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That can work if there’s sufficient trust between the developers and the community. If there isn’t, it will just make things worse. A lack of trust is a vicious circle. Any event or communication will be interpreted against that background which will only add fuel to the fire. I think IG ought to have gone completely silent! Just release the patches with the patch notes. People would rage like they do now but they would be shouting into the void. And the patches would provide something positive to talk about. When the first roadmap update is ready, make sure it’s as solid as you can make it, and only then reboot communications. There are situations where “silence is golden” does apply and this I think would have been one of them. Putting developers in front of the community hoping that they’ll put the pitchforks down won’t work, it just drains time, effort, and morale that could be better spent on the game itself. Put another way, actions speak louder than words.

I think I mentioned this in the grand EA discussion- there are many dormant threads on this forum that contain untainted discussion about the game, under the presumption that everything is fine and the game will eventually be completed. If that is what you want to talk about, why don’t you revive one of those many threads? I’ll stand corrected and be on your side if anyone starts bickering with you in a thread that’s actually about something substantive relating to the game that’s not a glaring current issue. Which thread do you wish you could post on?

They post a lot of development updates. There’s a lot to talk about there, or would be if the threads didn’t devolve into the usual bickering.

More personal comments removed. So we're all agreed that we hate each other and the other side is wrong. Now please talk about the game rather than each other. Meanwhile, overlapping threads have been merged.

cloud talk can stay, we can talk about the plane could be the engines are spooled down, but i cannot wait to see what horrible things we can build and call it an ssto SSTO B-2 bomber, "but can build mini space station in the bomb load"

I mean we literally have a whole new game with new UI and updated planets and all kinds of things, plus Science and colonies and interstellar are all on their way. Id love to talk about those things. We went years with much less in the past but still had tons of great conversations about how KSP could get better. Ive always had really lively conversations with folks I don’t agree with. Hearing new ideas is the only way we grow. Having different opinions is great. Repeating those opinions hundreds of times into most of the threads on a message board with the deliberate intent to clog all discussion and get attention from the devs is just run of the mill trolling. Its too bad. This place used to be fun.

I wonder if performative arguments have increased, or if there is simply less substantive stuff to talk about these days, because not much new has happened. Most topics have been worn out, so what is left on the forum is a low volume of posts about an issue that’s still salient, which is the fact that the game is currently a mess. Therefore it seems as if the forum has turned negative or unproductive. I’ll make a prediction: the tedium will become comparatively less impactful once a serious feature update is released in 5 years time. (okay the last bit was sarcastic, I couldn’t help myself)

Yes xD. Though, fun fact: KSP 2 wasn’t going to be early access either until October of 2022! To me, that is one question, but another would be, “why did they pretend like it was ever going to release in 2020, or 2022, or 2022, or 2023?” (in may ‘22 they claimed it would release in early ‘23, with no mention of early access). It did not happen during COVID. In 2019, they claimed the game would release in 2020. How long should COVID extend a year of dev time? Double it? Triple it? Quadrupole it? I don’t think COVID delays were instrumental in causing this debacle. None of those posts conveyed the state that the game was in accurately. If they did, everyone would have been shocked, given what the release date supposedly was! This applies to blogs in 2019-2022, because at any given time, release was supposedly only months away! Personally I read it as two things: 1) Frustration at being lied to wrt. “KSP 2: Lithobraking near you in 2020!” Where else should vent their frustration about KSP 2? Like I said, I find substantive forum threads to be largely rant-free. Others are not. Such is life. 2) A manifestation of concern over a beloved franchise and a would-be beloved game. That is why the issue of developer/manager competence is so present- we may have no control over it so talking about it is in that sense “useless”, but people will still want to talk about it because you add the long dev timeline + repeated false statements over the course of 3+ years and you have one hell of a concerning plot arch if you’re a fan of KSP. Exactly.

We can't possibly know about the past at the fidelity we know current temperature data. We don't know, and we can't know are completely reasonable answers. It's possible to say "we think the temperature was probably in this range" where the range is pretty broad (like a decent ± range of integer °C) assuming your question only pertains to "average temperature"—a nonphysical concept in itself there is no "average temperature," it's never observed, it's only calculated, and not calculated in a simple way where anyone could reproduce the value by taking data. I would say for the distant past, we can broadly talk about climate in terms of what grew or was grown (the latter during recorded history regarding agriculture) in given regions. Really far we might have ideas about the range of habitat where different animals—say dinosaurs—could live, and that could inform us about the probable climate at that time (though much would be assumption regarding dino physiology). Bottom line is if someone shows you a graph of temperature that claims to be accurate to fractions of a degree before the very recent past, they're blowing smoke up your (this is a family forum ). All I want is some epistemic humility.

