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I feel there was a balance they failed to hit (talking about direction as in the general sense of the finalized vision for the game). The heavy work on tutorials already tells you they were going for "we take this niche game and make it accessible to even more people, it'll definitely sell more." FS! followed on that by simplifying and linearizing the tech tree and having science be a single magic button, where you can absolutely skip even the timers so long as you hit it every time it flashes. Lastly, they also wanted to tell a semi-linear storyline through missions, discoverables and their lore. That part was really good, the new user onboarding was a magnitude better than KSP1. On the other hand, the game really required a strong technical foundation because by the time the difficulty curve of rocket launches and SSTOs is over, almost every player just goes big. Here is where to me they completely failed, by making a game that doesn't support this second bit. Of course now it'll all be woulds and coulds, but it's not hard to see that even without colonies we were already still finding the limits very easily (another example, another one, another). 8000 parts might sound like a lot on that bug report, but that's about a constellation of satellites, a couple rover missions, and a Jool 5 vessel. Meanwhile the game was supposed to allow you to do that on multiple star systems, whilst supporting trust under timewarp... and just no, the game could never be able to do that with the foundation it has. Also, as a last nail in the coffin, they forever handwaved the explanation of how Rask & Rusk (the binary system) were going to work. So yeah, we have a game built on flimsy foundations that they just outright refuse to talk about (remember the promises of HDRP and the system that'd replace PQS? I do), we have only the most basic stuff (yes, science and a tech tree is very basic, deal with it) implemented and none of the complex problems, and not just that but whatever little we have is already making those foundations quake... That's why you can google me saying "technologically bankrupt" multiple times. The balance they failed to implement in game by only including stuff for new people and nothing for veterans, was the same thing behind the scenes: they were doing only the easy stuff whilst completely neglecting the complex stuff and much less having the stones to talk about it. At this point I doubt they even had a plan past "cut everything down as manageable as possible", which is what net us all in one parts, gimped heating, the horrible coordinate reset on ground vehicles, and so on. I doubt they dropped anything in favor of a feature that probably never existed (yes, I saw the screenshot). I'm closer to believing they used multiplayer as an excuse to drop anything too complex/deep that might've further gimped the game's performance.

Yes, Nate also said that this parallel workflow was speeding up subsequent releases versus the cadence of bugfixes... and that didn't happen, with 2 proposed bugfix releases before colonies having failed to even show up let alone have a date for the first one 4 months down the road. That's what I mean with "don't exist": They weren't there, even if under "muh parallel development" they were supposed to start working on stuff as soon as FS! left the dock. Once again, all they could show from colonies was static assets on editor scenes., same kind of hot air they were showing before release saying they had a full game. Allegedly, and that being considered only as a way to have some compassion to their work. Even if this is something they've actively denied and the people working on whatever was scrapped was... themselves still under the same leadership. Sure you could talk licenses, but it's useless if we don't know how much really was lost, that's a magnitude order more conjecture than whether KSP2 is currently dead. This + things like using the same middleware, and hitting the same walls as the prequel with the fuel flow calculations were heavily worrying.

Yeah, it's not so much about how much money the studio can make, but about how much money it can be making in the nearest future. If a studio made a ton of money in the past, but has just released a game and will release the next one in 3-4 years, they'll still get the axe. The problem is that over the past few years, borrowing money was basically free for large businesses. If you weren't borrowing to open up a studio and spin up another project, you were leaving money on the table. Over the past year and a half or so, the fed rates climbed to a fairly high level. Suddenly, all these studios aren't free anymore - you're paying significant interest against the money you've borrowed, and anything that's not generating revenue right now basically becomes a significant drain. Consequently studios get cut left and right despite the publishers taking in a lot of money from sales. The only real conclusion we can make about the IG situation is that nobody expected them to release a polished, revenue-generating game within a year or so. And we sort of knew that from the state of Early Access. There's a game there, but it's not ready for the main marketing push, and won't be ready soon enough to offset the ongoing development costs if you have to pay interest on it. It's hard to say what exactly this means for the future of KSP2 without looking at the overall cash flow of T2, and hey, look at that, earnings call is coming up in a few days. They'll probably talk about IG and R7, but even if not, based on what they have in flight, what's bringing in money, and how much is going to the studios they currently have operating, we'll be able to get an idea of how much money T2 has to spend on smaller projects. Two likely possibilities is that either a) they've cut enough to have a small stream to afford a smaller 3rd party studio to take on KSP2 or b) they are waiting for some upcoming releases to bring in more cash. At the latest, we're looking GTA VI release, as that will inject a lot of capital to spend on other projects. That would mean development resuming in 2025-2026, though, with v1.0 coming in in 2026-2028? But unless the game just straight up gets canceled, which right now it doesn't sound like it will be, that's the worst case scenario. A lot of things can speed it up, and there might be a smaller studio PD is already talking to in regards to KSP2. We should have some idea soon. There is a grim possibility that KSP2 is already effectively canceled, and T2 just didn't want to make the announcement before the earnings call. In that case, we'll also know about it soon. I don't think it's the most likely scenario, but I'd be remiss not to acknowledge it.

