jfx

Not surprising how legitimate criticism of the reviews is - once again - bludgeoned into the ground by the usual burning of strawmen and hyperbole. Rating a game at > 95% with the pointed out flaws in graphics, sound and career progression is a joke (and as such exactly what one would expect from gaming "journalism").

This thread is in the 'General KSP discussion' forum. Prefacing a statement here with an 'In my opinion' disclaimer is tautological.

If anything this and the previous thread show that it is impossible to express any kind of valid criticism on this forum without being charged by the assembled army of white knights with shields raised high, who made defending squad from any kind of negative feedback their holy purpose. The visual and audio quality is bad even for a indie game. -> "Get over it they are placeholders, we are in alpha". The game is released and it is still bad -> "Get over it the Gameplay is great". The update removed any kind of difficulty introduced by the new aerodynamics -> "Install FAR" The game crashes because of the heat overlays -> "Well you can turn them off..." The contract system is barely fleshed out -> "Go play science/sandbox mode" The game is 40€ and is practically released without sound effects -> "Install chaterer" repeat ad nauseum. I get it that the great gameplay excuses many flaws, but it is no excuse to not even try - especially after an early access phase where you sold upwards of two million units.

As robot pointed out there is zero indication of this happening. Besides, I suspect that there is a second reason for KSPs underwhelming visuals (and up to a point - audio). As we know every asset in the game is loaded during the start of the game, resulting in roughly 2gb memory usage once you get to the space center scene. The game is advertised with 3gb RAM as minimal requirement. Now image better models, assets, maybe even cities or a skybox that actually features stars instead of blotches. Or in short: Imagine stock KSP with visuals you know from mods like b9 or the eve skyboxes - whatever your favorites are. The asset loading approach originally intended to handle a wonky game of "launch the rocket" just won't handle requirements of this scope. There's the reason the game even now defaults to /2 texture resolution after you install it. Its "ok" to tell modders/players to go to linux because the (modded) game is too fat to fit inside 32bit adress space, but you can't tell this to a customer who just paid 40€ for the base game.

Dwarf Fortress has a more consistent art style than KSP. Imagine being a new player, booting the game into career mode and taking a first look at the space center. It is bleak - to put it diplomatically. Especially if you compare the models to bac9s work. Currently KSP is a melange of models and styles accrued over several years - and some of them are badly showing their age (ask NovaSilisco about his 2.5m Tank textures...). But if I were in squad's position I'd not lift a single finger. For example: The tiling of the grass texture (in pretty much the sole modelled out scene of the game) was brought up three years ago. Even back then there were people on these forums who defended it, deeming it the "artists choice". Objectively seen KSP is as much a technical disaster as a gameplay pearl. The 85/100 reflects that.

Cities: Skylines does indeed use Unity 5 (And - SCNR- was released a week after the official Unity 5 release)

You can land planes with stub wings at 25m/s and heat shields are not needed even for interplanetary returns but hey, SQUAD knows best ... right?! /sarcasm

The second digit is the one that matters. The first one indicates the generation, the second one the power of the card and the rest does not matter for your purposes. Dont buy a stone old generation - nvidia: 6 and upwards, amd 7 and upwards.

Never buy a graphics card for gaming which has a second digit <5. There should be plenty of used options < $100 like nv 560gt/660gtx or Amd 7850/70

You've only yourself to blame for actually reading youtube comments.

Remove the politician. Fremdschämen intensifies.

Pretty meagre, only one Offer with i5 and dedicated GPU geforce 825M - still craptastic 1366p display and plastic case: http://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb&bpmax=0-500&v=e&filter=update&bl1_id=30&sort=p&xf=28_2500~29_Core+i5-4#xf_top > Avoid notebooks for gaming if possible. > KSP will run OK on a Intel HD4600, don't expect wonders and add a second RAM module for dual channel operation. Part Mods will crush it pretty fast though. I run KSP on a lenovo z510 (i5, decent 1080p display) I got for 350 pounds, they don't seem to be on sale in the UK though.

