Infinite Aerospace

Rose tinted glasses are a powerful accessory. People seem to forget that KSP1's code is a tangled mess, but when one hundred and three mods are added to it, and load times reach twenty minutes, it looks better than KSP2.

Thing is, KSP2 isn't broken, I was literally playing the game last night and it wasn't in any way shape or form 'broken', and it was perfectly playable and I don't exactly have a high-end system.

That's an interesting statement. He is 'looking forward to talking'. Doesn't seem very doom and gloom.

Yes, so then why are are people saying 'The studio is closed, it's over' when that's not the case? Development is clearly on-going until at least the end of June, what happens then is the real mystery.

I don't even personally understand why it was even advertised, and who actually wanted it. Anyone could see that multiplayer and Kerbal Space Program is an enormous can of worms. If they came along right now, as in Nate and said "Ok, look, we're having to crack on with this and multiplayer is going to be cut.", who would really care? I wouldn't to be honest, the rest of the game is where the value lies. A friend of mine that works with Unreal Engine said that exact thing, he doesn't really see how a physics simulation, with the time warp component can really function in multiplayer unless both players agreed to time warp at certain points.

Thing is, if Intercept is dead, closed, gone forever. Whom is updating the development branches on Steam, three of them have been updated literally twenty minutes ago, which is interesting as it's 06:37 AM over in Seattle right now.

You have to simply swap the files associated with the sunflare to whatever you'd like to swap them with, just overwrite the ones present in JNSQ. Just make sure they're names are the exact same. I had to do that with Ad Astra mod, as it changed the good sunflare with some janky one.

That seems fair with LS mods, though I can't really get away with anything but Kerbalism now. It's the best one for showing the perils, and troubles of spaceflight. Like, even having to deal with waste and such, and radiation, it's fabulous.

All of the part mods made by Benjee are 100% recommended, they're great and should be part of any mod list. Also, as for Life Support I find it hard to recommend any Life Support mods that aren't Kerbalism, it's the most in-depth one.

This is 100% what the sequel was intended to do (and does for what it's worth), to fix how hodge podge the coding of the original game was. It helps that a lot of what the modding community added, were going to be 'baked-in' features of KSP2.

What good does it do to make a KSP3 if KSP2 burned all of the bridges with the fanbase? Or are we going by the whole 'short memories' adage here? Right now, the community are basically condemning everything humanly possible about KSP2, who the hell would want to touch the IP again? Genuine question, not being facisous.

I suspect the real reason for this is poor mission planning, they forgot to add an antenna with high enough signal strength to keep us updated. Either that or they went offline due to their solar arrays not being aligned with Kerbol...or perhaps something more sinister, the Kraken!

Can't disagree with any of the above to be honest.

There is no mod/s to my knowledge that covers the fundamental basics of 'Colonies', at least not what the developers described. You'd (or people in general) probably be better off trying to implement such a thing into KSP2 as it's basically made for it. That said, there's loads of good stuff for KSP1, Hab Tech for example, or Planetary Base System which is really cool and adds a wonderful aesthetic to that particular category. Life support, your answer is Kerbalism and pretty much only Kerbalism, all of the other ones are half-baked in comparison. Science is broadly covered in Kerbalism. But there are a few mods that add more experiments and such, like Scan Sat. As for parts, Nertea's mods are a basic requirement of a good mod list, all of Benjee's stuff is solid too. But there's so many you'd have to kinda be specific about what sort of parts in particular you looking for? Utilities? You able to be more specific? If we're talking about stuff like cargo bays, et cetera, Universal Storage is a great starting point. Might I also recommend FMRS, for booster recoveries and stuff.

I have a mid-range laptop with an RTX 3060M and the game runs fine to be honest, 1080P all settings to maximum (except for textures) and I get in the region of ~50 FPS.

I think there's a degree of success here to be honest, but it's a hard case to make in an objective sense. I think I'll break down where I personally think the game does well, and where it doesn't: 1) Sound Design: - I can't think of a single person who hasn't had anything but praise for the sound design of the game, because it's brilliant. With my Corsair headset, I love the deep, visceral rumble of the rocket engines, specifically the solid rockets. The music as well, makes launch an event which is somewhere the first game was awful (and still is). 2) Terrain Implementation: - Kerbin looks so much better, like magnitudes better than it did in KSP1 and it's all down to terrain. There are mountain ranges on Kerbin now that are much more natural than what we found in the first game. The other planets too are much more varied and interesting in terms of terrain, the Mo-hole for example, the Dres canyon, the cracked surface of Eeloo, the high gloss ice flats of Minmus. You can't fault these improvements to be honest. 3) User Interface / Feature: - The UI in general is much better than the original, all the required information has been much better consolidated in the right sorta places for the user to see them at a glance, in terms of the map view I really like the visual representation of a bodies sphere of influence, and the SOI entry - exit. Again it just gives the right visual prompts to the user. Controversially I think the Part Manager is an improvement over the old system though I do think it should be possible to select individual parts, perhaps with ALT - Right Click or something. 4) Load times: - For a game that has EVE, proper scatter, and such baked into it, the load times are fantastic, whether that's the initial load time, or how long it takes to go from the vehicle assembly building to the launch pad, et cetera is spot on and kinda points to some of the work that was done in the coding side of things, spaghetti code be gone? There's a few areas I feel the game doesn't do well: 1) Colour / Shading: - There's no way to get around this, the game is far, far too glossy and far too 'vivid' in terms of colouring. The result is a more cartoon feel which I'm not personally that fond of. I think KSP2 would look fantastic with TUFX. 2) Manoeuvre Node Planner: - I find the widget thing a bit clunky in comparison to the one in KSP1, it doesn't feel as smooth for me personally. 3) Performance: - I think performance, on the whole is pretty decent for my, on my system but it was dreadful at launch and that dramatically affected how the game was received. Though this is getting better with each new build of the game, I think it's improved somewhere around the area of 100% in the period between 0.1.0 and 0.2.1 so that's obviously some decent progress. 4) Life Support: - There's a few in here, that are obviously subjective as they're my personal taste on things. The omission of Life Support was surprising, why a space simulation game doesn't have some degree of life support is baffling for me. One of the biggest reason we (humans) have never attempted to go to Mars to date is ensuring the safety of the crew, life support is an enormous design constraint in real-world space flight and it helps convey the dangers present, and inherent to space travel. I think the game would have been progressively improved, and performance would have improved and the rest would have been history.