A digression about Factorio has been moved here. If you want to talk about that game, please take the discussion there.

Right. That's how business works. T2 will say nothing more until then, and there's no-one left at IG who is a position to talk: anyone still at their desk will be focused on tying up the loose ends and under a strict NDA. So - sad to say, but we have to twiddle our thumbs for at least another week.

TBH I do not understand this kind of stuff. A lot of people here talk like "the community" is a magical thing. I have read a lot of stuff how "this community is not toxic" or something. This community is not a static thing and changes because of external influences. Like the development of KSP2. Honestly the amount of praise "the communitiy" is giving themselves over here is next level cringe. And feels totally out of touch with realitiy.

The problem is that correlation between studio doing a good job with the resources they have and the revenue math is negligible. I mean, it's possible to very clearly and unambiguously be bad at things. If you took publisher money and went on a drinking spree and had absolutely nothing to show for it, yeah, sure. But drawing the correlation the other way, from failed projects to the quality of the team overall, is pretty much statistical noise. In practice, a lot more is determined by the conditions of the project and the IP. Did PD trust your project enough to give you a budget to hire the best people in the field? No? You're kind of boned. People the Intercept hired for physics were just out of academia and had very little game dev experience. They were good at physics, but very, very green in games. Networking engineers they had also never had to work with a game like KSP2. I don't think that's because Intercept just didn't know how to find talented people. They didn't have the budget to hire people who could hit the ground running on absolutely everything. Finally, the engine. The only reason it's a Unity game is because heavy reuse of the KSP assets and code was promised by Star Theory, like, seven years ago, and it's been sunk costs ever since. That limits people you can hire to a specific set of skills, because you make certain kinds of games on Unity, and they aren't KSP. It's a big part of why Intercept ended up having to hire modders. They knew how to work with Unity, how to make things for KSP, and they were probably within budget. Clearly PD wanted to make a game cheap. And the ambition they were sold on was not of a cheap game to make. Not a lot of it is on the studio that was created years after the decisions were made. Some of it is on the people who were at Star Theory from the start, but the majority of it has been PD decisions on how much they value the IP. And the game was still happening. It was a buggy mess, it was wildly off schedule, but we were seeing a game being built. Just not fast enough. Not selling enough EA copies. Not getting glowing enough reviews. Given the same constraints, I don't know if it was possible to do better. You can make a strong argument that people who ended up in charge of the Intercept should not have attempted to make KSP2 with these constraints. And, yeah, maybe? But to say they are a studio that deserved closing more than another studio because they decided to try is at a minimum a very cynical thing to claim. And I would argue unfair. And then there are so many factors on top of that. It's not just about money you've earned it's how much you're going to earn soon. Again, Tango Gameworks are a great example. Hi-Fi Rush went above and beyond. Critical success, glowing user reviews, and it recouped its development costs several times over. Studio gets shut down. At the same time, the studio working on Fallout 76, whose beta launch makes KSP2 EA look good and who are running a bill tens of times higher are allowed to keep going. Because they are maintaining a title that continues to make money, and Tango Gameworks would have to start working on another game that will maybe be as successful as Hi-Fi Rush four years from now. So a studio that performed great got shutdown, and a studio that's been making mediocre work, taking years to put 76 back on track and massively over budget is allowed to keep going. It ain't about the the studio's performance. It's about the resources, and IP, and a type of project, and what the higher management thinks it means in terms of revenue over the next couple of quarters tops. There are additional considerations and backroom talk that makes me think that some of the criticism towards Intercept leadership is deserved. But I would not have drawn this conclusion purely from how the development of KSP2 has been going. Knowing everything we've learned about the project over, eh, 2023 or so, they were always going to have to fight uphill. Some of it through more thorns than another studio, perhaps, but I have no reason to believe that any other studio working on the same budget would be able to make KSP2 good enough to not be cut at this point. And that's all that matters here. The rest is fluff and victim-blaming. [snip]

