K^2

That's such an awful take this year. I'm not going to try to defend performance of IG - or rather, not the whole of IG. They have clearly fallen below the mark a number of times as a studio, but we've also seen some fantastic work put in by individuals and teams. So that's the first complaint, don't put everyone in the same bucket. There were several absolutely amazing people who just lost their job, and you're making it sound like it's their fault. At best, it's thoughtless. At worst, hypocritical and shamefully ignorant. Second is that how well or poorly the team has done is not remotely the deciding factor in whether a studio gets to stay. Just earlier this week we got news that Microsoft is making cuts across Bethesda, and Tango Gameworks got closed. They are developers of the Hi-Fi Rush, a game released just last year to overwhelming public acclaim and won a number of awards in 2023 and 2024, including Best Audio at TGA and Best Animation at BAFTA. And they just got shut down. No warning, no nothing. So saying Intercept got "fired" for doing bad job on KSP2 is simply not true. Individual people get fired for bad work. Studio shutdowns happen for absolutely unrelated reasons.

You're kind of missing the point here. Valve provides "Early Access" label as an opt-in for developers/publishers to stick on their game as a heads up to the consumer. There is nothing stopping you from shipping the 0.1 as 1.0, saying, "Yup, that's it, that's our game, totally a finished product" to Valve, and marketing it with, "Here's a roadmap for future updates, please buy the game now so we can keep working on it," to the public. The "Early Access" is entirely voluntary. If you look at the quality of asset-flip shlock that gets uploaded as finished games to Steam, you can see that Valve is not remotely interested in doing any sort of a quality control, and creating any sort of roadblocks to getting the "Early Access" label would mean that developers and publishers simply stop using the "Early Access" label. This is strictly worse for the consumers. The safeguards in place, and ones that absolutely could be improved, all have to do with honesty in advertising. If you were sold a product with a promise that has been violated, you do have recourse. The problem is that as things stand, getting any sort of action would require a class action lawsuit, and these are comparatively rare and hard to start. Laws acknowledging that in the digital age the consumers must have better tools for dealing with this should be put into place, and EU is at least trying a few things. None of it has to do with Valve, though. If we were to have easier ways for consumers to enforce the implied contract established by the Early Access, we would see developers be more careful about it. For a small indy dev studio, it could mean going bankrupt if they fail, but that's the same outcome if they never hit the market. For large companies, it would introduce liability for overpromising on EA, and would result in fewer titles hitting EA, but more of them making through to a finished game. That would be a net win to the consumers. I mean, yes, but it's also a little bit like saying, "People with gambling addiction just shouldn't gamble." Not all people are good with their purchasing decisions. To an extent, that's on them, but a company intentionally exploiting that is still a scummy company involved in a dishonest, and in some cases, illegal practices. That doesn't mean Early Access or gambling shouldn't exist. It means that there has to be some regulation around it. You shouldn't be able to just promise absolutely anything you want as a future update, put it up for EA, abandon it, and run away with the money. Just like you couldn't advertise a casino by promising that everyone who walks in will leave with more winnings than losses. And again, in most cases it is technically illegal already. We have laws requiring the advertising to stick to provable statements. It's just very difficult to enforce sometimes, and having better enforcement of what people have already generally agreed are good rules for corporations to follow can only be a good thing. Not that saying this is any sort of a plan. I fully acknowledge that it's a hard problem, and in many cases has to be weighed carefully against how much damage you're doing to potential innovation by introducing more hoops to jump through.

T2 is a publicly traded company. In general, anything they disclose to shareholders has to be public. An Earnings Call absolutely has to be public. It doesn't mean they have to stream the meeting, but they'll have to at least make the transcripts available. In practice, these are either streamed live, or the recordings are available on the company site. Previous recordings for T2 can be found here. I do see a link for a webcast of the upcoming earnings call linked from there, so presumably, you'd be able to watch it there.

