chefsbrian

Credit where Credit is due, if this does fix it outside of that last remaining case, then that's a win and I won't mald otherwise. At least with spontaneous disassembly a player could believe that they maybe did something wrong in construction, while orbital decay was the game decisively saying "you cannot into space today". I would say I'm going to reinstall and see how it is this weekend, but this weekend is Ludum Dare, so I'm going to be otherwise busy.

So, "Wow its hard but we'll totally get it eventually". As promised, I am not happy. You have all these options, can you please stop being so scared of making the 'wrong' choice that you end up making none at all? Your here to make a game, not make perfection, do not let perfection get in the way of good enough. Turn on one of the options that works right now, with the full disclosure that its probably not what you want right this second and it's liable to get replaced.

As long as the discussion is about the changes being done to solve the current issues with rockets flopping all over, I'll be overall happy - whether I'm happy with the specific changes or timelines is a different story, but I'll consider it progress if my displeasure is regarding when and how, as opposed to whether its even getting touched. However, if this is the equivalent of the heat system dev blog, a whole lotta words telling us "Wow its hard but we'll totally get it eventually" and just leaving it at that, I will not be happy.

And just for clarity's sake, this statement isn't related to the statement Mike made on the discord about having something coming soon to give updates on, right?

As much as project managers really, really, really wish it was the case, sheer developer hours sat in front of a problem doesn't come anywhere close to linear correlation to actual productivity. Its also unlikely the daily scrums are hour long beasts, in all my experience its more like 15 minutes, with the occasional longer one for proper backlog grooming. When it comes to trying to project manage bugfixes specifically, its pretty much all bets off trying to actually predict anything. At any point, for absolutely no discernable reason, a developer can have a brain flash and suddenly find the problem. Other times, they spend a week painstakingly iterating through every step of every point in the process a dozen times over, only to later find out that they were accidentally 'fixing' the very issue they were hunting due to some bizarre specific criteria to reproduce the bug that they just never knew to try. As far as the whole instigating communication question of this thread? I'm really not sure what they can do. The root cause of the lack of communication is painstakingly clear - They just don't have anything to say, that's a good idea to say right now. That's not because they aren't doing anything, but because of the specific predicament they're in right now. The core guts of the game are in bad shape, and the timelines for the major updates have been unsatisfactory to the general community. You can't really provide effective frequent communication on bugfixes if the bugs aren't getting fixed - You'd put out regular "Yea still looking" messages then suddenly "whoop its done here's a hotfix", not really anything of substance to speak of between the two. On the major update space, the bad state of core guts means a lot of people take any major talk about the upcoming features as smoke screens, or misallocations of resources, etc - I don't want to hear about the new toys when my current ones fall outta the sky. And any early communication about the next major milestone also risks delivering unrealistic expectations. People will see X features complete, and some will fabricate connective features wholecloth in their mind, setting themselves up for disappointment. Some will use the feature list to predict delivery windows, which often end up circulating in the community as fact rather than expectations, setting up for disappointment. And its also risky to show off things that might not end up making the final or first cut - The last thing you want is to show off a bunch of really cool, fully fleshed out features that don't get delivered right away, especially with community trust being in the state it is currently. On top of all of that, the longer this state of affairs goes, the worse it will get. People want communication because they feel that things are not getting done in a timely manner and want answers. But there are no answers or timely solutions to software bugs, that sort of work is very much an artform. The long term solution really is "The game needs to be stable".

