VlonaldKerman

I always felt that the shoddiness of Kerbal designs was meant to be taken as a transitory phase- because they are so reckless they start out with duck tape and progress towards tech greatness, mirroring the journey of the player from idiot to engineer. So rockets should wobble if they are too long and spaghetti like. But not if they are normal proportions. I have thought from the beginning that the framing of the disastrous launch of the game as a “Kerbal adventure in game development” is a manipulative narrative, and I think that the “players love disaster” line kind of comes from the same place. It’s not hard to figure out what people want- just look at what they try to mod KSP 1 to do. Many KSP 1 mods have massive parts, or procedural parts, to minimize joint connections which helps with both wobbliness and performance. Conclusion: players want less or no rocket wobble and good performance. That was easy! I truly hope the devs pull through and deliver a great game, but if they do, and if there’s still a player base, it will be in spite of sentiments like the ones Matt describes in his video. EDIT: There are also mods that add in realistic part failures. Note how none of them include tweaks to increase rocket wobble. Clearly, even players who love simulating extreme difficulty and disaster would rather have engines fail than rockets wobble!

Yes, I was being sarcastic. I think Nate also said they are fixing soon, so fingers crossed! Anyways, to stay on-topic, I wouldn’t be surprised if they release a new star system or two as DLC.

In your experience, does it show you the actual trajectory of your ship, or a random trajectory that may or may not be your own? For me, it seems to display a random trajectory.

Possibly way down the line they’ll add a system which displays the trajectory your ship is on.

That's fair- obviously you are under no obligation. I have too much time on my hands, so it's not a big deal for me. I appreciate the support.

I second this- rewatch the videos and post the relevant excerpts in the below thread! (shameless plug):

It seems inevitable in the modern era that a debate which boils down to testable/provable statements will nonetheless feature people talking about how they "feel." Believe me, I understand that people feel this way, myself included, and I understand why. The purpose of this thread is to talk less about how we feel and more about why an impartial third party SHOULD rationally feel a certain way. I'm sure you have many examples of marketing and undelivered promises- would you like to contribute to more substantive discussion by directly posting one? I believe that there are some clauses in the EULA that claim all player-created mods as property of T2. I don't have a quote ready for this, and I'll probably look to find one. In the meanwhile, do you have a source to back up your claims that T2 would be within their rights as set out by the EULA to do what you're describing? Or, better yet, a link to an example of it happening with another game? For those who are concerned that they will spend time finding evidence only for this thread to be taken down, if you would like me to, mention it in your post and I can make a backup of it in a word doc to post onto reddit or something in the event that this thread gets canned. However, whenever I see moderator intervention, it's usually because someone is being abusive, aggressive, or unreasonable- in other words, the opposite of the nature of this thread. They seem to allow for even the sharpest of respectful criticism of the game. I would think that they would be happy to see reasonable, substantive discussion as a counterpoint to the very posts which they have to remove. I'm not worried about them taking this down. EDIT: I'm not sure if this post comes across as combatitive- that is not my intention. I just don't want things to snowball until this becomes yet another broad discussion thread.

QUOTE Okay, I promised an update on my evaluation of the statement: "One of the nice problems we've had recently is actually members of the community feeling as though we're showing canned assets when it's actually the game; the game actually looks that good". Below are each of the Show and Tell pages on the forum that existed at the time of the interview that aren't obviously test scenes: - https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/202735-show-and-tell-the-kerbal-space-center/ The KSC looks roughly the same in the game as it does in the video. I give this a rating of TRUE. - https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/202101-show-and-tell-mun-terrain-work/ From orbit the Mun looks similar to the video but there is a brief view of the Mun's up-close terrain which looks much more detailed than what we currently have, 2 years after the interview with Nate Simpson. Additionally, if Nate was claiming that the stuff in these videos is in the game, it stands to reason that he meant that it was in the game with a frame rate of >5fps. However, it is unclear if this is a test scene, and he may not have been referring to this video. Therefore, I tentatively give this 3/5 pinocchios. - https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/201765-show-and-tell-pol-terrain-work/ The same analysis for the Mun video above applies to this Show and Tell about Pol. 3/5 pinocchios. - https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/201418-show-and-tell-clouds/ In my opinion, the clouds in this video look (though it is brief) better than the clouds we have in-game. There appears to be fewer lighting/shading issues, and there are multiple cloud layers with a variety in the type of cloud. Again, unclear if this is a test scene. If it isn't, then I would say 3.5/5 pinocchios. - https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/200806-show-and-tell-new-engine-exhaust-effects/ It's been a while since I played KSP 2 and saw the exhaust effects, but based on my memory, these look much more HD and better overall. These exist in a test scene, but still. Until I boot up KSP 2 again and look for myself, I'll hold off on rating this one.

