K^2

If cross-feed was as easy as it is in KSP, you could just add external tanks that stay with the launch hardware....

It's normal pre-alpha performance. I know a lot of games polish their Early Access cross-section to a beta level, but this wasn't done here. No amount of upgrading's going to save you from a game being poorly optimized. Most people with top-end machines had awful performance despite most CPU cores being idle, and even GPU being far from 100% utilized. Funny enough, you could probably fix GPU performance of KSP2 with mods. But you'll still have problems with awful performance of the resource management and the single thread bottlenecks. So while you can make the framerate on lower end GPUs a lot snappier for simpler planes and rockets flying through the atmosphere, there's not much you can do for the CPU performance bottlenecks on larger rockets outside of maybe custom parts, like larger tanks, that would reduce your total part count. But that's obviously a very limited band-aid solution.

That's exactly what Elon said. Except, now it's even easier to make mass accounts, because you can use a few quiet blue check accounts as "spotters" for your bot network, and any verification can be bypassed with Mechanical Turk attack for a fraction of a penny per account. But more importantly, this doesn't prevent targeted harassment. Because the blockers to creating a sock puppet are the same as creating a new legitimate account. And even if I make just one of these a month to harass people, multiply that by thousands of followers of the accounts who direct hate, and you end up with absolutely horrid conditions for anyone who falls in crosshairs. The reason it's not a problem here is because how few active users there are to begin with. The platform has to take steps against accounts with large number of followers who direct hate against others. If this is not done, it creates active harm to all minority groups on that platform. It allows hate crimes to happen, which can escalate into real world violence. If you actually care about the things you claim to care about, pay attention to that. Otherwise, you are contributing to that violence with your rhetoric.

While that's a valid point in terms of your casual circle, you have to keep in mind harassment campaigns that people run now. "Just block," doesn't work. If an account with 10k followers posts something hateful to their bigoted followers quoting something from your account, you get waves after waves of harassment posts. You can keep blocking them, but they create new accounts just to find your posts and reply with something bigoted, hateful, etc. You brought up antisemitism. Do you think your friends appreciate more that you unfollowed the few antiemetic accounts, that neither you nor them realized were being antiemetic, or the time before, when large obviously antiemetic accounts were getting banned on sight, and couldn't send out a bunch of followers with sock puppets to harass them? I think the latter might be a bigger issue. If you aren't part of a minority group that's being constantly harassed online, you really have no idea what you're talking about it. If you're trying to argument your actions by being an ally to these minority groups, listen to them. When someone from a minority group tells you that lack of censorship is harmful and dangerous, don't just ignore it because it made you feel good to remove a few bigots from your follow lists. It shouldn't be about that.

I'm a game dev. I have RTX, 20 cores, and 64GB so I can actually do the same stuff on my personal computer as I'd do on the work machine, But it's also great for gaming, so I was already about as prepared as I needed to be. But in general, yeah, don't preemptively upgrade for a game that hasn't been released yet. Wait for the game (or at least the Early Access if there is one) to release, for people to play it, and to know for sure both the specs you'll want and that you'll enjoy playing it. Don't just put in hundreds of dollars into an expectation of a game.

I don't think terminator's a cyborg. People just got used to calling anything human-looking with robotic parts sticking out (as in scenes where terminator has taken damage) cyborgs by that point. Technically, depending on how you classify the fleshy bits, terminator could be a cyborg. The skin, presumably, has the sensory capacity which the robot riding inside it can use, making it an instance of cybernetic connection, and nothing in the cyborg definition dictates which side does the driving. It could be argued that with the Borg, the robotic parts do the driving as well, and they're clearly cyborgs. But this only makes sense if we treat the flesh as an organism, which is a bit of a stretch. If it's synthetically grown flesh, it's organic, but it's not a self-sustained organism. Unless they literally clone the whole human, then gut the body and the robot wears it as a suit... Which my Terminator knowledge isn't sufficient to dispute, but I don't think that's what they've been implying in the movie.

Such an obvious problem, in fact, that it's the exact problem that we have specialized proteins for - ATP Synthase. Pathways to creating a proton gradient given an electric potential are many and obvious. Just FYI, that's not what the word cyborg means, or humans with their skeletons would be cyborgs by the default. Cybernetics is the study of feedback loops, and cybernetic organism, or cyborg for short, is an organism that has a cybernetic integration with something that isn't an organism or part of one. Since you're talking about life forms evolved with the inorganic parts, these parts are integral to the organism, and so these are not cyborgs by definition. A cyborg is created from a normal organism, not born as a cyborg, if that makes it a little bit more clear. In contrast, it does mean that a person wearing glasses is, technically, a cyborg, as glasses are involved in sensory feedback loop. But people don't usually use the term quite so liberally, of course.

