PS4 Announcement Discussion

[Violent Jeb]

You can quote assault my post all you want. It is bad because squad were to spend their time working on the game instead of working on the bottom line, we'd be quite a bit further along by now. If you don't get that everytime a dev has to sit down and talk to us about these "promotions and schemes and novelties", that they are opting out of days of potential productivity, then we have completely opposing viewpoints (as demonstrated by your above post). With that in mind, it does not change my opinion, nor the fact that others share my feelings.

I would rather see 1.03 than any of this other stuff.

[r4pt0r]

You can quote assault my post all you want. It is bad because squad were to spend their time working on the game instead of working on the bottom line, we'd be quite a bit further along by now. If you don't get that everytime a dev has to sit down and talk to us about these "promotions and schemes and novelties", that they are opting out of days of potential productivity, then we have completely opposing viewpoints (as demonstrated by your above post). With that in mind, it does not change my opinion, nor the fact that others share my feelings.

I would rather see 1.03 than any of this other stuff.

to be fair Max does the business things, and max himself has said he is not a dev.

[Red Iron Crown]

You can quote assault my post all you want. It is bad because squad were to spend their time working on the game instead of working on the bottom line, we'd be quite a bit further along by now. If you don't get that everytime a dev has to sit down and talk to us about these "promotions and schemes and novelties", that they are opting out of days of potential productivity, then we have completely opposing viewpoints (as demonstrated by your above post). With that in mind, it does not change my opinion, nor the fact that others share my feelings.

The bottom line is what makes working on the game possible. Would it be better if it wasn't necessary? Maybe. But we live in a world where the bills have to be paid and business ventures have to turn a profit.

[sal_vager]

Thing is katateochi, there's no way to measure whether KSP development was slowed, not now and not at any time in the future, though we have HarvesteR saying that development time was sped up thanks to help from Flying Tiger, which is likely to happen again as Squad port to Unity5, further shortening development time.

So the claim that this PS4 port is going to slow KSP development isn't really valid, and many other things can be claimed to do the same such as the plushie deal, but again there's no way to measure this.

Added to this, many players want Squad to take more time, but in the same breath claim that development is slowed by X reason, it's not possible to have both.

[DoToH]

In all honesty, it's our own fault. - snip-

Sure, but is theirs too. Not constructive posts and rant is expected in every forum.

They have a great communication tool, and they don't use it because some guys are annoyed/insluting/ranting whatever? They have moderators (guess... you're one of them).

[Yakuzi]

to be fair Max does the business things, and max himself has said he is not a dev.

Then perhaps Max's promotional stuff should be moved from Dev Tuesdays to for instance Merchandise Mondays^tm, so we don't get any of these falsely advertised* dev notes again.

Back OT, does anyone know whether PS4 players will be able to exchange their creations with PC players and vice versa?

*get it? Ok, I'll let myself out...

Edited June 18, 2015 by Yakuzi

[sal_vager]

Lol Yakuzi, that'd be funny.

So far, I don't know, I really hope so but when googling for info on even modding PS4 games all I turned up was homebrew and hacks, not owning a PS4 I can't test one to see if I can get any files off it.

If the PS4 has a cloud based sharing system or modding system I'd like to know.

[DuoDex]

Sure, but is theirs too. Not constructive posts and rant is expected in every forum.

They have a great communication tool, and they don't use it because some guys are annoyed/insluting/ranting whatever? They have moderators (guess... you're one of them).

One of the traditions of the internet (and this forum in particular) is that only rude/similarly troublemaking posts are removed. If Squad was treated as a user, there'd be a LOT more moderation. Devs, just like other people, get to choose what they want to see. If they don't want the near-constant criticism, a great deal of which is baseless or just plain rude, they don't have to take it.

Edited June 18, 2015 by DuoDex
bloody spelling

[Red Iron Crown]

Sure, but is theirs too. Not constructive posts and rant is expected in every forum.

They have a great communication tool, and they don't use it because some guys are annoyed/insluting/ranting whatever? They have moderators (guess... you're one of them).

