Lord Aurelius

Minecraft has been rewritten in C++ . All the current versions for console, mobile and Windows 10 are based on the same "Bedrock" edition (which is written in C++), although the legacy Java version is still supported and kept up-to-date for MacOS and Linux (and mods). The core Unity game/physics engine is likely C++ for performance reasons, but all the game scripts that the devs use to build KSP on top of Unity are C#.

Agreed on the concerns of the long-term profitability of KSP. We don't have any information on this at the moment on what the long-term plans are for the franchise as there hasn't been any talk whatsoever of additional DLC or any hints at all on anything like KSP 2. I know that the Making History expansion didn't go well, so if they are planning additional DLC they could have had to scrap whatever plans they had and reevaluate to avoid another PR disaster. In the meantime, the current crop of updates that's causing me to be cautiously optimistic might be an attempt to win back trust from the community before they announce the next big thing. The Kerbal franchise still has a huge amount of potential for spinoff games that could appeal to a much wider audience, and Take Two might very well have some secret development projects behind the scenes with a different studio entirely.

My view on the current state of the game is that it's slowly getting better now that we have a mature game company running things. From my perspective, Harvester hit upon a brilliant game concept with KSP that was unexpectedly popular and drew a lot of attention. This attention and the lack of game development experience at Squad led them to make some unwise business decisions (the whole console port fisaco), which really hurt overall development with the need to rush to hit the console release deadlines, resulting in the 1.0 alpha release. Many times it also felt like there really wasn't much of a development plan (at least from my perspective as an outsider) and the devs were often winging it from update to update. On top of that, nothing against Harvester personally, but this was a personal project to him and that emotional attachment seems to have affected his judgement with some of the game design decisions (not including a dV readout because "trial and error is fun" for example and the wobbly rockets). As much as I didn't like to see most of the original devs leave, in many ways the house cleaning and handing control over to a mature game management team is probably what KSP needed. Other than the MH fiasco, with Take Two in charge, the devs have actually been doing a good job of systematically going back through the game and fixing things that should have been addressed years ago (and they finally added a dV readout in stock). After seeing the last few updates, I'm cautiously optimistic for the future of the game.

I've considered doing something similar for myself and would be interested in seeing what you've put together. If it's just a bunch of config files, maybe just compress the folder and share it using Google Drive or similar.

Very pleased to see those awful stock craft finally getting some attention. I always thought it was ridiculous that many of them had intentional flaws for the player to fix, but this is mentioned absolutely nowhere in the game (which is awful game design IMHO). Between this and the new dV readout, I'm happy with the current direction the game is headed in. Also, I'm glad to see that the MH parts are being tuned to be more in line with the base game, but honestly I still feel like the base game tuning still needs a lot of work. Part costs in general seem to be more related to the tier they're unlocked in instead of anything to do with the part itself, so even relatively simple structural parts in high tiers like the quad coupler are often unreasonably expensive. The cost of engines vs other structural elements also doesn't really make any sense. In the early game, 3 of the fixed winglets cost MORE than a 1.25m rocket engine. There's also stat problems with other parts as well. MK2 and MK1 tanks have exactly the same fuel capacity, but the MK2 tanks have substantially more volume that is apparently wasted. I'll often use MK2 cargo bays with a 1.25m inline tank and 2x radial 0.625m tanks on the sides just to maximize the fuel capacity. The Kerbal pods are backwards with the beginner pods having the best weight per Kerbal ratio, with more advanced pods being effectively worthless from a gamplay standpoint unless you're really pinched for part count. Not to mention how little sense the tech tree in general makes with the order that parts are unlocked in. The remote guidance systems in particular have always bothered me with their location in the tech tree. These looks like rocket guidance systems used starting from the V2 rockets from before staging was used, but for some reason they're not available until the end of the tech tree, well past the point where they might have been useful for early sounding rockets (which need to use that awful Stayputnik part that really needs to be used with a fairing). Not to mention how silly it is that your first flight (where a new player is most likely to make a mistake) MUST be manned so there's a good chance they'll kill a Kerbal right off the bat instead of, you know, starting with an unmanned rocket like ALL real-life space programs did? That and how poor of a beginner engine the Flea is. WAY too much of a kick for a lone MK1 pod (and its poor stats make it useless in the rest of the game as well once you get any other engine) unless you use tweakables (which isn't taught, but what is taught based on how few parts are available is to use excessive amounts of thrust to splatter your Kerbals on the inside of the pod). I won't even get into all the problems with career mode in general. Anyways, hopefully this is just a step in the overall tuning process to fix the worst problems in MH before doing a more comprehensive look at the full game.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, I've learned of a few new mods to try. I've got 32GB of RAM, so I'll see what else I can fit in there.

