EndeavourCmdr

Any update on when the version with Theia will be available? It looks gorgeous and I reaally have been holding out hope for it.

Did this not work with Astronomers Visual Pack? The planets load, but I have no clouds. EDIT: Nevermind! I got it figured out. Once I removed Parallax and Astronomer's Visual Pack, everything worked as expected - in case anyone else has the same trouble

KSP1 and KSP2 are not the same game. This is not an accurate comparison, and does not indicate a good understanding of software development. While KSP2 is a "spiritual successor" to KSP1, it is not KSP1 just updated. I'd be shocked if any more than 2-3 percent of the original code is even in KSP2. When you start a new software project, especially considering the massive technological rewrites done for 2, you have to basically start from scratch. Sure, there might be some object libraries or something that you may be able to use in some capacity, but ANY version 2 that I've ever seen of a software project was nearly indistinguishable from the previous iteration. And again, it's not the same game. Nor the same studio. Intercept Games did not just take possession of the KSP1 code and "add/remove stuff" from it. If it was used at all, it was used only as a reference to get an idea for how certain things were put together. It the same IP, the same overall concept, the same basic features (and planned features), etc, but its not KSP1. Not one bit. It's its own game.

Really, this doesn't mean much. I would be absolutely shocked if there WASN'T an uptick in bug reports after a large feature update. That goes for any software product ever created. KSP is not unique in this regard. New features come with new bugs, and there is absolutely no possible to way catch them all before release day. And last we heard, some of those bug fixes are coming in the 0.2.2.0 update (soon), Also, I know a lot of people complained about update frequency, but.... in the last year since the For Science update, KSP2 got 11 updates and had 2441 bug fixes. That's hardly slacking! That's nearly 1 update per month for the last year - which in game development, is a crazy fast update schedule.

True, about KSP1 having only been in development exactly only one year prior to 0.13.3. But, that said, even 0.13.3 was still a bloody buggy mess. Really, it didn't even get reentry effects until 19.0, though that was still the same year (2012). That said, despite the features moving faster, the game was LOADED with bugs. So, while it is definitely possible to include more features much faster, it's also likely that those features are broken and buggy. While it might seem there are many similarities between the two games, saying "Well, KSP1 was developed in THIS amount of time, so, why did KSP2 take so long?", isn't actually a valid or fair comparison. We have absolutely no idea what the code base looked like. We have no idea what kind of processes were in place. So it is absolutely possible that the KSP1 core is a complete mess of things duct taped together just to get them to work. Technology and hardware has also changed since then. APIs have changed. It's very difficult to directly compare the development between the two projects, despite their shared name and features (or planned features).

You're absolutely right about having little recourse. And that is unfortunate. But we could have also just asked for a refund. But I'd like to address each of your points individually? 1. Expectations raised by Intercept Games: While there are plans to implement certain things in the future, I personally didn't feel like there were any false expectations made. I got exactly what I expected to get. Can you provide some specific examples of expectations that were set and not delivered upon? 2. Expectations raised by the relative high quality of KSP1: Sure, but KSP1 was not always like this. Though, Early Access wasn't technically around back then, but if it had been we might expect that it would have been around the time that KSP1 was no longer free, which was version 0.13.3 demo back in March of 2012. The latest version was 1.12.5 in January of 2023. It took 11 YEARS of active development to get KSP1 to where it is today. KSP2 only released in Early Access on Feb 23', just over a year ago. 3. EA launch at full price: A fair criticism, I agree. Most games do Early Access at some kind of reduced price - but not all. Look at Star Citizen, for example. Their "Early Access" costs $60 at the bare minimum, and in some cases is thousands of dollars, depending on the package you get, all for an incomplete, buggy game that may never release. Same as KSP2 was not that long ago. There are some MMOs that have done this too, for example, Ashes of Creation recently sold Alpha-2 access for about $350. So while it's somewhat rare for singleplayer titles, the pricing is not unheard of either. 4. IG's initial apparent attitude of "we don't care what you think and we're not in a rush to fix it. Besides, there's nothing to fix, the game is great!!": I never got this impression, especially the "we don't care what you think" part, but they may have a point about not being in a rush to fix it. It's far better to take your time and make sure you do something correctly than to try to rush it in, especially in a game with tens of thousands of lines of code, where a single change can introduce dozens of bugs in seemingly unrelated features. I'd always urge caution over speed myself as well. And I do agree, the game IS great. It is. It's not done, but what IS done, is enjoyable. 5. First update took forever and fixed very little. And then the pace went down even further.: True. I think T2 may have pushed the game to have been released in Early Access long before it was actually ready to do so. Publishers do this too often, sadly. So the team crunches to get out a minimum viable product, knowing that they really needed many more months to even come close to what they wanted to release to begin with. Communication could have been better, I agree. They might have the same "issue" that most of us developers do - assuming that your customer understands the process even a fraction as well as we do. Mostly, they don't, and we (as developers) need to be better at understanding that and communicating in a way that is clear to everyone, not just those with technical or industry knowledge.

