VlonaldKerman

One asterisk I would like to add to this, while I agree with the sentiment: I think it’s easy to make a rad system more frustrating than it’s worth. For instance, radiation for long term missions is a problem we haven’t solved in real life. If you implement a realistic rad system, alongside other life support things, the players first interplanetary missions will be excruciating (Kerbalism, anyone? It’s an acquired taste, even if I like it). It’s another one of those things that would be annoying to a fault if it’s anything other than a minor or transient concern at some point during the game progression, and not worth implementing if it’s going to be easy. Remember, at some point, the player is going to have big space colonies on lots of worlds. Are they going to have to worry about the lifetime radiation dosage of all of their kerbals? Or will there be a system to automate monitoring of radiation dosage? As the complexity and the multitude of considerations for each rocket with kerbals in it grows, the harder it will be to integrate individual mission gameplay into the late-game colonization gameplay loop.

What about the resource being science/tech? In KSP 1, it is relatively easy to gain science and progress quite quickly if you have even a basic sense for the gameplay (I landed on Mun/Minmus and got tons of science even the first time I played). In KSP 2, this early progression experience could be ratcheted up in terms of engineering difficulty to a small extent. The obvious concern here is that new players will find it frustrating. But I think this is a misunderstanding of the intended KSP audience. In my mind, the core KSP player is one who relishes in an interesting challenge. To reference another forum thread, many KSP players like the Lego philosophy for making fuel tanks as opposed to procedural tanks like those in Juno because it is a way of imposing structural constraints (though they don’t want the fail state to be comical bending of the rocket). When I was an inexperienced player, I enjoyed having to accomplish increasingly difficult mission parameters with primitive Kerbal technology. I often set my sights too high and failed, but every now and then I did something like landing on the Mun with several fewer tech nodes than one might think they need. However, this type of challenge goes away pretty early in the stock science mode with default multipliers. You can easily unlock a huge fraction of the tech tree in the Kerbin system without the use of labs or without my completionist/perfectionist mission designs. KSP 2 can do better in this regard, and I think that available tech is a good constraint in the early game, because it also mirrors humanity’s current state wrt. space exploration, which may one day give way to a resource constraint in real life. KSP 2 could mirror that progression without the tedium of funds and contracts.

At a certain point, the player base is going to be so small they’re going to have trouble finding bugs…

I was thinking of mods like MKS, with deep ISRU mechanics. I didn’t want to starts listing mods because the list would be very long and I would certainly miss things! I can see how it’s unclear, though. To clarify: I didn’t mean that the code could literally be copied and pasted- that would be impossible. I meant “copy” in the sense of, take note of the mechanic, and program a new system that takes heavy inspiration from the ground up, which, to your point, would allow for better optimization. In fact, for me personally, optimization is the whole point of buying a new game. If I wanted features that were buggy and laggy, I would stick with my huge KSP 1 mod pack. So I think we are in agreement.

I agree- it’s not a matter of “faking” really, but I suspect they knew they were “overhyping” it at the time; it just depends if you consider that fully a lie or not. The good news about KSP 2 multiplayer is that I think most of the player base actually doesn’t care that much about it, and they would be fine if it gets added on in the distant future. To the extent that they care anyways, it’s probably largely on principle, rather than the prospect of getting good use out of the multiplayer.

Imagine I’m working on another game which no one here has an emotional stake in. I announce in 2019 that it will release in 2020, and then I release videos of a unicorn standing around while I talk about all of the awesome things I’m programming for the unicorn to do, and there is small print at the bottom of the screen that says “Not gameplay footage.” Four years later, I release a demo of a heavily pixelated miniature pony with no wings and no horns. It runs at 5fps, and when you try and mount the horse, it wiggles around uncontrollably before igniting into flames. Remember, when this media was released, it was already after the initial full release date for the game. Many people logically concluded that they didn’t want to show gameplay, but we had no reason to expect it was just “concept art.” Again, I’m not an expert, but in your experience, are you often releasing pure unimplemented concept art a year+ after the game was supposed to release, and months before you claim that you will release the finished game? Surely the consumer is not expected to hear the devs talking about their internal build with colonies in the background of a test asset preview after the game was supposed to release because they’re “taking extra time to ensure quality” and conclude that it’s concept art? There is a difference between “not fully implemented” and “currently a 3-d object in a CAD with lots of hopes and dreams”. When they show a bunch of assets and animations while talking about what they’re going to do (and claiming they are playable in an internal build!) one naturally assumes said assets are in the “not fully implemented” category, but four years later and… I would say that as a non-super-genious-game-developer-savant, I personally was at least led in slightly the wrong direction.