I haven't played KSP much in awhile (other than randomly messing around occasionally) but since we just got a decent sized update and mods seem to be updating fairly quickly I figured I should try another career game. I've been around KSP for awhile but haven't paid much attention to the new mods (and I'm sure there's some mods that have been around for a long time that I haven't seen before). What I'm looking for is a refined/extended version of KSP that stays true to the KSP feel while addressing the shortcomings of the game as much as possible. I'll likely put together my own module manager configs to tweak things to my own liking as well. I'm not looking for mods like BDArmory or KSP Interstellar (as awesome as they are) that dramatically change the gameplay or provide OP parts. In particular: Improved graphics and audio (I've got a beefy PC and a 4K TV and I want the game to look awesome) Better UI (flight and VAB/SPH) Reasonable system rescale that works with stockalike parts and some additional planets Kerbal Konstructs (particularly mods that add more easter eggs if they exist) More game mechanics (life support, construction time, KAS/KIS, robotics, more interesting science experiments, etc) Better story contracts to provide a "story mode" as the main career progression instead of just unlocking the tech tree Better economy/strategies/contracts More parts to fill holes in the stock part lineup (I'll probably prune some of the parts in my custom config file so mods with parts that overlap with stock parts are fine) Better tech tree Other miscellaneous quality of life mods What mods would you recommend? It's a bit late here now, but tomorrow I'll put down a preliminary modlist.

When the screen burn-in of the KSP UI elements is worse than that of your OS UI.

For me, MechJeb enables me to enjoy the parts of the game I like best and skip the tedious maneuvers and manual calculations. Especially for interplanetary transfers. I like building spacecraft and to some degree mission planning, but I find flying to be rather tedious most of the time. Is it cheating? From my perspective, not really. Real rockets are flown by computer systems similar in function to MechJeb where mission planners choose the maneuvers but don't manually execute them. It might be a bit cheaty to rely on all the MechJeb built-in functions without fully understanding them, but at the same time it helps a lot to understand how to execute the maneuvers by watching MechJeb do them. I just pretend that I'm the boss and I told my Kerbal minions to go do the calculations for me and execute the maneuvers at the correct time. Maybe some day I'll get really ambitious and write a kOS script that fully automates a mun landing instead of using the MechJeb maneuver planner.

USI LS also has the advantage of RoverDude already being a developer. Multiple options to adjust difficulty would be a necessity, just like we have a reentry heat slider and multiple options for the comm network.

I know that most people won't use the infinite EVA fuel exploit, but I've read enough mission reports on the forums to see that it's still pretty common. For a small spacecraft, the exploit is still a very viable method for maneuvering in space and getting lots of free dV. Sure, it's more for advanced players, but it's still an exploit that needs to be fixed (and was slated to be fixed when monoprop fuel was added to all the capsules only to be cancelled at the last minute). Seems like another candidate for difficulty settings if they're concerned about new players running out of EVA fuel. No need to put a pilot in the capsule if a suitable probe core or the avionics part is present on the craft, so there's really no reason not to put an engineer or scientist in there for their bonuses. Sure, return missions from places like the surface of Eve (and to a lesser degree Tylo) are difficult, but returning from nearly anywhere else is pretty much a gimme with how little dV is required to get back. The only thing the capsule needs to make it survive reentry is a heat shield and parachute which is still a trivial amount of weight. With how many free Kerbals I get from rescue missions, I could easily make them expendable for a few missions.

If they do implement life support, I expect that you would have that choice. The comms network feature they added is a similar idea to life support for probes (an optional extra set of considerations that add some interesting challenges to mission planning) that can be enabled/disabled per save. If you don't want to play with it, then don't enable it. Same thing with reentry heating. Life support would also help balance the game a lot since manned missions are completely overpowered compared to probes right now (manned pods can still be controlled if the battery is dead, have full control regardless of signal connection, infinite fuel via the "get out and push" exploit, the ability to repair certain broken parts with an engineer, and 3 extra free science experiments for the measly cost of 0.5 tons for the lightest capsule). With life support, this could be balanced (just like it is in real life) with the need to carry a significant amount of extra resources to support a long-duration manned mission. Missions to the Mun are short enough that the necessary life support would be pretty minimal (just like IRL where the extra weight/volume was roughly equivalent to a 1.25m monoprop tank).