Thank you for this very thoughtful post, I mostly agree with your sentiments here. I'd like to respond specifically to some of your statements: I completely agree. I'll get to this later in my post. I generally find this to be true as well, however I would like to put one asterisk next to this statement. While it is unreasonable to expect frequent community updates which each address tons of important issues, there is, in principle, a reasonable pace of development which it is possible to exceed and to fall short of. If the KSP 2 team was working at the speed of light (pun??? I can't tell) then they could release as many updates as they want and not have to make a tradeoff between frequent updates and substantive ones. However, if, for example, there was some issue with the programmers working on KSP 2, and they were moving too slowly, the PR team would be stuck between a rock and a hard place: release frequent but underwhelming updates, or release infrequent updates to the dismay of the community, but address many issues in each one. Again, though, there is a way around this problem: develop the game at a sufficient pace. In this hypothetical (but maybe not hypothetical), the criticism which is directed at (relatively) innocent PR people who are stuck doing their job ought to be directed at the actual developers themselves as well as the high-level administrators who control the PR narrative. Whether or not the community on the forum has reasonable expectations for the pace of development of the game, though, as I'm sure we agree, is a different matter. I have a lot of time on my hands these days, and I do find myself making KSP 2 posts in bursts that last for a few days, then backing away a lot and letting things ruminate. It's definitely a positive thing to do- I love rock climbing, for instance. Finally, I'd just like to plug some of the forum pages which I've started, including the one I just created which is dedicated to posts containing actual evidence to substantiate claims, rather than relying on emotionally charged rhetoric or hearsay. I find many of these threads to be generally respectful, reasonable, and constructive, if not entirely positive. Like with any online forum, there are the mass discussion places that tend to be more like sound-bitey news stations, and some more select threads that are more like old-school, long-form investigative pieces (to stick with the news analogy). If you decide you still feel like engaging on this forum, I'd be happy to have you there.

