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Kerbart

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Everything posted by Kerbart

  1. Bazinga! Stupidly enough I never, ever thought this argument through. Think about it. Go ahead. Take a minute. Maybe two. Maybe five. And then you'll see why I just switched over to the “Yeah, micropayments in KSP, BRING IT, T2, BRING IT!” camp. (Hint: once you see it, it's stunningly obvious)
  2. So, based on the interpretation of an interpretation “Gamasutra listened in to the 50-minute call and managed to stay awake long enough to get some hints about the dark (yet unsurprising) future which lies in wait for all of us” you’re ringing the alarm bell? Look up the meaning of the phrase “telephone game”first. All I get is “after our customers buy a title, we want them to spend more money on it.” Now, the funny thing is, in any other field this wouldn’t be news. Waterman sells pens. No one, no one is upset over the fact that they sell their ink instead of giving it away. Nike sells shoes. No one, no one is upset over the fact that they sell their socks instead of giving them away. Nikon sells cameras. No one, no one is upset that you have to buy memory cards or film for them, instead of them supplying you with it for free. But as soon as it comes to games we expect ongoing development to be free of charge, eternally? Wake up call: if consumers are not willing to pay for ongoing development, it’s duration is going to be shorter than eternal; a lot shorter. T2 didn’t say micropayments in every game; they spoke about “recurring payments” for every title and they explicitly said that the specific form in which they would do that would differ from game to game. For some games that will be micropayments; for others it will be DLC. Fearmongering on the claim that T2 wants more money is pointless. Acting like it’s unreasonable to expect more than one paycheck for work delivered... if you think that’s how the world should work, let me know. My employer would love to offer you a job!
  3. "I haven't seen any posts about this before. Wouldn't it be great if Squad made the game multi player?"
  4. The questions is, is there a free alternative? Surely there are mods that offer some of the things that the DLC offers. And surely not everyone will pay for the DLC. The value of DLC parts (ignoring the extra functionality offered by the DLC) is not just in the parts itself, but rather: Supported by Squad; will be upgraded whenever KSP upgrades. No fear that your favorite mod parts have been abandoned, don't work on 1.4 (or whatever) and force you to either abandon you saved game or not upgrade. Can be considered "stock." Many people prefer playing stock. Or like to share their designs without "you will need [obscure mod] for this to work." It can be argued if DLC is stock or not, but regular mods are clearly not stock without discussion. No conflicts with other mods, no dependencies required. Whatever extended functionality it comes with, it will just work. Dependencies mean one more thing that can break during an upgrade. If there's any incompatibility with another mod, that mod maker will surely try to make it work, instead of saying "don't install together with mod xyz You're supporting continued development of KSP with it Some of this might apply to you. All of this might apply to you. None of this might apply to you. But there will be a good swat of KSP players who will find some of the above points of value for them, and enough of value to pay for the DLC mods because they offer something extra that regulars mods don't. The selling point of the DLC is not "these are mods." (they are mods). The selling point of the DLC is "these are mods made by Squad"
  5. A classic computer joke in the 1970s was how an early translation program was tested by translating The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak into Russian and from there back into English. It came back as The vodka is splendid but the beef was rotten.
  6. Meanwhile, folks will be asking why travel 300,000km if you can sit in caves on earth just as easily... Not me, but I’m sure ignoranti and hoaxers will be voicing that question.
  7. Your second question needs an “N/A” option. The results are now being polluted with answers from everyone not in that age group but being forced to pick either one as it’s a required question.
