Warbird

If someone contacted me and gave me unsolicited advice on how to do my job I doubt I'd feel obliged to give them a response; especially if it was as condescending as that.

Wrong on two counts there: 1. He doesn't have the mohawk anymore, so no pointy hair. 2. The PHB was scientifically proven to add nothing. Max is Schrodinger's producer. He exists in a duality of doing something and nothing and only collapses into one or the other when people start complaining. So he sorta adds something.

It's pretty great that you're taking an active interest in game development. It's a fun pastime than can be a great way to stay sharp with development skills and lets you be extremely creative. There's nothing wrong with tinkering with an existing program/demo in order to find out how it ticks; it's a great way to learn. Keep at it and you'll be amazed at how rewarding it can be. I wouldn't really recommend showing off something like Earlybird as it is now as "your own game" as it could be viewed as disingenuous to some people. If it's just a personal project you're kicking around, that's cool. Just let us know, more power to you. If I could offer one suggestion, it would be to find a specific idea or something you are interested in and focus on it. In the case of Earlybird you have a working base program already made for you courtesy of Unity. That's great for starting out! Ask yourself, "What do I want do with this game?" and more importantly, "How will I do it?". Be specific though, things like "Make it totally rad!" are fine but hard to know how to get to where you're going. Try and find a goal that you will be able to tell when you've reached it and how you'll get to reaching it. Any problem or goal can be achieved if you break it down into manageable parts. Take what you've learned from each part and use it to make the game into something more and, more importantly, something of your own. On a side note, if you have time I'd strongly recommend reading some game postmortems. They're a great way to see how different studios and groups handle development and all manner of things.

Why let boats have all the fun? Japan has a long and proud history of throwing all sorts of nonsense into space and having it work for some reason or the other.

The methodology here seems to be that anything posted here as far as upcoming content is concerned is to be held to be a certain fact. Max tweets and posts around when stuff is less certain and he's either trying to build/maintain interest in the game or to troll. Reddit has a far larger potential audience it can reach, so it's no real surprise that he/they submit content there so often. With the recent case of him tweeting out about the inclusion of a stock DV indicator, it wasn't included within the dev update notes the next day. This is likely due to it's level of development having gone not much farther than being agreed on for including in the game. With social media, they have a degree of wiggle room that they wouldn't have posting an announcement here. That being said, users that have issue with this have valid points. Squad has been pretty lousy about maintain centralized news and should look into bringing on someone that can maintain that. As Rows has just left, they should consider bringing on someone that could fill the position and guarantee that the forums would be a legitimate location to expect all centralized news. This would ideally be done by someone with prior experience with the game and community management. What's Skunky doing these days? He has both.

Kesos, because Mexicans.

Generally you want to kill off as much of your speed as you can and still remain in the air and then come in rear wheels first. KSP's aerodynamics are weird as are FAR's in some aspects. The best way to get good at landing is to just practice it, quicksave a klick or so out and try landing until you get to where you can consistently hit your target. You are using your brakes when landing, right?

Can you post a few screenshots of your craft? Also, what antenna are you using?

Toss Kerbal Engineer on there so we can tell what we're working with if you can. That lander's pretty beefy, so it's hard to say what the capabilities are by looking at it. I would highly recommend an Apollo style lander so you can keep things light. Plus, once you finish with the lander, leave it behind and it's that much less mass to carry back home.

That is my aim for now. I may be an idiot but I'm not (completely) insane. Think of this as [WIP European Extreme Mode] or something more akin to watching a nutshot compilation set to classical music. You know exactly what's going to happen and that it's going to involved lots of pain and crying, but you watch anyway. A modding train wreck in slow motion if you will. Long term we're going to be making drag chutes, thingamajiggers to hold payloads in place, animating the whole mess, some god awful textures, and who knows what else. Assuming we even get past me modeling this thing and importing it into the game without putting a fist through my screen or or sobbing in a corner. Anyway, back to the updates, which are going to be sporadic and varying in length, so fair warning. Chapter 3: "I Reject Your Reality And Substitute My Own" Now you're likely thinking, "Warbird, now that you have a rough model worked out, surely you will make a very rough proof of concept animation or something like that?" And the answer to that would be a resounding "But doing that would make sense!" We're adding hinges to this sucker and animating the entire mess at once. I play Dwarf Fortress for fun, I am not the sort of person that responds well to rational thought processes. So we're adding some protohinges for the door. How will they work? Don't know. Am I likely wasting my time? Probably. Am I going to have to throw this out and start over anyway? Most likely. However I need to do something semiproductive. Turns our that Blender doesn't seem to have half spheres as something you can spawn by default, so we've taken full spheres and flattened them out on top of extended bits from the bottom of the bay and a duplicated bit of the same parts on the door. I threw some cylinders in there to connect the hinges for now. The plan was to have something similar to the lander legs that were first put in the game doing the moving. Heck, it seems pretty Kerbal to me to have them welded on there in typical jury rigging fashion. So we may see them show up if I figure out how to do that. Shorter update today, I got caught up watching a movie and got distracted. Audience participation is welcome in this. If I can avoid having to texture these things I think this may not end up being a monstrosity. In the meantime I'm going to be watching Youtube tutorials on how not to suck so much. EDIT: Just because I can, here's one of those nifty embedded 3D models. Looks like it didn't take in the spheres, but whatever.

