PDCWolf

Well, the devblog has it right there, so you can compare the intricate system in KSP1, which worked to take into account the transfer between parts, and thus by nature the distance to heat dissipating parts, and also naturally by that simulation you'd have gradual buildup of unattended excess heat. Now literally nothing of that is taken into account. Also, re-entry is a single situation, and at the level of the simulated system it's just another heat intake point. Well, in my ideal world a sequel would present an evolution on most systems, otherwise what's the point? Also, whilst new features are really nice, Colonies and Interstellar have been done by mods, so they'll get compared to that when those arrive. As far as we know, they haven't even bothered solving the sequential vs simultaneous dilemma for interstellar missions (which we know includes timewarping at least decades). Drop the ball is the name of the game for now. Your biggest mistake is thinking prospective customers and refunders are not important, so let's rectify that: prospective buyers are the majority, even if you consider only the people who've bought KSP1 (5 million, vs not even 1 million who own KSP2 currently) as the only target demographic. This demographic limit we'll put in place so that we don't assume prospective buyers are infinite. Now, to conceptualize why the power of prospective buyers on the product is clearly enormous right now, consider the following: Both Lisias and my metaphor are equivalent. The people who will potentially purchase the game are the ones who have the most pull right now, the bosses in my metaphor, the mechanic's client in Lisias'. Why? because what they want in exchange for the game, is those people's money. Now, at this point a lot of people are surely crying "entitlement", but that's how capitalism works, and that's why customer integration has become so mainstream on almost every process, at a level or another. In fact, as further proof of this argument, again consider this: The people that already gave PD the money? In the eyes of PD they're completely worthless past their continued testing of the game and bug reports they may make. I'll rely on your job as a moderator to know this very well, as you know the people that were mad at the 20% discount were the ones who'd already paid, and the people who were mad that Nate "came down" (because they couldn't say it without being despective) to talk to refunders and the people "mocking him and his product instead of those supporting him" were the ones who'd already paid.

The why is important there. To stifle speculation about them not doing anything and even speculation about their capabilities as developers, they decided to let us know about a system that's a downgrade from its equivalent in KSP1, which they couldn't present in anything but the earliest concept, with line drawings. And then they went on an AMA with that dev, where they didn't pick any genuine questions and much less criticism about it live, as they left that as a homework for Nertea to post in the forum, with varying acceptance levels on those replies. It went bad because they made the worst possible choices at every step of the way.

I think you missed the concept, I was crafting a dummy statement to show Periple you can say something happened and its consequences without assigning blame.

Don't make it about me personally. It's not just me. Get out of the forums a bit and read around, specially around those dates. What you and others took as "trying to stay excited" other people took as "straight up lying to their faces when they can't even play the game". Whether they lied or not can't be discussed in this forum though, as my latest ban had me realize.

Not only is that statement greatly overblown (and disproven by Nate's saying when asked about the team's morale). The community felt much better when they actually started communicating like they should with adults, which is still reflected on the comments of those upnates. Then they took to saying a lot without anything to show for it, they'd go on to insult and almost abandon reddit, not say anything for months to anyone, fail to deliver the K.E.R.B. and append clauses to their initial statements about when it's supposed to come out, and so on. Their communication strategy was a failure, then they managed to turn it into a different kind of failure. Right now they've only gotten a pass because the presentation of FS! actually has some tangible stuff, something that only began to show up early October.

Nah, that's not what I think they wanted. I am of the vision that KSP1 was a golden egg goose, and 2 has (had?) the potential to be one as well, which is why I took Nate at face value when he said they were funded till 1.0. I've never thought, at any point, that KSP2 could be cancelled or dropped. I also don't think the negativity made them go faster. In fact they're not fast, they're painfully, measurably, and undoubtedly slow by any and all metrics other than comparing them to themselves and negativity didn't change their speed at all because it really seems that's as fast as they can go. I do think however, that we're getting the minimum viable product on literally anything promised, and so far that's my take on FS! with it seemingly being a carbon copy of KSP1 science with minimal changes (and no, a carbon copy with minimal changes is the opposite of what I expect from a sequel). I also think that negativity did get them to change their tone on communication, to the point of going on an interview like Matt's, where anyone else would've easily laughed at even being offered the unique chance to commit honesty-cide on camera. We didn't make them any faster, or make them create a better product. But at least we got them to be minimally honest about the state it is in, partially why, and to stop acting like everything is fine when it was in fact not.

