Beeman

It's not a suggestion, it's a speculative discussion ;P

People seem to think(the devs themselves as well, I believe) that this flow chart is too complex. It's honestly not and I'd LOVE to see even more complexity added to it. More ores, deep life support like food, water, oxygen, waste, KASPAR style storage modules that you can load and unload into little airlock compartments like a dumbwaiter for fun EVA aspects to resupply missions in addition to like...one or more types of food production for dedicated long-distance missions and bases where resupply missions wouldn't really be feasible. Maybe have food and waste be something you can toggle on and off via an options menu 'cause some people might not want to hassle with resupply missions. Or maybe have a slider which changes the rate at which your kerbonauts use life support resources. Hmm~ I'd also like to see one or two more resources, like maybe a generic precious metals resource called Kerbinum or something that you can mine. It would weigh a lot and if you landed it close to KSC, you could salvage it for moderate profits. Somethin' like that, anyways. Just more resources is good good good. The problem with that complexity is solely involved in dumping too many things on the player all at once. If they started with just a couple resources, getting you used to them and how they work together in your rockets and such, then introduced a couple more...and finally started teaching you how to mine them(perhaps one surface type at a time), then it's a very gradual type of thing. That's how we learn anything, gradually. It's only when someone piles too much on you at once that you get overwhelmed, which is partly why they're working on career mode now, for people like me who're a little too thick to figure out what's good in that ever growing list of parts.

So far, the most proud thing I've ever made was the very first successful munar lander I made in...either .14 or .15. Probably .15 'cause I'm pretty sure minmus was there in that version when I built this thing. It was hugely wasteful on fuel and what-not and I had three stages filled with solid rocket boosters at the bottom. There were at least fifty solid rocket boosters total and they only got me to probably...I don' tknow, probably less than ten thousand meters altitude. But I managed to get me the landy bit to mun. I even screwed up my rendezvous with mun once and flung myself straight to minmus. Touched down on the side of a hill and immediately rocketed back into orbit. Pretty sure I did it wrong and wound up in a solar orbit but it was still good. Felt good man.

Yeah, I'd be completely okay with selling tickets for kerbals to view certain launches. Maybe they'd be really epic real world-themed missions where your payout is increased by your public relations and number of people you get watching your launch. That'd be really interesting indeed

The problem isn't that people think it's impossible to get multiplayer working. Other Unity games offer multiplayer so obviously you could make multiplayer work in KSP just as easily. The problem, however, is that KSP revolves around features and mechanics that simply don't function in a multiplayer environment. If you had a vote for warp, then you'd only be able to warp when everyone's ready and you'd still wind up waiting large amounts of time. If you did the thing where you phase out into a singleplayer instance while warping, then your position and the position of all the planets would have to synch together with the server, which would be a very jarring and immersion-breaking experience for people, if you had multiple people controlling the same ship...well, I just don't really think that'd be all that fun, not going to lie. But what I've always thought would be really fun multiplayer in KSP would be...basically kerbal Moonbase Alpha. Coop bouncing around on the surface of a planet around a set base or station or whatever...maybe with a maximum distance from said base. Maybe have micrometeroids or dust or whatever else doing things to your installation, giving you things to repair. Maybe have science you could do with the other person(s). It'd just be casual and fun. But good job, either way. It's always good to see people flexing their coding muscles for whatever reason.

I don't think the suggestion here is about space tourism but I wouldn't be opposed to that idea. I think the original post is about just selling tickets to let people watch your launches, which I guess NASA does. I didn't know they charged for that, but I guess it makes sense. Either way, I'd be okay with it, whatever the original post meant.

I don't think career mode is going to be a straight linear progression outside of the tech tree. Like, I've seen Harvester talkin' about missions being kind of dynamic. I guess the plan is that the game will pay attention to what you're going and give you missions based on that. So if you spend a lot of time doing munar landings or science or whatever, you'll get some more munar missions to help you progress through the tech tree. I guess. Then again, missions are probably at least one update away so they may well change what they want it to be like. I don't think they've got a 100% vision for them anyways. That said, the endgame was supposed to be FTL travel. There was supposed to be a couple solar systems not that far away from Kerbol that were predefined and beyond that, solar systems were supposed to be procedurally generated. I think Nova was talking about that on reddit some time ago...so those plans may well have also changed. A lot of people would like to see a competing space program, though. It's kind of a popular suggestion and I"m not entirely against it. I just wonder how they'd squeeze that into the whole dynamic missions thing and what-not. It would have to adapt to keep pushing you further without jumping too far ahead and making you feel like you're wasting your time...and that might be difficult to program.