The problem with heat is keeping it in. And while magnetic confinement helps a little, an object at "only" a few million Kelvin will be radiating a trillion times more energy than the surface of the Sun inch-for-square inch, and mostly in X-Ray. And you usually want to go a little hotter to get the reactions going. The thermal radiation energies involved start at a dental X-Ray and go up if you want to have a livelier reaction rate. At these frequencies, we only know how to reflect X-Ray at very shallow angles. To prevent energy losses, you need to send that heat back in or run the reaction so fast there is no time for reactants to cool. Since nothing can reflect the radiated heat back in, the only way to avoid losses over time is to have you reactor be really big. Id est, the Sun. Your other options is running the reaction really fast, either in a continuous beam in a toroidal reactor or in spikes using either ablative or magnetic compression. All three of these have to work with fairly rarified plasma to function, so getting high mass flow rates simply isn't an option. There is a secret third option. Catalyzed fusion. Muons bring the barrier down enough that you can almost get away with room temperatures. Though, of course, a few thousand Kelvin won't hurt for a faster reaction. Trouble is that muons decay, and we haven't figured out how to make them efficiently. You solve that, and we'll have cheap, reliable (almost) cold fusion. You don't, and we're stuck compressing plasma really, really fast in large and expensive reactors.

I don't know if Discord is the right space for this sort of a thing either, and for a large community, it's a lot of the same effort running it as a large forum. The only reason I'm suggesting it is that it's relatively easy to set one up as a jumping off point.

Eh. They'll pivot. Their viewers are in the same boat as all of us, looking for the next game to latch on to, and the content will adjust. The chaos of the switch would have been distracting, but I think they got the view spike on the scandal that hopefully compensates a little. And I don't think there will be a vacuum for long. I don't think there's a game quite like what KSP2 was meant to be anywhere on the horizon, but plenty of other games that would be interesting to that community in the mean time.

My suggestion would be to set up an unofficial community Discord for KSP forums somewhere, independent of any official servers. Even if there's not much happening there, it can be a meeting point to discuss alternatives. I definitely wouldn't recommend rushing to create a new forum somewhere. The unfortunate reality of the forums is that they are a bit tedious to moderate when they grow large, and entirely pointless if they don't. Having gone through some exoduses in early 2000s when certain game communities crashed, and having been involved in setting up some community forums as replacements, I've stepped on a lot of these rakes. So until we have a good idea of how many people would be interested in participating and running the place, I wouldn't start on it.

100x Uranium is almost exactly antimatter. You can, of course, also just "burn" normal matter in a black hole, but that does come with... challenges.

Angels operate in a completely different price range. It's hard to say precisely how much T2 would be looking for, but it's pretty safe to say that it'd be in tens of millions. I have seen companies raise that as a seed, but that takes some extraordinary circumstances, and even then, you still need an operational budget. It's not absolutely impossible for an independent studio to obtain the KSP IP and make a game, but they will need backing from a publisher who will be expecting to turn a profit on this, so the only way it could happen is if some very well established names are behind it. And I don't really see this as likely. The actual most likely option, outside of the IP just getting iced at T2 indefinitely, is a studio buying it in expectation to crank out a bunch of cheap games exploiting the marketability of Kerbals. It's not the worst outcome, because if they do a good job with that, they will give a proper KSP sequel a go some ways down the line, but it won't be soon. All in all, this news has robbed me of what little optimism I still held on to. KSP2 is dead, and Kerbal IP is either going on ice or will only result in non-rocket-building games for a while.

By the time AI can make the kind of game development work that'd qualitatively change ability of one person to make a game, they won't need that one person either, and it won't be our games, it will be their games.

That's typically spread across multiple people, though. Solo dev games exist, but they're far more limited in scope basically by necessity. A solo dev doesn't have a long enough lifetime to do what a team of fifty can do in four years. No getting around that.

Naturally, you are referring to the fact that in most jurisdictions, spouses are subject to Fermi-Dirac statistics by law.