Not quite. All of those systems except for heat all share the same premise of being systems you engage with for a reward, situationally - Not every mission is a science or colony mission, and you pursue them for specific mechanical reward (Science points or new launch sites) in the goal of furthering what you are capable of doing. Heats closer to what life support, acting as an additional design challenge for certain mission profiles, or hopefully anything using nuclear or similar advanced power systems. The major differentiation between Heat and Life Support though is that heat is situational, consistent, and reliably addressed - If you're reentering, you need heat shield coverage. If you're disposing of waste heat, you need radiation. The system is easy to explain and address. Life support meanwhile, is highly variable, and ranges from extremely simple and uninteresting (Add literal metric tons of snacks) to very complex (Manage multiple resource recycler operations), and either side of the equation appeals to a very different crowd. Aggressively realistic life support systems paradoxically limit a lot of the ship design space - The requirement to carry a huge life support tonnage overhead is restrictive as to what else that mission can do, not creative. They also require a lot of mental overhead and consideration - Balancing input to output to avoid dying of CO2 poisoning halfway to the Jool moons takes some thought, and then multiply this with water and food as well. This tends to limit such a system to the more involved, systemic players - Its not at all friendly or useful to the players who just wanna slap a crew cabin onto a big cool rocket and go see the stars. On the opposite end of the design spectrum, aggressively pared down and simplified life support systems such as a single consumable 'snacks' resource only leads to it being treated as another fuel variable, consumed over time. There's little room for interesting design decisions or considerations, and any effort to merge the two leads to a worst of both worlds, not best. Introducing some complexity still fails to promote interesting rocket design, only checklisting, and that complexity still falls short of what the simulationist players would want. Ultimately, as long as KSP aims to be a rocketry sandbox that's focused on being an approachable way to learn and play with orbital mechanics, then the mechanics in the game should support that, not get in its way. Science, Colonies, and Resource gathering all encourage learning to fly new and varied mission profiles, forcing you to face space travel challenges that you may not have dealt with before as you suddenly have to plot routes between bodies you wouldn't have otherwise ventured between - Such as Moho to Duna, for a resource run. Life support doesn't encourage new mission profiles, it just puts some overhead in rocket design that either makes longer missions into prohibitive technical problems for rookies, or inflexible checklists of carrying extra tons with you. Life support is a more realistically complete vision of space travels complexity, but KSP is about space exploration, not space complexity. Best left to the mods at the end of the day.

And I'm warning them now, that's going to be an optics disaster. Most people aren't engaged enough with the various developer media to draw a distinction between the two - they'll just see it as incomplete or broken for only having the visual effect, because in normal peoples view, why would you bother adding effects for mechanics that don't exist? There's very little benefit of the doubt left in the community - Mostly Negative (33%, oof) recent reviews in steam isn't the kind of place you start to play games of "well technically its a new mechanic" with your community.

I'm gonna laugh if it gets all hyped up as new features and it turns out to just be reentry visual effects, but not the thermal system itself. Otherwise, its pretty bold of the team to come forward so early into a patch cycle hyping it up as the one that we'll all be excited about. I do hope that the scope of what to get excited about is shown quickly, because this community is notorious for working its expectations up to the stars, only to be disappointed when that's not reached.

If its any consolation, they shouldn't. Its not like pulling designer hands off the science development will help much with the core bugfixes - I imagine the science team (and every milestone team, really) is having to do with every tool and core engine programmer having been pulled off, leaving them to design and iterate with whatever was ready at the time. The guy who's designing up new parts and implementing the little details like the animations for deploying it is exceedingly unlikely to also be the guy who knows the fine details of the ghost physics interactions causing our stuff to fall outta space. So he's gonna be still playing with whatever toys they made to find out what's fun. It'll still slow things down as stuff they don't have tools for yet either gets shelved or done by hand, and some iterations and experiments are gonna be blocked by bugs not getting fixed or functionality not getting changed. But if they don't need either of those things, then there's no reason for it to block science from launching. And frankly, the peanut gallery is not who the devs should be looking to for release timing advice . The longer science goes undelivered, the saltier we get (justifiably). The longer core bugs remain unfixed, the saltier we get (justifiably). If they're already disappointing all of us, its probably preferable in the grand scale of things to make some of us happy with a science launch, even if it makes a bunch of us madder at a perceived misallocation of resources - Its not like the steam reviews from us can get much worse, Gabe hasn't implemented a "Two Thumbs Down" option yet.

If we follow this and disregard some of the game breakers, then I'm tenatively voting yes - Purely from a game design and game architecture perspective, the Science elements require nothing further to be put in place. Without knowing the exact details of science and its parts, we do know that science will involve flying parts to locations, which (Disregarding bugs) is implemented in the current game design. Those flights can become more or less difficult based on thermals, limited part selection, and other such factors, but you can put a science component on the surface of the Mun. Similarly, the science milestone is solely responsible for bringing the architecture and programming implementation of save-wide resources (science points), the research tree, mission control and experiment/contract(?) selection. None of these elements make sense to be implemented in advance and in isolation, and therefore don't make reasonable prerequisites. So yes, if we ignore the elephant in the room, then we can confidently say the stage has been set for Science to join us. I'd half-agree with you, in so far as I think getting science out with major bugs would be a bad idea. Science coming out does solve one of the problems from the whole "Is the game fun" debate in that it provides an actual mechanical reason to want to fly missions. However, if a lot of players come back around/new players wander in looking for a KSP2 experience with more to it than a sandbox, and run into the various mission-killing bugs that are out there, this long after launch, the games reception and public opinion is going to crater even farther. Its one thing to be widely known as a game with launch day problems, its another to 'appear' to have ignored those in favor of other things. Most people are completely ignorant to game development and programming, so the idea that six months might not be enough to chase down such a major bug as orbital decay isn't really conceivable to the average person, sounds like copium. Hell, even to me its a bit of a stretch and I actively make games as a competitive hobby lol. I think it'd be twisting the knife a bit to provide mechanical reasons to play, with reward systems, and then still have my decoupler take a few souvenir's with it - Goes from just messing with a random self driven mission, to feeling like active malice on the games behalf when it steals my experiment module and costs me the mission.

