Science! is going to be indicative, one way or the other. I expect continued improvement, some bugs, and snowballing progress. We shall see.

It’ll be interesting to see whether For Science! comes with improvements to the terrain system. We are going to be interacting with the terrain a fair bit more now…

This. Not a programmer, but the fact that For Science! is going to come with significant performance improvements etc. tends to indicate it may come with regular and foundational bugfixes as well as science and science parts.

Never wasn’t hopeful. The doom and negativity and angst is simply not credible - overwrought gamer/Reddit groupthink.

There’s a reason I don’t identify as a gamer. Saw the Yakez vid pop up on my YT feed. Did not subsidize the troll.

Well, is weekly communication that there’s no change in status of the fundamental bugs that are going to depend on milestone releases terribly useful? It’d be nice, sure, but weekly restatement of “we’re still working on it but it’s tied to chunks of the game that are under development and won’t be ready for months” won’t give us anything we wouldn’t already know. Sure it’s less communication, but I think it’s clear that IG is working away, and I’m not hugely fussed about fewer repetitive short term communications about long term fixes if we’ve been told they’re long term and being worked on. We already have the info we need. I think a bit more detail as to progress across the board would be more useful and interesting - not necessarily Gantt charts, but details on where the main focus of development is, how they’re progressing on the next milestones, how they’re balancing resources between milestones and bugfixing, that sort of thing. Big picture longer term more satisfying strategic stuff, in other words: the sort of information that’d quell most of the forum group over/under-think and speculation. If we know that the fundamental fixes are tied to features, it’d answer our concerns about those much better, too.

I think that fundamental feature fixes could easily be tracked separately from the patch to patch bugfixes - just stick them in a separate section at the bottom of the overall list. Ultimately, it’s not going to make any difference to the outcome, but people with more coding experience and time than I have might be able to make some semi-educated inferences from that information… I think that fundamental feature fixes could easily be tracked separately from the patch to patch bugfixes - just stick them in a separate section at the bottom of the overall list. Ultimately, it’s not going to make any difference to the outcome, but people with more coding experience and time than I have might be able to make some semi-educated inferences from that information…

I actually hadn’t seen that one. Thanks! The cutscene I was referring to was in KSP2 - the one with the telescope. I suppose the first evidence of non-Kerbal life in the game is the birdsong at KSC, but we’ve never actually seen the “birds”…

If the platform supports it, we could ask the mods to set up a Betting Pool sub - posts limited to expected timeline to milestone releases updated after each release, most accurate prediction wins, the winner earns undying forum glory.

And there’s a cutscene featuring a scientist observing a bug perched on the lens of their telescope, which I think is the first non-Kerbal life-form seen in the game.

I think you’re right. The forum meltdown if IG tinkered with the Kerbolar system to up the challenge would be massive. This is why I am looking forwards to Interstellar so much. We’ve been zooming around the Kerbolar system so much that I’d bet that most of us know more about it than we do about our own. Getting to explore a completely unknown new stellar system with bodies that are intentionally different from what we’ve seen to date is going to be an utter blast.

You think we would have learned not to infer too much from pre-release information by now :). Or, for that matter, hype ourselves into frenzies…

I’m talking about fog of game in science, as opposed to gating. Telescopes good enough to image the Mün and give you at least basic orbital data on the rest of the Kerbolar system should be an “infrastructure gimme”, like things like, say, electricity and the chemistry needed for solid fuel. If the Kerbals have basic rocketry they should have basic (circa 1950s) astronomy. IMHO they shouldn’t have Mariner-level data on Duna until their first flyby. So I’m largely in agreement with you. Ideally, something like what happened to the early Soviet Venus shots :).

I’ll just point to how Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto, not to mention a host of smaller objects, were discovered. And astronomers can’t work up orbital elements by eyeball. And speaking of outer planets, imagine our collective reaction to the telescopes revealing outer planets in the Kerbolar system :).

To be fair to the entire planetary astronomy field since, NASA and the Soviets didn’t use Kepler’s numbers… Ground-based scopes can give you orbits, size, things like colours, and surface features on the Moon. Farther out, you can see the presence of things like Jovian cloud bands, the Galilean satellites, and Saturn’s rings. Nothing like the kind of detail you can get from actually putting the smaller telescopes on flybys and orbiters closer to the CB. Then again, Kerbals are more risk tolerant than humans :). That would be silly of the devs. I’d be surprised if they hid something as basic behind a telescope requirement.