Agreed, with a caveat that it doesn't mean that PD isn't planning to continue development of KSP2, but rather that it's not happening right now, and if and when it resumes, a different team will be involved. If you want a comparison to what this can look like on the optimistic end of the spectrum, the way Paradox Interactive handled Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 development has similar beats. The game was running behind and reportedly there have been problems. One day PI simply announced that the game is indefinitely delayed, and Hardsuit Labs, who were working on it, was closing down. Granted, PI was more communicative than PD is being, but a lot of it was opaque corpo speak which said the same things we know about KSP2. Last year, they finally announced that The Chinese Room is now working on the game, has been making great progress, and that the game's targeting 2024 release. There's a world in which PD decides to pull the plug on KSP2 all together, but right now, the indication is that they're going the above route. They either have someone in mind for KSP2 development or they're shopping. Either way, it will take a bit of time to get the development going again, and I don't know if we'll get an update immediately on that, or if it's going to be a while until PD decides to show us both the new studio and progress being made. To be fair, I am basing this on the premise that if you already decided to cut losses, it's best to cut them immediately, because all that you'll have tomorrow is more losses. As a counterpoint, it's clear that publishers started treating studios and IP as tulips, and the only thing that counts is the stock price ticking up. So I can't exclude some "master strategy" of announcing the cuts now, taking a bonus for the stock increase, then telling everyone that KSP2 is canceled anyways, and when the stocks take the hit, spreading the arms and saying, "It's a tough year for everyone." The only thing I can say to that possibility is that then you might as well just sit on the title until another opportunity does show up, which from our perspective is going to be indistinguishable from the game still being "in development" but looking for developer. Either way, as far as I can tell, the game's on ice, and we'll just have to wait to see how, when, and if it gets defrosted.

It does. Corporations know that most people would, most generously, not do great work knowing they'll be out in a few weeks, and might even be risking sabotage. In practice, the moment the notice is served, everyone affected gets a short exit interview and are sent home. If anybody from Intercept are still working on KSP2, they have been transferred to the Private Division. Which might include a few people, but 70 people on WARN notice is at least almost everyone. So at most, a single digits of developers are now part of PD and still contributing to KSP2. More realistically, the support still being done for the game is by people who were already part of PD and have helped shipping the EA previously. (We have seen a number of engineers from PD listed on KSP2 EA credits.) Not particularly, unfortunately. Take Two and Private Division gain very little from providing additional information. Better to say nothing, and have people suspect, than speak up and lose the element of doubt kind of situation. However, if T2/PD already gave up on the game completely, I think they'd just say so. The fact that the official statement (the whole two sentences of it) suggests that KSP2 is still considered in development suggests that they're going to be looking for a new developer. In that case, the next update will probably be telling us that a <Studio Name> has taken over the development. That could be months from now, though.

Honestly, could be? Cathode temperature seems like a more straight forward way, but PWM is always an option, and I can't think of a reason why you couldn't go with short enough pulses where it doesn't matter that much. I have seen microwaves where the magnetron main power and dish spinner are on the same relay, so you can't modulate power with these without stopping the spinner, but I haven't experimented with how defrost setting works with these, so I can't say anything for sure.

Maybe the above at least gives you some ideas for keywords to search, or what to look for feature-wise. Microwaves use a magnetron, not a klystorn, but both devices have the same limitation in that the frequency is dependent on the cavity sizes. Moreover, the magnetron in a microwave oven is tuned to maximize absorption by water. Fortunately, you don't have to get creative with these. While it's difficult to regulate the applied high voltage, which is what really drives the output power, magnetron relies on a heated cathode. Running it cooler results in lower internal current and lower power output. And that you can regulate with just some power mosfets very easily without a risk of burning anything out. There are a lot of microwaves on the market that have adjustable power. Most have a defrost option at least, which runs at partial power. So the problem's always just the lack of features in the control board. You might have to shop around, but you can find a microwave oven with good power adjustment. The caveat is that it might be highly non-linear and you'll have to get the correct power settings by trial and error, but that's just a matter of getting used to it, basically.