Again, I can't find the source. So yeah, can't do much about it. I do remember them saying COVID wasn't "as big" of an issue, but yeah, it is well known the second delay was blamed on it. Your original point was that a lot of it was speculation. My point is that we're slowly getting more facts about it, even if they of course aren't enough to build the full picture, which we probably will never be able to. As for FS! it does seem to be locked in and in the very last steps of testing, which is good. I don't agree with the rest, as it's relentless and even violent speculation what's gotten people to ask the questions and finally got them to answer. If we all shut up, we'd still be on release day strategies, and honestly those upnates and blogs were vomitively tone deaf on all fronts. Imagine you arrive late to your job, half naked, and forgot more than half your stuff at home. Now, when your boss asks why, all you say is "I'm not telling." Well, that's kinda what's happening, and you honestly can't expect your boss to be happy with that explanation. On the contrary, if you give a really good explanation, with proof if it's something too crazy, then reasonable people will probably understand and give you a chance. Now, if you're following the metaphore, going silent for months, grumbling when asked about stuff or outright not answering, and then saying you have the most amazing update ready to release is not something people are going to just believe. Right?

Ok you made me watch the video again. I misheard. He said the industry is a revolving door but that they're below the average. Of course, no sources for the average (google says 1 to 5 years which is not very useful information). My bad for assuming these things were already common knowledge. It seems you've missed out on some stuff and I should've sourced them: From the video above. Development started in 2017. They never said anything about having to restart from scratch or throwing stuff away. THAT is speculation. COVID wasn't that much of an issue. This is the one where the source is not at hand. Thankfully I'm not as passionate in assigning blame to a scapegoat like the prominent voices saying T2 was the bad guy for almost a year now. Their studio is a revolving door. > Read my reply to Periple above. Nate does say their turnover is below the industry average, after saying the industry itself is a revolving door, so it's a misheard on my part. From the video above as well. 13:40

"Something big and bad did indeed happen, though we can't go into detail, but it took away this much development time" There you go. A statement crafted to at least mention that something happened without assigning blame or going into specifics. It's not a case of hurting sensitivities, there's got to be an NDA somewhere, specially when Star Theory fell, and only upper management made it through to IG. I agree we'll bever have a source on what exactly happened, sadly (sadly because it'd be an amazing manual on what not to do) but at least we've got a couple of facts to go by now. Specially for those keen on believing their every word. They blame themselves on underestimating. Development started in 2017. COVID wasn't that much of an issue. Their studio is a revolving door. T2 is not the bad guy. There's probably more but those give you the biggest outline.

It'll never be compatible to me to hear "I have 30 years making games" and "we underestimated by a huge margin how long it'd take those tasks to be completed. In this case it was 4 years". At least this interview puts the "wahh rushed into EA by evil t2" cries to rest.

Except it is true. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of proper optimizations where something has been fixed without sacrificing quality or having to hide it. Also culling is very appropriate in some places, but has caused pop-in in others (namely scatter, for example). From 0.1.2 Optimized orbital nodes in map by not processing non-visible ones < Culling Anti-tile is now disabled when low quality is selected < Graphical downgrade Optimization on Kerbal IVA cameras < Culling From 0.1.3 Adjusted PQS transition range for Vall < Downgrade Added level of detail to aviation lights at KSC < Downgrade Replaced raycast-based lens flare occlusion with depth-based occlusion < Graphical Downgrade Added new compute kernel to improve terrain performance by reducing rendering of non-visible detail < Culling Optimized cloud rendering when camera is below cloud layer < Culling Optimized per-engine point lights by turning off shadows < Graphical Downgrade Optimized PQS terrain textures to reduce memory usage < Graphical Downgrade Optimized tesselation factor for medium and low quality water to improve GPU performance < Graphical Downgrade Optimized water tesselation factor for water viewed from high altitude < Graphical Downgrade Optimized runtime CPU performance for water rendering by updating some properties less than once per frame" < Graphical Downgrade Reduced low- and medium-quality cloud texture sizes for Kerbin, Duna, Eve, and Laythe < Graphical Downgrade From 0.1.4 Added LODs to some KSC buildings < Downgrade Added LODs to spotlight shadows at KSC < Downgrade Now compare that to 0.1.5 where the game both looks and performs better.

Conversely, the most controversial and big stuff has been found by the community, mostly Anth as well. Like the game being released accidentally with DRM on, or bloating the registry to the point of not opening anymore, or having a very gross coordinate reset system, and so on. I'm still afraid of what Anth might find that now he can't tell us about, and now with Blackrack they pretty much confirm they've been hacking stuff together with little knowledge. This. We all understand an Early Access is not a perfect game (even if KSP2 abused that concept with sheer unplayability), and really the content starvation is magnitudes bigger than the bugfix starvation.

They probably have a bag of bugs that wasn't ready for 0.1.5 but in the 2 extra months will be ready for 0.2.0. Now, how important or crucial or foundational those bugfixes may be obviously I can't say, but it'd definitely be very rare for a big update do not include bugfixes in it as well. Remember that before Blackrack, 90% of performance gains came from them hiding, deleting, culling and downgrading stuff on screen, which is not fixing the performance of the game so much as it is a stopgap to make it playable whilst they hopefully actually fix stuff. Now Blackrack came in and pretty much fixed the clouds which were a huge performance issue, and actually one of the like 10 proper performance fixes we've seen and probably the only one with a measurable, night and day impact as well. This is my way of saying I think we'll be back to meager "we made something worse so the game runs a bit better" type fixes.