Real-world in-game ads can be good for some games...just KSP isn't one of them. I'd be okay with silly kerbal-themed ads, though. Not necessarily decals on my parts but maybe...I don't know, like sponsors or something. Might be a little needlessly complicated, though.

I swear I saw this suggestion a couple days ago. Or something very, very similar. We're going to have improved IVA at some point...like freely floating about inside of our vehicles and transferring between parts seamlessly through hatches and things. We're just not there yet. It might be a very low priority especially right now 'cause they're focusing really heavily on career mode stuffs. As for sounds and things...I'd like it if they implemented a customizable system just like chatterer into the game. That would be awesome. They could record their own radio chatter in backwards spanish and it would be awesome. Or just use real-life radio chatter and things like that as chatterer does 'cause that sounds great on its own. Either way, being able to customize the frequency of those things would be very important, I think 'cause some people just don't want to hear too much when they're playing a game. Others like the immersion Chatterer brings. When it comes to control panels and internal lights and things...I"m not entirely sure what they've got planned for that. I mean, we've already got a lot of buttons and things to play with, though I admit that it'd be nice to see action groups somewhere in command pod IVAs, among other things. Who knows what the future holds

I don't think they necessarily meant real-world corporations >_> But rather like kerba-kola or something like that, right? I'd be okay with that, but it would seem a bit superfluous. I mean, we don't even know how missions and public relations are going to work just yet. We don't even know how mining or recovery is going to work just yet(though we have a pretty good idea on the recovery >_> ). So there could already be lots of ways to make money...money might even be an afterthought

I"d like to see something like Kerbal Alarm Clock implemented into the vanilla experience. Especially if I can toggle it on and off 'cause sometimes it doesn't matter as much if I miss a maneuver node, like if I'm trying to get to Mun or something. But if I'm trying to get to another planet, it's kind of important I leave at a certain time, right? As for the suit colors, it's been suggested before that we have the ability to customize our kerbonauts' suit colors. Of course, a lot of people prefer the white for EVA 'cause it's all realistic and stuff and would just want to see orange suits for launches, white suits for EVA, blue polo shirts or something for IVA in stations and so on. Me, I'm in the full-on customization camp 'cause it's just fun. Doesn't remove anything from the game experience, the realists or whatever you'd like to call them can keep their real-world clothing colors and the weridos like me can paint their EVA suits bright pink if we wanted to. Would feel good man.

This would be something I would LOVE to see in an additional options menu wherein you toggle various features on and off to fine-tune your vanilla experience. Then mods could perhaps expand upon the system in some way. I don't know, either way, I think things that kind of necessitate more intelligent design of rockets and things like resupply missions and what-not are all really good because they just add more depth to the gameplay and that's always good, so long as it's not too monotonous.

I want to use a lot of those mods and I've certainly tried a couple of them. I feel, however, that they need a bit of work. I'd prefer TAC life support over IonCross because it seems to have bigger ambitions and wouldn't require me fiddling about with config files or anything(more or less) to add the life support resources that I'd more or less like to see in the game. On top of that, Deadly Reentry I tried for one flight and I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped. I sent a rocket into orbit and deorbited the three-man pod with the fitted heat-shield and the shield burned up before my pod could get half way through the atmosphere. Considering I was dropping from about a hundred kilometer orbit, it just seemed odd to me. Of course, I don't know a whole lot about real-world reentry heat so I didn't really know what to expect other than my apollo-lookin' pod surviving reentry from low kerbal orbit without additional heat shielding. That said, when .22 hits...maybe after .23, I'll pick up a lot of these mods and give the game a hardcore go. I really wish the vanilla game would incorporate some of these things, though, even as toggleable or scaleable options via a difficulty menu so people wouldn't necessarily have to futz about with mods to get the game playing just as they want with simple challenging aspects turned on or off or scaled up or down.

Not at all, my opinion is that it doesn't matter what they do. They have reason to go either way on the matter ;P That's it. That's all I've said. So thumbs up to them for whichever development route they decide XD

Yeeeeah, they're doing a lot of under-the-hood things right now. Things that won't impact us for another couple versions. Well, they'll slap us in the face a bit with .22 and the whole science, comms and R&D stuff that's going to be happening. Just let them do their thing and take their time to get everything just right before dumping it on us for mass testing. I mean, that's what we're here for, testing. It just so happens that the game is quite fun to play. How will you feel when KSP1.0 releases and there are no more guaranteed updates after that? Will you still be angry and feel the need to rant on the forums about their lack of new content after that? I would say that if you're really that bothered by how long it's taking them to get new content for you to bite into, just play some other games for a couple months and pick KSP back up in the early spring or late winter. Sometime 'round February-ish. Hopefully by then, we'll see lots of new science bits, new comm bits, a nearly complete career mode, handful of new parts and maybe...just maybe an aerodynamics/spaceplane overhaul. That, of course, is being quite optimistic. Some things just take time.