Thank you for pointing out I'm a moderator, that is important news. If it was my job to censor the forums I would not be volunteering my time to do it. We're here to keep the absolute worst of the crap off the forums (and believe me, there is much, much worse than what you see in this and other contentious threads), and I don't have any more say with Squad or the development process than I did before I was a moderator.

I participate in several other forums, and yes there are still haters and trolls there but there isn't the pervasive tone of negativity that this place has sometimes. I stand by my statement that if you want the devs to read the forums more then the best way to do it is to help make them worth reading.

[sal_vager]

Just going to post this in regards to the moderation I try to do here, it's easy to fall into the trap of just nuking anything even close to the forum rules DoToH, or worse, going out of your way to look for trouble, but that doesn't do any of us any good.

We do aim for a light touch here as much as possible, rather than act like police enforcing laws we prefer to act like firefighters dealing with emergency calls, though if we see smoke we'll investigate.

Trouble is there are things no one really wants to see, such as two members turning an interesting thread into their personal battleground, or stalking and harassing each other in other peoples threads.

It's also helping no one when members flat out lie about stuff to get others worked up, or complain about "censorship", by all means criticise but back up your claims or take a hike.

Too much moderation would be where the moderators think they are basically "the community" and in charge, and just impose their views on others, but that stifles discussion and I like to see varied discussion here.

On many sites the moderators are pretty much "us v them", and are very much apart from the community, rather than being a part of that community, and as a player and member I don't like or want that, so I encourage all the mods to participate, as I think it's better that we're all seen to be here for you guys, not here to just slap members with rules.

I've been on sites where the moderators just enforce rules with no consideration or thought, and it's not fun, stuff like that drove me away, so for as long as I'm here I'll work to keep KSP forum moderation pretty much as it is now, with all the moderators drawn from this community so they know it and care about it and its members.

Also, since doing all this I've had nowt from Squad, so maybe I'll ask for a PS4....

[DuoDex]

Also, since doing all this I've had nowt from Squad, so maybe I'll ask for a PS4....

Nonsense. Need I count the freebies handed out? None of which I have received?

[r4pt0r]

Also, since doing all this I've had nowt from Squad, so maybe I'll ask for a PS4....

I really enjoy mine. plus all these HD remakes and remasters mean some of my favorite games of all time might get more love.

Resident evil 2 HD, Ace Combat 4,6,0 HD PLEASE

I think it's great. I also enjoy my PC I built myself.

See people complain about console peasants and plebs, but historically those people, the 'unwashed masses', held the real power. The nobility and aristocracy had to keep them content or be overthrown.

So game on whatever system you enjoy.

I just hope the PS4 version of KSP doesnt end up like I fear it will. If its good, they will have another sale from me.

[sal_vager]

Yeah but anyway, who has a PS4 here? What modding or file access do you have?

Edit:

Oh cool, can you tell us about PS4 modding please r4pt0r?

[theend3r]

In all honesty, it's our own fault...

True, athough the ranting and bad, unconstructive criticism became significantly more prominent after the 0.90 -> 1.0 jump where people (imo rightfully) disliked the lack of proper community testing of such a large change in mechanics.

Sure, it's Squad's game but when people try so much to help you (for free on top of that) and you don't let them, their feelings are going to be a little hurt.

Are there any statistics showing how many sales are new compared to the pre 1.0 ones? To know how many "veterans" and newbies are there?

Edited June 18, 2015 by theend3r

[DuoDex]

True, athough the ranting and bad, unconstructive criticism became significantly more prominent after the 0.90 -> 1.0 jump where people (imo rightfully) disliked the lack of proper community testing of such a large change in mechanics.

Sure, it's Squad's game but when people try so much to help you (for free on top of that) and you don't let them, their feelings are going to be a little hurt.

Are there any statistics showing how many sales are new compared to the pre 1.0 ones? To know how many "veterans" and newbies are there?

The discussions about community playtesting have been hashed and rehashed. The eventual consensus is that while ideally community testing would be nice, practically it would not work. I am unsure about the availability of stats regarding sales but I don't think that Squad had released them in general.

