Devnote Tuesday: Forums, letters and development

[quyxkh]

Random points from discussion: 

"It'll ship when it's ready": I figure you already know you're in very good company.

Too late now, but next time you've got trouble with a delayed-waaay-too-long merge try 'git-imerge'.

Congrats on what looks to be a successful near-rewrite. Doing it again with better tools _and_ hindsight, I'm salivating.

Btw and off-topic, chock one more supporter up for the reward-real-research UI decisions, like not showing ΔV and TWR, that stuff's well within reach of a bright pre-teen, I figure some kids will actually hunt down the rocket equation for themselves, I smile thinking about the charge they'll get when they learn how it works and how simple it is..

[CrashTestDanny]

41 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

You know that 1.1 and Unity5 is planned, and that the developers are still active, hence the dev notes, so where you can come up with "postponed indefinitely" is frankly mind boggling

 

Things won't seem so bad if you lighten up

It was a friendly question posed in direct response to a comment by the OP.  If you don't want to hear or address it because you perceive it as antagonistic, well there's not a lot I can do about that.  Things also won't seem so bad if I spend my time playing a game that doesn't reliably crash every half hour because of memory leaks, and the perception that you, Mr. Moderator, representative of Squad, are giving me is that you'd prefer I do so.  So this is me, lightening up and bidding you goodbye.

 

Danny

[Red Iron Crown]

@CrashTestDanny You're totally misreading that response. There's absolutely no reason to think that the next update is postponed "indefinitely" given that the devs are still talking about the work on the update weekly. There's no need for a direct response from the devs because the fact that it's incorrect is obvious.

[CrashTestDanny]

2 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

@CrashTestDanny You're totally misreading that response. There's absolutely no reason to think that the next update is postponed "indefinitely" given that the devs are still talking about the work on the update weekly. There's no need for a direct response from the devs because the fact that it's incorrect is obvious.

Yeah, obviously a customer's concern about such a thing is wrong and stupid and doesn't need to be addressed, so I'll just stop bothering you.

Danny

[Red Iron Crown]

You are literally posting in a thread discussing the devs most recent update about their progress on the next version. Your concern is addressed in the OP of the thread, by Squad themselves.

[Racescort666]

7 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

Hahaha, actually I find this font (Lucida Sans Unicode) as more annoying than the Comic Sans MS. But nothing says progress than the Courier New Font.

Since the update to 1.0.5, even with rendering, scatter, and quality turned as high as I can, I have seemed to have lost all the trees. Has anyone else have this happen? Is there a setting I need to adjust?

FYI, comic sands does not show as comic sands on mobile. Maybe it's that I'm using different browsers (safari on mobile and chrome for full). Courier New is the only one that shows up properly.

[mattinoz]

4 hours ago, quyxkh said:

Random points from discussion: 

"It'll ship when it's ready": I figure you already know you're in very good company.

Too late now, but next time you've got trouble with a delayed-waaay-too-long merge try 'git-imerge'.

Congrats on what looks to be a successful near-rewrite. Doing it again with better tools _and_ hindsight, I'm salivating.

Btw and off-topic, chock one more supporter up for the reward-real-research UI decisions, like not showing ΔV and TWR, that stuff's well within reach of a bright pre-teen, I figure some kids will actually hunt down the rocket equation for themselves, I smile thinking about the charge they'll get when they learn how it works and how simple it is..

Well as long as they don't fall in to the company of:-

-Duke Nukem Forever

-Microsoft Longhorn

-Apple Copland

BTW and at risk of inflaming off-topicnes. I'm well and truly in the other camp. Delta-V s not needed because it's hard more so because it's !expletive! tedious. I shouldn't need excel spreadsheets to play a game. I have enough of those building buildings.

Edited December 3, 2015 by mattinoz
spelling

[CrashTestDanny]

10 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

You are literally posting in a thread discussing the devs most recent update about their progress on the next version. Your concern is addressed in the OP of the thread, by Squad themselves.

Nobody implied that there is not work being done on the next version.  The OP made a statement that " Dropping our internal Christmas deadline, discussed last week, was definitely the right call looking back on it".  I responded with an inquiry as to whether or not there is a new internal deadline.  You mods are blowing this out of proportion and because you somehow perceive the inquiry as antagonistic or maybe unnecessary, you are trying to suppress it with statements like "it is obvious".  Well clearly it is not obvious, since I have the question, and others have voiced similar concerns in this thread and others.