... and by 'canceled', I mean both literally by the publisher, and socially by the community. Okay okay, I know, my take is probably a bit of the "underdog" here. But for a moment, I'd like us to be a bit objective. Was the Early Access launch plagued by performance issues and unusably wobbly rockets? Yes, it was. But that was fixed. Sure, maybe not on a timeline that many were happy with, but as a software engineer, I can tell you that development is HARD. That's not "apologetics", it's a fact. Unforeseen issues and technical challenges come up ALL THE TIME in development. You don't know what it is that you don't know until you hit those issues. Besides just development hitches, which are normal and expected, it does also seem quite likely that the timelines were being dictated by Take-Two, who as the publisher, has their own agenda (and very little understanding of actual software development). Often times, these large publishers push development teams to hit release dates and patch windows which are just not feasible, and to make announcements that such things will be released in a certain period of time. But in reality, that's not how that works. Sure, Nate (and others) may have been pushed by T2 to say things like "x feature is coming in y months or so", when in reality that feature could realistically require a year (or more) to flesh out properly. So again and again, he (at their direction) makes statements, and those statements turn out to be impossible to deliver on time. And the team ends up crunching to hit those deadlines, which causes bugs to be introduced, and things to work all "janky". I've also been on the Project/Program Manager side of development, so I am confident in saying these things. The developers truly care about getting working features out. For the dev team (Intercept), the product is something they (we) take pride in. We WANT it to work, and we WANT you to enjoy it. The PMs and Publishers, on the other hand, only care about quotas, deadlines, and margins. So it's pretty easy to see where the blame lays, regarding those bugs and "missed" (unrealistic) expectations that were set. Now, with that out of the way, let's look at KSP2 as a whole. Forget the "missing" features, because they are not "missing", they are "planned". Just because they are not there yet, does not change the quality of what we have. And what we have is a really nice, now well-performing, beautiful, user-friendly KSP2, with tech trees and progressions, a large number of parts to play with, and a lovely Kerbolar system to fly around in. Those things that are there, for the vast part, work as intended, and are a joy to use. I myself now have nearly 550 hours in game, and an enjoying the hell out of it. I play it almost daily, for a few hours at a time. I've not had any game-breaking bugs, or anything else that prevents me from honestly enjoying it, exactly as it is. Also, the game IS modable. Personally, I am using the K2D2, Flight Plan, Science Arkive, Micro Engineer, CommNext, and Orbital Survey mods, all under BepInEx and SpaceWarp. And they too work nicely, providing an expanded experience to my game. With these mods, and the "For Science!" addition, we have PLENTY to do. And so, I am not exactly sure why this game has such negative reviews... Do I want the Colonies, the Interstaller Update, and additional star systems to go explore in? Obviously! That stuff would all be really cool! But we didn't have those in KSP1 either; only mods allowed that to happen. Really, the only core feature that we do not have in KSP2 that was in the original is a career more, and that (if I recall correctly) was never going to be added into KSP2 anyhow, and thus is a moot point. So it seems, to me at least, that all these negative reviews (which are supposed to be of THE GAME) are not warranted. From reading the reviews, it's not the state of the game itself which is/was being reviewed negatively, but rather, either the way that communication regarding progress was handled, or, peoples misunderstanding of what Early Access IS and means. Regarding the first point - communication - that's understandably frustrating, but unfortunately, these communications were in large part dictated by what the publisher (T2) wanted said, and when and how they wanted it to be said. If false promises were made regarding release dates and timelines - that's the publisher. If communications were not as frequent as they otherwise should have been - that's also the publisher's decision. Secondly, is Early Access. Now, we can make all the arguments that we want, but what we paid for is exactly what we got. It's right there in the name! "Early. Access". We bought "Access" to play a game "Early". Which means "before it's ready". Obviously, it may (will) have bugs. YES, we ARE participating in their beta testing. YES, our feedback IS needed to incrementally improve the game. YES, there likely WILL be plenty of broken things, missing features, performance issues, and other challenges which can make the game less enjoyable to play. But that was our choice. WE chose to buy "Early. Access" to this game, because we didn't want to wait for it to be ready. We didn't want to wait for release, when all of the planned features were done, and polished, and the game ran like butter, and all that jazz. WE wanted to play it, and we wanted to play it NOW. Early. In "Early. Access.". We did NOT pay for a completed working product with all of it's planned features. We did pay to play the development builds of this game, early. And we got what we paid for. I am sorry if some of us had a different expectation of what "Early" "Access" means. But it's generally been a pretty clear term to most people involved with video games for a number of years now. Steam even attempts to make sure we know by requiring every game to require a disclaimer regarding "Early Access". That's directly from Steam, and it's on every Early Access title's store page. We knew what we were buying. And if you didn't... somehow... after all of that... well, I don't know what to tell you. It's pretty clear to most of us. But I digress. Anyways, NEITHER of those two reasons (for the negative reviews) change the fact that we have (currently) a very enjoyable to play successor to KSP1. Plenty of YouTubers have been playing it for literally thousands of hours now, and have built their entire channels off of it. If the game "sucked" that much, they wouldn't waste their time. - let's just be real about that, okay? So, if the game itself isn't the problem, why did it fail? In my opinion, the community. Us. Review bombing the game, writing angry posts, lashing out at other community members, trash talking the development team and community managers, personal attacks against Nate Simpson, etc.... NONE of this lent itself towards a positive outcome for KSP2. What did we EXPECT would happen? We left a crap-ton of negative reviews on the "EARLY ACCESS" game on Steam, and absolutely demolished it in the discussions threads, both of which are the first place that perspective new buyers look, causing otherwise interested buyers to stay away, hurting sales numbers, and ultimately making the game fail. So yes, I will forever blame the community for causing this outcome. And it's not to point a finger and take out my frustration; it's so that hopefully, we look at ourselves a little closer, and realize that maybe our interactions have a larger impact than we thought. And maybe WE should take more care to support the games we care about, and those involved in making them. Now, please let's be kind and respectful in any comments below. Let's act like adults, and show everyone (and each other) that we know how to be civil. If you disagree with what I've said, that's fine, I am happy to discuss our differences in opinions. But let's HAVE a discussion. A real one. Let's use as much objectivity as possible, and try to not let emotions get in the way? Also, please do me a favor? If you DO agree, and you haven't already given Kerbal Space Program 2 a positive review (on Steam), go do that now. Show Kerbin some love. Show the developers your support. Show Take-Two that they are wrong. NOTE: I am in no way affiliated with Take-Two Interactive, Private Division, or Intercept Games, other than just being a long time fan of the Kerbal Space Program series, and an (otherwise, except for the development cancelation) very satisfied player of a game I dearly enjoy.

