The game is starting to give me a headache...

[Two]

So I started a new game a few days ago on hard mode: no saving, no revert flight, you fail: you suffer. It turned out to be actually way more fun than normal difficulty, or at least it would be, if it weren't for the bugs.

Yesterday I did my first moon-landing, after fighting with the editor first, who would constantly switch between radial and mirror mounting, even milliseconds before placing, threw out Bob from the pilot seat and put in Val like every time I launch a rocket, just to learn that it wouldn't leave the launchpad despite enough TWR. After an hour someone on the forum was so kind to tell me that this is a launchpad bug, where the rocket gets stuck in the pad. Now my rocket is using all 30/30 parts and I don't have the money to upgrade the lab yet, so I was screwed. Eventually I managed to shake the rocket enough on the launchpad to get it to fly (highly unstable, but fly), and managed to make my Mun-landing and return.

Today I tried to get to Minimus. Same issues with Editor, throw out Bob, shake on the launchpad to get up. SAS prograde fails to work properly, because I changed something about the rocket, and now it wobbles like they are partying hard in the command pod. SAS stabilize and manual flight: smooth like a feather. So I have to steer manually for now. Get the rocket to Orbit and towards Minimus... can't click on the flight-path anymore, because it shakes like the rocket did before, so manual warping till Minimus. Add the maneuver to enter orbit, warp to it... rocket doesn't stop and flies by. Good thing I have some extra dV, so I break manually and land the rocket, do the usual science stuff, put Bob on Eva, he fails to grab the ladder on exit for some reason, RCS doesn't turn on, because he somehow got knocked unconscious, he falls through the ground, everything vanishes (including all planets and KSC), and after a reload the lander is gone and all my Kerbals are dead. And of course no quick saves because of hard mode, so I guess I start from scratch again.

This game would be so much better if it weren't for all those annoying bugs.

[LittleBlueGaming]

Yeah, they can be annoying, but I just chalk them up to kerbal engineering

[Superfluous J]

First off, congrats on the 30-part mun lander. That's no small feat

Second, I refuse to disable save/revert options specifically because of bugs. I just do my best to not succumb to using it for other reasons.

[WOODY01]

I learned not to trust the stock warp to function properly all the time. It has failed me too many times at critical times like obtaining an orbit after an encounter. So it is either KAC or Mechjeb automaticzlly stoping warping for me.

I have had the radial and mirror symetry change on me a couple of times. I think it is caused by mousing over other parts that are already placed just like it does with the number sysmetry. Not sure if that is the cause.

Do not use the SAS to hold prograde during launch, turn off the gimbal on engines, or turn the gimbal range down. Turning off or reducing the gimbal range will help reduce over correcting. I also find that SAS can resist the gravity turn with some designs so I generally only use it before I start the turn or when I am above 30K and start making a more agressive turn towards the horizon.

It seems to me the path projection will shake if there is something causing the calculations to be a little more complicated. Like the Mun being close to or interferring with your path to minmus or leaving Kerbins SOI. It also shakes for me when I manage to have almost perfect circular orbit.

[FancyMouse]

I refuse to disable save/revert options specifically because of bugs.

Can't agree more. And even revert itself has a bug (reverting to VAB/SPH sometimes makes parts disappear).

[Varsi]

I learned not to trust the stock warp to function properly all the time. It has failed me too many times at critical times like obtaining an orbit after an encounter. So it is either KAC or Mechjeb automaticzlly stoping warping for me.

"Warp to" failed me the first time I tried it and haven't touched it after that. It's no fun missing insertion burns.

[Two]

So it is either KAC or Mechjeb automatically stoping warping for me.

It's kind of funny that mods can do properly, what KSP can't. As far as I was told, the MJ prograde hold works fine and without the shaking as well.

[steve_v]

Yeah, what an awesome bug-free 1.0 release that was not. Most of those issues are literally years old, and still not fixed.

Why even put "no quicksaves" in as a difficulty option when it stands a 100% chance of eventually borking your game?

[SemiaCloud]

I love playing without revert ever since I first tried it.

[Sma]

I haven't had many problems, but this may be similar.

Yesterday I was trying to launch up some engines/fuel tanks to attach to a "tourist" ship to go to the Mun and Minmus, and the launcher bugged. Once in orbit it was shaking all over the place, not the engines or control surfaces, but the camera shake. Then I noticed in the map that it said it was landed, even though it was in orbit. The engines/tanks, once detached were fine though. So far after that I haven't had it happen again so not sure what I did that caused it to happen. I thought maybe the game had gotten a glitch after running for a while so i closed it and reloaded but same thing.