Often on this forum, people make reference to "the communication from the dev team," usually in reference to statements made in the distant (relative to the life of the game) past, without directly citing those communications. This results in arguments being a lot less grounded, not to mention actually making the legitimate points made feel considerably less powerful. This is a thread for links, quotes, videos, and transcripts that are pertinent to discussions occurring elsewhere on the forum. Discussion is also welcome in this thread, with the caveat that if you make a definitive claim about something, it MUST be substantiated with an actual source! As a courtesy, if you are going to post a quote or something of that nature, please begin your post with a big "QUOTE" so that if people just want to scroll through to see the quotes, they can do so. Please, if you have a video, interview, etc. in mind, do take the time to find it, and, if nothing else, post a link here. I think it will do a tremendous service to the community. I'm doing a detailed analysis of my first quote, but don't feel obligated to do the same. If my quote is anything to go by, I think that there will be things in this thread that merit a prompt and direct response from the dev team- much more powerfully so than vague arguments taking place in various disparate forum threads. If we want an explanation of what's going on, or for everyone to chill out and calm down, then in either case, posting here is likely the best course of action. I'm not sure of the extent to which I can moderate responses/make sure that the above goals for this thread are adhered to (I'm not an expert on the rules/capabilities of this forum), but in my experience when people post rational responses in good faith on this forum, the conversation tends to stay that way, so I'm optimistic. Happy fact-hunting! Okay, here's my first contribution: QUOTE I'll start with an excerpt quotes from this interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RHbvphmnyE&t=9s which was brought to my attention by forum user Yakuzi in one of my other threads. It is an interview of Nate Simpson, circa 06/24/2021. QUOTE (emphasis added, some abbreviation, timestamp 00:09 - 01:13): Q: It's been almost two years since KSP 2 was first revealed. How has the games development progressed since then and how much of it was affected by the pandemic? A: Well, obviously there's been about two years of progress* since the last time we talked about the game. One big change is that we've been able to release more footage of the game actually working as opposed to assets in isolation. One of the nice problems we've had recently is actually members of the community feeling as though we're showing canned assets when it's actually the game; the game actually looks that good**... /... Obviously we're in the final stretch, we're releasing next year,*** so right now it's all about seeing these larger portions all get sewn together*** *into a cohesive whole, and it's sort of a culmination**** of a life-long dream seeing this thing actually become real. ANALYSIS- * If this is true, this disproves the popular theory that development on the game was restarted when T2 took over the project. This interview happened about a year after T2 took over the reigns- and there hadn't even been two years for two years worth of progress to be made on a new game. Additionally, it would obviously be misleading to say that "two years of progress" had been made "on the game" if it isn't the same game that he's talking about. ** I'll have to come back to this post and update it with the media that we had at the time of this interview, but many players are currently complaining that planet textures are lackluster when viewed up close. I believe that there are many photos/videos of things looking WAY better than they do now, such as better atmospheric scattering, higher-res terrain, etc. I'm not sure which in-game footage he is referencing, but this may be a misrepresentation- stay tuned for an update. *** Notice he did not say "we're releasing into early access next year"- he said, "we're releasing next year". It is often said on these forums that "KSP 1 was buggy in early access, obviously KSP 2 is buggy in early access!" It is understandable that the community would expect KSP 2 EA to be LESS BUGGY than KSP 1 EA given statements such as this which seem to indicate that they believed that there was a reasonable chance (he didn't even say might, he said that it will) that KSP 2 would FULLY RELEASE in 2022. This is a real example of Nate Simpson SAYING SOMETHING OTHER THAN that the game would release into early access as part of a long road to an eventual distant-future release in order to get community input. **** This statements intimates that large portions of the game (science, colonization, interstellar, multiplayer) were themselves LARGELY FINISHED AS OF THIS INTERVIEW (June 2021, ~2 years ago), and therefore just needed to be woven together. Taken in context, this makes sense if the game was slated for a full release in 2022. ***** Maybe a redundant highlight, but I'm gonna point this out anyway. In certain contexts (recent blog posts) Nate often makes statements like, "we're in this for the long haul," or, "___ is the best decision for the long-term quality of the game," or, "we're taking our time to get it right." He is not hesitant to let us know if he thinks that things will take a long time, or be slow, and that quality takes precedent over speed. Yet in this interview, he goes out of his way to suggest that the game is almost done and to expect big, final results soon, talking about "the final stretch... weaving together [core components]... a culmination". There is simply no way to spin this: This statement is completely incongruent with the way the game released, and when it released. In fact, it is so incongruent that a reasonable person could only conclude that this statement was either a delusion, a mis-speak, or a deliberate lie. What other examples of contradictory or misleading statements can you find? Or, have I misinterpreted this quote, or taken it out of context? Have the issues raised in this post (or others that are yet to come) addressed in other communications made from the dev team? Please do post below.

I believe I posted about this shortly after the EA launch- I'll summarize my theory: Until recently, they had never intended to do EA. They suffered repeated cost/time overruns due to a mix of technical/engineering challenges and poor management/etc. Then, T2 decided to light a fire underneath the devs by forcing them to release into EA. Thus, for the vast majority of the development time, they were developing the game as if it would all release at once, rather than focusing on the feature which would be present at release. The proof that I cited at the time was the lack of re-entry heating and bugs such as teleporting KSC- under no circumstances would those things be not present, and present, respectively, were it not for a hard corporate deadline. This is why many people believe (want to believe?) that the initial scope of the game was much more limited and they scrapped it when T2 took over. That way this version of the game is only ~3 years old. All of this despite the obvious large scope seen in the trailer and the fact that they never intimated that development was restarted- rather, they posted blogs, screenshots, and short videos which seemed to show a steadily progressing game.

While I understand and agree with your sentiment, I must remark that, technically, the week is not over.