  8. Since pointing out that this has been asked a million times before is not allowed... yes, a very good question, and remarkably nobody has ever brought it up. It’s indeed a mystery why this hasn’t been implemented yet! A few things to keep in mind: KSP runs on Unity. Perhaps running multi-player games on Unity is not as easy as one would think it is. Multi-player games either connect peer-to-peer or require a server. Servers cost money. One of the ways to solve that is by charging subscription fees or micropayments. I’m not going to suggest that that has been discussed to death (for obvious reasons) but I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that the KSP community in general would be fairly hostile to such a business model. That makes running multi-player with centralized servers hard. Of course you could release a server pack individuals can run, but now it has to (potentially) run on low-grade hardware with subpar bandwidth and create a bad user experience. There are issues beyond the logistics of connecting players with each other. For instance, how to handle timewarp. If, hypothetically, someone in the past thought multiplayer was a good idea (maybe to the point of making a mod for it, if only someone would!) they might have discovered that claiming “timewarp is the easiest issue to solve in multiplayer” turned out to be a very optimistic claim. While picking a certain strategy to handle timewarp is easy, it’s usually not satisfactory to at least some of the players. Griefers would be another issue. People who just join a multiplayer server to smash their ships into others, deorbit fuel stations, etc. Lag. If you’re moving at 3000m/s, being off by 1/100th of a second means you’re short, or overshooting, by 30m. That’s enough to turn safe docking or landing into a disaster. It’s not that these issues cannot be solved (although I would think that, once the community is aware of this multi-player concept, they might struggle to come up with a generally accepted time-warp resolution); it’s that making it all work is much, much difficult than coming up,with the idea of multi-player in the first place. On a positive note: now that it has been brought up, we can start thinking about solutions!
  9. Not all sheep are black doesn't mean all sheep are not black. The point was that the behavior of the menu screens is annoying enough for someone to write a mod to "fix it." That doesn't mean every mod is intended to fix unwanted behavior. What you did was a cheap shot and you know it.
  10. Users are coming up with workarounds, up to the point of making mods. A workaround indicates that something is not working the way it should work. It's not broken as in "crash to desktop," but rather in the same way as a door handle that you need to push has a sign that says "pull." The door works just fine. How would you react to building management saying "The door works fine, so there's no need to replace the sign?" Currently the game has a totally pointless two-tier start screen. It's annoying, and likely grounded in the early development of the game when there was nothing to show, “so let's make the start screen do something.” That might not be the origin of this byzantine structure, it certainly breathes the atmosphere of it. Developer attitude: “I think it works just fine. No reason to change it.” Reality check: If your users have a problem with it, it's not fine and it needs fixing. In the end, the decision "this works fine" should lay with the users, not the developers; otherwise you end up with bad interfaces (developer: "it's not my fault they click the wrong button." Well, yes, it is, because you did a bad job on designing a clumsy interface that encourages wrong actions)
  11. +1 for the honesty approach here. Also, without making it look like you're shunning responsibility, do realize that you're not the only one to blame: You were left with a machine you had no experience in You weren't trained on that machine You weren't given instruction on how to replace ink/toner/whatever on that machine (or you wouldn't be googling it). Which is a big deal, since you were fired over doing it wrong; so it's not like they left out some trivial information. You can start out with something along the lines of "that's a machine I actually have experience with, but nothing to be proud of. Can you help me?" or something along those lines. Further more, if the job is "a piece of cake" I assume that you'll have some spare time during your shifts. Why not work on "cheat sheets" for each machine? "How to turn it on" (I assume they're complex enough that it's not just a matter of turning the power switch to "on" but you'll need to run some checks, etc), "How to turn if off," "Replacing paper," "Replacing Ink," etc. You laminate them and have a binder for each machine with the cheat sheets. You will accomplish a couple of things doing that: (1) CYA for when using the wrong fluids if you followed the instructions (that, this goes without saying, were signed off on by your superiors) or do anything else wrong. (2) Familiarize yourself with the equipment. (3) Gives you something useful to do and (4) You are showing initiative to do your job better and make the workplace function better. Rare are the sites where that behavior is considered bad; in fact, most employers will highly appreciate it.
  12. Except that it is broken. People wouldn't be listing their workarounds or go through the trouble of making mods if the UX/UI experience was so good. While this ranks lower on the list than exploding landing gears it still needs to be fixed. And since it's not a bug, it never will get fixed. Unless somebody puts it in as a bug. Come to think of it, I might just do that. "Extraordinary amount of mouse clicks required to start or finish the game." Also, it's perfectly reproducible
  13. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'd love to see yours; I'm sure you're not so bold to make these kind of claims out of thin air.