Knowing in silence is still not owning up to it, it's not explaining why, and it's also not explaining how you expect for the next years to not go the same way. Until that happens, it'll never be "water under the bridge", it's more like water flooding my village and keeping my house under water, the damage is done, they need to face the reality that damage is done, repair it, and then maybe we can talk about how velocity is good and bugs are getting fixed and development is gonna go faster and faster. There's no way I'd believe statements like those whilst the biggest elephant in the room is still there. Heck, it's probably why almost nobody outside the forum believes those statements. If I called you the things Dakota called the reddit community, I'd be out the forums for at least 15 days for insulting language. That's the minimum you get when you insult your community that way.

This is not the first such message. I remember Nate wrote about the state of the game back in the spring and all the fans immediately forgave everything. This is a very superficial confession. It's just that the game is not in the best condition, and why it turned out like that, who misled us a year ago and what was done to prevent the game from being in such a state - there is no talk about this. After all, it's not a game in a bad state, but early access without a huge amount of old and new features in a bad state.

With regards to communication, there's been a *really* alarmingly small amount of talk about 'science'. Given that it's the first major content and functionality update to KSP2, and we're sitting at six months after launch. There's been no real detail to this point of what science entails, when it's likely to come, what sort of experiments are going to included. At this point ALL of these should have been finalised for some time now or else, what's been going on at Intercept? So, if all is well and science is finalised and just getting the bells and whistles done then why not share the details with the community? It would add a much needed injection of positivity. Now all I get on Discord is just rebuttal (from fellow users), and 'its being worked on' but how long does 'its being worked on' remain applicable?

Honestly I don't care anymore. Most of the public communication is basically telling lies. I know that sounds harsh but "heat turned off because of small VFX issues" was not the truth. And nothing has changed since that. So I don't care anymore about "announcements for announcements". And i tried to be polite on the forums because what I am actually thinking is not constructive. And then they blame reddit. I have no words. I have lost all hope because 6 month+ for the most basic bugs is too much. Have fun praising the next dev-blog where they tell you why heat is hard and post some short introduction about heat. A rough draft about how heat should work should have been done several years ago. I don't even understand why they post this NOW. Honestly. A lot of stuff people comment with "nice that you talk to us" for me is like: Wait a minute: They are just now thinking about that? OMG this is bad!

This where people can discuss their problems with KSP or the bugs they found.

Ok so I know this is quite a bit early but I wanted to start a discussion about what end game content might look like for KSP 2. I’m the kind of player who needs the game to provide me with goals to stay interested. However, in KSP 1 I usually played on science mode because the missions in KSP 1 weren’t super fun. There were a few milestone missions like Reach Duna, or task missions like Rescue This Kerbal who got stuck in orbit. But for the most part they felt tedious, like reaching this highly specific orbit, or flying your plane for about seven hours in real time to take the temperature at a specific altitude. On the other hand, just playing on science mode I tended to set out with the goal of reaching some distant planet I’d never reached before, but by the time I unlocked all the tech to get there, there no longer felt like there was much reason to go, since I’d already completed the tech tree. Plus getting to that point required about a hundred plus very similar launches from the same launch pad. Already I think there’s been a lot of talk about improving career mode so the missions aren’t so tedious. But I also want to hear what other driving forces might push us to continue to explore, even if we’ve unlocked all the tech? Some of that could just be simply improving time warp, or adding autopilot (presumably as an unlock in the tech tree), to generally reduce the tedium. If I can prove a plane can fly then time warp/autopilot it to a given location, that’s much less tedious then having to fly the entire mission in real time. Similarly I expect orbital construction will reduce a lot of tedium, since you can launch closer to your destination. Whether that’s making an interplanetary leap from Kerbin to Duna, or landing shuttles on Duna from an orbital base, not having to start every mission from the Kerbin launch pad will definitely reduce tedium, and make it easier to break the more ambitious missions into smaller more achievable chunks. Honestly this is one of the biggest reasons I’ve been excited for KSP 2 in the first place. So yeah! This might actually be a problem that’s already solved on paper. I just haven’t seen it yet since those features aren’t implemented. Thoughts? Ideas?

