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.

Am I mistaken in recalling that you were a software developer of some sort? Surely a software developer would recognize the substantial difference in the technical complexity of these two games. From the looks of it, it looks to be a fairly simplistic simulation compared to everything that KSP2 has to account for. I'm not seeing how the scope of these projects can be remotely compared.

Did you stop to think how silly that would be? The game is at what is likely the inflection point of the development cycle where it can start to turn the investment into profit. Cancelling would not only burn a huge amount of investment effort already committed, but also likely sink the value of the IP for the foreseeable future all while the game still has substantial financial value if it can get through to 1.0. Things would have to be very, very bad to come to that. FS! showed that they can still do it. There's still millions on the table in future sales if they finish it.

That makes sense when considered for colonies of a few Kerbals. From the looks of the scales in mind, colonies might have hundreds of Kerbals late game once they become self sufficient. At that point, an individual Kerbal's specialty won't matter as much. Are we then going to be balancing whether we want 60 engineers and 40 scientists, or 40-60, 55-45? It strikes me as the kind of tedium found in some strategy games that doesn't fit KSP. If specialties return, I think the focus on applications directly to missions would be more meaningful. With colonies taking the responsibilities of orbital science and assembly, individual kerbal specialties no longer have a central role. I'm open to ideas on how it could be done. Haven't seen any good suggestions that feel like they would fit the new model.

Yeah, that would be cool eventually. I would guess they thought of it and it's somewhere low on the priority list if I were to guess. Good to put it out there as something you'd like to see. Just wanted to make sure you knew that there's at least a gameplay solution in the interim.

I like to picture a little pneumatic mail tube that shoots the sample up the side of the craft into a slot on the probe core. It's a box, it could have room for a tiny bit of dirt.

Yep, any control module can store any science collected. Whichever returns home first will contribute the science points to your total.

I got the impression with the past discussions and the shear size of some of the passenger modules that colonies may require many, many kerbals to be fully functional for late game such that it doesn't make as much sense to think of them on an individual basis as you might need a whole team to keep some colony modules operational. That said, the careers aspect did add a nice angle to play for the ones who would be regular kerbolnauts. Needing to bring the right skill set for the mission added a small bit to mission planning. Overall though, I still felt it to be a pretty minor element that I don't feel it'd be a loss if they did away with it. If it was to return, I'd like to see much more dome with it to justify it as a feature to invest in.

You can use any probe core for this. +1 for radial heatshields. I know several asked for this for spaceplanes. Good to have for general use.

I'm not sure the point of this even. Not playing more than 2 hours is barely enough to get a feel for any of the changes. You might barely hit tech tier 2 if you rushed in this time, maybe a couple of launches. This is precisely the correlation I would expect to see of any game. If you come in with negative impressions and don't give it a chance, of course your impression won't change. On the other hand, if you filter reviews above 2 hours, that is players who legitimately invested in the patch to try it out seriously, you find reviews are 79% positive. That's a massive turn around compared to the 57% lifetime value. This is mirrored in the many posts I've read from players who actually played into the exploration experience: reception of the new features is positive. The team just needs to keep up the good work and more sour takes will turn positive when they give it a legitimate chance through future updates.

There are multiple ways to interet reception. Static metrics like a Steam rating is just one and it is plagued with it's own issues. The best way to understand is to read what people are actually saying and the response in posts following FS was extremely positive. It should come as no surprise that many still did not update their Steam reviews as the game is still not finished. This is a huge factor for many who rate on Steam. You have to dig deeper to isolate feedback specific to the patch itself and thaf was quite positive. There is no arguing the 0.1 release was botched. Their marketing failed heavily in that regard. But FS showed that they are moving in the right direction. Keeping their heads down in face of all of the unreasonable vitriol makes sense as no amount of communication will alleviate emotions originating out of pure impatience. I see this as a direct contradiction. You can either go fast, or carefully. At least on that linear spectrum. Unless you want to add "cost" on as a point to a triangle, there are only ever two options. For a game targeting a life matching or exceeding the original, carefully will pay dividends over the lifecycle compared to short term haste. Despite what the marketing had us believe about 0.1, my thinking aligns with @MechBFP in that development proper started much later than many wish was the case. I find the payoff for quality comes much later in the development cycle than the team is in now. Once many of the past mistakes are wrapped up, I would expect content pace to move faster as they will no longer be held back by the technical debt of the early alpha mistakes.