chefsbrian

[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.

Hardly a deliberate tactic, just passion. Remember that a forum (or any community) is mostly made up of the most passionate people for a project, both positive and negative. Those who don't really care and just play occasionally tend to lurk at best, but usually just don't engage these kinds of spaces at all. The negative speakers are speaking out because they want to be heard - the prospect of driving others away makes that harder, not easier. And its not some effort to tank/punish/etc the developers for it, as again, the majority of people don't interact with communities at this level. They'll see the steam ratings, a few suggested and top reviews, and make a decision there. Folks are upset with the state of things, and they want to talk with other people who are upset with the state of things. Others are ok with the state of things, and they want to talk to people who are ok with the state of things. Both groups want to feel vindicated, justified in how they feel by confirming that no, they're not just crazy or stupid, others feel the same way. Some of those people just take it a bit too personally when they stumble across someone who doesn't feel the same way they do. The community ends up on defense mode, with all members wary that someone's there to tear them down for hate/hope for the project. Which in turn leads most conversations to be snippy and aggressive as everyone takes every quip by assuming the worst. The gap between the groups grows wider, and the outliers become more extreme. Back immediately following launch, the extreme positive side was "Wow this is rough but the bones are so good, they'll sort it out soon" and the extreme negative side was "Wow the games in a terrible state, how'd they think this was ok to release?". Now, six months on, the extreme positive side is more or less saying "Lol why did you expect a full price game to be any good or playable when its got the Early Access label? You're a fool if you expected anything else" and the extreme negative side is "The devs have cut and run, the ones left over can't tie their own shoelaces much less write a line of code, how hard is it to copypaste from a decade old game?". The moderate opinions and positions are still here, but frankly, nobody listens much to them lol, quirk of human nature. So long as these narratives remain so extreme and so divergent, things won't get better in the community. The devs actions will shift the dial one way or another, but from a community perspective its in the worst possible state - Maximum risk of genuine incompetence and failure in the game, and maximum possibility that its all just around the corner. Six months with minimal quality patching is extremely poor. But six months plus change to a major feature release is pretty good. Frankly, until the devs land it, flat on their face or perfectly, its going to continue to diverge. Once they do the narrative will likely unify, either to "Yea it sucks" and "It sucks but recovery narrative NMS guys", or it lands it and goes "It sucked but its turning around" and "I told you guys to stop crying, its great". But all the while, as the passionate community divides and bickers and hopes for some proof one way or another, the real danger is the quiet majority audience. They're not hanging around reading devblogs. They're not digging deep into community discussions and roadmap details and the rocky development cycle the game has. They're seeing a 29% Mostly Negative recent review score on steam, and skipping the game. They're taking a gamble, buying it, having a bad time, and refunding it with a negative review. They're folks who bought the game, tried playing for a bit, left a negative review and put the game down and probably won't come back, alter reviews if it gets good, etc. The easiest representation of this I can see is the mission reports forums for the two games. The first games one is still pretty active, with the entire first page of threads having been posted in this month. KSP2 has six threads that've been active this month, and its first page goes back to April. If the passionate forum goers aren't flying as much, what do you think the casual audience is doing? Nothing much, I'd imagine. Balls in the developers court, but the clocks ticking - This lurch period of uncertainty isn't helping any aspect of the game or the community.

Radio silence and build only really works when you have a relatively stable foundation. They'd need to resolve the orbital decay and parts falling off at a minimum before they could do that. Otherwise, going radio silent with major defects looks like you're bailing. Whereas if they go radio silent to work on Science, and the biggest issues are "The part manager sucks" and "The game keeps putting extra kerbals in my spacecraft" then they're probably fine. Maybe you could add wobbly rockets onto that list, but I'm pretty sure the 'community' fix of file editing still provides an unofficial workaround, so if they don't wanna make that the official fix, at least there's something.

