Corona688

@JadeOfMaar Does MM edit the part files for you, or tweak the game on load? Also, taking suggestions for what engine to do next.

I gave into the dark side the other day, alt-F12 saves a huge amount of time in testing. I'm still keeping two rules, though; either stay on the launch clamps (infinite fuel / electricity umbilicals), or revert afterwards. How do you play it?

You can generate tiny amounts of thrust just by powering up a big magnetic field. It pushes against the Earth's own field. These EMdrives are driven by a magnetron, which requires - you guessed it - a big magnetic field. So there's good reason for skepticism here. At the tiny thrust being measured, it could be this effect or many other small-level effects, interference in sensors - magnetrons are notoriously noisy - or just plain experimental error.

We don't have to agree to disagree about things that are factually untrue, like this -- Saying so doesn't make it so. They're 100% functional and many have been redone twice or more. KSP - and any game which builds objects or worlds out of many individual parts - treads a fine line between performance and graphics. They've already thrown away improvements to avoid going over that line. Look. I can't dispute that the game doesn't fit your preferences. "This is what it needs to regain my interest" is also true. "I would not pay $40 for this game" is also indisputable. It's not that valuable to you. End of story. I only dispute what you imply over and over: "Their graphics standards are lazy". As a programmer, low-end gamer, and amateur artist, that's nothing but insulting. Read below. That's nice. I bet it can even do that on some of the cheaper graphic chipsets. Now, can it render seven of those strapped together with flex physics, at quadruple speed, on the cheapest GPUs and processors available today? That's what has to happen every time KSP physwarps through a launch. Modular part games limit their graphics for a very good reason. I really don't think you do. You take a lot for granted. P.S: You also take for granted that a terrific texture will still look terrific when downscaled. That's often not true. Something which looks better than stock in your settings, may look a lot worse to a low-end gamer. It's not always possible to please everyone.

@DeltaDizzy The mod is still really tiny, and I've had absolutely no feedback, so I didn't see the need.

Enabled kerbal G-blackouts, then tested them in the most cheap and punishing way I could contrive: The recovery pod performed beautifully. I only had to stage twice to make it do everything I wanted. It passively pointed itself heatshield-down, and the chutes all deployed one-at-a-time, particularly the "emergency" drogue which can deploy even at risky speeds.

The brakes don't matter, the wheels aren't what move it, it's the on-load impact with the ground which moves it. This really sounds like it honestly.

I really like that. It looks like it really belongs with the game's other parts.

That could have been the wheel / landing leg kraken. Sometimes when you load a ship, or approach a different ship, on load its wheels will clip under the ground a bit and repel it into the air.

... That word you keep using, I don't think it means what you think it means. That's fair enough: You didn't get what you wanted. I'm pretty sure you didn't pay $40 for it, though. Also, not being your cup of tea doesn't mean it's not worth $40. I cannot comprehend your priorities. Sure, you can fly straight from the launchpad to a distant planet with realistic physics all 10,000,000km of the way, land by the seat of your pants, then mine around in a rover of your own design without having any of it cutscened for you or even leaving the flight simulator. But the ground scatter makes the gameplay hollow. Most of what you want sounds very hollow. Five ways of saying "make it look nicer" with an explicit "at no performance cost" and an implicit "and all for free". You can get better graphics for $40, but it won't come with this.

I'm sorry, were you expecting aliens? The placeholder parts are in the island airport. If you don't enjoy sandbox games, you're not obligated to buy sandbox games. Right, you don't like sandbox games. You just want them to cost less.

I broadly agree with many of your points, but here: A $10 indie game like FTL is clever and entertaining, but -- at some point you realize it's a barely-animated card game with spaceships and catchy music. (And I'm saying this as someone who likes the game.) Is it realistic to say there's four times as much value in a realistic, build-it-yourself 3d spaceflight simulator with persistent and explorable planets? You're entitled to your opinion.

This would be really useful, especially when you orbitally assemble something with a mishmash of controls.

Because it calculates burn-times -- and everything else - from the raw acceleration of your ship, not the layout of your engines. This makes it somewhat idiot-proof in a blunt way. You don't need 13 control toggles to tell it whether you want to estimate main engines, RCS thrust, or aerobraking. It doesn't give a fig about your control PoV, either, which all too often makes it the first indicator of faulty controls. I'd hate to lose that. Probably related to control PoV changes.