I have no idea what you're talking about. It's the perfect amount of data. Draws a straight line on graph paper through points labeled (1866, 2) and (1946, 3) with intensity normally reserved for cutting red or blue wires.

Good call. I didn't realize WARN even differentiates, but apparently the type submitted can be closure or layoffs, and Take Two notice for Seattle was submitted with a "closure" type. Which really makes the way the question about it during the earnings call was answered even weirder. If you've submitted official gov't paperwork electing to put "closure" as the reason, why be coy about it when asked by shareholders?

Kerbal Kart. Maybe not literally, but we're getting some sort of a Kerbal Kart, I just know it. I don't know where that falls on your personal good vs interesting chart, but it's the only way T2 can do an inexpensive, moderately safe release that keeps the public interested in the little green beings from planet Kerbin at this point, and if there is any intention at all to come back to the franchise inside the company, they kind of have to. Personally, I don't hate it. So long as it's not a loot box nightmare, I'm perfectly happy to see a silly game with Kerbal IP stuck to it just 'cause, and especially if the theme is fitting, and few things make more sense to my image of Kerbals than them racing a bunch of go karts tuned in a homebrew sort of way with safety not even second. Edit: Tinfoil hat moment. What if Intercept did get a small team already working on a "safe" spinoff title? We know they were cooking and hiring. All we really know about the Intercept Games is that 70 people were let go, which is roughly the size of the KSP2 team. If they hired enough for the unnamed project to keep going, maybe that's still there? What if the Intercept Games isn't officially closed, because Intercept Games still has a crew of 10-15 people who were and continue to work on the spin-off game? No, I know that seems pretty unlikely, but if the game's simple enough, and they were getting close to the release, they might have been spared. I guess, if there's any chance at all, we'll hear something about that soon.

Nah, it's really not what it looks like when experienced game developers are in a room, regardless of the discipline. a) We all want to make a cool thing. b) We all know what it took to get to our senior roles. There is no steamrolling. No matter how passionate and amazing the vision is, when I say, "I hate to be that person, but I don't think we have the resources," the discussion pivots and we start talking about what we can deliver, and whether we can get more resources. Same thing happens if the limiting factors come from the art or design sides, because they have their own challenges and their own limitations. There are exceptions. There are studios with awful toxic cultures where they think they can throw enough people and enough crunch at the problem. I've seen that at Blizz and I've heard this of certain projects at R* for example. But at mid-size or indy, we all know each other. You aren't assigning nameless resources. There's a Gantt chart with everyone's names on it, and you know how much time each person is going to spend against their tasks, and how things are going to land. And no matter how impassionate the creative director is, it's not their first game. They know what the lines on the chart mean. The only way you get steamrolling is if the creatives are expecting to fall on the same level of experience from the tech counterparts, and that experience isn't there. The charts aren't made, or are made with made up time estimates that have no bearing on reality, and that's when the creatives might say, "So we're going with all of that?" hear no protests, and keep going. But it's not because they overwhelmed the voices of reason with their oratorical skills. It's because there were no voices of reason. Outside of generic management duties and knowing your trade, there are three things a good tech director has to bring to the table. Knowing where the limits of your team are, based on team's composition and time available; knowing when to speak up if the limits are exceeded - not against someone, but in support of the project, because you will be heard; and knowing how to communicate the limitations to the creative and design teams in a way that lets all of you together work on a compromise or a workaround. There are other nice-to-haves, like being able to mentor and grow your team, but at the end of the day, that's a responsibility that can be shared with the leads. The above is non-negotiable. If you don't have a person who can handle this within the scope of the given project, that project's doomed.

In game dev, that doesn't work with any developers, not just engineers. Severity varies with department and seniority, but even junior QA pick up game-specific know-how that make them far more efficient than whoever you'll find as a replacement. Generally speaking, losing senior engineers and tech-art hurts the most, but I've been on a project where the QA lead was onboarding engineers, because he's been on the project the longest, knew where all the skeletons are buried, and had a better grasp of the back end API than anyone in the engineering.\ It is very unfortunate that the people-first studios end up the most vulnerable when the industry is going through some cutbacks, because they consistently make some of the best games.

That's not what you said, though. What you said was, And that was never an option. (Yes, I said the "no options" thing in a completely broken way.) Taking money for IP and walking away was never an option. It wasn't his IP anymore. He wasn't taking money to walk away. He walked away because he wanted to work on something that's his. The options you are presenting were never options. The abandonment you're imagining never took place.

