PDCWolf

After his corporate post on LinkedIn post firing, where he says he's so good he works himself out of jobs (funny when you consider KSP2) I doubt he's gonna answer anything useful. I did shoot him a question that should be answerable entirely from the technical side, but I'm not sure if that bit is under NDA too. Feels like it's gonna be more wood for the fire.

Hello, I'm the original creator of this topic. I do not remember -at all- how I got it fixed last time, but it did involve something with the mixing of KJR and Proc Fairings.

Posting playercounts is not hating. It's stating a fact. Sure, it got tiring once everyone was doing it, but that still didn't change the fact that most of those posts reflected 100 people playing the game, which should be a clear message to the devs and above, which obviously got ignored. As for "sole clue being SteamDB", the math more or less points to steam being 75% of the total player and ownership base. If there was 100 steam players, the other platforms all together, along with launcherless people, should be about 25. Now, there's the fact that you invalidate other criticisms because "haters made the hate and aggressiveness rise." No. People have their own brain to produce reasons to hate KSP2, and a lot of people have their own brain to produce reasons to not hate it. KSP2 did more than enough to convince even the most stalwart people that it, or its development cycle, was garbage. It took all the way to FS! for the steam reviews to rise above mixed, only to promptly fall back and deeper once they completely cut off communication and then take a further plunge once the rumors of closure started flying. Now, from a simple numeric standpoint. >400.000 people own KSP2. How many hater posts did you see? 100? 1000?

No hater could make a mess this big. And that's already looking past the simple fact that there's little to no haters. The game was that much of a mess , and when it stopped being an unplayable mess, it still was a mediocre mess, and the speed of development was a mess, and the PR around the game was a mess, and the team trying to communicate was a mess. The only thing they did in a somewhat timely manner (and promptly left completely unattended past assigning some middlemen between reports and devs and adding an emoji to patch notes) was the bug report subforum... which in itself not being there from the beginning was already another mess.

Honestly, he's 100% right that orbital mechanics are "just math". Now, we could endlessly speculate about integrators for n-body, patched conics, anthropocentric planetarium models and whatever other tech he has available to pic from, but really, the meat of KSP1/2's complexity is not orbital mechanics (even if both had a big trouble with floating point stuff at the beginning and KSP2 never managed to fix it other than to copypaste KSP1s fix.) the real complexity is building real-time simulated mechanics that play well with timewarp, and with the possibility of non-sequential play (many missions going on at once) that happen to be deep and meaty rather than the shallow point-and-click we've got in both KSPs. HarvesteR already's got a leg up with KitHack by figuring out how to be able to support an arbitrarily big amount of parts, much bigger than KSP1 and obviously 2. Now, I do also agree that I don't like Icarus nor Stationeers (owned both, managed to refund Icarus, though this was literally years ago.) and that Dean has his quirks.

I know hyperbole is the only way left to bite back at some posts given the current state of affairs, as every other argument has collapsed with KSP2 and the complete franchise, but really, he hasn't promised anything yet. [snip]

They haven't posted a roadmap and 4 years worth of trailers and feature episodes about how great the game is yet. Talk to you when they do.

This is right after he met with Dean Hall. Nebulous, yes, but intentions are very clearly communicated, and we know Dean Hall also wanted in.

That 0.2.3 was announced nearing May tells you all you need to know about how ready colonies was: October/November at the least. And that was me not long afterwards correcting for my very first estimation that went around July/August. Those early estimates (and most people) forgot to take into account what we learned was a team of juniors sinking rapidly in size. I don't agree with the refining aspect you mention though, considering how they mentioned nothing about balancing science past the first checkboxes in 0.2.1 and then the K.E.R.B didn't ever mention science balancing or bugs either. It was just not in their plan to come back to features, at least until EA was over, or stuff got too broken.