I've done a tiny bit of that myself - see my sig. It's no coincidence that I started with the little engines, either. They're written in the new syntax and easy to mod. But plenty of engines are still written in the old config file syntax which limits your sound choices to a handful of 2011 defaults. Converting these files would be fairly straightforward if it wasn't for the particle effect options, which were also simple defaults in 2011 and have become complicated nine-option code brace things now. HarvestR may be the only person who completely understands how these config files work, or how sound works in KSP in general - he didn't like the Unity defaults and cooked up something of his own. So his leaving must have been a solid blow to the sound workover.

Another problem: Mods which want to take over your game, difficult to impossible to install in your current save.

Reaction wheels are still useful on a rover, especially in low gravity, but rover wheels should never have been wired to the same wasd as reaction wheels! It will intentionally try to tip you whenever you accelerate or turn. Luckily you can change motor keys separately.

Some of it comes down to how collision works in computer games, I think. Objects teleport tick-by-tick, and don't "collide" so much as "overlap". The game detects that and forcibly shoves them back apart. Which works great for a pair of spheres, but what about complex shapes? Moving them apart might just cause them to collide in a slightly different place, and need to be shoved apart again. Now, which direction is "apart" again? That's easy to tell if you're a sphere. Harder to tell if you're a flat square, ragdoll, or donut of fuel tanks. And what if you have three things in close proximity? Pushing two apart can shove them into the third. Then that shoves the first two back together. You can end up with a balance-point where the forces trying to blow it apart end up keeping their relative positions the same. Their relative positions. In game space, the force trying to tear them apart can accelerate them some arbitrary direction. Depending on how well these corners are handled, you either get KSP or Skate 3.

Probably preaching to the choir, but the instant the game introduced RCS, I already wanted the ability to set RCS thrusters linear-motion-only. You can now do this under a thruster's advanced tweakables - disable yaw, pitch, roll. You can even do this in flight if you have to, and it helps so much. No more insane rocking. No more wasted fuel.

Testing a 32-ton superlifter and sending a 32-ton miner to Minmus. Some of you might say this only looks like half a miner, and you'd be correct. To maintain symmetry in flight - such as it is - I'm sending its control module, main solar panels, and battery pack separately, to dock after landing. It will operate in highly reduced fashion in the meantime.

I did! nicer than the one of mine which inspired you, really. I cheated in that one too, you see. That thin line connecting the lander to my bubble? I didn't draw that! I just pasted atop the line from a science instrument popup.

My secret? I cheat. The circle dots hide plenty of imperfections. They also hide that this screenshot was taken halfway through that journey, not the end. The pixel speech bubbles, I googled "pixel speech bubble". The curved lines were drawn using the curve tool, plus hand-drawing for the arrows. What I do to make circles of color is ... I select circles, then I fill them with color. Then I expand the selection and fill a different color on a layer behind. Then I copy paste lots and lots. The picture-in-pictures are done similarly; select a circle, copy/paste, enlarge selection, fill color. I couldn't cheat everything. The dotted lines were a good 20 minutes of hand erasing I had no good way to number them either. I'll find a better way if I have to do that again. One of my favorite tools in GIMP is layer masks, also. The red arrows are actually a layer of 100% red, and the curves are drawn as white onto the otherwise-black layer mask. This lets me recolor them on a whim.

Minmus' flats are a gift to rovers. 17m/s and straight on until morning. What's really needed for better roving is a "terrain hold" feature, to keep their wheels pointed at the landscape. This would alleviate some of the fear that they'll self-destruct if you physwarp or take your eyes off them for a split second, would help them survive wheel-launching, and would be a good reason to try out the otherwise-useless rover core.

That's one of those "once we break the fusion barrier so energy is infinitely cheap" things. Without that, the math doesn't really work out. Not for harvesting purposes anyway. For loitering, perhaps, though a hot-air balloon might also serve with far less complexity.

Offering contracts to places you hadn't been before used to be a big problem. "Landed on the mun? Great! We want Duna now. Your finances and tech level are irrelevant. We believe in you!" Send little probes to places you want to go and it might take the hint. There's also that world firsts track/thingy in the admin building which increases the rewards for world records. That may help fund some exploration.