Lord Aurelius

@Corona688 I apologize if you took any of what I said as an insult, that was not my intent. I'll try to clarify where I stand with graphics in KSP. The visual fidelity is fine. If the devs have time eventually to add some extra eye candy for people with the PCs to handle it, great. My issue with the graphics as they stand is the inconsistency. With the exception of the 1.25m and 3.75m parts, all of the rocket tanks have textures that don't really go together. Mixing 2.5m with anything else looks pretty awful, and the giant orange tank doesn't even fit within the 2.5m family. This particular issue is probably my biggest peeve with the current graphics since 2.5m parts are some of the most commonly used, yet they have some of the worst textures. The smaller SRBs also don't really fit with anything. When I'm talking about placeholder parts, this is the kind of thing I'm referring to. Visually, it looks like Squad started to put together a consistent art style with the 1.25m, 3.75m, and spaceplane parts, but then ran out of time/gave up/etc with the other parts. To me, they look like placeholder parts that were intended to be improved at some point. Take a look at Ven's Stock Part Revamp. See how all the parts have a nice, clean, consistent style. It's not any higher resolution than stock and doesn't really impact performance, but it IMHO it looks much better. This is what I mean when I talk about consistency, and is what I would want to see an art pass accomplish. In my mind, the graphics issue that you're picking a bone with is actually secondary to the atrocious part balance and broken career. All I was saying in my previous comments about graphics is that better graphics would be nice, but the real need in the graphics department is consistency. Squad has shown that they can make good looking textures for some of the parts (3.75m and the new/overhauled spaceplane parts), and I would like to see that work finished for all the parts instead of having the inconsistency we have now.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree for the most part. Technically yes, a placeholder is a part that is intended to be replaced at some point with the final version. When development gets rushed, sometimes the placeholders end up unfortunately being the final versions. This doesn't mean that they aren't still poor quality parts that drag the overall quality of the game down until they're upgraded. Fair enough, for me, the game isn't worth $40 in its current state. I got it at the early access price, and the price I paid at the time was worth it, although I'm more than a little disappointed at how the development has gone since then. The value of a product is always in the eye of the buyer, and if I were to go and buy the game right now I wouldn't pay $40 for it and would wait for a significant sale. You're putting words in my mouth here. I said that the planets are dull and boring once you actually get there, and was trying to give some ideas on how they could be improved. Ground scatter is simply one easy way to make them somewhat more interesting barring larger additions like many more random anomalies or a more robust surface science system. You're putting words in my mouth again. There's such a thing as graphics settings and optimized (read: lower resolution) textures. What I was trying to say is that basic graphics could be what they are now with just having the textures redone to be a more consistent style, and the higher graphics settings could utilize the more demanding graphics options that some of the mods enable. Orbiter is free, and has significantly better graphics than KSP. Fair enough, but Harvester doesn't work for Squad and isn't involved in the game's development anymore. Developers sometimes make mistakes, and given the popularity of KER and MechJeb even with players who otherwise play completely stock, I would suggest that it was more of a mistake. A seat-of-the-pants trial and error approach to spaceflight is fun for the first little bit, but then gets extremely annoying when you realize that the game is arbitrarily hiding critical information from the player (but still displays that little dV readout for maneuvers) for "reasons". Which is a classic example of a placeholder part that should have been replaced but wasn't. Like in my reply to Corona688, there is such a thing as graphics settings. You simply leave the higher graphics options disabled for slower PCs so they're doing exactly the same graphics they are now, but the ceiling is higher now for players with the extra performance. I do realize that Squad has put a tremendous amount of effort into KSP and don't dispute that it still is likely a lot of work to really finish the game and polish it up nicely. That doesn't change the fact that the game as it stands now is still pretty rough and unfinished in many ways despite being "released", which has been my point all along. Again, I'm not advocating photorealistic 4K graphics. Fidelity improvements would be nice, but the biggest issue is the lack of consistency that makes a lot of rockets look pretty terrible with all the mismatched textures.