"No complaints yet" doesn't mean "no complaints possible", as the internet archive would've made clear with their recent loss of about half a million works due to rights disputes. That you'd turn that into hyperbole about "editing my posts" is completely unrelated, unlike the discussion of the rights of posts and the rights granted to T2 which is vital and completely on-topic to archival efforts. So I take this is probably bait to delete my answer as off-topic and warn me again or whatever. But hey, I'll bite, make it short and give you the pleasure: Posts made here, as per T2's UGC policy I'm giving my information through T2's services for public display, granting them, not anyone who'd make public backups, the right to display them. Thus it is against my rights to scrape my posts here and host them somewhere else. Now, I'm completely worthless in the grand scheme of things, but addon makers might have a word to say, which conjures up a lot of other possible legal issues. Lastly, I don't take your word as a warranty of anything take two might or might not do, as you yourselves have stated: you have no idea what's going on and barely any connection to T2, and you're all still here because the forum somehow still exists. If you don't think discussing the legal disputes that could arise from archival work is not part of the discussion of archival work, all I can do is laugh, and screenshot my post for when it disappears.

You... might not be seeing the problem, and not just you from the looks of this thread. If you're doing anything with my posts in private (and yes, I'm using myself as an example but this applies to everyone), you're violating my intellectual property rights, which I only ever transferred to Take Two by posting here. And even though by posting here I gave them right to public display, that's their right to publicly display my post, not yours. This is exactly why I never talked about public facing forum alternatives or "backups". Not just because I have zero care for anything but the mods, but because that really is a huge legal issue if TakeTwo wants to make it one, or any of the posters for that matter. It is subterfuge in the literal sense because you were hiding the truth that you were doing this, in some private discord most people were definitely not invited to. What weight you give to that of course I don't mind, and it's not even super grave to me, but a cat is a cat. If you all wanna do private backups... you shouldn't be confirming, publicizing, or sharing anything about them. If you plan to do a public facing mirror of the forum, you're setting up for having to take it down the moment T2 farts your way. Edit: https://www.take2games.com/legal/en-US/ <- Here's where you can check, under UGC what rights every user has, and what rights have been transferred to TT (and not anyone else).

Of course, talking about sekrit club discords and saying you all have a backup of something similar but flexing that "you can't reveal anything" (so why say anything in the first place?) is either kids spy games or actual subterfuge. And yes, no one wants to mod a game that was on flimsy legs and couldn't be played properly, but also a lot of people didn't want to mod a game that requires you to join a discord and submit to arbitrary "standards" or be judged and shunned for not doing it. We agree. Considering how aggressively the discourse was "shaped" during the early life of the game, how even now the game is dead and there's no boss around and there's a looming threat of the forum just disappearing the discourse is still aggressively "shaped" towards one side, and then considering my own experiences with this forum on top... No, I don't think there's attempts at sabotage from anyone, on the contrary, there's a lot of attempts at forcing a view like it was before Dakota pulled on the reins after a couple debacles. And no, before you hyperbole me again, I don't think every thread should just be hate or insults or criticism, even if at some point they became irrefutably well deserved and the community still needs to vent a lot. The forum is barely hanging on between 502s and being completely headless, but hey, the poll that would've put discussions like these at the top got magically ignored, and now this thread made by a mod in one section gets kicked down by another mod, like they haven't worked together for ~10 years. It's funny, and worrying. Trust being at an all time low isn't just for the devs and T2. It's for the whole machine because it has failed us multiple times and I don't mean the 502s with that.

And with that original thread locked it slowly fades down the order, which is obviously telling you something you already know... which is why I made that suggestion, but hey, at least now it's publicly clear it might be intended behavior for the topic to be forgotten fast. This kind of mystery and subterfuge is exactly why people wanted to stay away from the KSP2 modding scene. All the more reason to have more than one backup and alternative.