  14. There is not going to be a satisfying answer to this. A new version has to be developed, and you cannot rush those things. It will be done when it’s done, and nobody will gain anything from Squad releasing a rushed flawed version. Now, that doesn’t mean there’s no blame on Squad either. They chose to go with Flying Tiger, a move that about 99% on the forum questioned at the time, and five minutes of googling only showed them as delivering shoddy work. That distrust wasn’t unfounded, it seems, and now we’re here. If I had bought a console edition I’d be upset too. But aside from an understandable need to vent, you’ll have to sit it out—posting about it isn’t going to solve things.
  15. Emphasis on almost. We can safely rule out anything truly spectacular.
  16. I can already see the Facebook post in my mind (showing a picture of bug-eyed aliens on Mars, circling the rover): "SHOCKING DISCOVER will make your jaw drop! I cried when I learned the truth!"
  17. The various space agencies have underwhelmed us with "unprecedented discoveries" in the past. It's usually something in a hyper-specialized niche of some sub-niche of a research subject normal people regard "esoteric" for starters. "We've discovered that dust particles from comet 2012xyz are not perfectly round as previously thought, but rather have a circularity of only 99.72%, at least those in the size range of 1.05 - 1.07 mm" Rarely ever it's "streaming water discoverd on XYZ with actual video footage of said water" or something along those lines.
  18. I was going to mention that... but you already fixed it. Thank you for the amazingly fast update... and for one of my favorite mods in the first place!
  19. Would that be the issue with Planetary Base? Upon inspection of the CCK folder that came with KPB there seem to be no icon files for Planetary Bases...?
  20. Just the bugs folks mentioned earlier (game crashing, something with the drill config, etc). The filter issue is rather insignificant compared to that.
  21. Hey Nils, 1.5.6/1.3.1: there seems to be an option with the "group all parts in function filter" -- the function filter isn't showing. The parts are there; craft/bases with PBS parts function just fine; it's that the filter isn't showing up in the VAB, so you can't built equip new craft with the parts. The function filter works fine with the Feline Rover, btw. No rush, there's bigger bugs to fix it seems. And as always thank you for the wonderful mod!
  22. They're not as deep into Earth's gravity field as we are, that has a much bigger impact on time dilation than the velocity they're moving at. But that is also a relativistic effect, and the result is the same: those clocks experience time at a different rate than we do.
  23. I can only imagine the awesomeness of a direct link to the bug tracker from the community (forum) pages instead of a “secret URL” one has to google to access it. But that’s a decision we both have very little control over, so let’s not waste words on that. You’re right, more bug reports on this are needed. The problem is that it’s not exactly easy to reproduce; and the request of course is “a save file before it happens.” So that’s probably why. I’m not going to say “Instead of a snarky reply over a lack of bug reports for a hard to predict problem, you could just have said ‘We are aware of it, but it's an elusive problem and we have yet to identify a root cause; so unfortunately it's still there. More bug reports about this would help more resources work on it.’ but you didn’t. Oh well.” But I'm not going to say that. Peace.
  24. The acquisition would have emphasized the game KSP, not the IP (intellectual property) KSP. Press releases by companies like Take 2 tend to be written over the course of many days, approved up and down the corporate ladder until everyone agrees that the content of them says exactly what it is intended to say, not more and not less. I wouldn't put too much money KSP 2. Somewhere in the distant future perhaps, once KSP is milked dry. With fancier graphics, multiplayer, perhaps even n-body physics for those who want it. Meanwhile, think along the lines of: Kerbals (the Sims, but with Kerbals), Klose Kombat: Kerbal Edition, Kerman & Kerman Superkarts and an empire-building game named Kolony. Some of them mobile, perhaps even with the micropayments everyone is dying to see introduced. As for Kerbal Space Program -- perhaps a version 2, five years from now, but for now the game is still "alive" enough to warrant continued development.
  25. 10243 would be a good one to start but I'm sure there are others. Undocking has been a problem for ages (.90 and probably earlier). It's not that the ports are interlocked (some rails accel. will fix that) but rather that after undocking they're still connected (one ship, not two), yet the "undock" option is no longer there so you cannot longer undock. I had the problem mainly with Sr Docking ports, so not using it fixed it for me and it seemed to have faded in 1.0-1.2, but now in 1.3 it's happening again with regular 1.25m docking ports as well. It's been mentioned on the forum many times though.
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