This is both grossly oversimplified and completely: The gist is: Your CPU will determine what minimum FPS you will get (unless you have a GPU that is stressed out by rendering Office 2003), this is barely affected by most game settings (except stuff like viewing distance (ARMA etc.) traffic density (GTA) or similar stuff which translates in less computational workload on the CPU. In contrast GPU load is very easy to scale, be it through feature switches (SSAO, AA, AF, Post Processing, etc) or simple scaling of resolution, mesh complexity, etc.

tl;dr: Cell phone cameras are "optimized" to be small. Small camera sensor equals not much light hitting camera sensor equals dark+grainy picture. Dark+grainy picture after camera firmware equals dark+blurry picture. And since you made the moon image comparison: If i remember correctly they used a Hasselblad Camera with a 5.6x5.6cm negative size. That's somewhere north of 300.000mm² (not really compareable but still ...). And now you know why you need at least an aps-c or 4/3 camera to shoot anything good. ... or a webcam.

That may look cool, but is not exactly feasible for a cargo-sized (space-)plane. You see air intakes at the body of fighter aircraft because the turbojet compressor starts not far behind the intake. If you funnel air in a tunnel along the full body of a cargo plane you pretty much kill the pressure at the end because of friction and dissipation inside the air duct (no idea if this is the correct english term, translated from german engineering course some years ago).

None ... in the source. The Binary - who knows.

I struggle to understand the idea behind downloading a potentially malicious program to save one copy paste operation? Best case it is MORE work. Worst case is a compromised computer.

The provided "program" consists of one line which replaces a 13 letter one-time launch parameter. It's also most pathetic github repo I've seen so far, so it has that going for it - which is nice.

PhysX on the GPU is as dead as EAX. As expected with more open approaches taking over. And in its current state wouldn't have done anything for KSP either way (except fancy smoke particle simulation maybe) see: http://www.codercorner.com/blog/?p=917 PhysX (the CPU bound kind) 3.x is multithreading capable however (in theory) and that comes to Unity5. The migration will be significantly harder than pulling a switch though.

PCIe 3 cards run in PCIe 2 or even 1 slots, you're good. Just make sure your PSU has at least one, better two free 12v power connectors so you can power your new gpu with an adapter as it will most likely draw more than your old one. or better yet a 6pin gpu connector. Look at something like an AMD R9 270. Nvidia will launch new cards soonish, their sub $200 is pretty meh at the moment (imo). With an nvidia you'd lack severall nice-to-haves like mantle, directX11.2 and Nvidias awesomeness in regards to driver profiles and DSR is not that important for a card in that price range.

Possible if you add a gpu, but still far inferior to a self-built or store-built one. With the 300w psu you are pretty much limited to a 75w gpu since there appears to be no 6-pin pcie power connector. (Sorry, no way I'm going to traverse the wasteland named "hp.com" to check on that). Adapter may work though, still not much room for expansion due to the 300w limit. Anyways. With this attitude: I'm out, good luck - you're going to need it.

Tencharacters

Potato lvl Processor, avoid AMD CPUs for KSP and gaming in general. Only exception: FX83xx CPUs if you are poor and have both free electricity and a room that is in perpetual need of extra heating. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1200?vs=1197 Buy something with an i3-4 or i5-4. There should also be shops that offer assembly for parts you picked yourself (~€20 in yurop) which would be the best option for someone with electronic parts anxiety. edit: All the other PCs you posted suck, for reasons already mentioned in this thread.

Yup, marginally better than watching paint dry.

It's not the retina alone. Long time astronauts on Mir and ISS have higher incidence for Cataracts. As for radiation: Six Months on the ISS equal about 20 Years of the average yearly dose on the ground. Prolonged stays in low gravity also change the shape of your eyeballs.