For the record, as someone else already stated, indefinitely does not mean that no progress has been made - it means that no date has been set, or the date is undefined.  That is exactly what my inquiry was: "has a new date been set or is it postponed indefinitely".  A valid response to that question is not intuitively obvious from the original post.  There are three possible valid responses to my inquiry:  1 - A date has not been set yet (which means that the date is indefinite or undefined and which is the logical assumption based on the OP - but not quite obvious), 2 - The new date is X, or 3 - There is a new date, but we are not going to publicize it yet.  The response "things won't seem so bad if you lighten up" is not a valid response and is, quite frankly, inflammatory.  Your response of "nobody needs to answer your question because it's obvious that you are wrong in asking it" is less offensive, but still seems aimed at suppressing the question rather than actually shedding any light on it.  If I had seen the answer to my question in the OP, I would not have felt the need to make the inquiry.  If a valid answer is there, then please show me, because I did not find any clarification, only the original statement that the deadline was dropped, and it's implication is clearly that there is not a new deadline (I trust I don't need to define the word "Dropping").  

Your statements that I should lighten up or that my question is obviously wrong are simply not helpful and in my opinion, making such statements is an abuse of your position as moderators of this forum and a disservice to the community and the developers alike.

 

Danny

[Red Iron Crown]

Perhaps we are defining "indefinitely" differently. When I hear that something has been postponed indefinitely, the connotation is that work has stopped on it and it may never happen.

It should be obvious that there is an internal deadline, virtually every project undertaken by a company does. So I'll be explicit: Yes, there is a new internal deadline.

Finally, if I wanted to "abuse my position as moderator" to "suppress your question", I would simply delete it.

Edited December 3, 2015 by Red Iron Crown

[Starhawk]

3 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Perhaps we are defining "indefinitely" differently. When I hear that something has been postponed indefinitely, the connotation is that work has stopped on it and it may never happen.

I have to agree with Red that this is the common usage of the term 'indefinitely'.

Happy landings!

Edited December 3, 2015 by Starhawk

[CrashTestDanny]

You agree that "indefinite" is commonly used to mean all work has stopped?  I've never really encountered that usage and every dictionary I've found so far seems to contradict that...

From dictionary.com:  "not definite; without fixed or specified limit;unlimited"  

Doesn't actually have anything to do with whether or not work is being done.

Danny

[swjr-swis]

On 12/2/2015, 12:00:51, SQUAD said:

Any change will break someone’s workflow, and this is quite a major one. Give it a try for a week or two and we’re sure you’ll find that the new forums are an improvement.

I will admit: the International forum being effectively nuked with no real outlook to a fix, makes it very hard to see the improvement. I wish you guys would seriously look into some way of repairing this, especially since it is not just the International forum affected. The consistency of the translation error strongly suggests a search&replace is entirely within the realm of possibilities, whereas the currently offered 'workaround' (retype every single post almost word for word) is ridiculous to the extreme to those affected.

In any case, yay for progress on the 1.1 front.

 

Edited December 3, 2015 by swjr-swis

[Starhawk]

 

29 minutes ago, CrashTestDanny said:

You agree that "indefinite" is commonly used to mean all work has stopped?  I've never really encountered that usage and every dictionary I've found so far seems to contradict that...

Well, thesaurus.com lists 'continuously', 'endlessly', and 'without end' as three of the seven listed synonyms for indefinitely.

The Collins dictionary gives the definition 'Without any limit of time or number.' As well as the synonyms 'endlessly', 'continually', 'ad infinitum', and 'for ever'.

It may possibly be a more common usage in British or Canadian english.

Happy landings!

Edited December 3, 2015 by Starhawk

[Red Iron Crown]

Connotation, not definition. Companies often say something is "postponed indefinitely" to save face when it is actually cancelled.

[swjr-swis]

On 12/2/2015, 3:34:58, r4pt0r said:

the current forum format is far too empty with too much blank white space and not enough contrast between borders and the light gray/white

I can recommend using a custom style to fix this, until SQUAD do something about it. I used a similar style to what is published in this thread, but with most of the white replaced by light greys and blues, and it is leagues better than stock.

Only things that still bother me are the forced WYSIWYG and the multiquote/quote/like bar not staying at the very bottom for posts with sigs.

[r4pt0r]

Hahaha this page...

I will be laughing at this indefinitely.


Edit to swjr-swis: I saw that, but cannot get it to work with my browser. I use one called Iron, which is chrome based, but with more privacy feathures and without any data ever being sent to google. Google has taken it upon themselves to make it so Iron can no longer use Chrome extensions so that idea is borked. In the mean time, I made sure my sig is reasonably obnoxious and hopefully, someone can make the very few tweaks needed. That very thread mentions that it is a quick fix until the forums fix themselves.

Edited December 3, 2015 by r4pt0r

[swjr-swis]

On 12/2/2015, 3:02:20, adsii1970 said:

Since the update to 1.0.5, even with rendering, scatter, and quality turned as high as I can, I have seemed to have lost all the trees. Has anyone else have this happen? Is there a setting I need to adjust?

