Kerbart

It's kinda sad that these announcements do not excite me anymore. Not at all. My first thought here is "with the usual delays that'll be January. And then it's so close to February that, to "celebrate" the one year anniversary, it'll be delayed to late February. And then there are some last minute bugs... So really, March." [Sarcastic laughter]. Does that mean it's from the game that's in production? Not sure how WIP differs from what we've paid for so far. I don't think any part of flight is stress free. You never know when the game decides to go berserk on your craft. What you really mean is "on top of the 500 ways the game will destroy your craft without warning, we've now added re-entry heating!" Let's be real honest here. At the moment, he biggest threats to long running campaigns are: Rage quitting Game save file blowing up (or game stops working due to registry file size limits) Boredom because lack of new content I think we're far, far away from the game offering enough to explore to keep a campaign running longer than in between the annual milestone updates, when the game is barely stable enough to support a single round trip mission to the Mun. On the whole it's good to see that the game is moving forward. I can understand why the dev team is proud and enthusiastic about the new features. Just bear in mind that many in the community have grown tired of empty over-hyped promises and will be a bit more reserved about it, until we see actual in-game footage. They are not calling it a solution. Dissect IG's words as if you're a high paid attorney and draw your conclusions.

Extrapolating from what we have so far, I'm going to guess that above everything else, it'll be worse.

That's a nice step forward in the right direction, and also acknowledging the value of community input. Haters surely will interpret this move differently (I can see how), but that just means that the universe works as expected.

If it's just shoving some banners down the esophagus while loading I don't really care. The problem of course, is the tracking. Whenever news sites whine that their business is not sustainable with me running tracking blockers my thoughts are always "I don't mind the ads and I do not block them. I do block trackers, and sadly the ads you try to serve come with it. But that's a 'you' problem, I can't fix that."

I’m sure most, if not all of us, would rather play the game. But we can’t because it’s unplayable. So we rant. It’s not productive but neither is boasting about grid fins when the game needs serious fixing.

To play the devil's advocate here, a stack of 75m high needs, to have some flex in order to reflect reality. Or what about a 400m tall stack? Having a maximum tank size enforces those joints, making taller stacks less stable than shorter stacks. Just as in reality. In that sense the added complexity is not useless as it's a tool to provide structural challenges when building a ship. This might very well be the reason for the devs to not implement procedural tanks. I'm not in charge of that, and you'll probably disagree with the validity of such reasoning but it would suggest that there is a reason for the complexity. My personal view is that we should have procedural tanks for a variety of reasons but that internally they should be represented as a stack of smaller tanks, so we retain a noodle factor that punishes unrealistic tall and slender structures.

So... you look at the element value, see where it fals on the curve and then use the corresponding x-value to place it in a new array that uses floats as index values? Wouldn't you then have to sort that list as well to get things in the right order? Also, how expensive is it to do the reverse lookup on the curve? I'm not saying you're wrong, but sorting is one field in computer science that has been exhaustively researched. It's also way beyond my capacity to understand, but my suspicion is that there's just a step with a "hidden cost" involved that makes the algorithm in practice not as fast as you think.

Well the very early decision to go with Unity's physics model instead of rolling their own... Look at the current state of the game and keep in mind that this kind of physics simulation is complex and really hard. Do you want Intercept to roll out their own code for that? Even if they manage to make it bug-free—and we all know how that goes—it also has to be high performance. And as stated countless times before, the problem isn't just wobble. That's easy to fix. The problem is to address the wobble without trivializing the game. Anyone telling me that "in real life rockets don't flex and stretch" is doing a fantastic job of pretending not to know a lot about physics and engineering. Of course they do. That's the nature of the materials we use. Saturn V almost pogo'd itself to pieces before they managed to reduce the issue. The problem is scale, and making it fit in Unity physics model, and finding the balance between the game being fun (as in frustration-free) and the game being challenging. It's not a simple problem to solve properly, and they likely tabled it because there were bigger fish to fry.

Plot twist: you know your stakeholders want a regular update on the bug status. Is it that hard to have a central document that gets updated as work on the bug progresses? It doesn't even have to be daily, just update the status as appropriate. "Investigating," "Replicating succesfully," "Root cause analysis," "Considering Solution," "Testing Solution," "Sent to QA for final testing" something along those lines? They know there's a boat load of bugs. They know it's the biggest pain point of the product right now. They know that fixing the bugs is under the magnifying glass of their customers. They know those customers want to get an update on the progress of fixing those bugs. So why the surprised Pikachu face when it's time to actually publish the status update?

Well you have to contact the lead on each bug and get an update. I'm not a professional software engineer and I'd think they'd have a "bug list" with the status that gets updated on a daily basis, but what do I know.

That'll be a nice loophole to exploit for those Ship X kilogram of ore from A to B missions

U must be new to KSP2

Same here! I work for a Big Evil Coro that’s not nearly as evil as customers and outsiders like to think. Customers who also want us to deliver our services for free or even less than that, while complaining when we’re not the best in the industry. The Suits might not be developers, they will know their products and their markets. Which is why you see micropayments and treasure chests in some games but not in others, and why it is unlikely to see them in KSP despite what some haters will say. In the end developers need to get paid and need an office to work together in, and running the business that provides that — not to mention upfronting the substantial funds required for that — is why it’s hard to do it without them, and usually the job done, disliked as the decisions that they made are, are usually a necessity.