The hardcore spaceflight history nerds will point out things like this: https://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2021/06/engineer-special-study-of-moon-1960-1961.html?m=1 IRL, telescopic studies were fundamental in the early days of the space program. They were all we had to go on. And look at New Horizons and Pluto. My bet is that scopes are going to be needed to scope out Debdeb and its successors in Interstellar, but they might have an early game role too… That observatory dome on the R&D building is probably there for a reason. A fog of game in the Tracking station until you’ve first observed the planets with better scopes, then flybys, then orbiters, would be great.

Although it’s unlikely, I’m kind of hoping that once the last milestone drops, we’ll see an interview with the devs explaining exactly what the [expletive deleted] went on in the leadup to and aftermath of the EA release. I doubt we’ll ever learn why the EA dropped when it did, but what they’ve been doing since would be really interesting. My bet would be the bulk of the team has been working on the milestone updates and under the hood systems like the new terrain rendering and their common foundations in parallel with a smaller team fixing bugs, with the bug fixing being constrained by the foundation and under the hood work. A scenario where T2 forced IG to quickly rip the EA out of a parallel dev process in a partial and premature release resulting in slow updates to the EA as development continued on the rest of the game is more plausible than the “the entire team is cruelly lounging around laughing at the misery on the forum while mixing cocktails based on our tears” theory…

I’d disagree about the career carryover announcement. It indicates that they’re aiming to have enough of the foundations for the rest of the roadmap done and under the hood with 1.5 and 2.0 that the other milestone updates are going to be smooth sailing. I’ve been around long enough that I remember how updates messed with Brotoro’s Long Term Laythe series (not to mention starting new saves with every version). It’ll be nice to not have to go through that again…

The fact that they’ve confirmed that 1.5 is the last patch before 2.0 is encouraging in that respect. Let’s hope they’ll be able to pull it off. The 1.5 patch will be telling. If they kill a lot of the big ugly bugs 2.0 may launch relatively smoothly. I remember those innocent bygone days leading up to the EA launch when we were all yelling at the clouds…

I’d agree. I’m expecting the pace to pick up as the EA issues get fixed, For Science! drops, and more resources get focused on the remaining roadmap updates. To the extent that some of the underpinnings of the subsequent updates are included in the earlier ones, they later roadmap updates might start dropping faster as there’s less work to be done. I’m kind of curious to see what the mystery update at the end of the roadmap is going to be…

I didn’t really mind that in KSP1 - sounding rockets are fun. Heck, pretty much anything that you can launch in the game is fun. What got to me after a while was the Contracts system being procedural and frankly a bit nonsensical. If Exploration Mode is a bit less like a business plan for SpaceX written by a pre-alpha release of ChatGPT based on a prompt written by a second grader, hooray.

Understandable, I suppose, but the latter presupposes some shockingly bad management at a level higher than IG. If we assume that the negativity is overwrought speculation by people of varying degrees of business and project management sophistication, the possibility that the slow pace since the premature launch was driven by IG sticking to parallel development of the roadmap features along a long term plan by a smallish studio, as opposed to development planning to appease a forum rabble :). There’s only two more months to go before we find out, happily. I’ll remain optimistic.

Patience. Sure, the EA’s worst issue has been the fan base, but I expect we’re going to see feature releases dropping more quickly over time - I doubt that the next feature release will take ten months or so. In a year or two a lot of posts will have aged like milk, but as the game begins to flesh out and improve, the dev’s plan becomes more apparent, and all the prognostications of doom become (even more) obviously… um, hysterical, overwrought and silly, I expect things will get back to normal around here. The state of For Science! on release is going to to be informative. If the devs have been working on it, the core game, and the other roadmap features in parallel, it may be less buggy, followed by the next release in quicker succession. If so, I think that it’ll be fairly obvious that although the EA was released in the state it was for unverifiable reasons that it’s pointless to speculate about, the development is proceeding along lines that you’d expect from a major studio, and that all the anti-hype was just overheated forum speculation and can be ignored without loss. We shall see.

Nice to see a refreshing absence of whingeing pessimistic cynical [redacted]. The question was never if (unless you took the wrong people seriously), it was only a question of when. It seems like patience and optimism aren’t just virtues anymore… they’re practically superpowers.

Excellent news. Was there ever any serious, credible doubt that this was going to happen? Looking forwards to getting some quality time in with this over Christmas!