Looks promising, although I'll hold my judgement on missions/science until we actually know more. Speculating too much off one screenshot is, at best, how you disappoint yourself by building up unrealistic expectations of a feature :P. I will join the general chorus of "I better not be constrained by the mission layouts" that's being echo'd, but nothing here explicitly worries me that I will actually be constrained in that regard. Not so interested in the various terrain features though. Glad to see the art teams been keeping busy, and there's nothing wrong with them that says why I'm not impressed, but its like a photo of a water fountain being shown to a guy in a desert - doesn't matter what's out there to see if my rocket falls outta space before I can get there. Not the art teams fault though.

Wonder if its just a performance concern - the Unity default lighting systems can be a bit expensive performance wise, they might be trying to protect us from ourselves. That being said, I should be allowed the lunar spotlight, and if I crash my game its my problem

Yup, and from a game designers perspective, its a nightmare to maintain infinitely expanding options and accounting for all the possible interactions. Which is why endless configurable options is rare "Both" felt like a copout to me, so I voted for the KSP2 system - the specific interface could use some refinement, but having dragged points instead of mouse tracking is way preferable to me from a consistent interaction perspective - no more fairings freaking out because of a bad camera angle.

I was torn on what to say about playable. On one hand, the game doesn't crash every time I launch a rocket, and most of the rocket generally goes where I want it to, for a while at least. On the other hand, many of the basic mechanics like orbits, docking, etc don't work and are intended to work, especially for the current gameplay mechanics. I ultimately leaned no, as the buggy behavior bricks most of my missions, preventing me from playing the content. If those bugs were not present, I'd easily say yes. On fun, I also said no - Again, due to the bugs, there's nothing fun about having a mission be bricked. IF those bugs were not present, I would be on "no, but its on the right track" - If the sandbox was working right, I'd have simply run out of fun things to do by now, but during the moments it does work, it works right and enjoyably so - I'd just have grown bored of doing the same mission profiles with the same parts. They're only a few bugs away reaching the point where the idea of good is over the horizon though, as opposed to mired away. Not easy bugs, it seems, but no less close to that. The fact I can enumerate the problems clearly rather than a vague sense of distaste and displeasure over some lack of "Game Feel" is good in its own regards.

Agreed, there's legibility issues, consistency issues, and the UI does a relatively poor job of using color and contrast to bring attention to important things - its instead used to highlight interactable elements, which leads to the buttons you usually don't press having permanent focus over the regularly relevant information. Highlighting them with color is good, but not exclusively over everything else. That being said, I do think its on the right path - It needs work, but I like the general layout, Parts manager excluded. It just needs more time in the oven.

