Picard2

Maybe a floating 'Report' button appears at the top / bottom of the screen you can click to open the report?

Really like the idea of being able to group things in the part manager, and use those groups in other contexts (like adding the group to an action, or have any toggle switches appear for the group in the part manager).

Yes! I hadn't realised why the post-incident report felt so jarring, but this is exactly it - the instant you crash it's there up in your face.

Indeed - the size of the first patch and the number of things addressed does give me more hope now. Still a long way to go, obviously, but the brief time I spent with it last night it did feel like a step up in playability - and manoeuvre nodes, intercept planning were a couple of the big ones towards that.

Yeah the labels are great, really good enhancement. I guess the labels are all two characters to keep them the same width. Not one I have a huge preference over, but I would lean more towards your suggestion of S/M/L rather than SM/MD/LG as it's just more familiar and easier to parse at a glance.

I find the middle click drag to be quite awkward myself. Not sure why - other games use middle click drag to eg rotate camera and that feels OK. Possibly just the combination of vertical mouse movement while holding the wheel (as opposed to horizontal when rotating camera in other games). I do use a 'vertical' mouse rather than a standard one, could be a factor. Middle click drag feels really slow at moving the camera, that could also be a factor. Maybe increasing the movement speed would help, or maybe something else - an option for a keybind to control vertical movement (eg q/z or something). Other than that, controls feel good to me. Really like the scroll zoom.

In the video it looked like the kind of minor inaccuracy caused by how difficult it is to perfectly time the start and end of the burn. We're always going to be some milliseconds out either end when we do it manually, and the fiddling looked to be mostly adjusting for that? To me at least.

Agree it's much better in my brief testing. Love how it now shows the burn length, which was a crucial missing feature. Really like the new subtle audio cues - I think they're new? - for when you're a few seconds away from burn. Would be improved by adjusting the top line - required deltaV before burn -> required / remaining deltaV during burn (or maybe just remaining deltaV) so you can easily see how much deltaV you have left in the manoeuvre as you're going. Also, watching the video, I wonder if the 'warp to manoeuvre' button might be enhanced by adding warp to 10-15 second before the end / before mid-burn staging once you're actually in the burn? So you can easily program in a warp to shortly before you need to terminate.

Thanks for all your hard work, appreciated.

I'm kind of glad I saw one small spoiler, because I would not have realised there was even stuff out there to discover, if that makes sense? But yeah, definitely avoiding that stuff now - fortunately most people seem to be good at tagging threads as spoilers or not! Really do want to wait before exploring so I can experience things 'properly'.

Even just sticking the VAB icons on there next to the part name would probably help a bit.

Glad I'm not the only one with that opinion of FlightSim! And didn't even mention the obtuse way it handles DLC, which can't be downloaded through the 'normal' process but also requires manually downloading and updating. I really don't understand what it actually gives them, either. To build and maintain such a system surely has a cost associated. Really hope KSP2 doesn't follow this model!

I'm kind of in a middle ground, I guess. Like you, I prefer a lot more structure in my sandboxes than KSP2 currently offers. Only ever played KSP1 in career for this reason - and that feeling of progression massively lacking for me in KSP2 when I can just build whatever I want with any parts, and have no real reason to go anywhere yet. Exploration is cool and all, I get the motivation, but it's just not enough for my tastes. Like you, the lack of reentry drama really does detract something important from the sense of returning from a hard, dangerous mission. In addition, often I found when I was exploring, I'd notice interesting things and want to check them out - yet also get a feeling that I wanted to 'save' the exploration for a proper structured playthrough. Weird, maybe, but it almost felt like I'd be giving myself spoilers by exploring things in a full sandbox mode. Like, I want to visit the other planets and see what they're like. But without any constraints on my actions it just feels, to me, almost like I'd be cheating. KSP1 does have just so much more 'stuff' due to the modding community. More parts than you could ever need, interesting new components and mechanics to give even more structure / reason to launch missions or visit the worlds. Comparing the two games might be unfair, given how long the community has developed mods, but it is a big difference all the same. But, KSP2 does have a lot going for it too (without repeating all the arguments about the current state). I'd forgotten what it felt like to have a KSP game load up in a few seconds, there's a range of quality of life features so to me it just feels more 'comfortable' (for want of a better word). I can see the appeal of going back, modded KSP1 is just so much 'more' right now, so much bigger, but I don't think it's for me. Until the science / progression systems arrive, I'll probably not be putting a ton of hours into KSP2, I think - just bits here and there. But I also don't feel too inclined to return to KSP1 either. I have other games to play, and will play them instead - while dropping back in on KSP2 from time to time to keep up with updates and so on, until I feel there's enough there for my personal tastes to do a proper playthrough. Whilst trying to contribute to the community if I can. This is why I bought into the early access, after all - to follow the progress as it goes, and add any feedback I can that might be half decent because I want this game to be good. That being said, I do kind of have a wish to have one final play of KSP1 with a nice big RP-1 install, but right now I've just got so many other games I want to play that it's just not close to the top of my list.

Yes, I'm sure there's a lot of thought needed to go into these kinds of interfaces. And I do think that's been done for the part manager - it isn't perfect yet but it's doing a lot of stuff well, and doing it right. But just not doing it in the right places (or, doing it in places where a different method would work better).