It's not a "below 70 person team" now. It's a zero person team. Or nearly enough - as discussed at length, there might be some PD developers who have previously working on KSP2 that are still able to do some minor fixes. There were 76 names for Intercept listed in KSP2 EA credits. Some of these people already departed earlier or work remotely. We do not know the status of the latter, but this is basically everyone who was working on KSP2 as part of Intercept Games. The entire Intercept dev team is gone. This isn't a warning. It's a notice of termination compliant with the WARN act. Washington state laws prohibit firing a significant number of employees without providing them with a 60 day notice. Now, imagine that you were told that 60 days from now you're going to get fired. How much work are you going to do? Are there guarantees you won't intentionally try to break something as revenge? No. This is why companies don't just tell you that you'll be fired 60 days from now. They post a WARN notice at the end of the day on Monday, and then you're told Tuesday morning to collect your things and go home. You still get payed for the next 60 days, and your health benefits are still running for that time, but you no longer do any work for the company. You have basically been fired with severance, and the whole song-and-dance with it being a "warning" is just to comply with a state law. So we know for a fact that a PD studio in Seattle has let go of 70 people. The only Seattle studio with that many people is Intercept Games, and 70 people is basically everybody there. There could have been a handful of transfers to PD. In fact, a few people have been reported to have their Linkedin info change from Intercept Games to Private Division. But it's still very nearly everyone at a minimum. Intercept Games no longer exists, and there is no KSP2 dev team at present. These are known facts. The rest we're still waiting to find out.

It's generally difficult to regulate power precisely and efficiently in another way. A rheostat will be generating huge losses, expressed as heat. And while a variable transformer is an option in some applications, it tends not to work well with induction specifically. Technology Connections has very recently did an entire video on the topic, primarily on the standard solution of using simmerstats, but these are doing precisely the thing you're trying to avoid and precisely for the reasons outlined. Technology Connection - Simmerstats There is an example of a place where we do need to deliver a very measured amount of power while still being constrained by the same problems of efficiency and heat dissipation, which is electric motors. Especially in drones and EVs, but even a lot of RC toys rely on this these days. The solution is using ECS to deliver power to the motor. ESC is a solid state device, and it is surprisingly efficient, but under the hood, or under the plastic, really, what they do is still just very fast power switching. They do the same work as a simmersat does, but on the time frames of a single polarity cycle step of a brushless motor. The good ones will match the frequency of the motor using back-EMF as an indicator of the cycle, and then deliver a measured duration of an applied voltage to the motor's coils. Because the frequency is so high, the power delivery is effectively continuous, and you can adjust the torque of the motor as desired. Something like this can be built for the inductor stove. The challenge is largely the same. You have to match the oscillation frequency of the induction coil with your power pulses, and then adjust the duration of the pulses to deliver the right amount of power. You might be able to modify a brushless ECS to drive it, as it's doing the same job. But be warned that it's not a trivial task and ESCs in kW ranges tend to go for a few hundred dollars (or pounds, since you're calling the cooktops hobs, I guess). There are some designs out there that use an MCU and off-the-shelf parts to build a custom regulator that is capable of PWM adjustments. Here's one I found after a quick search. If you're good with soldering tools and aren't afraid of some MCU work, that's absolutely an option. P.S. If you're unsure how the induction stoves work in general, Wikipedia article on Inductive Cooking gives a good enough intro. In short, it's a very high power AC generator utilizing an LC resonance. If you can power through concept of impedance and how that relates to damped harmonic oscillators, you're set on theory.

Perhaps, they are rightfully terrified that my review of their implementation of warp would be entirely too scathing. Right now is an awful time to be looking for jobs in game dev. Engineering will probably do alright, at least these with some experience, but for others it will be rough.

You right, I don't. I have owned, and still do, actually, a number of Ti calculators, including the infamous 92. 89 and 92 are both capable of some symbolic math and do handle units reasonably well, but there are also a lot of rough edges. Plus, I don't want to carry a calculator with me in the modern age. If I'm going to make this, it's going to be a JS app hosted through github in all likelihood. That way I can run it from desktop or a phone wherever I am.

