nats

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles?topics=development

Heard rumours that the game is due for release soon, that is fantastic news! Do we have an exact date? Great to hear everything is nearly finished after all this time. Cant wait to play it as intended. How many planets and moons are there in the game now then?

One thing that I dont know - is the quote size of asteroids in meters or miles? Because if size E = 18 meters that is nothing where asteroids are concerned and yet getting hit by an 18 mile asteroid would be a civilisation killing event! I assume its meters because the rest of the game seems to be in decimal but if so the asteroid sizes are rather lame arent they? When you consider that the Chicxub Crater was formed by a 10km asteroid and we have 1.2 million estimated asteroids of 100m or larger it would seem to make the Kerbal asteroids rather puny by comparison. I dont know why you would even bother tracking asteroids smaller than 10m to be honest.

Ah I didnt know they respawned constantly, I thought there was a fixed set of asteroids in an 'asteroid belt'. That isnt as cool than I thought then if they just spawn and despawn. What a shame, I thought that they would be in permanent orbits. Bogs.

The ARM update looks really good, I havent had time to get into it properly yet but I have started off tracking about 40 or so asteroids. Makes me wonder how many asteroids there actually are in the game. Seems to be quite a few though. Certainly the aheer amount of them makes it rather disorientating when you show them on the tracking view, perhaps being able to get rid of the orbit lines temporarily might make things a bit easier to understand? The other thing is - there is no warning as to which of these are large asteroids and which are actually going to hit the planet. I mean NASA will surely have markers on all the large Earth orbit crossing asteroids (the ones that would survive it through the atmosphere). This is the kind of thing we need here, perhaps shaded lines to show the asteroids sizes first, and then perhaps a different colour for large asteroids that will actually hit the planet - red or something. And then I would also love to see a warning that comes up on the screen whenever one of these is detected so I can mount a mission to get rid of it. Maybe this might be the kind of thing coming with the astronomy part of the game I dont know? Also I would say that, considering the amount of asteroids that are obviously in the game, its a bit labourious to have to manually track all of them. I would hope that this could be automated at some point. Otherwise you could spend all of your time in the tracking view! Will any of these asteroids be able to destroy your buildings in the future I wonder or perhaps even end the game if a truly massive one hits the planet? - although what you could do about one of those if you saw one heading your way, I dont know. Anyway certainly this update changes the game somewhat, cheers.

Come back after many moons away and still there is an issue with the pull down bar on your website being obscured by the video pane. This has been around for at least a year. I thought you lot had somebody who looked into website issues etc on the team? How is this something only I seem to notice? Anyway to recreate it: select the community button on the toolbar and see how you cant select anything below the forum button? The video pane is obscuring the rest of the menu.

Probably Space Invaders in an arcade, or a pong-type tennis game on our rubbishy home console.

What about getting some friends over and trying tabletop games or role playing games? I find Traveller is a great scifi RPG game for messing about with designing things, trying out things, playing solo and wth others. And its a nice change to computer games, which do get a bit dull after a while especially these days with all their mass regurgitation - mainstream new games are getting so bloody dull. Elite Dangerous is on the horizon though so there is hope yet. But yeah sometimes I get feed up wth sitting in front of a computer and just feel like getting away for a while. So RPG games, model making, reading or doing sports/gym are all good avenues to explore for taking up some time away from a monitor not to mention indulging in a good social life!

Elite Dangerous is going to be superb, Star Citizen I am not sure about, I liked Wing Commander but not Privateer. The scripting/hand creation of story and planets etc works well with a flight sim storyline but not so well with a exploration/trading type game. So I might get Star Citizen at some point, but Ive already bought Elite Dangerous. Frontier Elite II was one of my favourite games of all time so I am really looking forward to the new Elite game, in fact I have been waiting for Elite IV for about 15 years. Its going to blow everything else away. But at the moment I am playing Buzz Aldrins Space Program Manager early access version and its good fun. I like the historical missions, but it still needs some polishing and gameplay variation incorporated to enabel players to get over critical failures by rushing later programs and the like, at the moment if you get a critical failure it pretty much scuppers your chances of a moon landing on time although you are given till 1974 so thats not too bad.

I have just bought this game myself and its looking really good, very addictive already even without the Race into Space elements introduced yet. Trying to get to the moon by 1969 is flipping tough. And personally I love the way its going to gradually grow to include the Shuttle/ISS missions and eventually Mars. I love NASA spaceflight history though so getting into this game was a no brainer for me.

High diving on Minmus can be fun.

I find it boring as well - but more for the fact that its doing science for new parts! Why? How the heck does science create new parts? New parts should come from research labs, employing technicians, buying materials and using funding. The only thing you should get from carrying out mission science is some prestige and that should provide more funding to the program. I dont see how science is related to parts manufacture at all. It all seems very contrived to me the way it is presently. I think Slitherines Buzz Aldrins Space Program Manager does the whole space program thing far better. But hopefully the end game will be a lot more interesting after they have introduced some of the other game elements like economy and contracts.

I was wondering this as well until now. Did anyone mention this at all? Tumblr what the hell is that? I dont have any intention of going and registering with yet another crappy site to get my news with yet another password that I will forget - Facebook will do fine which is where I get all my gaming news. If Squad dont want to communicate through the biggest social communication site then they are a load of idiots. How to shoot yourselves in the foot marketing wise - follow these guys! .... bloody Tumblr! Get a grip guys, who goes to these places except for computer geek fanatics?

I dont know about being a frame rate killer but I hate the way the water looks and I hate that line that appears as I get close to it as well. Its one of the parts of the game I hate the most in fact.

They should make some science based station modules and make higher level science missions require them to be placed in orbit for several weeks - as they would require vast amounts of electricity putting them ina proper station would be the only real way to do it. And once resources come along in the game and these experiments need constant crew attention and therefore air, food and water etc space stations will really srtart to come into their own.