Kerbart

There are also various docking port alignment mods (navyfish and navball come to mind) that make it easier to dock with the right orientation, so that you don’t have to fix it afterwards.

It should be stock. Much more elegant than autostrutting.

As long as the revenue supports it, KSP 1 DLC and updates will be rolled out. But to be fair, once 2 is in full swing I don’t expect the 1 revenue to be that much. Perhaps heavily discounted?

Excellent find. "please don't let this be another No Mans Sky clone." Who has the illusion that the camera operator (or whoever spoke) was the only one in the audience thinking that? And then, at 1:10, it was perfectly clear to the audience, that this game isn't that. A bit of humor at the right moment, emphasizes what this game should not be mistaken for (boring, heavy handed, not inspiring).

Don't forget the audacity to charge $60 for it, instead of handing it out for free. Yes, that is relevant. You see, in the end, KSP(2) is a commercial venture. That 30+ head team on Star Helix, that has been working on the project for two years? They all get paid. Because if they don't, they're no showing up and there will not be a game. So in the end, Private Division needs to sell the game. And advertising and marketing are part of that. Marketing software is all about managing expectations. So we're selling "space." Customers will blast the game in the reviews if it's not what they think it is. Or will not buy it if they don't think it is what it is. You will buy, because you're familiar with it. So really, painting the character of the game (which is what the video does) is not that important to you, and Private Division will care less about how you feel about lolsplotions. Those are not for you. Who it is important to, are the people that have not seen KSP yet. So what is space not? Is it Wing Commander, or EVE Online? No, it is not. Is it Roller Coaster Tycoon or SimCiyt in space? No, it is not. Is it No Mans Sky? Absolutely not Is it you-need-a-math-degree space? Nope. The video makes very clear that this is not about shooting aliens. It's not about racing. What it is about is fun. Humor evokes "fun." You don't need a degree in rocket engineering for this game, look at those bumbling fools! If they can do it, so can you! The message of "lolsplosions" is not that the game is about that. There's enough footage in the clip to show that. The message of it, is that the kind of fun the game pursues is family friendly; not too serious. This is a fun game! Kerbal Space Program is inspiring and can set directions for older children/young adults. But only if they play the game. Will a "this is a serious simulation about aerospace" message make them interested? Absolutely not. Will this video make them interested in picking up the game? Will they go on a journey of exploration, learn a lot about physics, and spend their time creating and exploring instead of playing a shooting gallery? I can tell you that it's 100% more likely that they do that, then when they never pick up the game. Yeah, keep the "lolsplotions" in the video.

Look at FS2004 vs FSX - given how much more hardware FSX required, a large part of the community hang on to FS2004 and gradually everyone went over. Of course, it wasn’t uncommon to have sunk a couple of hundred dollars in scenery and aircraft over the years, which also worked as a brake on switching over all the way. While an KSP-1 Early Access program is ruled out, it’s hard to believe the game will go live with 100% of the envisioned features enabled. If that’s the case, especially when it might take a while for the modding community to release missing features (in their spare time after all), we’ll probably see a transition period. Most of it though hinges on how good KSP2 will be—only time will tell.

And Squad has held up to its promise. Thank you, Squad! KSP2 is not an update though; it's a new version. As such, it will not be available as a free update. If only KSP2 gives you 1% of the value (expressed per played hour) that KSP1 gave, it will still be an incredibly good deal!

That’s the downside of developers being aware of the community. Given how a casual remark might haunt them for the rest of eternity (“still no [feature x]” as a comment on every single upgrade even when it’s clear that it will never be implented) they will not commit to anything unless it’s 100% sure and can you blame them? Lua seems to be very popular as a scripting language for games. And perhaps they mean it’s following a Lua syntax. So it can be processed with any program that can evaluate Lua scripts.

You don’t need to dock, just get very close, and you can EVA the Kerbal onto your ship. If you have part mods, the rescue Kerbal might be on board of a part without a hatch. There’s a mod to control what parts are allowed for rescue missions, but I forgot the name.

Chrisjen Avasarala? While I would love to hear her do the voice-over, I think every other sentence laced with profanity will not jive very well with the family-friendly character the game is promoting.

I fully agree. Which makes the quote that they’re keeping the aero model the same as in KSP1 “to not confuse players” a bit puzzling. People will adapt.

Basically the problem you describe is why we have objects, to prevent any of the issues you describe. Search for “objects” and “classes” and firm up your knowledge of that subject. In addition, whatever solution you came up with, I can state with mathematical certainty that if it requires lots of global variables, it is not a good solution. Get more experience with a few projects, follow along with some books, and see how it’s done. A few generic statements: Python integrates very well with C, at least the standard (CPython) version. Some of Python’s most relevant libraries are written in C. You could also consider switching to another version of Python called Cython which allows seamless integration. However, if eventually you want to run your code from an Arduino I’d stay away from Cython and look up how it’s done for Micro Python; From what I understand it’s the same kind of mechanism as with regular Python. It really, really, really helps to focus on learning to program in Python first and do some simple projects (scraping the web, automate file-oriented tasks, etc) to gain some general experience in programming, and in learning what are good and bad practices are. After that, get an Adafruit CircuitPython board or a BBC microbit board, for less than $20 you’ll have great fun interfacing with hardware and getting hands on experience. As pointed out, C++ is C with added bells and whistles. While the basics are very similar, the advanced stuff is not (mainly because the main charm of C is its rock-solid simplicity; there is no “advanced stuff” in the language, which doesn’t mean you can’t do advanced stuff with it—an important distinction). Whatever you do to interface with the hardware, do it in C and not C++