I totally agree, had another post above that Moonship was oversize for the initial landings. Now I would use another Moonship with an orbital module for the orbital moon station, it would be an fuel depot and even an rescue ship. But the BO lander is probably more practical but might likely more expensive / slower, SpaceX is testing Starship. Yes New Glen is less ambitions but its not SS more like falcon heavy as I understand. So you use your 18 wheel truck to buy an burger as its cheaper / faster than other options like taxi or meal delivery services. You obviously want SS for the base, they should also be pretty easy to turn into base modules. Then the talk ISRU and hydrolox become more relevant again.

Somebody had already ninja'd me on Reddit. But what about her box with husband's things. A pair of very small boots, and something like "He was fond of caring of this, could talk about them for hours" (at least in translation). Was her husband a leprechaun?

Well, truth be told I may be taking a little shortcut. We're getting close to whatever the end is, and frankly it's just more efficient if the main people who need to talk next can do it in the same room. Especially when getting visual effects right can mean an hour of flying people around in jetpacks, dealing with helmet bugs, and trying to orient bridge sets sunny-side up for better lighting etc., for just a couple of panels. If there's any concern about continuity etc., well I did hang a lampshade with the thread title. I was considering having Evil Bob throw even more snark than his "abusing crew transfers" comment by pointing out that the "turbolifts" are just part-clipped lander cans, and why couldn't he just transfer into a docked landing craft? Well if he could do that, why did the boarding parties have to burn through bulkheads etc. to get aboard? I'm certainly not going to explain it! This is why the author's crew compartment is as well-stocked with lampshades as KSP craft are with flags and EVA propellant. Who's to say? A couple of thoughts from a similarly mirrored situation: (1) It is far easier for civilized [kerbs] to behave like barbarians than it is for barbarians to behave like civilized [kerbs], BUT, (2) ruthlessly evil or not, it is possible to be a "[kerb] of integrity" in more than one universe.

The $20M is for just the launch, not the payloads. Several years ago, a SpaceX engineer giving a talk at a conference said their marginal internal cost was ~$25M a launch (I posted the vid here at the time, but it was pulled down—possibly because he talked about those numbers). This was long before they were flying 20 times+, and before they recovered fairings much if at all. So $20M seems pretty reasonable as a current ballpark.

This is something I and others said multiple times throughout EA. I think a lot of anger at the communication/CMs was misplaced disappointment with the development speed. If the game was fun and developing quickly they could’ve talked as much or as little as they wanted. You don’t really need to have a big dev interview once a month if there’s a content update once a month to show what the devs have been up to. A KERB update post is easily replaced by weekly patches with detailed patch notes. Then they can talk a lot, nearly not at all, be sassy like the Wendy’s Twitter, be very proper or whatever other style they want and it wouldn’t really matter. The frustration always stemmed from this being the slowest progressing EA game I think any of us have ever played. With the devs not active (for the most part) interacting with the community that frustration was expressed to the CMs, and eventually it became (unfairly) frustration at the CMs.

Did you really put the "Terrain Implementation" along the Pros of this game ? Damn, it looks so aged, so outdated, so clunky, so weird, inhomogeneous, unaesthetic, etc. Especially with the harsh lightning which got quite improved by the last Blackrack efforts, but I find the terrain to be so 2015, technically speaking, and very not beautiful as an art decision (which is more personal opinion). The only way to get it "OK-Ish" is to compare it to Stock KSP1. But doing so, well, I won't elaborate further, it is nonsense to me as it's just the literal bare minimum. Terrain is very precisely what I was expected the most, because it would mean a LOT for this game, even gameplay wise, with proper collision, scenery, landscape to discover, etc etc, I've already repeated that so many time and now there no point to get to it again. Really, terrain and scenery is the key for a proper KSP2... Everything else fade out compared to what it can bring to the table. Look at the trailer again if you want to talk about it, I don't find much people sharing my opinion so I would gladly elaborate again, finally, if there is some people who want to debate that subject.