I am using mods though, so maybe its a combination of things at specific times that causes it. Though, I was launching 2 tanks/engines side by side, so its possible maybe they had parts clipped through each other and that caused the bug. Did not have part clipping enabled though.

[Renegrade]

By the way, hard mode doesn't disable quicksaving, just quickloading and reverting. The save format is identical between a standard save and a quick save, so one can simply restore a corrupted/messed-up main save by overwriting persistent.sfs with quicksave.sfs. It's still necessary to remember to actually use the quicksave, of course..

[steve_v]

The point is that a game now at release status shouldn't have game breaking bugs to begin with. Manually un-borking saves is something I'll gladly put up with in an early access/beta game, but it's unacceptable in a released product.

[katateochi]

So today started out with a mission to eject an asteroid out of the system. Set up the rendezvous and adjusted it so my approach distance was ~500 meters. The rendezvous was about 60 days away so I returned to the space centre to run another mission in the meantime.

I had a contract to go and recover something from Mun so I started that. All was going OK until I got close to the thing I was supposed to pick up, whereupon it just sank into the ground. So I reloaded a save while still in Mun orbit and tried again, and again. Each time as I got near it, it sank. So I gave up on that one and switched back to my asteroid mission.

The nicely setup rendezvous was now way off, instead of being within 500m it was now ~10,000km off. I had enough dV to adjust it back and carry on. Once I'd caught the asteroid I started to mine it....clunk, the camera shifted violently, signifying that the asteroid had suddenly been drained of all it's resources in a second. hmph...reloaded tried again, this time mining worked ok and after a tedious burn I'd shunted it to an escape trajectory out of the solar system.

At that point two things were getting quite close to happening, a crew pod was now 2 days away from returning back to Kerbin and another mission was about 20 days away from reaching Duna. So I switched to the crew pod. NAN!!!! black screen doom, had to restart the game (and then load up a save from a few minutes before switching as the NAN had deleted the craft). After trying several times to switch to the craft while it was on a solar orbit and failing I waited until the craft had crossed into Kerbin's SOI and then switched. That time it worked fine and I was able to bring that crew back home.

Then onto the Duna mission, switch to craft...NAN!! AGAIN!! reloaded game with save from before switch and tried the trick of waiting till the craft was in Duna's SOI before switching to it. No such luck, this time whatever I did when I switched to it I got a NAN error. So that's Val and Bob dead and a craft that was supposed to complete 4 separate contracts lost (never mind the two days I'd spend building it).

So four totally separate missions, each one plagued with bugs, 2 completely borked. And I frustrated? ARE YOU KIDDING!! I'm done, wake me when the next version comes out.

[Tankman101]

but it's unacceptable in a released product.

You must have not liked pretty much all games in the past 5 years

[steve_v]

Really? granted I don't follow the latest releases that closely, but I certainly haven't seen another released game with this level of known performance issues and bugs on release day.

You see, when a bug is reported, the expectation is that it will actually be fixed. What we're seeing here is the exact opposite - new bugs being introduced and old ones being ignored.

The temperature gauge memory leak is a new bug that should not have made it through QA. We're still waiting for a fix.

Look at Claws "stock bugfix modules" those bugs have been around for so long that the community has fixed them. Why hasn't Squad?

Volunteers aren't making money out of KSP, why should it fall to them to fix bugs?

There is more active bugfixing and support going on on the forums than the official bugtracker. I'm beginning to wonder if anyone official is even looking at it.

I for one like helping people, but I'm tired of answering the same questions over and over, usually with "oh, that's a stock bug, it's been around for years" or "there's a mod to fix that" - You shouldn't need mods to fix the game.

Everything I've picked up in the last 5 years I've been able to play right through without game breaking bugs, minor ones maybe but I certainly haven't had to hand-edit saves on any other game I can recall.

And those issues I have encountered have been patched, and patched quickly.

What irks me is not that there are issues, but that such issues have been reported - in some cases several versions ago - and the game went 1.0 without addressing them.

I don't want figurines, or marketing hype. I don't even want more new features. What I want is reasonable performance and bugfixes, in a timely manner. This is, after all, no longer a beta (where all the bugs should be squashed) it's a retail product.