If you want to go the "to be fair" route, you'd acknowledge that almost every easter egg in the game is just a nod to humanity's own spacefaring endeavors and discoveries. I talk a lot more about this in the other thread that I reference, so I don't expect you to know my exact thoughts. The gist of it is that I fall in the "keep the aliens lore out of KSP" camp and give me more of what Pthigrivi and I talk about in this thread.

Building an Eve biome hopper. Horizontal take off with wings, twin Vector engines. put the nose in the air and you can get an Ap of 120/140 km, and come down a quarter of a planet away, on Kerbin, I figure that means about a sixth of Eve. Its an Intercontinental Ballistic Airplane. My question is about lower- slower flight. What is my best strategy for flying an overpowered plane that goes through fuel so quickly? Short bursts of full throttle followed by long periods of gliding? Or a small amount of continuous thrust? Subsonic and low? or climb to 7 km and bust the sound barrier? - and then glide? but for how long? down to Mach 1, or down to stall speed? So many options!

Imagine I’m working on another game which no one here has an emotional stake in. I announce in 2019 that it will release in 2020, and then I release videos of a unicorn standing around while I talk about all of the awesome things I’m programming for the unicorn to do, and there is small print at the bottom of the screen that says “Not gameplay footage.” Four years later, I release a demo of a heavily pixelated miniature pony with no wings and no horns. It runs at 5fps, and when you try and mount the horse, it wiggles around uncontrollably before igniting into flames. Remember, when this media was released, it was already after the initial full release date for the game. Many people logically concluded that they didn’t want to show gameplay, but we had no reason to expect it was just “concept art.” Again, I’m not an expert, but in your experience, are you often releasing pure unimplemented concept art a year+ after the game was supposed to release, and months before you claim that you will release the finished game? Surely the consumer is not expected to hear the devs talking about their internal build with colonies in the background of a test asset preview after the game was supposed to release because they’re “taking extra time to ensure quality” and conclude that it’s concept art? There is a difference between “not fully implemented” and “currently a 3-d object in a CAD with lots of hopes and dreams”. When they show a bunch of assets and animations while talking about what they’re going to do (and claiming they are playable in an internal build!) one naturally assumes said assets are in the “not fully implemented” category, but four years later and… I would say that as a non-super-genious-game-developer-savant, I personally was at least led in slightly the wrong direction.

I think it's only misleading if you mislead! Mockups, concept art, in-progress models, test scenes etc are a part of normal game development, and there's nothing wrong with showing them off and explaining what you're working on. It's only misleading if you show a mockup and say that it's actual gameplay. Or do you think they should only ever talk about things that are finalized and complete and ready to roll out to the public? Moreover, the multiplayer screenshots they've shown don't look like mockups at all. You make mockups to help design things, so they need to look more or less like what you think the final product will look like when it's done. The screenshots look nothing like that, instead they look like what an engineer would have running on their box when working on a feature. That's for sure! And it's certainly hard to tell what stage their multiplayer feature is right now, but the fact that they've got it in from the start is the right thing to do. I do think that "conspiracy theory" is a pretty good description of the claim that they're faking screenshots and flat-out lying about having working multiplayer at all. It would have to be a conspiracy by everybody who knows it's not true, which must be over a hundred people, and all of those people would have to be keeping the secret knowing that it's really likely they'll get caught, and when they do, it will do really bad things to their company and their career personally. It'd ruin their reputation not just with the public but also within the industry, I wouldn't consider hiring somebody who got caught blatantly lying about something like that. It's just not a done thing. Additional context: person B works in gamedev and has seen loads of mockups, concept art, test scenes, and how things look in various stages of development, while person A has only ever seen the finished product. This scenario doesn't sound plausible to me at all! I think it would be more like: Person A: There’s no way they have a clean UI but no anti aliasing yet. Prob fake. Person B: Did they say if it's a fully-functional in-engine UI or a design mockup? You really shouldn't latch onto superficial features like AA or other rendering-related stuff. They will go in when they'll get around to it. Also the people working on the UI likely won't be the same people who are working on rendering (they're different specialities), so it's to be expected that they're at different stages of readiness. When you make a game with a team everything proceeds in parallel and you will see some extremely rough bits side by side with finished or nearly finished things. So a conversation like that would be as likely as looking at a screenshot of one of the beautiful part models and going "probably fake, no way you'd see something that nice when they don't even have AA in yet." It just betrays a lack of understanding of how these things are made!