Not just the first, but also the second, third, ... without saying T2 is without blame, the decision to set a hard publication date was something I completely understand. We don't know how many "rewrites from scratch" there were, but given the endless delays and the sorry state of the game at EA, I assume more than one. "Perfect is the enemy of good" and that seemed to have happened here. It's easy to blame "the suits" for "beancounter" decisions but this one seems to have been a pure necessity or we would never have seen anything (as bad as it is right now)

I've gone over my posts five times, I haven't seen mention of vertical struts anywhere. Do I use vertical struts? Yes, when connecting a large tank, small engine + decoupler to another large tank. And I think it's a stunning lack of mechanical insights to expect the game to not require extra bracing in such a situation. To connect similar sizes parts? Never. It's just a matter of keeping diameter in check with vertical size, aka good (mechanical) design practices. Now I'm curious where on earth you need vertical bracing between (same sized) parts. I certainly don't

So... wobble is not an issue in real rockets and struts are not used? I think that "making your rocket strong enough" is am essential part of designing it, just like adding enough fuel and Smaking sure you have enough batteries. Your engines need to be strong enough, so why not your rocket? SpaceX seems to be using struts. But maybe their designers don't know what they are doing?

One of the great things about KSP1 is the incredible detail at the KSC, and how it's fully explorable. There are all kinds of places you can walk your Kerbals to. In KSP2, not so much. Pretty much none of the staircases have colliders and you'll sink right through them. It would, for instance, be so much fun if you could get off the launchpad using the stairs, walk over to the launch tower, and climb it all the way to the top, to watch a launch. Or explore any of the other buildings with external staircases.

While they're at it, I hope they give us infinite fuel. That's another engineering problem. And batteries that never drain. And microscopic antennae that work across the galaxy. Those are all things designers shouldn't have to deal with.

I think that the fundamental problem isn't wobble; it's failure. Yes, it's very easy to modify the game in such a way that rockets are infinitely stiff and don't wobble. Problem is that it's also possible to make rockets that are super aerodynamic (think shaped like broomstick instead of a soda bottle) and offer very little design constraints. The reason we don't have infinite stiff joints is the same as we don't have 2500 kN engines with 95,000 Isp, gimballed and weighing only 50 kg. Wouldn't it be wonderful? At the same time, it kills any challenge the game might offer. Real rockets don't wobble; you're right about that. They just explode. And usually they don't because they're designed by engineers who know what they are doing. Wobble is the way the game gives feedback that you're flying an unsound design. People freak out when their rocket, shaped like a hot air balloon, flips over when they yank it to a 45° angle at 10km. Imagine the complaints of people when their rocket explodes for no reason. Oh yes, the reason is there: your design is too slender, there's too much weight on top, you're using way too much control authority, etc. But now the game doesn't give any visual clues up to that point, just boom. Can we have rockets that don't wobble? Yes, but it would either be not fun (the rapid unplanned disassembly), or, ironically, unrealistic (build and fly what you want without regards for real life physics). That's why it's such a hard problem.

Cutting thrust or completely disabling the engine? Semantics do matter — although not that much since completely disabling an engine (as opposed to throttling down to 0) seems to be the only way to ensure your engine doesn't go full throttle when going to the tracking station.

In discrete steps, and with limited options,. So you can piece two Jumbo 64's together (or have one of 1.75× length) without losing the "work with the parts you're dealt with" character of the game Yes but there are serious game play issues with that since parts themselves have infinite stiffness. What will stop you from welding a stack of 10 Jumbo 64 XL's together? Things do bend in reality (most non-engineers are not aware of this) and doing this through the joints is the only way the game can do it. Part of the challenge, and fun, is that you have to build ships that have at least some structural integrity. The issue isn't the flexible joints per se but the fact that it happens only at the joints. And then it's exaggerated (a) to compensate for the lack of flex inside parts and (b) to make it visible in the first place, because a 1% flex before things catastrophically come apart isn't really providing hints that a design exceeds what's possible in reality. Personally I see a couple of ways to combat this: Provide other clues that the vessel is starting to exceed stress levels beyond tolerance: screeching sounds, things breaking off, cracks appearing, etc. Reduce joint flex bu making parts flexible — model large tanks internally into subdivisions with flexi joints. These joints can be much stiffer than regular part joints as there's no need to compensate for the lack of stiffness inside the parts Throw in procedural parts (as above) There would still be a design penalty for using overly slender tanks with a lot of thrust. Technically, wobbling could be eliminated — you'd hear screeching, cracks appear, the tank visibly bends, and then it explodes. Although under less extreme circumstances — say a large cylindrical tank foolishly used as a structural part for a space station — you'd still encounter bending but non-fatal (a metal-fatigue tracker would be an interesting but likely overly complex addition to the game, but that's where modders come in). The downside, and not an insignificant one given the performance issues the game has, is that an approach like this could effectively increase the part count of a vessel significantly as all large parts will likely be subdivided.

Would an example of such lack of communication being posting info of an upcoming hotfix on reddit but not on the forum?

Communication is two-way. Sticking your fingers in your ears and announcing “a talk about wobbly rockets” (a talk, not a discussion, not addressing it, not discussing possible solutions — and they are masters in picking their words when it comes to this) without any regards for what has the most attention right now isn’t communicating. It’s broadcasting with a bull horn and showing no interest in what goes on in the community.

One thing EA has taught me is that Intercept's PR is exceptionally well versed in saying something that sounds like something else. Afterwards you can't really say "you promised x" because they never actually said that. Yes, that's toxic and creates distrust from your customers in the long run and here we are. Maybe I'm overly negative but I didn't see words like "address" or "solution" on the announcement. We do have announcements about timelines of when they will announce the timeline of bug fixes. This one isn't even that. It's just a talk.

So now that we know that it falls down, the sign for anti-matter mass has to be positive, right (+5kg not -5kg)? If my understanding of physics is correct, that leaves us only with the question whether or not pineapple pizza is acceptable.