You're not wrong. It's just that if the entire team is gone, there's nobody left to speak for the team from the team. And people might not want to speak unofficially out of fear of losing these 60 days of pay and benefits. Washington is an at-will state. Until June, these 70 people on WARN list are still, legally speaking, employees, and are receiving their normal pay, insurance, and other benefits. And the company can't cut all of them at once, because that would be violation of the WARN act. But because all of the employment is at-will, employer can cut any one employee at any time for any reason. In practice, the company always wants to have a reason, so that there is no wrongful termination lawsuit, because there are a lot of reasons for which you explicitly can't fire people, especially when WARN is in effect, and the burden of proof can fall on the company. If they instantly terminate, say, ten people, that will stink. But if one or two people break silence, they can be unceremoniously fired. If this is what we're looking at, we might either get some indirect hints from social media, or something a bit more concrete in about two months. That said, I do repeat, I think you're right, and I think this silence is hurting PD, so it would be very helpful for them to make a more concrete announcement of what exactly is happening with KSP2 in the nearest future. I just think that communication can only come from PD at this point, and we are all likely to be very skeptical of what it says.

It's not about finishing the game. It's about passing console cert. It's an amount of work that may surprise you, and may surprise you even more to learn how little it has to do with a working/finished game. There are just all these hoops you have to jump through. Even just looking at KSP2 EA credits you can see that a number of engineers are listed who are part of PD and not IG. If there are changes being made, I would be heavily on these people being involved, as they are still part of PD. We might have also seen a handful of people transferred from IG to PD. Very far from entire team, not enough to add features, but enough to get the build released if it was nearly ready, for example.

I doubt there's enough to release colonies, or people would have found more than they did in previous releases. There are some core systems in place, and some might even be partially implemented in the form of KSC functionality, but not enough to just patch up. I am extrapolating a bit past the full confidence, though. A completely isolated experimental branch with a lot more progress on it that some MacGyvers from PD can manage to integrate into a functional Frankenstein isn't entirely impossible. Just very unlikely. I am certain, however, that no way they're getting a console release out. Not without a dev team, at least contractors, coming in, learning the code base and making all the missing stuff. What we have in EA doesn't have a snowball's to pass console cert, and it doesn't sound like Intercept was working on it. Edit: It might be relatively easy for PD to push out another star system. It's mostly asset work, and it's ok if some of it is broken, as it'd be mostly graphical glitches. I don't know how you'd get to it, unless they move it way closer to Kerbol and maybe beef up NTRs? But it's technically on the table. If PD really wants to make it look like real feature work is happening, that's probably the lowest branch.

Intercept isn't going to be working for the next 60 days. They were already sent home. The notice is a legal formality. In practice, employees are fired on the spot and given 60 days of pay and benefits. Nobody is working on KSP2 right now, and no progress towards 1.0 will be made until a replacement studio is found. We don't know how long that will be, but don't expext anything to happen over the next couple of months at least, and it might take a lot longer. I would be shocked if we get any code updates this year, unless something was basically ready to go and can be pushed out by a skeleton crew of PD devs, and even that would be minor. 1.0 is not coming this year. It probably isn't coming in 2025 either.

Because all of the units are already matching. You can do all of the math here with numbers separately and units separately. If you evaluate the units only, the expression simplifies as follows. (m3/s2 * s2)1/3 = (m3)1/3 = m3 * 1/3 = m So this tells us that the answer will be in meters, which is what we want. And then the numerical part can be done by just multiplying the numbers together, which is why you get the same numerical answer. The reason to put in the units anyways is basically a self-check. If you made a mistake in the formula, you'll either get strange units out or an error. For example, if you were to forget to square the period, you'd end up with (m3/s)1/3 = m/s1/3, and because cube root of seconds (s1/3) isn't a physical unit, you'd get some form of an error. Which is preferable, in my opinion, to getting a number that's completely wrong, using it without realizing, and ending up having to scrap the mission. The other reason is convenience. Even if you're in metric, you might be dealing with hours or kilometers, not just seconds and meters. Google calculator will make that conversion for you.