There's a fair few examples of that, JNSQ for example with the fantastic Ad Astra, if using that combination with Galileo Planet Pack (as a second star) it totally breaks the EVE configs for that second system. I'm sure there's probably a work around.

To be fair, sound design and implementation was one of the best crafted features of the game and it received near constant plaudits. The whole point of Kerbal Space Program II is to remake, and expand upon the original Kerbal concept, this time without the spaghetti code and lack of atmosphere. I mean a game about launching rockets, where the rockets are generic, sound recorded from inside a biscuit tin kinda doesn't do a rocket justice. I can't fault them for pursuing that and it's one of the areas they absolutely nailed, same for the score.

Thanks for the clarification on that.

*Lacked the ability to do it in (insert time frame). But overall it does seem that it was, slowly but surely coming together, that however might have passed some arbitrary deadline.

We don't know at this point whether Kerbal Space Program is ceasing development. Whether the intellectual property will be handed from Intercept Games to another group, is another unknown but this is a distinct possibility given what Mike said, and the fact the development branches are still being regularly updated on Steam. I would assume they own the rights to Kerbal Space Program in its entirety. So I don't think the forum will disappear as it's still relevant. The whole notion of over-promise, under-deliver and running off with the money isn't really applicable because if the game dies, right now then Take-Two are going to be losing money, not gaining. I don't really have any disagreement with the final part, though I'm not sure incompetent is the right word as such. Kerbal II was meant to write the mistakes of it's predecessor and is in turn very differently coded, perhaps achieving this proved a lot more challenging than originally anticipated.

Honestly I don't see how anyone can argue that the game wasn't how it was because of the engineering team, rather than Nate. He is creative director, he's stated on a number of occasions that he's not a programmer and that isn't his 'realm' so to speak. I don't like to speak ill of people, it's generally distasteful but you've gotta square blame, if there is any in the right places. Not that I'm personally stating the engineering team failed, because I have mixed feelings about that, some good, some bad. The creative direction of the game was actually really good, don't get me wrong it was a bit bright, a bit glossy but those are all variables that could change as time goes on, I'd personally like it a bit darker, a bit grainer but that's my own personal taste.

Yeah that last part is inaccurate, Planetary Annihilation came into existence when John Mavor, founder of Uber Entertainment created it as a Kickstarter. The game you're thinking of, was Total Annihilation, created by Cavedog, of which John Mavor worked for, he created the engine for that game. Planetary Annihilation is the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation (Released 1997). The game (Planetary Annihilation) received Mixed Reviews upon release but after the release of stand-alone expansion TITANS, the fortunes of the game in the eyes of gamers changed and it sits with a solid 85% very positive reputation on Steam. Another game Nate worked on, at Gas Powered Games was Supreme Commander II, sequel to Supreme Commander, another spiritual successor to Total Annihilation (recurring theme here). Again, it was well received and sits with 88% very positive score on Steam. It's objectively a really good game, perhaps not as good in some regards to the first but better in other regards. For the record I played Total Annihilation, when it came out and it was a great game. I kinda wish the fortunes of Kerbal Space Program had have been different, and it remained with Star Theory. I'd love to see what Mavor would have done, I think it might have been better to be honest with him at the helm, no disrespect intended towards Nate. Mavor has since went on to form 'Galactic Annihilation', the title of his new project which is, you've guessed it, a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, and it looks absolutely awesome! Edit: that last part is slightly inaccurate, Industrial Annihilation is the title of the game.

That and no-one has said 'Development of Kerbal Space Program will cease', that and there are development branches on Steam receiving regular updates, so someone is still doing something regarding the game, I would assume it's the folks at Intercept until their closure at the end of June. Perhaps they've been told something along the lines of get "Get 0.3 wrapped up before the deadline and hand-over". I don't know, I hope so.

Nate worked for Uber Entertainment (former Gas Powered Games) so he worked on Planetary Annihilation and Supreme Commander II, both of which are still available on Steam. Planetary Annihilation was a fantastic game that could, and should well have been expanded on. But from a creative point of view, it's pretty solid.