There were several very experienced people on the project, but that might have been even worse. The senior people might be used to their counterparts from other departments telling them when they're over-reaching, and the junior people might not know to speak up, creating a perfect storm for confidently heading in the wrong direction. Dev teams tend to be pretty flexible in terms of the hierarchy - there isn't usually a strict chain of command to follow (though, there is one outlined, and it's usually used to resolve conflicts). But the composition of the team is still very important. If you're lacking "high ranking" developers in any given area, even if the juniors are capable of doing the work, it's going to bite you in the rear. But on the net, it's not something invisible. Everyone knew the project's off schedule. The internal view was clearly, "We're not getting enough resources, and the goal posts are constantly shifted," which is at least partially fair. But to a publisher that looks like a team that's giving a constant thumbs up and under-delivering. The correct reaction from a publisher is looking into the causes, down to the point of sending their due diligence team in. Because PD usually works with external studios, they have people specifically employed to look into other team's culture, work practices, etc, which evaluates developers prior to signing them up. And if your internal studio starts showing signs of distress, these are the people who will tell you precisely what's going wrong. Instead, PD's reaction was to just keep saying, "Hurry it up," and then putting a hard deadline for EA? That's not going to make the situation better. All it does is moves another goal post from the team's perspective. Bottom line, we can argue at length on what the studio could have done to self-correct and to send clearer communication up the chain to the publisher to resolve the situation, and whether that was even possible. But there is no argument that identifying and responding to problems like this is part of the publisher's job. It's literally what they are there for - managing resources and targets for the team. And the publisher that only adjust the latter without even checking on the former does not know how to do their job. And this is why I'm fully on Intercept's side, including individuals often blamed for it, like Nate. Mistakes were clearly made, but mistakes always happen in any development, and in a healthy developer-publisher relationship, these would have been corrected years ago. And FWIW, I don't think it's malicious from T2/PD's perspective either. They shot themselves in the foot and lost a bunch of their own money. A lot of people here will say, "And ours!" and that's true, but T2 wanted KSP2 to be successful as much as the rest of us. The only predatory move was how EA was marketed, and I don't think that was intentionally malicious. I don't know if anybody here ever worked with brand/marketing people in games, but they are their own universe. I know a bunch of people just picture an office building full of boring bean-counters, and they have a few of these, but marketing is about hype, about going viral, about making things popular. They are extremely excitable, and often terminally online bunch. (Also often older than the target demographic, leading to a touch of the "How do you do, fellow kids," but that's a separate topic.) So if you send them an email saying, "Hey we are releasing an Early Access for this game, can you make a trailer?" you'll get exactly what we got. I don't think anybody wanted to hide how rough EA is to defraud somebody. Analytics wanted to see how many units EA can sell to make projections for the 1.0, marketing just wanted to do the best they can as always, and somebody in charged pushed the red "launch" button without ever considering the consequences. It was still predatory and damaging, but I don't think anybody involved went in with that intention. People at T2 who should have thought about it just didn't care. And that last bit is probably the summary for the entire story.

But again, his job wasn't engineering. His job was getting everyone on board for a unified vision of what KSP2 should be, which, goal clearly achieved. The fact that it was a vision not achievable with tech/resources on board is not his fault. It's literally not in Creative Director's job description. You have the art director who is supposed to make sure the assets can meet creative's requirements, or push the brakes. You have the technical/engineering director who's supposed to do the same from the tech side. Then you have production that's supposed to get everyone organized, get them in the same room, and make sure the abilities and vision of the studio are all aligned, and finally up to the publisher to approve that vision and the bill for it. If the vision is clearly presented, everyone understand that vision, and then the project fails because resources for that vision aren't there, Creative Director's the last person on the list of guilty parties among the above-mentioned. Other people on the team are the ones that should be raising a red flag on that, resulting in change of course ordered from above. I'd also argue that art's in the clear, simply because of where things landed. So we're looking at production, engineering director, and the publisher. And we know the publisher's done a lot of shady stuff in this process, so it does make them the prime suspect, and next on my list is technical leadership (or lack thereof for the most of the duration, which is also mostly on publisher...)

I don't think he had options. As far as I understand it, HarvesteR's work on KSP1 was work-for-higher, or whatever equivalent they have under Brazilian laws, and so all rights belonged to Squad. His options were to continue working on KSP1 as a salaried employee, or go do something else.