So I have a question. The financial call for TT happens on the 16th. People here talk as if it is a public call people can listen in on. Is that the case? If so, how do we listen in, and at what time? My assumption is that we can't, but that the call is made public shortly after it happens. If someone can confirm this, I would greatly appreciate it!

The CMs certainly are not at fault. They only acted within the scope of their abilities at any given time. Thay must have been a pretty excrementsty burden to bear... wanting to talk about really cool stuff thay was almost ready .. just need to figure this out or that.. and not getting to talk about it at all. I feel like the CMs kinda got the crappiest deal of all. The industry has exploded since early 00's. A vote based system to enter EA is longer relevant. And I know nothing is perfect.. a large group of angry incels could still slam whatever feature and initiate unfair action. But with people behind the oversight, this would be obvious. This sentiment has been fermenting for a bit over a couple (one) other titles I wanted to be excited about but feel developers employed less than genuine approach to EA. It may shape up to be alright in the end.. the massive breach of trust doesn't occur in the community over singular incidents. It's not like we freaked out over price, or routine delays in communication, then postponed delays of communication, lack of technical dev blogs, incinere AMAs... it was a culmination effect. @chefsbrian obviously titles with awesome customer relations and positive review rating would not be one brought to question. im not asking anyone to adopt a unilateral set of qualifiers for EA. Merely adhere to the standard each puts forth on their own EA store page. Each one answers certain questions about what EA means to them & how they intend to approach various benchmarks for the guidelines. There isn't even a scope set forth in the guidleines with a set of minimum acceptance criteria.. beyond game must be playable & not provide blatantly inaccurate info. There is no minimum required engagement for the community feedback nor a set bar for how frequent we should get announcements of any kind. But the development staff sets that expectation when they fill out the little questionnaire & it enters into writing. That is the first step of a relationship where trust Is a factor. That trust is based on what we read on that page. (Very few read anything outside the Steam page)

Nice, I didn't see any other obvious install issues. I don't really know much about the B9 error, but your log is way cleaner. Hopefully someone else can help pin down the specific error. Personally, I'm side-eyeing IFS just because I hear so many people talk about incompatibilities with it, but I don't have an experience with it myself.