Why not aliens? We've already got crashed flying saucers in multiple places, strange monoliths, and a dead Kraken scattered around the system. I'm not expecting live aliens, but more anomalies and at least more interesting terrain scatter (preferably with collision meshes) would go a long ways to making the planets feel like more than mostly featureless rocks. Some of the placeholder parts are in the island airport. The rest are still in the VAB/SPH. I bought KSP way back in 0.19 before career mode was solidified with the expectation that we would get a great career mode to complement the sandbox. You are correct that pure sandbox games aren't necessarily my favorite. They're fun for awhile and to come back to occasionally, but I do end up burning out on them after awhile. It's really not about them costing less. It's about devs actually finishing them. As much as I like what Minecraft did to spur the market for these types of games, I also despise what it did in terms of making people more tolerant of devs who release unfinished games. Minecraft for all its good points has many of the same problems of KSP with being unfinished long after it was "released". If a someone makes a great open world sandbox that manages to put in a great story and overall goal as well and actually finishes the game and properly balances and polishes it, then I would gladly pay AAA prices for it. I do agree that I can be quite negative on this whole issue. When 1.0 dropped, I was not happy with the state of the game or the developer's apparent priorities (marketing gimmicks and a disastrous console release). I'm glad the devs are still supporting the game, but I would much prefer if they were expanding on a completed game instead of playing catch-up to a premature release. If I'm going to take a step back and ask myself what KSP would need to be worth $40, here's what I would say it needs: A proper tutorial. Could even be some kind of career mode, but the important part is that it should guide players step-by-step through all the game mechanics like interplanetary transfers, orbital rendezvous, and precision planetary landings. Life Support to balance probes vs Kerbals. Should be toggleable on a per-save basis like the comm net feature is. Some basic KER/MechJeb functionality. At the very least a dV readout. Some basic autopilot (another difficulty option perhaps) would be great. IRL people don't fly rockets by hand. Art pass on all parts for style and quality consistency, and to fix odd design choices like the Mk1-2 pod with the hatch on a diagonal. Graphics pass on overall game to incorporate some of the features of the more popular graphics mods without raising the minimum game requirements Audio pass to add missing sounds and better quality music (some of those audio tracks get really repetitive and annoying, plus no music when in atmo for some reason), plus some chatterer type functionality A rethinking of career mode. Maybe even something as simple as putting something along the lines of the Anomaly Surveyor contracts into the game, with a few cinematics when discovering anomalies and some kind of overall story to go with them. A no-holds-barred full balance pass of everything. Part stats, missing parts, tech tree, contracts, game systems, all of it. Don't worry about breaking save games, each update ultimately ends up doing that to some degree anyways. Polish, polish, polish. I agree, lowering the price isn't the answer. What I would prefer to see (likely along with everyone else here) is the game improved to match the price. Which the devs are (very) slowly doing. Hopefully some day (soon) I'll actually be able to look at the game and not feel the urge to mod the living daylights out of it just to fix these issues and make it enjoyable for me.

Which kind of goes hand-in-hand with my point. There IS something wrong with KSP at $40... it's an unfinished game lacking a lot of basic polish, balance and completeness that would be expected from a "released" product. I'm not saying that it isn't the right business decision for them to price it like they have, but that I don't feel like it's actually representative of the true state of the game.

KSP is clever and entertaining, but -- at some point you realize it's an empty sandbox with a bunch of dull planets and poorly balanced mechanics and placeholder parts, and no real sense of purpose other than what you come up with to challenge yourself. Even career mode, once you've finished the tech tree, degenerates into sandbox with a few extra restrictions on funds. Sorry, not trying to be snarky, but like I said, KSP still feels largely unfinished. That's kind of the core of my feeling on the price. The $40 price came when the game went to 1.0 and ostensibly represents a "released" product. When I play the game, it still feels largely the same as it did as of 0.90, although it is nice not having to install FAR and DRE to get a decent atmosphere. It's not so much about the actual dollar value, but about what the higher price is supposed to represent and how I feel the game doesn't actually live up to that representation.

I don't disagree there, however the base game with low impact visual mods and some extra parts will run just fine.

Without even looking at the specs, the answer is yes. I've been able to run KSP on Core2 Duo laptops, albeit somewhat slowly. Looking at the specs, you're not going to have any issues running the game. Even with lots graphics overhaul mods. The only spec that might cause trouble is the only 8GB of RAM. That's enough for the short term, but considering that Windows really needs at least 2GB by itself, you're limiting yourself to around 6GB for KSP and other games before things really start slowing down (when your computer runs out of space in the RAM, it starts using the much, much slower hard drive to store the information to avoid having your computer crash). Considering how easy it was to run into the 4GB limit before KSP 64-bit was stable, that might not be quite enough if you plan on keeping the PC for awhile. I would suggest that you consider getting 16GB, or at least ensuring that your motherboard has a free ram slot to add more RAM if you can't afford it right now.