This has been talked about lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots. The problem is that physics is currently only handled by one CPU core...when the average user has two, three and four cores...or more, even However, SQUAD can't do very much to thread the physics calculations across multiple cores. It's a limitation with the Unity engine and one that I"m certain the Unity developers are working on. So, until Unity gets updated to allow multi-core physics processing, we're kind of doomed to excessive lag with large numbers of parts being in your general vicinity all at once.

You actually couldn't say that about career mode because...as I understand it, career mode has been the goal of KSP from the get-go. But sandbox was required to get the core gameplay mechanics(building, launching rockets and doing things in space) up and running and well tested. What we can almost certainly expect KSP1.0 to contain is at least everything that modern space programs are capable of. Missions that have already flown and been successful. That includes probes, minimalistic manned missions, rovers, spaceplanes/shuttles(only because they're already in the game), station building, telescopes and other such things with all the great career mode goodies layered on top of all that. I mean, we already have just about all the parts we need to make KSP a playable game with an engaging career mode...and you can expect career mode to feel grand and compelling like a tycoon game, which has been said to be the ultimate goal of KSP's career mode. How they'll change that as they actually develop it is beyond me, but I'm excited either way. All we really need from this point on is career mode stuff. Granted, we know that they've got at least one year left of development time given their own estimates plus a few months 'cause you can never predict how long it's going to take to iron out some things. But they only really need a few more major patches and they could release KSP as a full-on game. They've almost got R&D in the bag, we just need currency, missions, the full-on knowledgebase, lots more sciency bits, hopefully life support and other such career-only mechanics. Everything else is icing on top and could very well be left off for expansions...and all I was saying was that I'd personally be okay with that. Yes, I would obviously prefer much more complex systems in the vanilla game, I even mentioned that I'd like to see more resources than what they showed in that flow chart. Things like different metals for part construction or rare elements/metals that you could deliver back to KSC for straight income and little else, if anything. I'd love to see all kinds of fun mechanics creep their way into the vanilla game but there's no telling what they're going to do because talking about expansions made a lot of people angry...but they honestly felt like that would be the best option for them to ensure that KSP finally gets finished. We all love KSP very much so and only want to see the vanilla experience expand and expand, but there's got to be a limit for KSP1.0 and I feel like that's all they were feeling when they talked about expansions and/or DLC stuff. But what they're almost guaranteed to implement is all the stuff that KSP was intended to do in the first place...which is to provide a space program simulation/tycoon experience that all sorts of people can enjoy and might actually make people learn a thing or two about space.

I'd be okay with fairings that disabled physics on objects inside of them. But I'd rather just have fairings that act as fairings...though we won't see a need for them 'till aerodynamics get reworked, if they ever get around to that(it's not a particularly urgent matter, that's for sure). I think it'd be interesting to hear what the Unity developers would have to say about the performance issues we get due to physics and what-not.

You seem angry about my response. Try not to be, I"m just a simple fool who tries to maintain a generally unbiased outlook on most things and if people much smarter than myself are going to correct me when I'm being ignorant, I'm more than happy to be learning something with everyone else. Of course, I feel the need to ask...you did see where I said that was something that was pointed out to me, right? I did fully admit more than once to not being very knowledgeable about this sort of thing. I mean, my previous understanding of the topic was...as you say; that it was best to wait 'till your major features were implemented before you start optimizing the poots out of your game. Then, as I said, that apparently Microsoft standpoint on microoptimization was pointed out to me. Pointed out to me is the important part of that. It's not what I'm saying, it's what was pointed out to me. That said, I recall...several patches ago Harvester mentioning that he was rewriting a lot of the game's code to make newer features work better and to make it easier to add newer features in the future. This was...around .15/.16, I believe. So they know what they're doing with their code, more or less. That's why I went on to say that it's best to just be patient. I mean, most of my response was saying how it's best to be patient about this type of thing focusing on one factoid that I regurgitated that..as I said may well not apply to SQUAD, is kind of silly. Just calm down, relax and let the discussion flow naturally. Idiots like myself will be glazed over by the intelligent peoples' responses, you don't have to point out when we're being too ignorant in such a way as you ignore half of what I said.