Edited June 3, 2015 by steve_v

[viktor19]

With KAC, I have recently encountered a glitch. Upon switching to vessel screen and navball turned black. Since then I always quicksave and switch vessels in fear.

[WOODY01]

Really? granted I don't follow the latest releases......

It is actually rather common for small/indie devs to release buggy unoptimized games. Even releasing with game breaking bugs. I suspect most cases it is a result of fincial issues and/or unexperienced devs underestimating the time and skill it takes to develope a stable, optimized, bug free game.

I am rather happy with KSP despite suffering a memory leak which limits the number of times I can switch between vehicles.

[steve_v]

Outside of KSP, I can't even remember the last time I encountered a real live memory leak. Because QA, and because memory management is not rocket science.

If your application is leaking memory, your code is garbage or you didn't test it properly. End of story.

KSP is a truly beautiful concept, the execution is something else entirely.

If it were getting better I'd be happy. But it's not.

Edited June 3, 2015 by steve_v

[worir4]

Just remember, no matter how big your headache is, the kerbals' is probably a lot worse...

[Ringkeeper]

SAS prograde fails to work properly, because I changed something about the rocket, and now it wobbles like they are partying hard in the command pod. SAS stabilize and manual flight: smooth like a feather.

Had same problem and found the solution in one of the many threads here in the board: Reduce the gimbalrange on your engine. After that, the rocket flys nice. Somehow SAS+Gimbal+long pointy rocket = wobble...

I always reduce gimbal to 50% on a 3° engine.

[-ELF-]

Emmm...

Minecraft.

Released product, million sales, bla-bla-bla.

Almost no physics.

Annoying bugs. Annoying bugs everywhere. Horses not rideable since 1.8 (almost a year ago) and still not rideable, and won't in 1.9 as it was officially stated. Server memory leaks crash game each 30 minutes when exploring certain areas and so on. Still fun to play and attracts new players.

Sims 4.

Released product, million sales, even more bla-bla-bla.

No physics.

Annoying bugs. Lots of them. Sudden crashes during load process, memory leaks, stuck Sim issues, accidentally disappearing objects, Origin connection issues, including Sims losing connection to origin process, while origin process has connection to server.

Still very fun to play and attracts TONS of players.

KSP.

Released product, you got the idea.

Complicated physics, that pushes the engine over it's edge.

Annoying bugs. Memory leaks, sudden crashes on scene change, some cosmetic issues with inconvenient buttons or unfriendly interface here and there.

Very fun to play, attracts new players.

So, how is it different from what Mojang or EA releases? I see no difference, it has at least same playability as others (we had the competition with my wife yesterday evening just about that. She was playing Sims 4 and I was playing Linux version of KSP. And actually I were crashing probably only a little more often, but the loading times were lower.)

[steve_v]

Minecraft: Won't buy/play, too buggy.

Sims4: Won't buy/play, too buggy.

Origin: Won't touch with 1000ft pole.

You got the idea.

Let's not compare to the lowest common denominator, shall we? KSP has potential. I hate seeing potential squandered.

Edited June 3, 2015 by steve_v

[-ELF-]

Yep, everyone has their own point. I am fan of indie gaming, so I would say I am not against spending some money on the idea, not on the game itself, even if I will not see that game actually. It is just worth trying.

Also, I would say I can deal with a lot more bugs to get the fun KSP gives me. So, totally playable even at 10 FPS I get commonly.

[steve_v]

Don't get me wrong, It's a great game. But it could and should be better. 10FPS on modern hardware is a joke.

[selfish_meme]

Don't get me wrong, It's a great game. But it could and should be better. 10FPS on modern hardware is a joke.

Yeah but it's not the same issue that other games have, most games like Battlefield and such are limited by their graphical output (for which you have a honkin great GPU card for) so the investment is not just a good computer it's a Graphics card as well to just to play the game. KSP looks pretty much the same even with all the graphics turned down (not sure about Windows DirectX, who has time for Microsoft or 32bit). Its the FPU and CPU that are being stressed (plus memory if you want to run mods).

I think to compare KSP to Farcry say you would need to invest the same sort of money in your CPU and Memory that you would for a Graphics Card to play the aforementioned game. Maybe a eight Core i7 extreme and 16GB of DDR4 RAM, run that on Linux and watch it fly, you could get away with a $100 graphics card.