Rocketwerkz are making their own game, and since they're building it on their engine, it's in a very different category. I'm sure they could pivot more towards KSP2, but that'd be starting work from scratch, effectively. Realistically, I think RW will pick up some devs from this and continue making their own game. It's possible that it will be good. Possibly great. But I think it will be more tightly scoped than KSP2 was intended to be. I see no indication at present that there is a replacement for Intercept. As it was an internal team, there would be complications with shopping for a replacement before the studio got closed, and these things take time. It's entirely possible that T2 has a studio in mind, but unless it's another internal team (and I can't think who) this would have to start with negotiations, and then we'll lose more time as the team is ramped up. I wouldn't expect any updates on how KSP2 is going for at least half a year.

Literally the first sentence of that quote. But I get it, you didn't care about the second part so much, that you had to spend the entire post telling me how much you didn't care. And then to say one more time how much you and everybody else didn't care about it. Just to make sure I know you don't care. Noted, other people's income is never a thing you think about, Cryptobux. So lets stick to the topic of... Oh, you might want to skip that part. We were talking about CEO salary and whether it's a good use of company finances, and I know how much you don't care about it.

I'm saying that if maybe you had a loss-generating division operating under your nose for four years, you don't get to quadruple your salary, and then fire absolutely everyone in that division without looking at who was actually at fault there. But also, I happen to pay taxes. A lot of taxes, actually. I pay more in taxes every year than half of the country makes as their pre-tax paycheck. So I'm paying for children going to local schools, for people who aren't covered through work to receive some sort of healthcare, even for some poor people getting food. And I think that's the right thing to do. Because that's how you end up with a nice society full of healthy, educated people, and not a dystopian hellhole where everything sucks. If you don't understand that, you're part of the reason why things suck. You got me there.

Well, in this case both. Google's calculator already "understands" units, so you can just put numbers in with the units they are in, and it will take that into consideration when doing math. For a simple example, lets say you're traveling at 5m/s for 2 hours and you want to know how far you traveled in miles. Distance is just speed times time, so d = v * t, but you can't just multiply 5 * 2 here, because units don't match. Normally, you'd have to convert hours into seconds, then do the multiplication, and then you'd still have result in meters, which you need to convert into miles. Instead, Google lets you to just type in the following. 5m/s * 2 hours to miles And it will spit out 22.369 miles as an answer. It's the correct result and in units you wanted. Under the hood it's doing the same thing that maybe you recall from school science class, where there would be fractions inserted to cancel the units. It would look something like this (5 m/s) * (2 hours) * (3600 s/hour) * (1 mile / (1609.34 m)) and then you'd go through and cancel the seconds, hours, and meters (because they show up in numerator and denominator the same number of times) and you'd be left with (5 * 2 * 3600 / 1609.34) miles And if you multiply out just the numerical part here, you'll get 22.369. Google's calculator does all of that for you, so you don't have to put in unit conversion factors so long as you put everything else in with the correct units.

I believe, de-escalation from overgeneralizing to generalizing is exactly what I promised in these two sentences. I also used the phrase "a lot" instead of "most". If two of the shoes in your house have baby rattlesnakes in them, that's a lot, even though it's probably far from being the most. It's also two more rattlesnakes than you'd like to have in your house, and you might start thinking that there is something systematically wrong with your house or the shoes that it happened twice. I am very good at my job too, which is dealing with simulation and control systems. I could be making bank in military-industrial or self-driving cars, but I'm not going to, because I don't want that on my conscience. So I make video games instead. Because I can do my job, one I'm very good at, without putting lives at risk. Being good at your job and not carrying about people's feelings only goes so far. When you kick hundreds of people on the street to maximize the profit, saying, "It's just my job," is about as good of a defense as "I was just following orders," while committing war crimes. Is that every C-level? No. Most run startups and will go down with the ship if crap hits the fan. But we aren't talking about these people when we're talking about studios getting unceremoniously closed, are we? And before you say, "But they must make profit to stay afloat," gaming companies posted record earnings in 2023. December 2023 was the highest revenue month ever for games. Bar none. And the Take Two CEO has recently increased his own salary to $43M/year as a pat on the back for that. I don't know how familiar you are with studio finances, but running the studio of the size of Intercept costs several times less than T2 CEO's salary. And we haven't even talked about the bonuses. That's just salary. If you have a studio your corporation owns, a corporation you are a CEO of, and it's being mismanaged and isn't delivering on targets, replace that leadership. Possibly even dismantle the studio and absorb the employees into the other projects. If you are a CEO taking in $43M/year and your solution is to serve 70 WARN notices, I'd like to hear you explain how this is a total normal person behavior of doing one's job. Please, go ahead.