I'm also in the camp of thinking that KSP really needs to be finished. It still feels like an Early Access game despite having "released" over 3 years ago. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy for the continued development, but everything I'm seeing (outside of the mission builder and some of the redundant parts in Making History) feels like things that should have been done before 1.0. All water under the bridge now though. Very glad to see that Take Two is letting the devs focus on actually finishing things up and address the mountain of technical debt. Hopefully the parts revamp is just the first pass and they'll be able to also address other art assets, audio, game systems/balance (especially career) and possibly add some new things like life support and improved experiments on other planets. Also, it would be great if we could get the prerelease branch back. They probably would have caught that drag/lift bug before release (and it gives modders an opportunity to test their mods on the new version ahead of release). Would also be great to have more news on the console front. I'm still convinced that releasing on the console was probably the biggest mistake in KSP's development, but the players who did purchase console versions need to know if they're going to receive the same development support that the PC version has received (and hopefully eventually a finished game as well).

If I end up doing anything with this, I very well end up doing something along those lines, although it might be a bit more like the Skyrim Revisited guide. Pretty much just sharing with my personal modlist and tweaks/settings so others can benefit from the time I've put into planning everything out and tweaking things to work together (and maybe get some suggestions on other mods to include I may have overlooked).

I know that, I've been hanging around the forums since 0.19. I'm very much aware that everyone has their opinions on the "perfect" KSP setup. Especially the people who tend to be more active on the forums. Like I said, all I'm trying to propose is something like STEP. KSP and Skyrim are both alike in the sense that they're great ideas with lots of bugs and half-baked execution, and I'm just trying to see if there's any interest in putting together a guide to give some examples of mods to address the core issues and provide a reasonable foundation for adding additional mods onto. A lot of the motivation for this comes from the fact that a lot of mod authors have a list of recommended mods on their pages, and these recommendations have been very helpful to me with getting ideas and seeing new mods to make my game better. I would just like to have a lot of this information in one place, with directions on how to install the various mods and have them play nice with each other instead of having to dig through old forum posts. If there's no interest in a community effort for this, maybe I'll put together a quick-and-dirty guide for myself (so I can remember which mods I've used and how I got them working together) and post it up in case anyone finds it useful.

I'm not suggesting a modpack. A modpack would be a single download with all the mods pre-modified and bundled together so it's a single archive to install. What I'm suggesting is a step-by-step guide that tells what mods to download and install, what files/in-game configs to edit, and possibly provides some small helper mods with modulemanager configs to make everything play nice. Players would still download the individual mods via CKAN or the various author's download pages. I'm not surprised something like that would happen, although which particular attempt are you referring to? The only mods I'm aware of that have tried to do anything like this are RSS-RO and SETI, and neither of those have had that particular problem. I'm familiar with realism overhaul, and like you said, it significantly changes the game which is what I'm trying to avoid. Your second point is valid, but I keep feeling like there could be a place for a "good enough" baseline that at least includes bugfix, and popular graphics/audio QoL mods. Some players will obsess over building their perfect KSP version (I know I've been like that, and yes, to some degree that mindset has prompted me to suggest this in the first place), but I'm at point now where "good enough" is preferable to playing stock, or spending a bunch of time messing around with mods and never actually really playing KSP before I get frustrated and move onto something else. I find it hard to believe that I'm the only player who feels this way and would at least like some basic starting point.

One thing I keep thinking would be really nice to have for KSP is something akin to Skyrim's STEP project. For those who aren't familiar with STEP (Skyrim Total Enhancement Project), here's the description they provide: " STEP is an extensive, STEP-by-STEP, guide to enhancing TESV Skyrim with the best mods, tweaks and settings. The focus is quality over quantity. STEP tries to stay as close to vanilla Skyrim as possible while improving visual quality and correcting game-play mechanics." The goal would be to have a set of baseline mods and tweaks that everyone using the guide would be expected to use (things like bugfix and optimization/quality of life mods that don't change gameplay or increase game requirements). Additional configurations could be specified beyond the baseline, and could include things like graphical overhauls, part rebalances (with some new parts as well to fill in gaps) and even full career overhauls (kind of like what SETI was trying to accomplish). The modding community outside of the project would be encouraged to create their own configurations starting from the baseline or other official configs, and the best of these could potentially be "adopted" by the project and maintained by the main project team. My idea is to make this more of a community rather than an individual project (kind of how RSS-RO has been done) so multiple modders can contribute and come and go from the project in response to real-life demands. I've seen far, far too many great mods get abandoned by the wayside when the author went MIA and left their mod with a restrictive license, and I would want to see the project organized in such a way as to (hopefully) prevent this. I don't have the time myself to lead something like this, but I would be willing to help contribute with planning/organization and/or creating part configs. Does anyone have any interest in something like this?