I love almost everything about the game as it is now, though I haven't really accomplished much. My only dislike is that career mode isn't fully implemented yet...but I can wait for that. Waiting is certainly torturous, though DX I guess performance is something I dislike but I've played laggy, buggy and outright unstable games before and I'll continue to play them into the future...so that's kind of an afterthought for me.

I don't think I've seen this specifically suggested before, though it probably has been. Not recently, though, I think. I feel like the UI is going to see a bit of an improvement at some point. Maybe even a complete redesign. I mean, a lot of things in KSP are still placeholder, so maybe the part menu is too. Either way, this would certainly be a small but largely beneficial modification to the way the UI works right now so I can dig it.

Apparently waiting 'till your major features are all implemented before you heavily optimize is a bad and outdated idea. That was pointed out to me in another thread a week or two ago by someone who's undoubtedly more knowledgeable about this type of thing than I am. Of course, his source was a Microsoft employee's comment on it from something completely unrelated or somethin' like that....and may very well not apply to a smaller studio with a much, MUCH smaller budget than that of a company like Microsoft. Also, SQUAD can't really do anything about multithreading physics calculations. That's entirely up to the Unity developers...and given the popularity of KSP, I would expect them to be working on their solution to this problem right now. I mean, independent developers are falling in love with Unity left and right and increasing the performance for how Unity handles physics would not only benefit us and SQUAD, but anyone who wants to make a physics-heavy game in Unity. But maybe it's difficult for them to figure that out just right. Maybe they have to reorganize a lot of their previously established Unity code to make it work the way we need it to. I wouldn't know so I'm just trying to be patient about it. All in all, I'd say just wait it out. There's a LOT of games coming out this fall, so maybe some of the more casual players should spend less time in KSP for a few months, though still load it up from time to time for testing purposes and to just play it 'cause it's still fun in all its laggy glory. I mean, I hadn't really played KSP practically at all between .14/.15 and .21 and I really enjoyed all of the progress that they made thusfar. Though I'm still waiting for career mode before I start getting too extravagant with my missions. I don't know, taking a break to play other games for a while would certainly help a lot of people who're getting more and more frustrated with lack of major optimizations that may or may not be impossible for SQUAD to do right now so that's my...perhaps overly simplistic opinion on the matter.

I vaguely remember some comments and certainly lots of rumors about the resources system. Apparently they thought this was a little too complex for people. It honestly isn't. I've said it before, all they'd need to do is introduce just a couple elements at a time so we can wrap our heads around them THEN lay the mining and processing down on us in a similar fashion. Or something like that. It'd be easy with their tech tree madness that they've got planned. They could even add more complexity to the system and as long as they took us through it at a gradual rate via career mode...it would be perfectly fine. That said, I feel that they might actually hold off on releasing those systems for an expansion after KSP1.0 is released. Of course, that's all based on what they said. Those features will be huge and game changing, almost like an entirely new game in itself, so that would really fit the definition that they laid out for expansions or DLC. What they feel those things should be. They might even add deep colonization to that expansion to make it even more substantial. Hmm...at the same time, I think that they might not do expansions after all. I mean, it made a LOT of people angry. On the flip side to that, they did guarantee that anyone who purchased the game before the end of april were guaranteed all future updates and expansions for free. I honestly don't know what they're planning. What they're going to do. But I got the game right in the middle...or near the end of April, I think. On Steam, so I'd honestly be okay either way XD I also feel that they kind of deserve the right to put out an expansion like that. Or rather, to hold resource prospecting, collecting, mining and deep colonization for an expansion. Maybe they'll hold off FTL and that whole other star systems thing for an expansion, too! I really wouldn't mind that, though if I hadn't gotten the game before the end of April I wouldn't really be able to afford those expansions, unless they offered a compilation at a steep discount or something. I don't know, but I do know that they put a lot of thought into each and every update and every major feature so I feel that they deserve a little extra reward for doing so. If I had the money for it, I'd buy KSP for all of my friends, even the ones that wouldn't necessarily play it just so that SQUAD could have a little extra cash for their efforts. They're certainly treating us better than most publishers and developers who put out sixty dollar games. So they deserve a little somethin' on top of their already really positive reputation and their undoubtedly substantial payout from sales thusfar.

We'll probably have statistics like that accessible from the knowledgebase somewhere 'round KSC. Or something. People just like seeing statistics.

I've been to duna once on my own and almost completely messed it up. Had to burn for about five minutes to actually catch its sphere of influence. It was intense. Other than that, I'm trying not to get too far in what I can do before career mode is implemented...though I'll probably break down and play a bit in .22 'cause R&D sounds too interesting to not play.