Terraforming would make good sequel content, but I'm not sure it'd make good design sense - KSP's focus is all about building rockets to explore. Colonies facilitate making exploration meaningful by providing resource constraints, new places to start exploration from, which in turn makes exploration both more mechanically interesting as you design craft around available resource limits, and mechanically rewarding as colonization makes future explorations easier. Terraforming is cool, but has little influence on that loop - Atmosphere makes launches harder, and the theoretical benefit of an endless colony unconstrained by life support is only of benefit if that unconstrained scale is put to unconstrained resource and part production. You'd end up with a colony that ends up no longer serving either of its design purposes. It would probably serve a new purpose, as an immense resource sink, but KSP isn't factorio, its not really going to be about scaling your industrial base. Procedural Star Systems are probably possible on paper in the current engine, and could be fun, but I think its solving a problem that won't exist - For the same reason intergalactic gameplay wouldn't make sense. KSP is still grounded in hard science - Even if you could hit 80% of the irl speed of light, traveling to a galaxy like andromeda is on the order of millions of years for the trip. Even with KSP's compressed space scale, and a theoretically hard science fusion torch, its just not within feasible for a player to launch a hundred millenia long cruise. It'd have to give up the hard science grounding that its working so hard to stick with, and it'd do so only to reveal star systems that could have simply existed as a kerbol neighbor. If a player really is starved for star system content faster than the team can hand make it, Modders already went to great lengths to make it happen in KSP1, I guarantee you folks will be putting full light years of content out for KSP2. As for Interstellar Radiation, there's nothing preventing it from being in KSP2, just depends on if they want a life support focus or not. And a life support focus is a gameplay complexity decision, not an engine or game release issue, so KSP3 will still face the same complexity/value comparison of any life support mechanics. Too simple, and its just a bar you slap a part on to track. Too complex, and its inscrutable for a lot of players to deal with. These would all make great post-updates or paid expansions - New parts and 'professionally' authored content is always nice. Just because there is modding, there's always puritans who prefer the 'official' experience, and folks like me who mod like crazy, but prefer official content for stability reasons. Brown dwarves in particular have my interest, would be really cool, moody, darker systems to venture through.

If I put on my big optimism hat, the only thing I'd still have to disagree with is the big bugs being solved - Orbit decay is a massive problem, and phantom forces in any complex physics simulation is an absolute nightmare to untangle, even for experienced teams. There's a reason most games flagrantly fake it, rather than deal with anything approaching realistic behavior. The nature of how the systems work makes it really difficult to simply itemize input and output, and often you think you've solved the problem only to have solved a symptom, and amplified a problem elsewhere. And falling outta space is about as big of a bug as a space game can have. Everything else is plausible if we go optimistically and assume good resource allocation and outcomes. Except for KSP3 maybe - Unless the feature implementations turn out poorly, they're really covering all the bases here. You're more likely to see paid content expansions for KSP2 into 2030 just by the game having been built as a much more robust platform - a lot of things are built so far to maximize loading performance, asset handling etc in a way thats not just modding friendly, but expansion friendly.

Can't say the thought hasn't crossed my mind, but I think a flop and bail of this magnitude would be too damaging to the Private Division brand as a whole to be worth any financial cut and run. More likely you see the roadmap delivered poorly/cut down, with no further additions and an ignoble end, over a full bail. Whatever the behind the scenes issues, I don't think its worth tanking the possibility for Private Division to basically ever be trusted with early access again. Small indies get away with it, someone backed by Take2 isn't going to be so lucky.

I was expecting science to be in the "We've seen it and have a tenative release window" by now, as predicted days after the EA release. So I'm not particularly confident making a prediction for another six months, I'd put my chips down on thermals being out in some form by then. That said, I do think that if science isn't out by the one year anniversary and doesn't have a firm release window being publicly communicated, its going to be bad. There are lots of early access games with long release cycles, but very few with year+ long release cycles for updates. Those games generally thrive and survive on being stable, quality experiences people enjoy playing for a significant period of time. Starsector has had an extremely long development cycle, with 6-12 month update cycles seemingly the norm. The games also stable, feature rich, and playable for dozens of hours on a single save, before diving into the modding community. That's the sort of line that needs to be reached for long lifecycles to be viable. KSP2 lacks in the stability department, and has a content pipeline for most people measured in single hours. S'not to dismiss the people who do find plenty of fun in the current version, just that more casual players lack any mechanical incentive to play beyond a couple launches, and lack the content depth to make more varied launches to stretch that. Science, assuming its not somehow awful, solves a lot of that. It gives mechanical incentive to engage and fly missions even if the part count isn't widely expanded, and it rations out the part count to stretch that content longer. Single hours of content easily hits the high teens of hours. That helps a great deal, as suddenly you're not done with the game in an afternoon, but in a few days - its a small paper difference but a huge perception difference. My hype train has been reassigned, its barreling off towards starfield now. Not that Bethesda has a great reputation for super-stable games either, might still end up off the rails

