JordanL

You should hop into the #kspmodders room on IRC if you need to contact one of the creators of a popular mod. Pretty much everyone who works on a widely used mod hangs around there.

Okay. I did have the nodes plotted a while back... LOTS of reloading of the game. I'll replot these and post them when I can get to it.

Okay, here's a little more of a proper example of the models I've been working on.

lol, I couldn't help but laugh. It looked like Bill swapped out the decoupler for C4.

Does it have node definitions for the cylinders embedded in the ring?

First look at the parts (completely untextured) This is the 15m torus on a 2.5m center piece. You'll see there's space for four engine blocks around the torus. Each of these blocks has space for one 2.5m engine, and four 1.5m engines.

Yeah, a lookup table that's created once it can be for the vehicle is actually going to be more accurate in most cases, simply because there is less room for error/bugs. This sort of this probably should be done on a curve lookup.

Well, perhaps my first project shouldn't be the mod I'm working on, it should be to create some tutorials that actually address the things I'm running into once I figure them out.

I have a tapered triagular shape (tapered from 2.5m to 1.5m in the z direction over the x direction), where the y-size varies from 12m to 2m. A box wouldn't be a very good collider for my model, but a rhomboid of some kind might be.

You mean like... creating multiple box or cylinder objects in Unity to approximate the shape of the model and designating them as colliders?

Fair. I don't think I could ever bring myself to say this game is broken. This game is the absolute gold standard of alpha releases. Seriously, when was the last time an alpha release game was this well built and had this kind of community mod support? i can see how that would be frustrating, especially for someone who has invested a lot of time in building mods for the game as well (something I'm failing at spectacularly myself so far :/).

Tiberion, I feel like a major part of what upset you is what I posted, given your comments and the things you're referencing. I'm sorry if that's the case. Perhaps my initial summation (about the VAB) wasn't entirely reflective of what I am concerned about, but I felt that I explained myself fairly well afterward. I don't feel like I'm part of a side at all. I didn't know there were sides. I'm confused about what we've been told, and feel like a more complete explanation would help, and when one of the community moderators asked me directly for what I would do differently I feel like I explained that without any whining or even displeasure. I'm not sure if you're misunderstanding what I'm concerned about or not.

In Blender, I'm trying to make a collision mesh to import into Unity. Is it best to just make another .blend file with the mesh?