It’s not the calculations per sé, but the implementation in the game. For instance, if you use double precision floats, you’d have around 15 decimals... but only when you’re close to zero. Squad had to learn about the implications of that and find a workaround. With starting from scratch you run the risk having to reinvent the wheel, and what’s worse, having to learn why you’d have to reinvent it. This is especially the case for Unity. “Don’t use wheels, for reason x, y and z” You may start out using wheels and be pretty far committed to it before learning why it’s such a bad idea and by then your code ends up similar to V1 as it contains all kinds of patches and fixes to work around a problem (using “wheels” as an arbitrary example). Again, I’m not saying that writing KSP2 from scratch is bad, it will probably benefit from it; just that it will come at the price of extensive debugging.

Have you tried the Swivel?

BATTERY OPERATED AIR PUMP, REQUIRES BATTERIES One star review: “I can’t plug it in, it requires batteries” Maybe not verbatim but yes, I’ve seen tons of those as well. Looking at comparable products on Steam I find it hard to believe it will be an issue. Nowadays people will probably go to Youtube or Twitch to see if a game would be interesting. I know I do.

That is not the general prevailing wisdom, and the road of history is paved with the corpses of ill-fated software projects that made such a decision (dbase, netscape, lotus for windoes, to name a few infamous ones). While you do get the benefit of building an arguably better architecture, you also throw out years of experience in catching all kinds of edge cases, and KSP seems full of them. Workarounds for double-precision limis, edge cases for calculations, Unity bugs... From a performance perspective it is likely a no-brainer, and years of expanding features on top of expanded features have made the KSP1 code base for sure an interesting contraption (or maybe not... I haven’t seen it). From a bug perspective it will guaranteed to be the worst version in years, especially if 2.0 goes live in 7 months, as some on the forum claim. I will keep referring to Astroneer, as I’m familiar with it, and it’s very similar in its development, looking at team size, time scale, scope, genre, etc. They went through early access, which revealed a ton of bugs and performance issues that were fixed. Even then, the “live” version contains some very interesting and annoying bugs (rovers sinking in the ground or flying away, pretty devastating when they are your local life support system) and updates are rolled out on a regular basis to fix them. These are professional developers, building a game from scratch. The game will be good. But riddled with bugs.

Without time warp? That’s usually what inroduces the error.

We can’t?

I don’t disagree with you. The KSP1 team had to overcome a couple of challenges during the project. Most importantly scope, but also the double-precision issue, and as the project continued, decoupling various object hierarchies from each other. That leaves you with an increasingly difficult structure to work with. Even with zero access to the KSP1 code (and I assume Star Helix does have access, if only for the orbital mechanics calculations and 3D models), they have the superior advantage of hindsight in regards to where to end up. Preservation of angular momentum is one of those; axial tilt of planets is another. Still, completing a product takes more time, and I hope there will be an early access program. If there is, it most certainly will be in 2020. Without it, chances are (a) that a 2020 deadline will not be met (with mathematical certainty a deadline of early 2020, and with that I mean H1), or (b) a version 2.0 will be delivered that for all intents and purposes is an early access version but simply not called that way.

Let’s see... Continueing KSP1 is... fraud | pointless | essential | as if KSP2 should be taken serious The KSP2 release is... too early | too late KSP2 parts should be... the same | completely different, of course Kerbals Kulture... lolz expolzions | can we finally grow out if that? Multiplayer... it will ruin the game | finally! Perfomance will suck | the game will fly I might have forgotten a few (dozen) but it’s pretty representative of the forum opinion on KSP2 sofar.

Tom Cargill, Bell Labs: Your talking about the version 2, written from scratch, of a game that has been under active development for 8 years. They’re not even in Alpha yet (or we wouldn’t see “pre-alpha release” videos). By a company that has no track record of delivering on time. If anything is released in 2020 it’s going to be an Early Access version and I certainly hope they go down that route, but I will be very surprised if the official gold version is released in 2020, and if it is, it will be unfinished and full of bugs.

Software, and schedules. I do admire your optimism for truly believing the 2020 deadline.

I hate to rain on your parade, but evidence in the form of developer quotes accompanied by a video released by said developers is not the most convincing evidence. I agree with you that there’s a good chance that a lot of the KSP2 code will be written from scratch. Not because “KSP1 was coded so poorly” — that’s hard to judge without seeing the code. What we do know is that KSP1 has gone through various focus changes; starting as a 2D rocket launch simulator even without “space” to what it is now. There’s only so much you can stretch the original framework; I agree that it’s likely that there’s a new framework that will support requested features (multi-play, large ships, etc). As to performance? We’ll find out when the game is released.I doubt it’s running on an Osborne 2 computer with a potato graphics card, so seeing anything that’s less than smoothin a video that showcases the best they have so far is not promising. luckily we have about two years to argue over this!

Very nice. However, the devs of KSP2, in interviews, very clearly state that the main issues is rigid bodies, and although the newer version of Unity that is used performs better, they're working on novel approaches to boast performance even further. The demo at 18 minutes is not a single rigid body though;it's 5000 point masses. Still impressive, and nice if it works that way... but that alone will do nothing to prevent a 500 part ship to be sluggish, unless they're covering rigid body physics as well.

When you look carefully at the LM used by Armstrong, Aldrin, and the men that followed them you don't see a reentry pod or heatshield either. Kinda makes you think, doesn't it?