It seems obvious, but besides the scatter density turned as high as possible, there is also a toggle to enable or disable Terrain Scatters entirely, on the graphics settings. Have you checked if that one is enabled?

[Racescort666]

27 minutes ago, CrashTestDanny said:

You agree that "indefinite" is commonly used to mean all work has stopped?  I've never really encountered that usage and every dictionary I've found so far seems to contradict that...

From dictionary.com:  "not definite; without fixed or specified limit;unlimited"  

Doesn't actually have anything to do with whether or not work is being done.

Danny

In my experience, saying that something has been postponed indefinitely is a tongue in cheek way of saying it's been cancelled. Not talking about Squad but generically, the company doesn't want to admit that they've wasted time and money so they say it's been postponed, like that makes things better. 

In other words, "postponed indefinitely" is an idiom for "cancelled." 

[CrashTestDanny]

21 minutes ago, Racescort666 said:

In my experience, saying that something has been postponed indefinitely is a tongue in cheek way of saying it's been cancelled. Not talking about Squad but generically, the company doesn't want to admit that they've wasted time and money so they say it's been postponed, like that makes things better. 

In other words, "postponed indefinitely" is an idiom for "cancelled." 

I agree that some people use it this way.  I was not and I believed that was clear since we are discussing continuing work.  I don't agree that the continuing work "obviously" has an internal deadline.  I am a developer myself and I understand that sometimes it's tough to put a timeline on this type of work, and I have also seen plenty of projects postponed indefinitely that did end up being completed later on, but continued without a deadline for some period of time.

Regardless, since they don't seem to want to give us any idea when we might expect fixes to some of the major issues that I and others seem to encounter on an all-too-frequent basis, I think I need to find something more fun than waiting 8 minutes out of every 30 for KSP to reload because it has a 200M-600M memory leak on every scene change.  That's kinda sad to me, because without that one issue, there's no question in my mind that KSP would be hands-down the best, funnest, most awesome game I have ever played (just check my initial post in the introductions thread).  But if I have to spend a quarter to a third of my limited and therefore valuable play time recovering from [software] crashes (as opposed to spacecraft or aircraft crashes which are my own fault) then my frustration with that pretty quickly overcomes the enjoyment I get from the game.

Danny

[Glaran K'erman]

Guess what, the OP never uses the word 'indefinite" or any of its variations. Problem solved, we can stop talking bout this.

I am haunted by what Doc Turk has in the works.....WHAT IS IT! I CAN'T TAKE THE SUSPENSE!

Edited December 3, 2015 by Glaran K'erman

[csebal]

Thanks for the update, Squad, good to hear there is progress and congrats for the forum upgrade.

Sorry for the TL/DR, but I can only read so much drama in one thread 

What is the consensus here, do we have a new release date set for 1.1 or is it still hush-hush?

 

Edited December 3, 2015 by csebal
Stuff

[Superfluous J]

15 minutes ago, csebal said:

What is the consensus here, do we have a new release date set for 1.1 or is it still hush-hush?

The consensus is "Yes."

To both questions.

[steve_v]

IME, working to a deadline, self imposed or otherwise, generally leads to bugs being overlooked or features dropped. The latter concerns me not at all, but I'd much prefer 1.1 came out late and working properly, as opposed to on-time and buggy.
Let's see if we can get a release that doesn't need an immediate hotfix for a change, shall we? By all means Squad, take your time, so long as it's being spent wisely.

As such, I'd never ask for a release schedule, but I will most likely complain loudly if it's released in a rush/mess.

Edited December 3, 2015 by steve_v

[softweir]

@steve_v: Alas; with a system as complex as KSP developers can never guarantee a release will be bug-free, no matter how long they spend on debugging it. It is impossible for a test team to come up with as many ingenious ways to break a game as a few thousand eccentric and enthusiastic gamers can!

However, the number of bugs tends towards zero as time approaches infinity; so the longer, the better. Just don't hold out for zero bugs.

[csebal]

2 hours ago, steve_v said:

As such, I'd never ask for a release schedule, but I will most likely complain loudly if it's released in a rush/mess.

I would not complain either. I would simply be disappointed if I do not have a release date. Would be a long and off topic discussion, suffice to say, that I have my own expectations towards practitioners of my profession and being able to tell how much time you need to finish the job is among those expectations.

As a side note: Spoons can be dangerous if handled improperly and should be banned to avoid being misused.  I mean.. if you are not careful, you can scoop your eyes out with them  I am sure that release schedules are okay, as long as they are used responsibly by *professionals*.