I'm not really convinced the prospect of time warp for infinite resources is even a problem, and if it is it doesn't need to be solved nearly as annoyingly as semi-randomly gating my colony progress behind a radiant fetchquest. For players who don't want to deal with resources, sandbox mode is almost certainly hanging around. If it is still deemed to be a problem to 'hurry up and wait' on resources, the KSP gameloop is to build things to solve problems - So have colonies have resource storage limits, and colony buildings that provide storage. Players can timewarp to full if they want, but not to infinite. Simple solution that integrates into what they want you doing, without being annoying - its just another step in growing and building a colony, and makes sense. We've already seen orbital colonies with piles of spherical tanks, so might just be that's how it already works. I'd love to see life support added, and I'll definitely be using life support mods, but I don't blame the devs if they're not adding it themselves. Life support is hard - look at the modding space for it. On the extreme simple end you just have snacks, which are a thematic but uninteresting "add another bar" approach to life support. On the other extreme, you have stuff like USI or Kerbalism that provide very involved life support that acts an interesting design challenge to missions - but also a relatively difficult and unintuitive one as you get into long term habitation and all its complexities. Satisfying both groups without making something very compromised that ends up making neither happy is a major design challenge. One that I believe is easier to leave open to the modding community, where bespoke solutions for all the various preferences are more easily compartmentalized.

Oof, sucks to hear it. Orbit decay is one of those hard blockers for me trying the game again. Better luck next patch.

I'd hope for ~12-1pm for the launch time, local to them. Dropping out a patch right end of day is a bold move, better to have a few hours in case you need an emergency hotfix/rollback, especially when you've already had one game breaker try and make it out. But there's never a 'best' time to patch, just a lot of 'good enough'

[Snip] I think you guys both need to look at the fact that these little statements and sideways jabs at eachother are poisoning the well and making it worse for everyone - Believe me, I'm not laying any sort of sole blame at either of yours feet, but that theoretical new users walking into the forum has a 50/50 chance of seeing one side just being passive aggressive to the other first, and thats the sort of thing that immediately starts a negative slant in peoples minds - and first impressions are hard to change. I'm pretty sure the only reason I didn't do the same is I recognize both of you from pre-release talks where the conversation was much more cordial, so I know neither of you are just folks that need to touch grass. There's genuine intent and good will behind these, but from incredibly different sides of the spectrum of opinions. I don't wanna pick on either of you with this, y'all just happened to be the first obvious opposite end voices in here S'not an easy problem to solve now though, nor do I have some dumb plan to try and fix things. Simply disengaging is still silencing a voice, and doesn't help with the problem. And folks don't really easily put aside resentment, and there's nothing really to 'unify' around as a narrative, whether it be failure or hope as I mentioned earlier. Devs gotta do something that triggers a community shift, the current status quo is engrained too hard. I haven't read the specific argument so I'll refrain from commenting on it, but for the general idea - often enough someones moving goalposts can be mistaken for a person who's just really bad at expressing themselves. As with PDC here just prior, sometimes folks need to stop and ask for clarifications rather than jumping at things - its easy to turn a confusing moment into a confrontational gotcha that turns into a defensive crawl that resembles goalposts. Once a conversation has a hint of potential malice in it, its easy to start attributing the suspected behavior to all behaviors. We're all Space Rocket nerds at the end of the day, not debate club masters, folks are gonna speak off the cuff and make mistakes.

Eh, a more realistic take is that the engineering team of any game studio is actually in fairly high demand - Not to demean any of the skillsets involved in development, but the kinds of people who can do the kinds of engine and core work a KSP style project relies on are able to demand a much higher salary than the usual tool and engine devs. So when you buy out the studio and start poaching people, you gotta give them a hell of a deal to convince them to stay and deal with the repurposed bovine waste. I'd put down $20 that they were offered 'industry standard' based on some low CoL area the parent company operates in, and didn't take it. The replacement crew, in a similar salary band, are only likely to take that salary band as a stepping stone - accept mediocre pay, stick around for a year for the resume, and use that to springboard into something nicer in the industry. Classic recipe for project level churn and talent bleed. These sorta business failures are from a lovely mix of situational ignorance, and bureaucratic incompetence - The HR person doesn't know why these devs want so much money, the execs want the budget balanced and timelines to be hit, the hiring managers just have resumes to fill, and the team leads have a hell of a time making a pitch to the business on why they should seemingly overpay for talent. Its not that anyone specific individual is incompetent, they're just siloed and focused on a smaller part of the picture.

If you want a defense of him that's also negative of the KSP2 project, another perfectly valid reason for letting him go is that he wouldn't agree to doing the impossible. Its not uncommon in any industry for someone to demand something that's infeasible, and to replace people until they have a crew that is willing to try. Whether that infeasibility was a hard truth, or lack of talent/ambition is impossible to say until all the chips are on the table, and we know very little about anything that matters right now. Dude could be perfectly competent and left an impossible project at the end of the day. Could be the reverse.