If they could do it so well why not do it earlier? Either blackrack was needed, or he wasn't.

Well, I definitely don't agree with how he puts it in the video, but I do have an opinion that's kinda similar: The clouds have been a well known performance hog for 8 months, it took them hiring Blackrack for that to be done correctly, and the graphics quality actually jumped after that. So here's what I said on reddit: Yay on Blackrack getting hired, absolutely not yay on whoever was doing that work before [and whatever they're supposed to be doing now]. Like yes, hiring Blackrack has been a positive for the game, and for him, that's not even arguable, but it does let you see that a single, well trained man can fix the mess they made and haven't been able to fix in 8 months. That people are happy enough with Blackrack getting hired and the result of his work shouldn't occlude that there was a big issue there that Blackrack had to step in and solve. Again, congrats to him and very well done to IG for figuring out he was the man for the job.

I don't know if there's a word that implies the same to a lesser degree. However your post is a clear example of what I was talking about, thank you.

It's funny to me the 2 views that this topic has "exposed" (not in the negative connotation of the word): I'm not negative because I'm smarter. (Conversely, I don't care because I'm smarter). I'm not negative because I believe positivity has an impact. As for the later, good for you I guess, even though those people end up being perceived as a cult (i.e. the discord). For the former... yeah if you think you're above everyone else just because you have the opinions and views that you happen to have, you might be beyond any discussion and argument as well. The first thing you have to accept is negativity is justified. Is it becoming less justified as the game gets "better"? yes, but it'll never be completely unjustified. The second thing you have to accept is that negativity is the current majority. Mostly thanks to the first, a lot of people feel negative about the game, in fact outside of the forum and discord (and not that much in the forum even), the normal opinion about the game is negative. Lastly, for content creators, creating for the majority is what matters. The majority are negative about the game, justifiedly so, and such making "negative" content about KSP2 will resonate with them. Now, does this make Yakez a troll, toxic clout chaser as so many people want to paint him as? Probably not. Again, negativity is justified, and the most common feeling regarding the game. That's why what these types of threads do is dehumanize people with different opinions. "Down with the toxic trolls" and such.

Yes it does.

The indie space has its own problems as well, but that'd be going way off-topic. Sadly for AA/AAA it's been pretty ubiquitous to see the Nth tencent weekly rotating microtransaction store, the casino, the lootboxes and such. In fact the only reason for the later to disappear is being all but straight up outlawed.

Ah yes, this argument, one of my favorites. Microtransactions and lootboxes were never worth it for me, now they're the things games are built around rather than the other way.

What happens when people speak in parables and throw stones without quoting: I wasn't referring to you. I will however say that Autostrut again is not something I'm happy about. KSP2 is magnitudes more part-number constrained than its predecessor, with a huge save bloat problem that's still unsolved (after they said it was by design first now they say they're looking for fixes). Autostrut is fuel to those 2 fires, adding phantom parts and thus bloating the save even more. Why people haven't yet realized the huge problem brewing for the future with all these bandages on top of bandages is beyond me. These new "all in one" science parts are not "an exciting gameplay change", they're literally a bandaid to the save bloat problem. Like the grav ring in a single part, like the "huge 100 meter long parts", like procwings, and so on.

After learning orbital mechanics, the game trivializes itself. Struts and Autostrut are both bandaids to the real problem, and any advanced enough player will make literally anything fly by spamming both. Even if you added mass and cost to them, the only thing you'd end up with is more struts, more fuel tanks and more engines because the problematic cycle is still there, you've just amplified it. Further on, in real life, the only thing you end up with is people unable to build the stuff they want because half their part budget went into struts, and autostruts spamming joints would kill whatever is left of the performance, which is confirmed going to be an even bigger problem in KSP2. Remember that not a single feature is in the game and they're now in talks about disabling vessel simulation because the game outright downgrades into not working anymore. Also, you both can quote me, I give you permission, you don't need to parable about "someones".

[1] Wobble needs to go. The second example still has parts sliding into each other which is unrealistic and intuitive. Since we don't and won't have a softbody system, it should clearly communicate that it's about to snap in half and do so, but without having to disable self-collisions.

Yeah, I'll agree a million times the QOL changes are great, but I'll also argue a million times it's not worth anywhere close to $50, and that the point of a sequel is to go deeper than "QOL Changes".

Say you had part A, generating heat, attached to B, which had the radiators. If A was a drill for example, it'd heat at the skin first, then convect to the core and to B's skin and core, which would then convect to the radiators. Thus, it would've been much more efficient to put the radiators on A directly, as you'd be cooling the skin and maybe have some leftover convect into the core and to other parts (thus unless you spammed radiators, heat buildup was a thing). On the other hand, if A was really a drill, you can't cool it directly and have to design with that in mind. With the proposed heat system, you can put radiators in the cockpit to cool the heat from the engines at the other side of the ship because the whole ship is a magic mass of instantly transferred and equalized heat.