Honestly, probably a good call, considering public sentiment. If they come out with a big, high effort production around a feature, while the patch is still delayed and needing work, people will gripe endlessly that they're still not even finishing the patches before going off on tangents. I know I'd probably feel that way, even with full knowledge that most of the production overhead should be designers and not core devs. Best to hold off a few days to focus on whatever this issue is. And who knows, maybe its related, some heat foundational change in the guts might just be what's tanking performance - We know they've been doing occlusion reworks already, and heat would touch heavily into those. Still a bad taste, but the best options of a bad situation. I exist solely to mald at the KSP2 development cycle, and build rigid rockets. And I'm all outta rigidity. /s To be a bit more serious, I'm not really sure what other conversations people can really have at this point. The AMA's haven't provided a great deal of discussion material, and its been over a month since the last developer insight/showcase. And while that one provided some insight into the design plans behind heat, it wasn't the sorta big feature/implementation reveal that gets conversations going. Everything else that already exists has mostly been talked to death. We've found the easter eggs, flown the meme missions (The determined have, at any rate) and seen the sights. The remaining conversations are all forward looking, and folks are pretty pessimistic about that so far.

Apologies, it was too aggressive. But mentioning refunds as some sort of action to be taken doesn't achieve anything, especially when its well beyond any possibility. Its not constructive, productive, or addressing any of the other issues at hand, so it appears dismissive, right. And seeming to dismiss criticisms by saying "Get a Refund" comes across as a passive aggressive way to tell people "Here's the door". That's not how it ever has to be. The fact that EA has been abused so badly to the point that people think the prior mishandlings of it somehow justifies telling people that this is how it should be doesn't make it any better. I've been playing update cycle games since before the term Early Access was even coined to widely describe the concept. And even back then, it was well understood that there was a line between "Features" in the larger scope of the things the game would achieve, and "Functionality" in so far as the things you can touch working correctly. At some point, through various bizarre blends of mistakes and human justification behaviors, the idea that "Features were coming but Functionality would work" became "Functionality is coming". An early access shooter where you only got two guns is just a mediocre shooter, but you can enjoy those guns. An early access shooter with two guns that don't shoot straight 80% of the time is just a broken game, and the EA label doesn't make it less broken. If features are the muscle and bone of the game, functionality is the nervous system - don't matter how strong n sturdy the rest is if you can't signal it. But we've seemingly lost the wider consumer expectation for that, where mere functionality is seen as a bonus. And now we're at the point that the EA label is used to somehow justify a game, a literal entertainment product, not being entertaining due to significant material defects in the aspects that are available. I'm not ragging at you personally for using this line by the way, lots of people do, it just really bothers me to see how far things have gone bad in the whole industry for this to be a line that even gets repeated in anything other that articles from the Onion. I've been in the 'sausage factory', I compete in Game Jams as a hobby and have been involved in much larger software projects of all stripes, and I can assure you there's no good reason for the consumers as a whole to have shifted from the basic expectation of "The thing I got works". Making games is hard. But that's not the consumers problem, and they most certainly shouldn't be expected to pay up anyway when mistakes are made. For what its worth, Bethesda gets way too much slack on this too. The whole Features vs Functionality thing has been a growing problem in all games for a while now, and 76 showed how the line they walked of avoiding true gamebreakers was more luck than divine will.

Is it really necessary to be so passive aggressive with "Well why don't you just take your ball and get out of here then"? At no point did I say I want my money back, just that I want to actually be able to play what I've paid for. There's a difference between "I've seen all the game has to offer at this time so I'm going to put it down" and "The game doesn't work so I have to put it down", and KSP2 is very much the latter.