[r4pt0r]

Yeah but anyway, who has a PS4 here? What modding or file access do you have?

Edit:

Oh cool, can you tell us about PS4 modding please r4pt0r?

I dont meddle with that stuff on my PS4. I have however messed around with modding the Wii, playing Project M, a Smash Bros. mod. and some roster editing for backbreaker, a football game.

What we should all take note of is Bethesda announced modding will be a possibility on the Xbox1 Fallout 4. It is expected to come to PS4 as well: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/fallout-4-pc-mods-will-be-playable-on-ps4-eventual/1100-6428239/

Is the delay between XB1 mods and PS4 mods an exclusivity thing(microsoft paying bethesda so mods come to XB1 first?), or is it because the framework for a sony modding system is not in place? I dont know. But such a thing is expected at some point.

I will say that if the framework is available, a system wherein you can get mods ingame would be best. I would hope for the following:

Player starts ps4

starts KSP

main menu

clicks spaceport

clicks the mods/crafts they want downloaded/activated

plays KSP

That would be awesome. Until we know how modding will work on consoles though, this is all speculation. Hopefully no curse account would be needed in any of this, just click stuff in the spaceport.

In the past modding console games has required things like hex editing and a usb drive or SD card, and required a PC anyway. If it could all be contained to just the console that would be great.

perhaps official mod depositories could be linked directly to ps4 ksp servers?

Edited June 18, 2015 by r4pt0r

[katateochi]

Thing is katateochi, there's no way to measure whether KSP development was slowed, not now and not at any time in the future, though we have HarvesteR saying that development time was sped up thanks to help from Flying Tiger, which is likely to happen again as Squad port to Unity5, further shortening development time.

Well Squad should know pretty accurately week by week how team performance is changing (I'm assuming they use some form of industry standard metric tracking, ie PivotalTracker). Whether they share that with us is totally another matter (and personally as a dev, I don't share that info with my clients) so we have to trust what they tell us, but that trust has been rather shaken of late (hence us being all skeptical and prone to assuming the worst).

So the claim that this PS4 port is going to slow KSP development isn't really valid, and many other things can be claimed to do the same such as the plushie deal, but again there's no way to measure this.

Added to this, many players want Squad to take more time, but in the same breath claim that development is slowed by X reason, it's not possible to have both.

I think there is a bit of distinction here; I am one of the players who wants Squad to take their time, on the core game, but I think that we're feeling miffed that core dev is being slowed by other side lines. Personally it's not the dev being slowed that bothers me, it's context switching that I'm concerned about. If the dev team are having to switch between work on the core improvements and spending time bringing FT up to speed then that is likely to reduce their performance (by which I mean attention to detail, more than speed).

Yes, what I am saying is speculation, but it is speculation based on a fair bit of experience in managing programing projects.

[DuoDex]

Yup. I'm not as worried as I was when they just went 'PS4! EEEY!'. My hope is that Squad will do what Mojang did - keep up development and let the porting company try to keep up.

[technicalfool]

I dont meddle with that stuff on my PS4. I have however messed around with modding the Wii, playing Project M, a Smash Bros. mod.

What we should all take note of is Bethesda announced modding will be a possibility on the Xbox1 Fallout 4. It is expected to come to PS4 as well: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/fallout-4-pc-mods-will-be-playable-on-ps4-eventual/1100-6428239/

Is the delay between XB1 mods and PS4 mods an exclusivity thing(microsoft paying bethesda so mods come to XB1 first?), or is it because the framework for a sony modding system is not in place? I dont know. But such a thing is expected at some point.

I will say that if the framework is available, a system wherein you can get mods ingame would be best. I would hope for the following:

Player starts ps4

starts KSP

main menu

clicks spaceport

clicks the mods/crafts they want downloaded/activated

plays KSP

That would be awesome. Until we know how modding will work on consoles though, this is all speculation. Hopefully no curse account would be needed in any of this, just click stuff in the spaceport.