I've worked PR before, and I've also worked as a video game journalist, in addition to my experience as a developer.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, so I guess I'll approach this seriously. I don't develop games, and the point in mentioning that I'm a developer was not to make it seem like I know what they should do better than they do. I mentioned that I'm a developer, because the specific point that I was being asked about (client communication) is something that is common to all development, but is very different from most other fields. I've been on the other side of this (with individual clients and companies instead of communities), and I know that sometimes it's better for Dev to simply not communicate or say something until they have a good plan in place. One thing you really don't want if you're developing anything is letting the client (or in this case community) drive the dev cycle, but if you expose a void of information, the client will always fill it with something. It's often better to not mention the void of information until you have your own plan on how to fill it. In this case, I think that this whole resource thing would actually be received a lot differently from the community if it wasn't paired with the announcement of multiplayer as a core mechanic. This has come off to many users as, "The thing we said we wouldn't do because it was impossible is part of our scope and always has been, and the thing that we said we would do and gave detailed outlines for is no longer in scope because we didn't like how it worked". I mean, they are both entirely valid things to happen, but juxtaposed it sort of sets everyone off, and makes it seem like SQUAD doesn't know what they're doing (they know what they're doing). It probably should have been something like: "Multiplayer is something that we've always wanted to put into the game, but for the longest time we didn't know if it would be possible within our development cycle. Now that we're further into alpha, it's clear that our scope can handle multiplayer, which is a feature we feel will strongly improve the experience of the game. "When it comes to the resource system that we outlined a while ago, we haven't talked about it since because we don't have anything to say. Resource mining, like other 'end-game' content, will be tackled once we have all of the core development to a state we're happy with. There's lots of things that we can do to make the core gameplay more enjoyable first, and that's a better use of our time for the immediate future. Resource mining was one concept of what end-game might look like, among many others, so once we feel comfortable getting into hard scoping of that content we'll revisit it and see what makes sense with what we've already built. That might not include resource mining, we don't know. We don't want to restrict ourselves by scoping a part of the game we aren't ready to scope yet. "The important thing is that whatever the end-game content ends up looking like, it's fun and it fits with the rest of the game. Right now we want to finish off the career mode and polish what we have before pressing on. We'll talk more about what end-game looks like once we're closer to the end of development." Such a statement is true (strictly speaking) even if they've already internally ruled out resource mining, and is something people can accept a lot better. Plus it would set people up for the eventual "we threw out resource mining" by setting up the expectations people have, wrapping all of those suggestions and features into "end-game content" which will be talked about closer to the end of dev. It also avoids committing the dev team one way or the other to a scoping session that honestly might change (yet again) by the time they are actually working on it. In short, development is all about delivering a product that your customer is happy with... but if you don't know how to manage customer expectations gracefully, it doesn't matter how awesome your product is. Look at Spore. Maxis and EA managed the expectations on that development cycle very poorly, and then rushed to try and meet some moving goalposts. And then failed at it completely. But on its own, without any context, Spore is an entertaining game. It's just not what people expected. Managing expectations is what actually separates "good" developers and companies. You under promise, you over deliver. SQUAD isn't doing terrible at that, but their product is much better than people think it is, and that's because they're communicating too much or too little (as I said I'm still not sure which). They are the ones that have taken the initiative to build an alpha community to provide feedback, and in that context I'd personally like more information about the overall vision. But goodness, if we're all having these kinds of arguments, this must be a good game. There's no way that I'd even contemplate these kinds of discussions over most games, and that's because the product that SQUAD has delivered so far has exceeded my expectations. That's hard (very hard) to do consistently.

I think that it boils down to a few things that all collaborate together to create a poor situation: - The KSP community in general has fantastic communication and collaboration amongst each other, and SQUAD maintains an excellent community space for such things. - Information about upcoming features and releases has (historically) been almost entirely absent. SQUAD has been changing this a bit (0.23 being a notable example) but not significantly. - There are many different styles of play in this game, and SQUAD is trying to support them all. They are doing a decent job of that, but some of them (such as sci-fi themed vs. realistic near future) are mutually exclusive, and at least in all communication so far, SQUAD has not even noted that they understand this (which they obviously do). I think it's pretty clear that SQUAD likes and is building for the realistic near future scenario, but creative direction in general has been mostly uncommunicated. - As a developer, I know that part of this has to boil down to the fact that this is an alpha game in pre-release, and if SQUAD was spending that much time on such general direction, it would be difficult to get work done. - However, there needs to be more finality to things that come from development. If there is a future feature set that is outlined by dev to the public, it should be because some version of it will definitely be there. Likewise, if something is removed from scope, that decision needs to be communicated promptly and simply. At issue with this particular update, and the resulting thread, is that it's clear from the update the dev team has known resources (in their previous form) were out for a while. This communication doesn't tell us 1. why that communication to the community was delayed or 2. what sort of conceptual replacement is envisioned. It should have included one of those, or not been announced at all, IMO. Most people that are displeased would probably have no issue if the probable replacement goal/mechanic was outlined at the same time, or it was communicated briefly early on when it was figured out. - The communication needs to be more honest about the fact that some things can be very cool, but out of scope. Things like "multiplayer can't be done" never should have come out. "Multiplayer doesn't fit our scope right now" would have been better. In summary, I think it has to do with the fact that SQUAD is giving us details, but not as much vision. If we have details, it should probably be a subset of some vision that we already know about, or we probably shouldn't know about it. I'm honestly not sure if SQUAD is over or under communicating right now.