I'm in Seattle. I'm a software engineer. I volunteer as tribute.

That's not how that works. Here, companies of more than 100 employees are required to give 60 days notice when a major layoff happens.

They do this whenever the algorithm detects unusual review activity. Nothing new there. People freak out and try to "review bomb", and the algorithm kicks in and makes everyone cool their jets for a bit

Still speculation. Wait for something official to be announced. Freaking out will NOT help.

Literally the same advice I gave him several posts up, lol

@BechMeister, well, I kind of gave up on that design anyhow, because I learned that my drop probes were unable to support the power draw of the antennae when used as relays. That said, the drop ship was piloted by a Kerbal, and the pods each had a probe core. On my initial test craft, there was only 1 drop pod, and the mothership. Had it worked out, I would have added more drop pods.

Strange this is, the mothership wasn't on the tracking station either. I did check that right away. Seems like if you use decouplers, the entire ship gets discarded.

I mean, you CAN make an SSTO, but the question you might want to ask is: "why am I building an SSTO?". If I recall, the only reason that we ever tried to build SSTOs in the first place was cost savings. Because having parts burn up or get destroyed on every launch wasn't cost efficient. But that's not really the case now, with companies like SpaceX returning their booster stages back to the pad. And realistically, there isn't much actual benefit to SSTOs either, as you end up carrying a lot of dead (unneeded) mass along for the rest of the ride, which only hurts your Delta-V capacity. And to offset that loss in Delta-V, your only option is to carry more fuel, which itself is just more weight that you are bringing just to burn off a lot of for a few hundred extra m/s. That said, by all means, continue to practice and try it just for "the funs". It's a good learning and engineering exercise, nonetheless. But honestly, the best bet IS to stage parts that you no longer need. The less mass you carry into orbit, the better.