I'm very aware that people put price and hours of playtime together. KSP is a great game in this regard. However, my point is that the game is still incomplete and we're paying full release price for an unfinished product. I know, it's hard to define "complete" when it's a game that's in continuous development, but as a ballpark definition I expect a 1.0 release to be something that is a balanced, cohesive, complete experience with the necessary game system in place and working. Even after over two years of development since 1.0, I still feel that KSP hasn't reached this point. We're still missing any sort of official life support, which is one of the fundamental issues facing real world manned spaceflight and would help balance out how OP manned flights are in the game right now compared to probes. Part balance is still all over the place, there's holes in the stock part lineup, and career mode is still a mess. Even the part models are of wildly varying degrees of quality, and a lot of audio is still missing. I realize that things are slowly improving with the new devs, but until the game actually finishes these things I still consider this game to be an early access title in everything except name and price. Which gets back to my original issue with the price of the game. I've had the game since 0.19 and been on the forums nearly as long. I know KSP has a great community, especially with modding, and that's what's kept the game alive in spite of the devs. Scott Manley's videos are great, but the game really should provide all the information the player actually needs to play the game. It's poor game design, especially in a "released" title, to expect the player to use the wiki for everything. Maybe that's part of the rationale for the new expansion pack, since it shifts the burden of creating decent tutorials off the devs and onto the player base so that's one less thing they have to do. I can partially agree that it's not my game, at least not the current incarnation of the title. Especially since a huge amount of dev time (especially in that critical time leading up to 1.0) seemed to be eaten up by console development to the detriment of the rest of the game, and I have no interest in playing KSP on a console. The concept of KSP is extremely appealing and I've got lots of hours of enjoyment out of it, but I also cringe every time I see the stock career, tech tree and part balance and have to spend a bunch of time getting mods set up to make it my game.

This isn't necessarily the best metric for determining the value of a game (or media in general). There's tons of free-to-play games that will devour your soul if you want them to without you having to pay a cent. There's also some really great movies out there that are worth seeing even with high movie ticket prices that only last a few hours at most. What I'm looking for is a great experience. KSP offers some of this, but at the same time there isn't much actual content in the game. You, the player, have to put a lot of your own effort into the game for it to be enjoyable (especially with the almost complete lack of a decent tutorial). For many players it's tons of time getting all the mods working correctly, for others its coming up with a narrative to give motivation to what they're doing since the game doesn't provide any.

No doubt KSP is much more complicated than most indie games. That's why I mentioned technical debt in my earlier post. However, that doesn't give it a free pass on things like internal art/style consistency and poor career gameplay. Neither of those things are directly affected by the complexity of the code (aside from developer time constraints). I'm thankful that Squad is slowly tackling the technical debt and attempting to finish the game, but there's still a lot of work to be done before I'd call it finished. Part of the problem with balance is that it can't really be done right until all the game features and systems are complete, which even now over two years after release isn't the case. When they do (hopefully) get around to it, I would expect it to be a comprehensive pass on all aspects of gameplay.

I'm not talking about the super high-res textures and volumetric clouds players add with mods. I'm talking about the difference between the old 2.5m parts and the newer 3.75m ones. The newer parts look good, but the old parts are long overdue for an art pass to bring them up to the same art style and quality. Your second point is precisely why I'm still salty about this whole issue. If the devs had actually balanced things before 1.0 when the game was still in early access and the general mindset was that things can and would change, then it would have been a lot easier to do this. A balanced base game would have been much easier to extend in the future with just minor tweaks and would have given good reference values for part mods instead of the hodgepodge of values we have now. I'm still holding out hope that the devs will bite the bullet and do a balance pass at some point.