To my eye they’re the opposite. They’re very rough, with no UI and ugly placeholder info about each of the players overlaid on the scene. That’s exactly what I’d expect to see of a feature that’s in development but not close to release. If they did mock them up, why do you think they didn’t bother using the game UI as a base and pasting in some pretty multiplayer labels and controls? Scenario one: screenshots show rudimentary UI. Person a: The screenshots look fake Person b: Obviously they look bare bones- what else would you expect at this stage? Scenario two: screenshots have clean multiplayer UI. Person a: There’s no way they have a clean UI but no anti aliasing yet. Prob fake. Person b: Why would they fake this? The UI looks so advanced- if they were faking it, it would look much simpler because why bother with making it look finished? In all seriousness, I do think Alexoff has a point about the dev screenshots, at the very least in the sense that it’s misleading to show a bunch of assets and talk about all the great things you’re implementing when they are at that point just 3-D models. With respect to multiplayer, I’m not an expert, but I expect that it’s much easier to get a basic multiplayer that allows devs to be in the same world thrown together than it is to make something which has 100% functionality and stability like an actual multiplayer release. So again, it’s not really “fake” but is misleading. With regards to the screenshot at hand about heating, who knows.

I wouldn't call it conspiracy theories. The developers are constantly forced to think everything for them, and I decided to think that everything that is not presented in the game on Steam or not posted on the gameplay video exists only in the form of concepts. And whether these concepts will be in the game is unclear, scattering has not been added to the game, only distant fog. So I only believe my eyes, and the screenshots of the multiplayer are extremely unconvincing, I would say that the developers seem to be trolling us with such screenshots. In a game that hundred (?) of developers are creating, they haven't added destructible buildings or banal anti-aliasing in half a year, what kind of multiplayer can we talk about?

Well, their problem is they spaced out the updates even more. This gets you more time but it further increases expectations for what your updates contain, and I’m not yet sure if it was wise of them or not. I hope they delay the patch to add more features, instead of coming up with an update comparable to what we had before when the space between them was much smaller. I have a similar feeling that they bit more than they can chew. I hope they do the right thing and leave the smart people some room to work and talk, and quit marketing nothing burgers.

Cheaty post to unbury the thread, but seriously, it would be nice to have a megathread like this to talk about lore.

YEAR 3, DAY 149 - LIBRA 3 Crew: Lebro, Malgard, Genenie After some redesigns to Libra Orbit, Jeb's Junkyard shipped us their new model just last week. This flight is quite important, as it's the first crewed test flight to dock with Kerman Station. Much like the flight plan of Nova 3, Libra 3 will spend about 10 days at Kerman Station. As usual, the flight has two pilots and one engineer, just wring out the spacecraft as thoroughly as possible. If this flight is a success, the Libra Orbit will be free for a tourist flight for Kerman Station. And there's a long line of Kerbals who want his once in a lifetime experience. While all of them are of... the higher classes, one Kerbal in administration put forth the idea of "affordable space travel". What?! Who let this guys into the meeting?! Fire him immediately! Liftoff of Libra 3! Jet engine separation. Libra 3 is in orbit (The ascent, I must say, was quite painful though. I genuinely got mad at the game, and had to take a break to cool down. That's why there's a lack of screenshots.)! A maneuver is planned out, and the Libra Orbit begins to make its way to Kerman Station. While braking at Kerman Station, the Libra Orbit ran out of fuel! Good thing it was moving slow enough that RCS could slow it down. It was quite the nerve wracking experience. But, in the end, the spacecraft successfully docked to Kerman Station. Oh yeah, and the fuel issue was fixed. The MPCF is VERY over engineered. I could just put some of the fuel from its tanks onto the Libra Orbit, and everything is perfectly fine. The station's looking... a little cluttered right now. Also, for the next 10 days it may be a little cramped. On the bright side, they have more lab assistants, and more friends to talk to. So everything may have worked out fine. We would like to congratulate Jeb's Junkyard and their engineers for their tireless work on the Libra Orbit! It has now entered the books as a perfectly functioning spacecraft, and is also perfect for providing a cheap way for resupplying Kerman Station and sending tourists into space!