Yeah for sure, I was just saying that it reminds me of interstellar. Also, why not have a planet orbiting a black hole with massive waves… that would certainly be an engineering challenge lol

Maybe I should edit my post and clarify: I am NOT referring to the new terrain maps/textures themselves, especially on Kerbin. I'm referring to the PQS/PQS+ system that the terrain uses to exist, which, in my EXTREMELY low-level understanding, is limited in some fundamental way. They repainted KSP 1, but they didn't change the underlying system which, if they did change it, could yield better, more performant results. And, they talked up their new terrain system as offering unprecedented close-up detail. Additionally I would certainly say that up-close planetary textures themselves are underwhelming as currently implemented- for instance, Duna's "sand". For now, I'll stick with KSP 1 + Parallax.

Wow. We need a thread which compiles all of the statements like this that were made, in my opinion. This is pretty egregious. I’ve often read people saying, “when did they say X.” Statements like this are important because they are relevant to the future of the game: he knew, at the time, that this wasn’t true. That speaks directly to trust in the dev team and the game’s future prospects.

Yeah- that’s one of the reasons I created this thread. If anyone has links to statements, that would be appreciated. Either they said something to this effect, or the community generally assumed there would be a new code base given the things they promised to achieve. It’s also been a common point raised by people who defend the state of the game that they scrapped the initial vision of the game in 2020 when T2 took over, and that the initial vision did not include revamped core systems and was a reskin like you described, and that the game is in an early state because they decided to start over with a more ambitious, ground-up development that fundamentally altered game mechanics and systems. However, this doesn’t seem to be true, which casts doubt on the idea that development was restarted. If dev wasn’t restarted, then that means that the game was in an unbelievably early state when they claimed to be < a year away from release.

Kerbalism mod gives long-duration science in KSP 1, but is not integrated with gameplay in any way. This is a good idea in my book. I also like that SCANSat gives you maps you can actually use.

We need the astronaut transfer van! And the elevator ride to the top of the rocket! Could be made procedural/automatic, like an alternative to the current launch clamps.

Would be awesome. Reminds of Interstellar.

I don't get it, why would you expect this to be in a rocket game???

Interesting. I just made a post about this kind of issue- I feel like we've seen/heard about a lot of systems that aren't yet well integrated with each other, which is concerning considering that this under the hood stuff is the most important part of the game. Also directly contradicts some Nate Simpson pre-launch statements that I think were in the vein of, "The core game is mostly finished, so we're releasing into EA to refine game features and improve polish" or something to that effect.