Yeah, if I thought my vision was perfect I'd be developing a game to implement it (I'm a programmer). SQUAD has a PR problem with communication, not a problem with the game. 90% of people just play the game though and never really engage the community, so that doesn't have to a focal point for it to be a successful game. They are hedging a lot, which suggests that they don't have a clear vision one way or the other for a whole lot of things. Which is sort of expected in an alpha product, it would just avoid a lot of this if they said that explicitly (which they sort of did with the comment about MMO's). I don't think it matters too much though in the end... the mod community is so strong that I don't think there will ever really be missing features, it's just some will be implemented less optimally because they are done in mods instead of the core game. I don't see KSP as a "sci-fi themed" game, and I don't think stock ever will be. That's actually good, IMO, but I'd like to have that option, which is why I'm brushing up on my C# and 3D modeling to make my own feature-complete sci-fi stock extension. We'll see how far I get with that.

I never said that the VAB was the entire game, I said that the game is being designed so that the VAB is the core game mechanic. That has nothing to do with whether or not other parts are challenging or polished. As for the quote, as I thought was pretty clear, I am saying that their statements have been untrustworthy but their production has been reliable. Frankly, I'm more excited about performance improvements coming in 0.23 than I would have been about a whole resource system being unveiled. But just in case, I'll say it again: My statements are not predicated on any resource system specifically, I see it as indicative of a larger vision that I'm not sure how to characterize and I'm not sure if I personally agree with. But generally I agree, I've had my say, i don't have anything further to add to this discussion.

As I said, (perhaps I should have bolded?), my statement about SQUAD's direction to the game is not specifically about the resources, for many of the reasons you are citing. It is the culmination of many things they have done and said. That's just my impression, it can't be blatantly false. And I love designing just the right craft in the VAB then executing it. I mentioned earlier that this game is incredibly fun, I just don't like the direction I'm seeing from SQUAD. If you disagree that's fine. They have said that they are discarding it for something better, that they didn't like how grindy it was, that there will be "end-game" content... okay, I trust that. But they are simply saying what's not going to be there, not what is, and the things SQUAD has said will/won't be there in the future, that suddenly gets reversed in a future update, makes me question how much I should trust anything that doesn't have a release plan already in place. And that's besides the point that it may very well be 2016 before 1.0 is done and all these features that add "end-game fun" are there. I don't think SQUAD is doing poorly, I'm just not sure I agree with their vision because as it stands right now their vision is cluttered, confusing and untrustworthy. I certainly can trust that they'll do a good job at whatever they do, because everything they have done has been a good job of what they've set out to do. So now that I've expanded my more glib, general statement into something a little more explanatory, should I still stop saying it? Because I kind of feel like I'm just expressing a personal opinion that is entirely valid with respect to past events and current statements.

I'll be doing that on a test cube this evening when I get home from work. I don't trust the Unity preview at all though. My Unity render had both static and pulsing emissives, and my .mu had neither.

As critical as I'm being in this thread, I'll have to agree with this. Kethane is a mod that created something where nothing was, but it isn't the best or final implementation. My issue is much more that SQUAD seems to think the VAB/SPH are the only parts of the game where players should spend their time, and that the rest of the game is a pass/fail performance test of all the time you spend in the VAB. That isn't how people play the game, that isn't how people want to play the game, and if that's SQUAD's vision of the game kindly wake up and discard it.

Also, what's more fun: Launching and transfering perhaps a dozen tug/refueler ships to Jool, or sending a second "mining" setup to handle all of it? Juggling all the transfer burns to handle Kerbin -> Jool fueling is a pain.

Even career mode, as they've described and displayed it, is all about jumping through hoops so that your VAB/SPH can do more. That's it. I still love the hell out of this game, but without mods I don't think this is something I would play often or for very long. Looks like Kethane + Real Fuels will just be "stock" for my game experience. No point in playing 0.23 or any other update until at least those two are updated.

Let me summarize even further: Without a resource system of some kind (mining or other), the VAB is the game. Looks like this game will absolutely require community mod packs even after it is finished.

Yeah, this one has me stumped. I followed all these tutorials before I posted this, and they haven't helped. :/