I've been working on a CubeSat for the past 2 years, mostly software and testing, and we uploaded the final code onto it yesterday, it is flying to Texas for integration in a few hours, and will be launching into space on Cygnus NG-21 probably sometime in August, and ejected from the International Space Station probably in Fall or early Winter. (picture was very zoomed out, that's why it is a bit fuzzy, I zoomed in) This is CySat-1, a mission to prove the viability of measuring Earth's soil moisture levels using a software defined radiometer (and also to prove that an undergraduate led satellite program at our university is viable). There's many subsytems involved: Endurosat OBC, tells everything else what to do Endurosat UHF antenna and transceiver, how we talk to the satellite, has the worst documentation of any of the modules and took us a long time to figure out how to use. CubeSpace ADCS, has magneto-torquers, star trackers, Earth sensors, a magnetometer, GPS, and a reaction wheel to figure out where the satellite is and point it in the right direction. Endurosat EPS, manages power collection, the batteries, and power distribution throughout the satellite A breakout board with numerous electronic components soldered onto it for toggling power and converting voltages PumpkinSpace solar panels, we bought them (really expensive) after failing to build our own Analog Devices AD9361-Z7035 FPGA/SDR/SOM/whatever you want to call it. Power hungry computer that is only on sometimes, and runs our scientific program using GNU Radio and Python on an Analog Devices Linux Distro Analog Devices ADRV1CRR-BOB Carrier Board, holds the other Analog Devices board and distributes power and data to and from it Mini-Circuits Low Noise Amplifiers and Bandpass Filters to amplify the signals from the radiometer antenna A custom antenna for the radiometer And on the ground: An Ubuntu desktop computer running a GNU Radio flowgraph to talk to the satellite A software defined radio and antenna (we will get a bigger antenna in the next few months, the one we have is temporary) A Windows laptop running a python program (the ground station front end/GUI) to communicate with the Linux server I have been a programmer for CySat-1 for the past four semesters, programming lead for the past three semesters, and the only programmer for the last semester. My job has been to get these 7 computers made by 4 different manufacturers running 3.5 different operating systems in 2 separate programming languages talking with each other seamlessly. For the most part, we have succeeded, and the satellite has worked during short term ground testing. Unfortunately, we ran out of time for long term testing due to an issue with charging the batteries. This project has been one relentless string of failures and setbacks and frustrations, so long I'll probably make a video essay about it at some point. It felt like bashing my head up against a wall repeatedly only to find another wall on the other side, over and over and over again. I'm not very optimistic about our chances for successfully completing the mission, we have at least one possibly unresolved critical bug with no leads (and no time to fix), and given that we were discovering bugs literally up to and including the very last day, there's probably more we don't know about. But I learned a lot, enough that success is one of the possible outcomes. While it is supposed to do a lot more than beeping, I will be happy if it beeps. I'll be even happier if it will beep on command. Anything after that is purely bonus in my mind, especially given that half of university CubeSats don't even get a beep back, so I'm told. I'm proud of how much we managed to overcome, and that this thing finally got shipped off after years of delays, the satellite having been originally conceived sometime between 2002 and 2017 depending on what you take as the start date. That picture is an expression of equal parts "We finally finished it!" "Oh boy, what if I forgot something? What if it fails because I forgot to change a line of code, and I won't know for another six months!" and "What now? This has been my big thing for 2 years, where do I go from here?" In a really roundabout way, KSP is one of the reasons I found myself on this project. Part of that was just because it awakened my love for space, but another part of it was that the organization that manages CySat has a bunch of other project teams, one of which was a KSP simpit. I was on that project for one semester because a friend told me about it. When the KSP simpit project shut down, that same friend invited me to join CySat. It has certainly been an adventure that took me far outside my comfort zone. When I started, I didn't know a lick of C, and barely knew two licks of Python. I came in wanting to do structures/CAD stuff, as I felt that would be what I would suck the least at. But through a quirk of fate, got put on programming instead, something I did not at all feel confident doing. After a lot of pain and a lot of learning , the inter-computer links fell one by one, and we got it to a point where everything (discounting the single use stuff we weren't able to test) works in short term ground testing. While obviously we would have preferred to do more extensive testing, at this point, for a variety of reasons, we've just got to send it. About eleven years and about two weeks ago, I launched my first Kerbal into the sky, and now, a spacecraft I worked on is getting launched for real. Hopefully, when it gets up there, it shows up as a probe and not as debris!

Which sounds nothing like what they did back to Star Theory. Remember, if it was that, we already know what it looks like. The fact they got offered re-hiring was communicated instantly, and so was that another studio was to continue the game's development. They also got a message warning of this with a lot of time, they were not gagged and were able to talk right then and there. It's a totally different news that we got now, they did not communicate anything similar. "We're firing people and closing projects." Read above. People really like to not look back it seems.

All good, it's your right. But... How long are you going to expect them to deign to explain something to you? A month? One year? a decade? a century? And if you expect someone to talk, it's because you don't understand the corporate fabric. Anyone who breaks the line is not going to be hired even in the competition. Marked for life.

i love this thread so much, it's a rare bastion of unfiltered love and compassion in an otherwise hostile subforum A huge thank you to Intercept Games and all its members. I hope you find work that's good for you, and, even though I bet you're not really allowed to talk about it, I hope whatever it is that happened isn't the downfall of the project you poured your hearts into. I appreciate you all!

I think my main concern that causes me to question definitions of harm is people being overbearing. I think people (above the age of consent/legality or whatever) should be allowed to make their own decisions, but given a good education of the pluses and minuses of the possible choices at hand. Unfortunately I feel people (at least my age, early 20s) don’t really get taught the skills necessary to properly weigh pros and cons and end up going more with their emotions. It’s hard to find the balance between a warning and an order. I am terribly sorry but I must now correct myself. I was using the wrong term. Some families in Nepal practice polyandry, not polygamy, although polygamy can be found in Nepal too, it is not what I studied about. The way it works is one wife usually marries an entire family’s brothers. The husbands are not drawn from different families. Tension is mainly around personal issues. It’s been several months since the anthropology class and I don’t seem to have taken notes on the subject, but I recall that having two males helps raise lots of farm hands and keep the population stable. I’ve found the TED Talk I watched during my studies. I don’t know if it’s okay to post it, so just Google “Are five husbands better than one TED Talk” and you can find it if you’re interested.