I was looking at this thread: And it made me think about my KSP 1 save that I'm playing right now. I have over 100 mods installed, including MKS, Galaxies Unbound, and Blackrack's volumetric clouds. I've experienced my fair share of bugs (exploding crafts, editor bugs/craft file corruption, crashes, removing some stars from GU which I've never visited despawned crafts which were in orbit around Mun), and the performance is pretty poor due to poor CPU and GPU utilization levels (~40 fps in orbit), which pretty much nullifies any benefit to my having an RTX 4090, etc. That being said, the gameplay is so rewarding that I still push through the bugs and poor performance. It made me realize what I really want KSP 2 to be, and what it is basically supposed to be: Modded KSP 1, but with better feature implementation, and VASTLY better performance. Personally, I think MKS does colonization pretty well, and while I'm excited to see what the KSP 2 devs have done with it, I'm mainly looking to KSP 2 to implement the same or better quality features without the bugs and performance issues you have to endure (no matter the hardware) with modded KSP 1. It is through this lens that I view KSP 2's development: not so much whether they're implementing new parts, features or reworked science. These things are nice, but they're not so different from what we already have with FREE KSP 1 mods. The NEW thing I paid $50 for, is the promise of eventually getting these things, plus performance and stability. The current performance and stability issues KSP 2 has aren't so concerning to me- rather, it's to be expected. What IS a concern, is when a community poll shows that a vast majority people on this forum don't believe the game has the "foundations" to make 1000 part vessels a reality, and most respondents didn't think the game would ever get to that point. This gets to the question of reworked systems, and there is a concerning pattern: - The physics system is supposed to be substantially changed, to make larger crafts performant. According to data miners, they've made some edits to the base unity physics engine, but anyone who's played the game knows that they haven't reworked the physics system in a fundamental way. - They demoed an atmospheric scattering system that hasn't been integrated. We don't know if it's possible to make it performant and game-ready. - The reworked terrain system has not yet been implemented. For now, we are stuck with almost the same thing that we had in KSP 1, with some revamped textures and new heightmaps. - The reworked heating system is not yet in place, though hopefully it will be soon. - The reworked aero model is fundamentally similar to KSP 1, with maybe some tweaks to formulas and weightings to accomodate procedural wings. - The maneuver system has been reworked, but creating maneuvers is very clunky and we don't know if the rework was fully successful due to having no interstellar bodies to test it on. - The trajectory system was reworked to accommodate long-duration burns and brachistochrone transfers, however it is currently broken. Good luck getting a Tylo gravity assist, I hope Tylo ends up being where the game says it will, but in my experience, it almost never is. - We have not yet seen the full persistent supply consumption and transport system that will facilitate colonies. - I'm not sure if they've implemented the location system which moves the origin to accommodate interstellar distances- if they have, seen my trajectories bullet. - We don't know what the new science system is going to be, but I suspect it will be fine, so not much worry there. - We don't really know about multiplayer. Presumably this will require fundamentally new under the hood tech. - I'm not sure where the tutorial system stands- I haven't really paid attention to it. I remember there being lots of bugs, but presumably those will be fixed. What remains to be seen is if these tutorials will succeed in attracting or onboarding new players more effectively than Scott Manley videos- that question is way up in the air ATM. - Am I missing a reworked "under-the-hood" system from this list? Do I have inaccurate information? Please let me know- I'm going off memory here. My point is not that we don't have all the features or that it's very early access, or that the game should be in a more advanced state- those debates have been played out (and are still playing out) elsewhere. My point is that, in my opinion, KSP 2 will live or die by these bullet points, not just in the extent to which they are implemented, but that they're implemented performantly and relatively bug-free. These core systems and their quality are what really counts, long-term. I've heard this sentiment expressed elsewhere in the fanbase and I wanted to state it clearly here. I've seen a lot of comments to the effect of: "Wow, KSP 2 obviously has a great team of visual artists. They are good at designing parts, planets and they are good at having ideas for the game. But we have no idea if that beautiful planet texture and terrain tessellation will make it into the game, and we don't know if they physics system will allow players to make use of those massive interplanetary transfer parts." Are they doing well at implementing reworked core systems? We just don't know. I asked this question for both of the Q&A's, and despite the fact that, in my view, it is the single most important question facing KSP 2's development, I don't believe they addressed it (at least not in my brief review of the transcripts). Does anyone have information that I'm missing on this? Or just interesting opinions? I feel like I see a lot of yelling about "BUGS BUGS BUGS" and a lot of yelling about "IT'S EARLY ACCESS OF COURSE IT'S LAGGY", but these conversations tend to miss the point if the cause of the low FPS is a fundamental issue rather than bug-hunting or other optimization problem.

I think Juno craft creation is much more based around procedural parts, as opposed to the "lego" KSP build style. Personally I like KSP, in that I don't feel paralyzed by infinite options. I do really like Juno's coding system, though- it's basically a drag and drop (think: scratch) version of KOS. Is this really true? I don't see why they couldn't just implement the Scatterer mod-level stuff, as a starting point. Not to say that they can copy the code or anything, but Scatterer proves that it can be done to a reasonable level of effectiveness and performance. This seems wild- have I misunderstood what you're saying?

I just hope that once the bugs are fixed people will come back. Me personally, I just don’t feel like building a big elaborate mission and having the trajectory be completely wrong and miss my gravity assist, etc. As it stands, ultra-modded (100+ mods) KSP 1 is less buggy and similarly performant to KSP 2 (even though my max GPU utilization is ~50%) WITH all the features we don’t have yet in KSP 2. Once the basic systems are largely bug-free and we have science, I’ll probably start my first real KSP 2 save game, and I would expect to see engagement rise exponentially once people are actually logging on to play the same save game day after day.

I feel like this is an attack on Warm Snow, which has more current players than KSP 2 and a higher all-time peek. I understand criticism of KSP 2 but warm snow? Come on.