To my eye they’re the opposite. They’re very rough, with no UI and ugly placeholder info about each of the players overlaid on the scene. That’s exactly what I’d expect to see of a feature that’s in development but not close to release. If they did mock them up, why do you think they didn’t bother using the game UI as a base and pasting in some pretty multiplayer labels and controls? Scenario one: screenshots show rudimentary UI. Person a: The screenshots look fake Person b: Obviously they look bare bones- what else would you expect at this stage? Scenario two: screenshots have clean multiplayer UI. Person a: There’s no way they have a clean UI but no anti aliasing yet. Prob fake. Person b: Why would they fake this? The UI looks so advanced- if they were faking it, it would look much simpler because why bother with making it look finished? In all seriousness, I do think Alexoff has a point about the dev screenshots, at the very least in the sense that it’s misleading to show a bunch of assets and talk about all the great things you’re implementing when they are at that point just 3-D models. With respect to multiplayer, I’m not an expert, but I expect that it’s much easier to get a basic multiplayer that allows devs to be in the same world thrown together than it is to make something which has 100% functionality and stability like an actual multiplayer release. So again, it’s not really “fake” but is misleading. With regards to the screenshot at hand about heating, who knows.

I actually am not sure it’s this- obv something happened a couple of years ago that screwed development. There are two narratives that could be true: 1) Incompetence screwed development and it’s still there so future development will be impeded, potentially fatally. 2) It was a problem which they solved by restarting, so now they’re behind, but development should continue without sever incompetence. It’s hard to tell which of these is true. But it is important- this is what I try to communicate to those who say, “Whatever happened is water under the bridge, they’re in EA now and I’m just going to support them; they’ll finish eventually.” What the actual problem was/is probably goes beyond Nate Simpson. He’s a nice scapegoat, but I doubt one person is responsible for what we see- like I said, it’s probably either widespread or deep incompetence or another problem that’s out of Nate’s control. With regards to the question of “what is going on, why hasn’t anyone come clean” I wouldn’t expect Nate to be in a position to do so. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to direct your frustration at him- that’s his job, that’s why he’s paid the big bucks. But I doubt it’s actually really in his lap. They were supposed to be different- ie. new core physics, graphics, etc. systems that would scale more effectively and performantly. However, many or most of those are not in place. I made a thread about this a while ago. In other words, they are supposed to be different from the ground up (this is also the rationale some use to justify the long development time and unadvanced state of the game). However, they are factually not, in many ways. At least not yet. Perhaps there are tons of systems laying around which are 80% ready and haven’t yet been integrated into the main build, and these are fundamentally different that the first game. In that case, you would be right(I hope you are). However, I’m skeptical of this narrative. Time will tell.

I suspect multiplayer will be fine. Big servers will be chaos, private ones will be whatever you want them to be. I also suspect it will be less popular than people are expecting. As a side note: On the internet, I expect chaos, and draconian rules in response to counter it. Such has always been the way of the internet- is there any reason to be concerned about KSP specifically? Minor detail. Don’t worry- the core systems are solid

Long time KSP fan/YouTuber and integral part of KSP community labeled bitter automatically for criticizing buggy game, more at 12.

This is an interesting idea- part contract, part side quest, part mini game… I have this vision in my head of getting an alert that Jeb has lost a sandwich on minmus, and launching a little drone/satellite to find the sandwich and return it to Kerbin. That would be perfect in a dumb way. It reminds me of that animated short where they get a birthday cake on eve. Not to get political, but THIS is how you include silliness in the game (looking at you rocket wobble).

Go back to a lot of the dev communications from when EA was released… they absolutely said that. It was a rhetorical question- I wasn’t demanding an answer. Just because they are stuck between a rock and a hard place and can’t answer the question doesn’t mean people can’t be frustrated with it. They made a mistake when releasing the game as it is/was, and the can’t stop people from being rightfully mad about that until they fix it. That’s life. Point taken, you may be correct. At that time, I was only watching KSP videos, because I couldn’t afford a PC. Also, it seems like their new heat model is much better than even the current KSP one, so it’s not directly comparable. Not enough time to make the game (because developement hell and bad management) This would’ve been good to know before the EA release, was my point. All in all, I just hope that they are rid of the problems that led to the EA launch. Hopefully we’ll have reentry heating soon. I am, however, skeptical of the feasibility of some of the features in the heating dev blog, like shadows affecting heat, proximity to lava, etc.