Exactly. I'm just thinking about the mods for KSP1 which did the same global list thing - you just opened a convenient menu, filtered by whatever you wanted, easy. Having this built in would be great.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is basically a few hundred MB launcher downloaded through Steam, and a few hundred GB downloaded through the awful launcher which maxes out your CPU for hours while it downloads all the game files slowly one by one and pauses downloading to extract everything one by one. Not bitter about this at all. By far the worst non-gameplay user experience I've had in gaming. Hoping KSP2 is all handled via Steam download.

Voted yay because I think it's great but only in the right context. But this basically sums up my view too. Global part manager is a great idea, but it's incorrectly tied to contexts where it shouldn't be used. When you right-click on a part you are making an explicit instruction to show you details for that part, I think. And you might need to view multiple parts side by side. But a global list is so useful that removing that as a feature makes no sense either. It's just two completely different functions you're trying to achieve: "show me all parts on the vessel" versus "show me what I clicked on". Having only one method to do these two different functions doesn't work. Ideally, I think single-part right-click menu should have a 'pop-out' button to jump up to the global list if you need it for any reason. So much clutter - sometimes useful but often not. Filter buttons seem kind of essential. Show me only engine parts, or only crew cabins, or electricity generators.

Maybe like cats who have some properties more like liquids.

My impressions: Launcher - annoying, but seen worse. Not asked me to create an account after the first time I clicked no thanks, loads fairly quickly most times. But agree any launcher just feels pointless. UI - fine at 4k, bit big but nothing too bad. Though I'm using 'big screen' 4k rather than 'retina-style' 4k, maybe I'd feel differently on a smaller screen with higher pixel density, don't know. There's a mod for UI scaling but I've not felt the need to use it myself. Performance - fine for me at 4k for first release early access. But I'm used to gaming at 30fps, it's a bit less than that on launches but in space it's OK. Everything maxed, antialiasing 8x, no vsync. Rockets - generally decent. One did have some weird floaty boosters, but whatever. Not a big deal, just strutted it up. Everything else flew fine. Been exploring the Mun and Minmus. Totally doable without flight aids. Not had any problems reverting or staging, or with lost inputs, but I've seen others have and it sounds very annoying indeed. Anecdotally, get the impression it may be affected by longer play sessions and repeated launces or something - in general my sessions are only 30 minutes so maybe that's why I've not encountered. Personal impression: seems fine for first release early access. Not great, but everything I've launched has gone fine and I'm exploring the moons. Price is absolutely ludicrous, no way is it worth $50 for what is there right now, that's such a bizarre price selection. I genuinely don't understand why it's priced at $50 at this stage, but it is what it is and we all make our own choice. The big easy refund button is there for us all.

I have, it's incredibly easy. Steam has a dedicated page explaining their refund policy. To request a refund, select a game in your game library, click support, click 'it's not what I expected', click 'I'd like to request a refund', wait for them to process it. My experience, a day or two processing time. Basically every game now has a 2 hour full game demo. Their policy is not perfect, but it really takes a lot of risk out of buying games on Steam.

Thanks! Yeah I agree seeing the automated ships actually flying around and stuff sounds amazing but probably not realistic (and maybe not a ton of value relative to expense after the excitement of the first few times of recognising your design inbound from Duna). Scheduling and stuff seems like it would need to be a must have - seeing your carefully designed exploration vehicles be unable to launch for nine months because you forgot to order in a new convoy probably wouldn't be a great time.

This is what I want, I think. Rather than 90% of gameplay being cargo hauling, the gameplay is developing the extraction and delivery systems which are then abstracted / simulated. Is it something they've talked about much? I heard a bit of mention of it but not too familiar with what they're planning here. Will you see the vessels you designed flying around, or something much more abstracted where a viable craft / route is designed and the game just calculates x units of resource y over time t from your design?

Yeah this needs addressing. There's probably an argument either way about a 'global' parts list needing (or not) multiple windows if you can also have multiple right-click 'single' part windows, but you definitely need a way to details about multiple different parts side by side.

Exactly! That's what I'm saying. Make contracts / missions serve a purpose in your program. Like your example of a refuelling outpost in a valuable location in the outer planets. We still don't know how the science system will look, but could equally imagine some sort of long-term base on another world where science is involved. That kind of thing. I do enjoy the open-endedness of the current career system - you don't only have one main goal (interstellar) but your goals are your own in that playthrough - so I do hope the new system enables that sort of gameplay too. But at the same time feel like there's a risk we're just fixating on the idea that grinding for funds is better simply because that's the only option we've had.

Oh I agree if it's just a whole mode filled with carting resources back and forth that's going to get boring pretty quick. I really don't believe any of us want a system that is just 90% flying cargo trips back and forth. For me, random arbitrary contracts in KSP1 were also just really boring. Like, build a base on this moon! The base has to include these random parts slapped together, and you'll never need to go back to the base again. A challenge for sure, but no real long-term gameplay purpose to it. But I think this all sounds like it has the potential to be a lot more interesting than just random dead-end missions that do have some challenge but don't progress the underlying space program at all. There's just so much more possibilities beyond what KSP1 offered with either random pointless missions or repetitive space hauling for no real reason. Just my opinion of course, and absolutely agree a huge amount of this depends on how well any system is implemented - space trucker simulator does not sound exciting to me either! But I am excited by the possibility of some actual meaning and purpose to the missions I'm flying.