Setting aside whatever narrative you're building, I don't know where you're getting an idea that C-levels of these megacorps are naive idiots that can be puppeteered with some smiles and sweet words. If pretending they're all stupid is an attempt to regain some feeling of control, I'd say it's a crap coping mechanism. The competence they hold might not be in industry experience, shrewd erudition, or even financial acumen at times, but it's precisely in dealing with other people effectively and for personal gain. Overgeneralizing usually isn't a great idea, so there are exceptions of all kinds, but as you're looking at larger and larger corporations, being a psychopath becomes a more significant boon to the corporate leadership. Consequently, a lot of the C levels in these companies are. So you're looking at people who often lack empathy, have strange quirks, and may act with unearned arrogance, projecting, whether they believe it themselves or not, that they're great at everything, when in reality they're really just good at building alliances and climbing ladders. But they are good at that. You don't survive at that level otherwise, sometimes literally. You can't run a simple con on people like that. They've run these cons themselves to get where they are. If you really believe that you're seeing someone run a con on a corporation, and you can understand the way it works, the corp isn't being played. They're part of the show. And the "obvious con artist," is probably the intended fall guy. For the PR fallout, primarily. All that said, I very much doubt that it applies to the current situation. I don't know Nate personally, but I've worked with enough directors whom he very much reminds me of. They're genuine in wanting to build that game. Sometimes, the ambition is greater than the resources, available, and you can give up or you can bet on the resources becoming available if you make your enthusiasm infectious enough. And a lot of great games happened this way. Also, a lot of great flops. None of it precludes such directors from lacking skill to pull off the success even if the resources materialize, so I don't know which one is the case here. Whether the Intercept got everything they needed, but fell behind on the schedule anyways due to inability to staff and manage the teams properly, or if they weren't given adequate resources to hire the people they needed for the scope of the project. Worst part, we might not learn which one it is for a very long time. But in either case, the upper management at T2 and PD would have been very much aware of the situation. If they chose to bet on KSP2 despite the team's inability to execute on it (in either of these two scenarios) it's because T2 knew they can still sell the hype. And they did. There is absolutely no reason to think that T2 has been misled by Intercept leadership.

70 people are getting let go. Restructuring doesn't require WARN notice. That's everybody at the studio. There's nobody left to fold in.

They'd get pressured into refunds this way, since there is enough marketing for features that clearly aren't there yet. I don't know if T2 would want to do that, especially when they can just continue saying it's in development and do nothing for now. Even from, "it's the next year's T2 problem," that would make more sense. Would they eventually? Hard to say. I still think it'd be cheaper for them to hire a contractor to just wedge things in and call it good enough, even if it will be less stable and worse performing than it is now. Then call it a 1.0, and put it up on the storefront under some deep discount. So I think it's between that option and finishing it for real. And they don't have to decide right now.

Yeah. It's common to skip multiplication signs in algebraic notation, but it has to be explicitly typed out in an expression you feed to something like Google Calculator. So when writing an algebraic formula, I might write something like xy2, but in a calculator it'd become x * y^2. (Some algebraic engines, like Mathematica, can handle algebraic notation exactly as written, but that's another tangent.)