steveman0

I'm not trying to argue. Just legitimately confused. People seem to come up with fantastical stories of what the game is and is not rather than listening to the official word. It has been a huge factor in the community going all sorts of negative directions unnecessarily. Nothing good comes from doomsaying over assumptions.

How so? The roadmap has been published for a long time and the content on it fixed more or less since the beginning. The first was never announced as a planned feature as far as I'm aware, resources were always planned to fill this role. The other two have no word one way or another. I think you're just assuming these things while ignoring the plans they laid out. There is a ton of room for strategizing around colonies and how you'll pursue interstellar travel given the requirements for it in the cotext of finite resources and dependencies on colonies to accomplish this. If anything, we need more communication to stop people making up what they think the game is going to be than what it is. There has been doomsaying left and right despite many of things like this that fly in the face of many of the gameplay goals laid out as a part of the roadmap.

Check oit the latest dev update. We're getting 0 dV manuever planning soon.

I haven't played through them multiple times nor do I have plans to. I very rarely replay past games as I almost always have new ones on the backlog that I could play instead. I don't see why replayability is a concern though. Even with what we have now, there's over 100 hours of content finishing the missions they provided if you don't rush it and we know there are plans to continue adding missions. By the time they are done there will be hundreds of hours of content and little reason why I would want to go back and do it all again. It's perfectly fine to me to be "done" with a game in that regard. I think there's plenty more to the game that will make for good entertainment anyway that doesn't require replaying from scratch at least through to the end of EA. There's plenty of time to consider changes if they end up being needed, but I'm not worried.

Just want to throw in my perspective since it contrasts with the following discussion that the biggest factor for me was the vastly improved gameplay progression the exploration mode introduced. I got KSP 2 on its initial 0.1 release but only really played ~5hours before putting it down. The science and mission progression in FS were the hook I needed and these were substantially better than the original. I found KSP1's tech tree progression did not provide much push to actually explore the system much and the career missions were quite repetitive. I lost interest before I left Kerbin's SOI. KSP2's requirement to complete the missions and go interplanetary for the science to progress made it much easier to commit to bigger missions. It didn't have as much of a barrier to it as I felt in 1. There's so much more to do and think about with those bigger missions that makes for good fun. I'm not self-motivated in sandox games as well as some, so the structure here provided the enthusiasm to experience it.

I don't think the parts are what are holding them back. As you noted, new parts and modules aren't challenging. The fundamentals of the system including improvements to performance to support them aren't something easily released early. The requirements are quite extensive and why I have always felt the original 6-8 month timeline was a bit optimistic. A lot has to be done if they are aiming for it to be complete to the extent that they can fully shift new development to interstellar.

Unity is not really central to the situation. It is possible to solve these issues either through multithreading, as difficult as this would be, or through batching parts to reduce simulation load. The choice of engine is irrelevant to this though as any good solution here isn't going to rely on the simplified toolset of any off-the-shelf engine.

Is this based on actual knowledge of KSP2 specifically? Unity games are perfectly capable of leveraging multiple threads just as nearly any other engine when designed as such. Can you elaborate on the KSP2 design of their threading approach as to why it's an issue?

It's this kind of exageration that makes it understandable why they wouldn't want to engage with the community right now. You hurt your credibility by making claims like this. 0.2+ has been quite playable. Not bug free, but easily playable for 100+ hours as a solid game with the addition of the science and mission objectives.

But... how? We already have science experiments that require time in orbit, or orbits, to capture the science for a biome. Just take that to the extreme? I suppose if they simulated it so that it could work in the background when you are controlling other craft, but how does this change the gameplay outside of encouraging time warp to finish it? This is a notable problem that hasn't been answered. What exactly would be different in this ideal new science scenario? I already find science gathering to be quite an engaging, long-term activity to the extent that it requires me planning many missions to explore new places. Going places is a large part of exploring the game after all. Pressing the button to register I've done it is a nice conclusion to the efforts of the mission for me.

They asked for feedback on missions for ideas before. I recall mention that part of the hold back on more missions was the logic to evaluate the objectives are met. As they implement these, I'm sure we will see new side mission types. For example, I could imagine a case where we get an "Observe an eclipse on a body other than Kerbin". They just haven't written the code to detect this event to make this a mission. That'd be a shame. Imagine, multiplayer specific mission objectives! This was one I submitted to the mission/tutorial feedback threads. I wasn't the only one either, so I would expect it's high up on the priority list for addition.

I think it was sufficiently overhauled. The one-click use is so much easier to mamage and the new parts and use methods are far more interesting to plan for. I've seen several people express disappointment but no one seems to have a better idea for what it should have been. Were people expecting quick-time events or puzzle minigames for completing science? The science systems does a very effective job of couraging particular mission builds and to explore the system for new places to run the science. That's the core purpose it was intended to accomplish and it worked substantially better for me than KSP1. I've collected roughly 250k science in KSP2. Never even finished science mode in 1 as it and the career structure were too tedious by comparison.

I'm so glad the repetitive missions are gone. I hated them in KSP1. The boredom of them was a big factor in me never leaving Kerbin's SOI. KSP2's missions actually encouraged me to go and try new things. This is what missions are supposed to do, not make you repeat the same thing over and over. I haven't even finished all the missions FS introduced and I've already clocked at least 130 hours in it. If they continue to add side missions and extend the story missions with the milestones, the tailored missions can easily add up to hundreds of hours by the time they reach 1.0. If you managed to finish all of them, I suspect by then you will either be satisfied, have your own list of things of your own to do, or have a list of mods that will fill in the gap. It doesn't strike me as an important focus for core development to invest in repetitive missions when they can instead provide more incentives to explore.

I always like to highlight that the "significantly" here was notably understated compared to all of the caution about the timeline. I think it's a bit extreme to put too much stock in that considering there were doubts that it could even be faster. These kinds of interpretations are the kinds of things that set people up for disappointment. I think a fairer assessment is that it will be marginally faster.

And this is the elephant in the room. KSP2 needs to use moving, splitting, and merging frames of reference for compatibility of spatial scales of interstellar distances on temporal scales varying by many orders of magnitude for the simulation while also supporting multiplayer synchronization. These differences heap a ton of requirements above and beyond what Kithack requires as well as the original KSP where multiplayer wasn't in the mix of all of this. Maybe your experience is just different enough more than mine not to see this in the same light. My background includes simulation including some real-time work that has taught me a few of the pitfalls of simulation resolution, sim time scales, boundary conditions, and the nuances of network sync that can uterly wreck havoc on the expected performamce of the sim when these all combine. It's a whole lot simpler when you can work in a simple single-res, single frame of reference, simulation space.