In the past modding console games has required things like hex editing and a usb drive or SD card, and required a PC anyway. If it could all be contained to just the console that would be great.

perhaps official mod depositories could be linked directly to ps4 ksp servers?

Well, if KSPS4 (I hope that becomes the official title) runs on the same mono-based system as the PC version, with mono being used as an abstraction layer between MSIL and the underlying hardware, then it may well be possible for a lot of mods to "just work" on any mono-based system. It's why many, if not most mods work across Win/Mac/Linux without any additional mucking about.

The problem is that the PS4 is very much a locked down toy rather than a general purpose computer, and that's the way Sony like it. Allowing anybody to just shove a mono assembly/DLL into KSPS4 would be tantamount to allowing arbitrary code to run on the PS4. I'm not sure what their per-title sandboxing is like. If the only thing a mod can see is KSP's "sandbox" so to speak, then I can't see there being any massive security issues for Sony.

If however, a mod can ../../../../ its way across the filesystem and other similar wonderfulness, then expect there to be a big fat NOPE to any modding at all.

Of course, this is all speculation. I guess we'll find out about mod support closer to release.

[tygoo7]

I dont meddle with that stuff on my PS4. I have however messed around with modding the Wii, playing Project M, a Smash Bros. mod. and some roster editing for backbreaker, a football game.

What we should all take note of is Bethesda announced modding will be a possibility on the Xbox1 Fallout 4. It is expected to come to PS4 as well: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/fallout-4-pc-mods-will-be-playable-on-ps4-eventual/1100-6428239/

Is the delay between XB1 mods and PS4 mods an exclusivity thing(microsoft paying bethesda so mods come to XB1 first?), or is it because the framework for a sony modding system is not in place? I dont know. But such a thing is expected at some point.

I will say that if the framework is available, a system wherein you can get mods ingame would be best. I would hope for the following:

Player starts ps4

starts KSP

main menu

clicks spaceport

clicks the mods/crafts they want downloaded/activated

plays KSP

That would be awesome. Until we know how modding will work on consoles though, this is all speculation. Hopefully no curse account would be needed in any of this, just click stuff in the spaceport.

In the past modding console games has required things like hex editing and a usb drive or SD card, and required a PC anyway. If it could all be contained to just the console that would be great.

perhaps official mod depositories could be linked directly to ps4 ksp servers?

Maybe they could include something like CKAN directly in KSP for PS4?

[BagelRabbit]

See, the problem here is that helpful criticism is a perfectly reasonable thing to put out there. Saying, "I don't approve of this change because this and this and that" should not be criticized, as long as it is not meant to do anything but to improve the game we know and love. Often, though, the criticism SQUAD faces goes a bit beyond anything anyone could call 'helpful.'

The problem seems to arise when:

1) Some not-quite-level-minded soul comes on and starts loudly complaining. This is quite common amongst this Forum. It is also quite common in most other forums.

2) A loud minority of people (or sometimes even a louder majority) agrees and starts parroting some of the earlier statements made. This is generally propagated by the misconception* that SQUAD listens if the entire community violently protests, whereas it won't listen if we make gentle statements about fixing KSP.

*I'm not entirely sure that the above is really a misconception: if maybe fifteen people asked politely to bring back the Round-8, would it have been done? It's an interesting question. But I digress.

3) They battering-ram SQUAD for a while. Eventually, they lose interest, noting that SQUAD probably won't listen anyway. They drift away, grumbling. No progress is made on either side.

I don't know whose fault this is. Maybe it's the boisterous Forum-goers, maybe it's SQUAD, or maybe (and in my opinion, almost certainly) it's a combination of both. But regardless of who is feeding this cycle, moderators seem to be caught in the crossfire.

I really sympathize for moderators and I know the job must be quite difficult at times... I just hope that something happens, and soon. So far as I know, there hasn't been any talk of compromise between Forum-goers, moderators, and devs... maybe this could/should happen at some point?