Ask yourself, "What if played KSP and decided to make a mod?" If you found that amusing or only slightly repulsing, then boy do I have a thread for you! The name's Warbird and I've been playing KSP since around version .11 or so. My proficiency with KSP is lacking and I have no experience with modding or modeling to speak of. So naturally I've decided to develop a mod that needs good amounts of both and lord knows what else! I thought that someone might find the process of me making every possible mistake in existence amusing or possibly educational in a "that's why you don't put a fork in an electrical socket" sort of way, so I've decided to document this comedy of errors for future generations. Knowing my luck, this is going to end up being the Boatmurdered of KSP.Let's get started shall we? I may as well be trying to pilot real rockets into space, but you have to learn sometime. No time like the present I suppose. Chapter 1: "Oh God What Have I Gotten Myself Into" So here's the plan. I'm a bit of an aviation fanatic and the idea of subsystems and unnecessary and overcomplicated dodads excites me. I've decided that the game needs something similar to the LAPES system. Seen here: (Notice the military precision and professionalism? We'll be having none of that!) Why? I have no idea, but I figure it'll look cool. Why start with a static fuel tank when I could make something completely outside my ability and overly complicated? Let's get started shall we?According to some wiki pages and posts I sorta half read I'm going to need something to make 3D models and Unity or something like that. As I'm cheap, we'll be forgoing 3DS Max for something called Blender. I've gone ahead and installed both and some part tools loader that I have utterly no idea how to use. Strike that, I have utterly no idea how to use any of those things. Chapter 2: "Google All The Things!" This is blender, what I can only assume is this year's hottest gray cube simulator. As cubes are not known for their agility or aerodynamic properties, we'll need to do something about that. After 30 minutes of trying to figure out how to move around and about 12 Google searches later, I've got an idea of how to manipulate the object into something more appropriate. This isn't going to be easy. I'd say I was about as good at this as Jeb is at piloting, but that would be insulting ol'Jeb. Thankfully it turns our that Blender has the ability to automatically import premade shapes, "meshes" they claim, into the editor for usage. After a good hour's work I now have something vaguely phallic more aerodynamically feasible. However, it appears to be solid, and that's not terribly conducive to storing payloads for dropping off. We'll have to look into that. After an hour and a half of searching, looking for buttons, and multiple attempts to write Python scripts to hollow out the shape (without knowing Python of course), it seems that you can get what I'm aiming for by simply deleting a face of the cylinder. The stupid thing wasn't hollow to begin with. I want to cry. No time for that though, we have to purdy this thing up a bit. Namely by altering the shape and adding a "door" to the back of the "plane". After 45 minutes of meticulously planting and plotting each face and point on both the body and door of the plane juuuuuust right, I find something called a Snap Tool. Which does a better job of what I spent the last 3/4ths of an hour doing in less than 5 minutes. My life is pain. That's if for now, I'll update in a little bit when I have more to show. If you have any tips or suggestions feel free to leave them, but you might as well be bailing out the Titanic with a bucket. (Mods, if this is in the wrong place I apologise, but I didn't see anywhere else that this would fit.)

Have the devs considered sending a complementary copy of KSP to North Korea? They seem to have a thing for launching stuff only to watch it blow up and fail.

It was /v/\'s flavor of the month late last year. Many threads of failed rockets filled the board and much hilarity was had. The swastika SRB rocket was a particular favorite of mine...

Whelp... Might as well lock/delete this then.

I\'ve become subject to a blinding flash of stupidity. Are the lander legs too short or am I scewing something up? They don\'t seem able to extend to a point past the engine\'s nozzle when placed at the absolute lowest on the preceding stage. What am I doing wrong here?

I hadn\'t, but I had made a point to stay away from what was once pony central on the board. A purge and a release, this day gets better and better.

A thought just occurred to me; is this a leap year? Either way, we ought to be seeing the patch drop in the next 48 hours or so.

It\'s profitable because it will cause on the fence people to buy it now rather than run the risk of driving them away at the higher price.

Interesting language in this. and Assuming that the price will increase when the patch is rolled out, we won\'t see the update until early next month. Not what I was hoping for (the ideal here being the patch has been out but I failed to notice), but at least it isn\'t VALVe time. And as the others have said, it would be ludicrous to make those who have already bought the game fork over more money. Now if this was EA on the other hand....

Apollo 18 was taken by a crappy movie and Apollo -1 was just silly.

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