I'll admit, I've more or less given up on the project entirely. I was among the crowd expecting a rough launch, but rapid improvement. I was expecting Science and some basic level of stability before 2023 was out - Not perfect feature parity or even specifically science being fully completed, but most of it there and mostly working as intended. I was prepared for regular save eating bugs, quirks, parts that got cut from X update last minute because they more or less just didn't work, etc. Reaching science parity with the old game should have been 'easier'. Not easy explicitly, but it was already a reasonably well mapped design space, both technologically and conceptually. Between KSP1 and the slew of mods, there's a good amount of info about what does and doesn't work, what kind of problems are fun to solve, and other such things that are more than enough to build a playable science iteration. The successor roadmap items are a much bigger question mark, and I expected the update cycle to slow for a while afterwards into 2024 just due to the complexity of crafting such systems from more or less scratch. To summarize, I expected a chaotic, fast EA experience up to science feature parity with KSP1, and then a pullback and some stabilizing and quiet while the game moved onto the feature net new roadmap items. What I wasn't expecting was to have the game half a year after release still struggling with fundamental bugs, still lacking heat (Its not explicitly a big deal, but the fact it was stated as 'shortly after' release just highlights how things went wrong) and still being very unreliable mechanically. I don't have much interest in investing time into a long mission when the games just gonna treat my ships construction as a suggestion, and my orbit as something that it can fidget with and change at a whim. Now all this isn't to say that the game can't come back, or that my giving up has me never touching it again if it improves in the future. Games have been resurrected before. The problem is that as the people who give up and step outta the EA community grows, the quality of your feedback declines. More of your remaining player base becomes the diehard fans that will eat glass to push through on completing a mission. That willingness to push through the bad times can mask a lot of problems - The existing players get calloused to pain points, you don't hear about them much as a developer, and then you don't give them much attention as it doesn't seem to be as big of an issue. Long term, this turns into a development cycle that masks problems rather than facing them, because the wider audience just left and stopped complaining about those problems. Squeaky wheel and all that jazz. Maybe I'll be proven wrong with a Christmas surprise, but I doubt it at this point. And Starfield shortly, should help scratch a bit of that space exploration itch. Remnant 2's been waiting for me to stop being salty about the labyrinth boss and pick it back up. And even in the Indie space, Terra Invicta's been running a decent if slow patch cycle, but the game more or less launched finished anyway. But I didn't give KSP2 Seventy of my Canadian Rubles so I could go buy some other games to play instead. They're getting measured against their peers large and small, who faced the same tribulations of game development, publishers and the weirdness of the last five years, and provided much better game outcomes at the end. I think all it'd take is a single, out of the ballpark patch or roadmap item. If the team suddenly pulls a "We fixed all the various mission killing bugs" patch outta their rears, or if they suddenly slam down a really well built, interesting and reasonably stable Science update, the energy of the community would probably turn around fast. Folks love underdog comeback stories, lots of abandoners would hear about it and swing back by, and it could arrest the spiral that's going on right now.

Its probably trying to load the atmosphere effects, hence the blue. If your coming in that fast, it probably doesn't have time to even render fully.

Nasty version of the warp kraken maybe? It likes to rip out engines and little things, but with a lack of more frustrating targets, it could have just decided to eat some random joints instead. as for the shutters taking off a docking port, did you use any part clipping per chance?

Well, assuming that all sections of the ring had reaction wheels, it would depend on how KSP decided to handle rolling, whether it gunned all wheels up to full force, or if the ones on the pivot axis watched how much force they pushed. Either way, the likely reaction would be the ring bowing, and if that didn't snap it in half the difference in orbit speed and direction (and possibly altitude, depends how far you got it to bow) with the bent pieces would rapidly disintegrate the whole assembly.

Well that's because KSP isn't equipped to dispense lunches, unfortunately. Terrible oversight that I hope the dev's look into shortly, so that my missions can continue unperturbed by a rumbling stomach But in all seriousness, try making a post in the Bug's and support section, and be sure to read this http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/24543-NEED-SUPPORT-Read-this-before-posting which is stickied at the top of the forum, to make sure your providing enough information.

I'm surprised nobody pointed this out, but even IF you could get a ring into orbit and the physics engine didn't choke up and die, the whole thing would die if you tab away or time accelerate. Rotational is lost when things go on rails (How the nose of your orbiters will not stay level with the horizon) and depending on how KSP calculates its center of mass and motion, the entire thing would likely tear itself apart at the seams when it attempts to resume its position, because if the pieces lost the rotational force keeping the ring shaped like, well, a ring, the best result would be that one of the ends pops open, the worst result being each piece attempts to start back up and collides with its neighbor, dropping most of the ring, if not all into the planet, and possibly shooting out a small segment or fragments into deep space, depending on how the whole thing was simulated. (not to mention the MASSIVE floating errors that would provide a massive feast to the kraken)

205: Capsule escape systems are locked from the outside

190: Failed docking attempts become Successful Firework displays 191: The only evidence of Civilization is ancient ruins on the opposite side of the planet 192: The Structural yield points of all our materials coincide with their point of maximum explosive potention 192b: The same applies to our crews

All you have to do is put everything from the parts folder in the download, into the parts folder for the game, and the same for the plugin data. Keep in mind, that since its plugin powered, it will not work with the free version of the game.