Does anyone have any epic playlists and the associated settings they would be kind enough to share? I've toyed with the idea of setting this mod up myself and would like some inspiration on what other people have done with this.

I agree, sound design is one of the weakest parts of KSP. Free music is great for a placeholder in an early access game, but KSP supposedly left early access years ago. At this point the free music is pretty much an established part of the game now, but I don't see why they couldn't commission the artist to create some new music to complement the tracks that are already in the game. I would especially like to see transition tracks in place of the abrupt and jarring audio transitions we have now. As has already been mentioned, I would love to see the devs officially implement something like what the Soundtrack Editor mod implements, complete with unique theme music for each orbital situation around each planet. Instead of those random bird sounds, have a KSP theme that plays while looking at the KSC. Have a variation on that which plays while driving/flying a vehicle around the KSC. Outside of the KSC, have a main Kerbin theme, with different variations depending on the situation (landed, splashed down, flying, upper atmosphere, low and high space). Then do the same thing for all of the planets. Also have some situational tracks that play in other situations, like immediately after lifting off or when docking, or when reentering an atmosphere. It's no small task, but good sound design is a big part of crafting an awesome gaming experience.

Glad to see the devs slowly adding in requested features like Steam integration and better controller support for PC. Now if we can just get some sort of life support mod integrated (like what the devs did with RemoteTech), an art and audio pass, a rethinking of career mode, and a proper balance pass, then maybe we'll finally have a more or less complete game.

From thinking more about this issue, it seems more than anything else like there's a general trend in companies to reserve as many rights as they possibly can with the EULA "just in case", knowing that most people don't read it or otherwise don't care. Seems ridiculous, but I suppose the same thing happens everywhere people can get away with doing it (including government). Most of the time it doesn't really have any bearing on the company's behavior since if they really tried to enforce the more controversial points, it would be such a PR nightmare that it wouldn't be worth it.

This looks more like Take Two covering their bases for the future of KSP more than anything else since it sounds like it's not too much different from the EULA's for their other games. However, the wording about content ownership with mods is still extremely troubling. Are contracts like this even legally enforceable since it basically amounts of intellectual property theft on the part of the company if they choose to assert this clause? I've heard of similarly draconian work contracts where everything you do, even in your free time while employed is supposed to be the property of the company, but modders aren't employees of Take Two. Best case, I hope Take Two is simply applying their standard EULA to KSP with no plans to curtail the modding scene and will clarify (with a legal addenum) this intent. Some modders will understandably leave the KSP scene (a lot have already with all the problems with KSP's development over the last several years), but others will take their place. I don't want to think about the worst case with KSP being ruined with overly aggressive monetization attempts. Edit: If they changed the EULA out from under us and we don't agree with the new one, are we technically eligible for a refund since the EULA specifically says that we need to agree to it to continue using the software and the conditions have changed since the original purchase?

I was thinking rover wheel sounds and deploy sounds for things like solar panels and radiators, and cargo/service bays. Also, RCS/Vernor engines should make some sound in a vacuum due to the fact that they're rocket engines. Same thing goes for Kerbals on EVA with their thrusters. I'm not expecting Star Wars levels of sound effects, but at least some mostly realistic sound cues for actions. For music, I can see things being quiet just before launch, but once a craft launches it would be nice to have some music in atmo. It's also silly that simply being in an atmosphere results in no music, but everywhere else, including landing on other planets (as long as they don't have an atmosphere) has the same music as outer space. To me it's another inconsistency that doesn't make any sense. Ideally, I wouldn't mind seeing each planet have their own music theme, with different tracks for each of the environments to provide audio cues for switching situations.

I first played KSP back when it was 0.19, and the demo was 0.18. The first thing I did (after the tutorial) was to start adding more and more boosters, fuel tanks, and engines until I managed to put Jeb on an escape trajectory out of the sun. In the more recent versions of KSP, the first thing I do with a new version is install MechJeb. For career, if for some reason I've decided to put myself through the pain of the vanilla game progression, the first mission is to launch a command pod to get science from the launchpad. That's enough to unlock the next tier and build a slightly better first real rocket. Otherwise, I spend several hours getting a bunch of mods installed and working together before starting career.

Yeah, I probably should have used different words or been a bit more explicit in what I was getting at. Given your art background, it probably drives you crazy when people throw out the word graphics like I did when they actually mean something else. And I even watched an Extra Credits episode on YouTube not long ago on this whole issue...