I actually have to agree that KSP is a bit too expensive given the current state of the game. Not because it isn't a fun game, and not because I haven't gotten hundreds of hours of enjoyment from it. The problem is that the game STILL feels like an early access title in a lot of ways. Game balance and polish are both still sorely lacking for a game that has been "released". Not to mention gameplay outside of sandbox mode. $40 is quite expensive for an indie/small developer game, most of those are $30 or less and many of them are made with much higher production values than KSP. The higher price implies a higher level of quality and polish which KSP simply doesn't have right now given that we're STILL using poor quality placeholder graphics and part balance values. What KSP does have is a niche with no real competition. If the devs can ever properly finish the game, it will easily be worth whatever price they want to charge. As it stands now though, KSP is still in early access as far as I'm concerned. The only thing that really changed when it went 1.0 was the price, so in my mind the game needs to actually be finished before it will be worth the full asking price. Yes, I'm a bit salty about this whole issue. Mostly because I can see the potential of KSP to be so much better than it is now and how it's being held back by years of technical debt and questionable business decisions (the whole console debacle).

That's not entirely true. Sure, a mobile device won't be up to what a full PC can do, but the latest Snapdragon 835 GPU (Adreno 540) is roughly equivalent in performance to the Intel HD Graphics 4600 (what most Haswell CPUs shipped with). I've played KSP on that GPU. For memory bandwidth, the Snapdragon can do 18 GB/s. This is close to a dual channel Haswell chip as well with slow DDR3, which does a little over 20 GB/s. Overall, mobile performance has come a long ways. Considering that I was able to run KSP on an old Thinkpad with a Core2 Duo which is much slower than the Haswell chip mentioned, I don't see any major performance obstacles for running KSP on mobile devices. You won't necessarily be building 1000+ part motherships, but for relatively small vessels the game would likely be completely playable. Sources: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11201/qualcomm-snapdragon-835-performance-preview/3 https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-Adreno-540-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.207856.0.html http://www.corsair.com/en-eu/blog/2015/september/ddr3_vs_ddr4_generational

I totally agree, we don't want another extremely poor quality port. However, I was talking about the fact that with modern mobile devices the performance is there to run the game, and with some appropriate UI design it could also be controllable. In my mind, a competent dev is implied, although realistically not always a given. Performance between CPU architectures is a really difficult issue to properly characterize. In many ways it's an apples vs oranges thing, and clock speed doesn't really mean anything. Still, I've run KSP on an old laptop with a Core2 Duo CPU, which is slower than a modern ARM SoC.

As has been said, performance isn't really an issue anymore given how powerful mobile devices have become. The bigger issue is controls, although I don't see that being insurmountable. Dragging around with one finger moves the camera, have a virtual joystick for the control axes, drag the throttle, and have a dropdown from the top of the screen with buttons for lights, landing gear, action groups, etc. The hardest part would be the right-click parts menu. Maybe long press on the desired part, and make the UI interact-able when the game is paused so the player can pause the game to use the menus. This would also be very much appreciated on the desktop version as well.

I totally understand your concerns with forcing the player to do specific mission types. If the devs ever get around to trying any of this stuff out, a huge amount of playtesting will be needed to see how it actually works in practice. It's one thing for us to be armchair devs theorizing about how to make this game more awesome, and another thing entirely to actually put it into practice and see how it holds up. One feature I really hope Making History ships with is the ability to create a series of missions, not just a one-off. That way players could construct their own careers/campaigns and use the mission triggers to simulate some of these things.

Using funds primarily for the tech tree makes perfect sense. That's how research generally works IRL. That also is a great idea for the part missions, I agree that right now they're generally stupid. Unless I get one to test a part on the launchpad (free money), they're generally not worth bothering with at all. Multiple science categories makes a lot more sense than what we have now. The idea of sampling a planet to use parts there is another related thought (extension?) to the unlocking parts via missions thing. Additionally, it could be used to limit where Kerbals could EVA. If you haven't sent a probe there before to take measurements, the Kerbal's suits (or even their capsules) might not be appropriate for the environment. Especially on Eve and the sunny side of Moho.

Awesome, I was just searching for a mod to do random star systems in KSP. Are you also planning to add some options to also generate different starting worlds in the future instead of preserving the Kerbin system? Would it be possible to integrate this into the game at some point? I don't know much about how the KSP engine works and when the system is generated (during the loading screen? after loading a savegame?), but it would be awesome to have a different map for each savegame (or the same ones if you choose the same seed).

Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at, and I know that it would require some new systems and a LOT of balance work to get it right. The idea is that when you get into a specific situation where you don't have the technology to go farther, that inspires the R&D people to come up with the parts you need for the next step. Which also gives me an idea for a semi-related thing. IRL, the biggest challenge with any kind of mission to Venus is the crushing pressure and high temperature. KSP doesn't model any of this. It would be neat to have some part upgrades that would be required for those extreme conditions. Not that Eve isn't difficult enough already (at least to return from). A procedural seed option for KSP would be awesome. I just did a quick search and found this: Unfortunately it's an external application for now, but hopefully at some point it will be integrated into the game. Also during that search I came across some old dev comments on why they didn't do it, and it had to do with being able to share the game experience. That has some merit, but at the same time if the seed is visible, people will be able to share great seeds and be able to share experiences that way. Would definitely add a lot to the replayability of the game.

Totally agree. That said, I could potentially see certain specific experiments (not generic science points) being prerequisites for some parts. For example, getting a probe into space would provide the necessary environmental hostility information to design a crewed space capsule.

I would also like to add that part balance is also a critical part of balancing the tech tree. Just moving some of the parts around doesn't completely solve the issues since the part costs (and in some cases their specs) have already been tweaked to reflect their position in the tech tree. Science experiments and science multipliers also need a balance pass. It's just silly that I can get more science running around the KSC in the early game than I can from LKO. Not to mention that single data point experiments like temperature and pressure measurements don't transmit at 100% for inexplicable reasons, while a much more complex crew or EVA report does. Additionally, I would like to see an Anomaly Explorer style series of contracts that the player is free to pursue or ignore as they choose so they have some larger goal to work towards besides just "gather all the science" and "put a flag on every body". In fact, from some of NovaSilisko's comments from when he used to be a dev that was the original plan, but it was scrapped for some reason (along with additional planets). Life support (and Kerbal balance in general) is a step above these things in terms of needing extra code, but if we're encouraging interplanetary play and meaningful game balance, it needs to be added. Right now there's really no reason to use probes (especially if you're using the comm network which nerfs them outside of com range) when for just slightly more weight you can throw a Mk1 lander can on the vessel and have a bunch of free science (with 100% transmission to boot), plus infinite fuel with "get out and push". Not to mention that there's an effectively unlimited supply of free kerbals in LKO with the rescue contracts, so it's perfectly feasible to leave some at permanent surface installations on places like Eve. Especially since there isn't any life support to run out.

Sadly I have to agree with you here. It does parallel the reality of the space race, but it would be so much better if it enabled players to test out all the wacky proposed manned mission ideas without needing to install mods for things like life support. Which, incidentally, is the biggest challenge facing manned missions today.

You said it. I've said it many times before, but what career really needs is an end goal to play towards. Right now, there really isn't one other than unlock the tech tree. The best solution I've seen is something like the anomaly explorer contract pack. It gives you a set of increasingly difficult missions to actually use all those shiny parts on and an end-game goal to work towards. Otherwise, the only reward is the satisfaction of coming up with a mission and pulling it off (which is really more what sandbox mode is about anyways). I hardly consider the bland, boring planet surfaces and the forgettable (or worse, generic placeholder) science descriptions to be rewards at all.

Personally, I think mods are great. That said, I've been playing stock recently (with the exception of MechJeb and a module manager plugin that removes the need of the dedicated MechJeb part) for ease of sharing craft files and to avoid "mod creep". When I get beyond basic information mods, it's a slippery slope of "just one more mod...". Especially now that KSP is 64-bit and I have 16GB of RAM so there really isn't an upper limit. Pretty soon I find myself spending more time searching for new mods to add and finding ways to get them to play nice with each other than actually playing the game. I have nothing against mods or people who play with them. Mods add awesome things to the game and I'm very glad they exist. Many times though I want to build something I could (potentially at least) easily share with others. Or I just want to actually play the game rather than spending several days (weeks?) getting that perfect modded copy of KSP working how I want.

The thing that frustrates me the most is that the game still feels rough and unfinished over TWO YEARS after 1.0. The inconsistent art, missing sounds, broken part balance/career/tech tree/etc all frustrate me. Especially since at this point the devs are working on DLC so the broken placeholders are likely permanent now. I can still hope that at some point the devs will go ahead and just bite the bullet and do a comprehensive balance and polish overhaul.