While I appreciate that they’ve increased communication and transparency about the current state of the game, I don’t think that addresses the driver of the negativity on the forums. Put simply, the game is not worth $50 right now. This means that it must one day be worth $50 for your money to count (actually, with inflation + time value of money it should one day be worth more than $50). The past allows you to predict the future, so early adopters, especially when the game is this early, are naturally curious as to how the game is at this early or a stage after years and years of dev time, and after several statements that were certainly misleading (take a shot for every time they said, “we’re taking our time to do it right”), and a large marketing campaign alongside a high-production-value trailer that all seemed to indicate the game would be in a better state (yeah I know the trailer said something like “join the adventure” but is that really a fair warning?). The question is clearly “why”. Why so unfinished, why the big price, why the big marketing, why the gaslighting when they say, “It’s early access” despite the fact that a reasonable person could’ve easily expected more. Crucially, why are so few of the fundamental back-end system revamps which will allow the game to fulfill its ambition in place? From a bureaucracy standpoint, I don’t expect them to be allowed to answer the question, so I don’t have it out for the devs themselves. But I’m still frustrated. All in all, I hope the game succeeds, and I’ll continue to cheer on the devs when I think they’re doing the right things, etc. But I think our collective memories might be too short, and that is causing us to forget all of the pre-release footage detailing better planet surfaces, in-implemented features, core system updates, etc., and the constant implication that when it came to releasing the game, quality took precedent over expediency. It seems like most people forgot, that they claimed the game would release in 2020, and they never said the words early access until some time in 2022! There’s no way to spin that. I can find mentions of part heating systems in the changelog for KSP v0.13, and I think reentry visuals were added in 0.19.2. So a little earlier in the process…

I’ve noticed a lot of discussion in this forum about game systems which I think benefit from the example of KSP 1 mods. For instance, there has been argument about the way in which colonies should share resources. Since this is the development suggestion/discussion page, I would like to highlight some places where KSP 1 mods have kind of “figured it out” to some extent: - Basic life support (less punishing than Kerbalism) - Colony Supply Management - ISRU - Supply route automation - Interstellar capable engines - Other solar systems - Rocket wobble (many parts mods have very large/long or procedural parts to reduce joint connections and minimize wobble) - Much, much more In some cases, I think mods can be almost literally copied, and with minimal streamline and improved performance, it is basically perfect. In other cases, there are lessons to be learned- for instance the variety of extra large parts indicates that players in fact DO NOT like wobble or view it as integral to the late game experience at least. I’m sure the devs are looking to mods for inspiration (and staff!) but it seems like a lot of people posting here forget that we already have blueprints for successful gameplay in a lot of key areas, and as a result they argue unnecessarily. Am I off-base or redundant?

I think the best way to approach this is the way KSP 1 mods tend to work- there are a few resources which are rare and require you to go to different places. But mostly, the issue is transport. It ends up being much easier to mine things on Duna than it is to mine them on Kerbin and send them to Duna. Thus, there is no need for cheap “plot holes” like there being no ore on Kerbin, it simply makes more sense to use ISRU, especially when building/launching ships from other worlds. Same goes for fuel. Remember in The Martian when the MAV uses the Martian atmosphere to make its fuel? It doesn’t do that because there is no fuel on Earth- it does that for weight efficiency purposes.

If I understand correctly, you are giving an example where the wiggle of the decouplers act as a sort of shock absorber. In other words, if the decouplers had INFINITE give, no energy would be transferred to the main vehicle. When they have ZERO wiggle, all of the booster energy is transferred. You argue that if all of the energy is transferred then there will be structural problems with the decoupler on the main stage (non-radial). However, if this was the case, then I would just get a decoupler with ZERO wiggle, and out on less powerful boosters. The net energy transferred would be the same. All I want is as much acceleration as the main structure can handle, with as few other variables (eg. wobble) as possible. With respect to torque, having radial boosters does allow for the imparting of more torque than a single engine alone. But again, I view that problem as separate from the issue of radial decouplers. Whatever the solution to the torque is (eg. limiting engine gimbal, structural reinforcement), it should not be to increase the energy loss associated with the wobbling of radial decouplers to neuter the rockets control capabilities/stability. Moreover, if most or many launches would require this reinforcement, why not make it automatic (increasing joint rigidity across the board)? If I have to add struts to every launch, that is not an interesting engineering/gameplay challenge- that is unnecessary tediousness. Struts should be a special-use-case part, as they are in real life (by struts I mean any method of structural reinforcement). The only exception to this that I would like is if they implemented variable-integrity fuel tanks (like RO), which act as a trade off between structural integrity and mass/unit fuel storage. In fact, in real life, I do not believe that rockets have this problem- I believe that the attachments of radial boosters are relatively rigid. If the flight parameters of a mission specify X g’s of acceleration, the body of the rocket is designed to handle that force, if reinforcements are necessary, then so be it. But whether that energy comes from radial boosters or the main engine, the problem remains.