The situation could have been similar, though probably less hurtful on head count - that was while the game was in prealpha stages, so there was not much talk anyway, so nobody noticed anything out of normal schedule.

So, if you are all interested in a lot of the back end systems in KSP (scaled space vs local space, PQS, floating origin, floating velocity reference frame, quaternion3d and vector3d doubles,. etc...) I would like to point you to Harv and Mu's Unite talk that took place 10 years ago on Sep 20th of 2013. KSP 1 was not, easy. It took years. KSP 2, would have also taken years, and Juno New Origins has taken years, so has every other major space flight game with any level of simulation. Turns out that not on is "space hard" but making space... is also hard.

First post on here in a while. Wish it was under better circumstances. To be clear: as of the writing of this post, KSP 2 HAS NOT BEEN OFFICIALLY CANCELLED. Mostly, this is a response to a phenomena I've noticed a lot on this forum: people making statements to the effect of "They promised us they would finish the game, isn't this some kind of breach (possibly even legal)?" Some people are talking about lawsuits, others about refunds. The fact is, early access games are always a risk, both for the publisher as well as the customer, even when they are being developed by a major studio. KSP 2 in particular, is a relatively niche-interest game whose development was seeminly laden with difficult technical problems and other REAL CODING CHALLENGES which have the tendency to make development slower and more expensive than other reliable, mass-market games. Take Two may well decide that KSP 2 will either be unprofitable, or that the money will be better spent somewhere else. They may be right. Unfortunately, there is no known way to design an economic system that both 1) causes companies to waste money on consumers like us and 2) leads to the development of MRI machines, sufficient food to feed the population, etc. A lot of the initial anger back when the game was released was in this context. The anger boiled down to two main points: The game was way less developed than it ought to have been based on previews and pre-development communications. This could have many causes, among them: There were more engineering challenges than expected, or they were more difficult than anticipated Development was being mismanaged There was dishonesty involved Development was restarted due to some unknown reason, possibly some combination of the other bullets All of which indicate that the game's development was significantly more risky (less guaranteed) than what one might otherwise assume, which was/is upsetting to many fans of the game. Especially in light of (1), the asking price of $50 was extremely steep. Not only was the game not worth $50 at that moment, but the development of the game was full of risks and red flags that reduced the likelyhood of successful development even further below that which one would expect from an early access game, which should reduce the price. Since the release, which many viewed as already involving several broken promises, more 'promises' or 'goals' have gone unfulfilled, such as: Frequent communication Updates "on the timescales of weeks, not months" "Major content updates coming within months of each other" And other such conditions which would alleviate risk and speak to a solid development environment. Take-Two's "cost reduction plan" is not a monumental, rare, or unpredictable occurence. It is exactly the sort of thing we should expect companies to do: look to reallocate funds away from things that either lose money or don't make enough money, and towards things that do. We should have had, and should continue to have, the expectation that KSP 2 will be subject to such pressures, AND THAT EXPECTATION SHOULD BE BAKED INTO THE PRICE OF THE GAME. It's no surprise, then, that many of the same people who were fine with the price of the game and many other perceived sleights feel like they are owed some sort of recourse if the game fails. You are not owed anything- your "recourse" was had a year ago when you purchased the game for less than it would eventually cost if it made it to release- you got a bargain, which doubled as your consolation were the game to fail. If you are unsatisfied with your recourse, then perhaps we are in agreement that the game should have been, for instance, $30. All this being said, I hope for the sake of the community, the devs, who I do believe worked hard to make this game succeed and care about the game, and the broader world which stands to benefit from the existence of games like KSP 2, that the worst has not come to pass, and that the game will continue to be developed, and one day release successfully. I mainly wrote this post because it concerns what I believe to be a common flaw in the way people think/talk about "cOrPoRaTiOnS" which irritates me greatly, and I'm not a perfect person.

I am not sure about that. The game still has so many bugs that it is pretty much unplayable. At least for me. There was a lot of talk about how "Science" was a good update. I tried it and after all the bugs I stopped playing again. It did improve the game. But the game was still bad. I know others have a different oppionions. But for me the game in the current state is still not playable and the Science update did not fix any of the main issues I did have with it.