These two statements are in contradiction. The mature answer is not to start hurling insults around and taking it out on the easiest, biggest target. Sinking KSP2 took a lot of people, a lot of missed calls, and a lot bad stuff from multiple sides. And no, this isn't defending TakeTwo, but actually pointing out that they aren't the only ones to blame, they're just the easy target by being a faceless corporation that's not gonna come swinging back at you. The answer also isn't blaming the people that got scammed for wanting to play another fun game. That kind of outrage-tivism died long ago on the worst times of Twitter witch-hunting. For 1: Do not even go there. You might not want to get all legal about IP ownership because a lot of the modding community only exists because of T2 turning a blind eye to the blatant EULA violation some mods surely must have gone through *wink* to exist, which is decompiling the game. As far as legal cleanliness stands, a lot of mods are not in a position to be part of any legal discussion. For 2: I highly doubt you'll get access to the raw database. So what you should seek is to backup at least the visible data. We shouldn't even be considering copying the forum, just safeguarding the information hosted therein. For 3: Again, barking at the wrong tree. Even if you did get that database backup, when hosting another instance of Invision you'll run into licence costs for invision even if you absorb the costs of hosting yourself. Ads will only give you as much as people look at the forum and click on them... which is literally nothing for 1000 people looking and maybe 10 clicking by mistake in the official forums, gonna be less for your unofficial forum. For 4: Well, if you got that far... good luck. The Skateholders.

I know Network is definitely the right place, not questioning the move. What I want to suggest is that given the perceived urgency of this topic, and it's massive importance to the modding community and the community in general to safeguard the presence of said modding scene (which is also the biggest thing keeping the KSP1 alive). That this should not be hidden so far down the forum even if the section is the correct one it should be in. Where it is right now, no one that isn't subscribed to the topic or has posted in it will see it.

*points at the subreddit.* Yes, I know, it's not a forum and you can't host threads for mods in the same way it works here, but it is infinitely better than discord for hosting links. Nothing more annoying than stuff not being google-able because people put it inside discord servers. If you wanna kill the modding scene, make it all unsearchable by hiding it behind a discord.

Are you in a position to reveal who's footing the bill for the forum and/or who's currently your "boss" ? I know... from experience... that moderation is voluntary in 99% of cases, but there's still gotta be someone in charge, either financially, or editorially, or both. I'll be the first to say it, at least in this thread: The forum is overrated in its current state, and pretty much completely unnecessary as a place that at most hosts 400 people online and about 20 active in various threads. The only thing I'm genuinely worried about is the mod scene for KSP1, specially those mods that stopped being in active development/support and only exist here. I'm not even gonna hint at me making any sort of effort, but I will do the minimum effort of saying I genuinely hope someone does some archival work for it.

The 502s are shameful, about as petty as not saying anything about the franchise. Were. Because it's clear that once the WARN went effective, everything he was doing was ignored, like the reorganization poll.

It's really not. It's a less stable codebase with issues rooted way deeper than KSP1's and left to rot much early in its lifecycle. Sure, it's got axial tilt and on demand asset loading which are nice, but other than that there's nothing salvageable, and there's not even appropriate mod support without hacking your way in through bepinex which is cancer. It's also very well known that it supports less parts, less total vessels (and less total parts in a save), and it's much easier to just break it.

Not from any factual standpoint. KSP2 is a worse game in every single technical aspect bar loading times (and those loading times are as it is right now, missing all but one mainline features).

The product was plenty matured and solidly pointing at a concrete direction when it came out, one of the lessons he learned I guess, plus it was just an evolution from Balsa. I'd say there's not much more that can be added to it considering the more focused scope it has and I'd be pretty surprised if he keeps working on it for a full more year.

Seems like he's the only one to learn lessons from KSP1 so I trust him after seeing all of that applied to Kithack. Hopefully he learnt all the lessons and has outgrown the "developer asymptotes" phase.

I'd say you go and ask around the subreddit. I got my first refund a month after purchase, 5+ hours into the game by demonstrating to a human (steam support, not automated refund options) that official PD support was only giving dismissive, uninformed answers. It took many tries, long discussions and having to screenshot everything, but I did get my refund.

It's still hopeful for some to see changes to the depots, even if we're left to wonder who is it and what they're doing.

Good opportunity to clarify: "Record update" means the store page was updated, not the game files. EDIT: I checked, they removed the roadmap and all mentions of promised features. EDIT 2: I'm home now, and I can indeed see the roadmap, so I'll chalk it up to me being distracted by work when I checked.