In KSP 1, the MKS mod uses a resource sharing radius concept once you have a colony hub. They’re also adding various automation features to resource sharing. MKS is widely accepted as the best KSP 1 colonization mod. I share your concern that the game could stray too far from its roots, but in this case, I think it’s fine. There’s a balance between realism/integrity, and tedium. The great thing about KSP is, modders have already found that balance through years of development and community feedback! All the devs need to do is look to KSP 1 mods that already exist, and implement them in a smoother, more streamlined, more performant way, with some calculated additions/subtractions of their own.

I think that the resource model is a good one, for the following reason: The game is about conducting science and living on other planets. In the real world, launching to orbit is unbelievably expensive, even with reusability. Thus, any substantial semi-permanent colony would use ISRU anyway. This is true by definition- the cost to launch to orbit, even with substantial reusability, is simply prohibitive. Thus, if a colony exists, it must not get its resources from Earth. If the game were to have funds as a mechanic, and if the funds system was at all realistic, it wouldn’t alter gameplay substantially. It would add some tedious steps in the beginning of a career as you fund your main missions, but once you reach the point of semi-permanent extra-kerbin habitation, you would use ISRU anyway. To the extent that funds would alter your gameplay at this stage, it would only be a nuisance. I actually like the risk of a fail-state- I like being forced to plan extensively, test craft, build in redundancy, etc. However, I don’t think funds are the best way to do this. I prefer various gameplay/difficulty mods that add more risk to actual missions, and I can decide the fail-state on my own (I.e. if 10 kerbals die, career over, etc.). Besides, I’m sure someone will add a money mod. That’s not an excuse for bad gameplay, but I think it’s reasonable to leave niche preferences to modders. TLDR: funds are bad b/c they wouldn’t substantially alter player behavior in the mid-late game, and would thus be at best redundant, and at worst, tedious.

Good point, I forgot.

*Im not an expert on this stuff and I could be wrong but* Or they could simply increase the rigidity of those connections substantially, given that radial decouples have essentially one use case, and that use case almost always requires struts atm. Currently, radial decouplers are simply dysfunctional, but not in an “interesting engineering way”, it’s just a tedious way. Struts cost minimal mass, and there will be no cost/money system in KSP 2 I believe.

Is this actually true? I think that it’s only true when you are within physics range of the craft, not in the background, or, for instance, in the tracking station. I’m not near my pc right now so I can’t really check, but I remember noticing this when using Bon Voyage rover mod.

I’m pretty sure it would require a substantial rewrite to the whole physics system, as others have alluded to. Also, there’s no guarantee that it would work well and not cause other problems. So they would have to spend a lot of time on a fix that’s impossible to test until after the system is implemented- in other words, they’ll have to spend a lot of man hours before they figure out whether or not it’s feasible or effective. So I agree that they are likely holding off; I just hope that they do come back to this down the line when there will be the temptation to just say, “Yep, the game is finally done!” That is, unless the performance of the flexible joint system is too poor to support massive colony ships, in which case they will be forced to either consider static joints or change the way that colonies work to disincentivize massive ships, which I’m worried they might do and would be a disaster.

There could also be an in flight overlay, similar to the drag, hear, and fuel overlays. I also feel like the details of the visual feedback mechanism are very important, and I still feel like there should be simulation of flexing in some way. Especially for large vehicles- for example, skyscrapers, bridges, and other large buildings flex. Massive colony motherships would therefore have some flex too, especially if poorly designed. But maybe it’s not calculated on the joint level. Certainly food for thought. Overall, though, pretty epic suggestion. This is why KSP community is the best.

This is in fact a dub.

I think it should be configurable. However, I suspect that this will be left to modders.