Sorry for deviating off the original topic of the thread, by the way... though I just saw a lot of moderators discussing this issue on this thread, so I can't have caused that much trouble

-Upsilon

[basic.syntax]

LoL, Upsilon, you've pointed out problems in points 1-2-3... then ask for a compromise? I agree with your first paragraph, but what do you have in mind? Moderators have rules they try to operate under, only removing the worst of the worst. Forum users can say pretty much whatever they like about a topic, up until it conflicts with forum rules, and needs moderation. The only way I see to reduce 1-2-3 is for those types of people to change, or heavy-handed moderation. Heavy moderation leads to lots of arguing about edge cases. I don't think either is happening, so absent other options I'm not thinking of, I don't see anything changing.

If the forum has 1000 active users online, and 50% decide to post about something... even if all is written calmly and reasonably, that is a lot of posts. Developers start wishing for a TL;DR, and probably stop reading and go back to trying to make the game better.

PS4. There. I'm on topic

###

OK, I can do better than that. Almost a TL;DR for the thread.

The PS4 worries and negative opinions show a slight tug of war between:

"this is a cash grab, a sell-out" (as if: tons more people will buy it now, maybe Sony dumped a bucket of money on Squad.)

- and -

• worries that the port will be bad, ('KSP is too complex to hand over to a primarily mobile developer'),
  
• PC development will suffer,
  
• it can't be nearly as successful on consoles as it's been on PC/Mac/Linux,
  
• too many keyboard commands to work well on a console controller,
  
• mod difficulties - ('the game I enjoy on PC is mainly thanks to great mods'),
  

The "cash grab" opinion seems to be in the minority, the others (which point out problems with the easy money theory, if that's what "cash grab" means) have a lot more they can write about. The truth will probably end up somewhere in the middle, as it normally does. I've written in other posts that I wish Squad success in this endeavor. Any additional income, if wisely reinvested in KSP development, should help make KSP better for everyone.

Edited June 19, 2015 by basic.syntax

[NoMrBond]

It is expected to come to PS4 as well: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/fallout-4-pc-mods-will-be-playable-on-ps4-eventual/1100-6428239/

Is the delay between XB1 mods and PS4 mods an exclusivity thing(microsoft paying bethesda so mods come to XB1 first?), or is it because the framework for a sony modding system is not in place? I dont know. But such a thing is expected at some point.

Sony have also said that mod support is coming for FFXIV:H (shortly after launch was the timeframe), so it sounds like some kind of mod framework is coming for PS4 (I doubt it would be exclusive to FFXIV)

[boxman]

So.. they can't make money now, because it's not beneficial to PC players?

You should re read the comments in this thread. Most of us who are skeptical about this project are worried that it will COST them money instead of profiting from it.

I have so far only seen a few people ever mentioning they want a console port. This type of game is the kind of game that rarely do good on consoles and the controls and lack of mods will also make this game very limited compared to the pc version and that is if they somehow make it even run properly on such low end hardware.

We are also skeptical because the company behind the port has absolutely no trackrecord except for very simple and shady looking mobile games.

Some of the games shown on the website even looks like they have been just reskinned and sold as a different game even though the gameplay looks the same.

The type of games they make is something you could easily make in gamemaker with no coding skills at all.

Edit: I am not saying this is proof or anything that they are not capable of porting the game, but I think it is perfectly ok to be skeptical and critical when they have no track record with advanced games like this. I think the only thing that will help us relax a bit is them showing us that the game runs and that the controller actually works with editor, UI and things like action groups.

- - - Updated - - -

Sony have also said that mod support is coming for FFXIV:H (shortly after launch was the timeframe), so it sounds like some kind of mod framework is coming for PS4 (I doubt it would be exclusive to FFXIV)

Either way it will be limited to mods that does not need any extra code/dlls to function. So it will still be a heavily stripped down version even if by some miracle they get it working as good with the ps4 controller.

Edited June 19, 2015 by boxman

[mordin86]

No idea why would Squad do that. KSP is not exactly your typical console game. Also in my few years with this game I have never seen anyone asking for the console version.

How many console users will really buy this?

They should really put 64 bit support/Unity 5 first.

First Elite dangerous, now KSP.... in both cases there's a chance that PC users will be from this moment more or less ignored due to focus on other platform.