Does anyone here play the Demo?

[Eldrad_Ulthran]

On 1/1/2016 at 3:57 AM, pandaman said:

With all due respect, and no offence intended, not everyone can spare $20 for a game that easily.  Different people have different circumstances, that's life.

 No matter how good a game, and how good value for money it is (and KSP is awesome value for money), some kids need to save up their pocket money and some adults have more urgent priorities (like food and bills).

I totally agree: I only bought the game a few months ago but before that I was using a potato to play the demo. I was broke and could'nt afford new hardware. Fortunately dad chipped in and bought me a laptop

[RX2000]

I personally couldnt STAND the demo. It actually did the opposite & made me NOT buy the game after I played it the first time. I had to go & watch some YouTube videos of KSP before I decided to go back & give it another try after playing the demo. It was just confusing & very poorly done if you ask me.

[Sharpy]

I don't think there's anything you can do in demo that you can't do in the full game on the same hardware. Maaaybe if you're very, very tight on RAM the extra parts won't fit, but that would require a computer literally so crap it would be unable to run WinXP. And I don't think KSP runs on Windows Millennium. Stock KSP has quite small minimal requirements.

Sure demo limits your capabilities so you're simply unable to build anything that would cause serious performance problems - and if you go into heavy modding and megastructures, there's no computer too powerful for KSP. But I believe your first landing would be a more pleasant experience on Full than Demo, regardless of hardware. And yeah, not everyone has spare $20 ready. But saving up $20 should be pretty easy - and IMO, waiting for a new computer to get KSP is a mistake.

Edited November 27, 2016 by Sharpy

[Eldrad_Ulthran]

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

and IMO, waiting for a new computer to get KSP is a mistake

True, but my old laptop was over 10 years old and had practically no ram available.

[cantab]

The 0.18.3 demo gave me a great first impression of the game, its tutorials got me started and then I went on the internet to learn a bit more. But the 1.0 demo suffers from a poor choice of parts. From memory:

0.18.3 : Large fuel tanks for decent sized, reasonably rigid (by pre-ARM standards at least), low part count rockets.
1.0: Small fuel tanks mean wobbly rockets and a part count spike.

0.18.3: Has gimballing engines, adjustable fins, RCS thrusters, and 1.25m reaction wheels to control your rocket.
1.0: Only offers RCS and small reaction wheels that don't fit in the stack. Controlling your rocket is made unnecessarily harder than in the full game.

0.18.3: Has the 909 which makes a good upper stage engine, which demonstrates the whole point of staging and helps players get beyond low orbit. Good lander engine too.
1.0: Lacks a good upper stage or lander engine.

All these part issues come from one source: The tech tree of the full game was allowed to dictate the parts available in the demo, rather than giving the demo the parts to show KSP in its best light.

As for the new demo's tutorials, I've never looked. I can't really judge them in the same way a novice would anyway.

Regarding PC performance, it's possible that on a PC with very limited RAM KSP will only load if the settings are turned down, which of course is a bit hard to do if the game won't load and show the settings screen! (You can do it by editing the file but that's not obvious to a newbie.) The demo would be less likely to suffer this issue.

[Tyko]

On 11/26/2016 at 6:35 PM, RX2000 said:

I personally couldnt STAND the demo. It actually did the opposite & made me NOT buy the game after I played it the first time. I had to go & watch some YouTube videos of KSP before I decided to go back & give it another try after playing the demo. It was just confusing & very poorly done if you ask me.

I'm with @RX2000. I first tried the demo last year and it almost scared me away from the game. Last week I installed it again so I could help @AdmFranzvonHippie (new forum member) with a few questions. I thought it would be super simple because I've played KSP for thousands of hours. Even with that experience I found the mix of parts they chose for the demo to be a far cry from ideal. I also wish that the demo was based on 1.2.x rather than 1.[something older]

[NSEP]

I play it rarely. Just for lolz.

[wumpus]

On 11/26/2016 at 9:35 PM, RX2000 said:

I personally couldnt STAND the demo. It actually did the opposite & made me NOT buy the game after I played it the first time. I had to go & watch some YouTube videos of KSP before I decided to go back & give it another try after playing the demo. It was just confusing & very poorly done if you ask me.

That's weird.  Which one?  There were two demos released.  One was based on the .18 version (basically the last free edition, presumably altered to not accept mods and a few other limitations) and another based on the 1.0.0 release.  I don't remember the 1.0.0 demo being unplayable (I think I landed on Minmus), but I do remember some nasty bugs when the main release dropped (some of that might have been steam bugs, I think there was a nasty conflict between stale code and new code that made parachutes unusable.  Completely redownloading fixed that).

[Ty Tan Tu]

This is probably heresy, and I would not blame the moderators for deleting it, but you might want to look at Orbiter too. That is where I started out. It was actually Orbiter that lead me to KSP.

[wumpus]

1 hour ago, Ty Tan Tu said:

This is probably heresy, and I would not blame the moderators for deleting it, but you might want to look at Orbiter too. That is where I started out. It was actually Orbiter that lead me to KSP.

Considering that Harvester started by writing a "simplified orbiter" (and the first discussions/announcements of KSP were in the orbiter forum), I would be painfully embarrassed if they deleted it.

[Tyko]

is the Demo somehow locked so players can add more parts / mod it?

[RX2000]

4 hours ago, wumpus said:

That's weird.  Which one?  There were two demos released.  One was based on the .18 version (basically the last free edition, presumably altered to not accept mods and a few other limitations) and another based on the 1.0.0 release.  I don't remember the 1.0.0 demo being unplayable (I think I landed on Minmus), but I do remember some nasty bugs when the main release dropped (some of that might have been steam bugs, I think there was a nasty conflict between stale code and new code that made parachutes unusable.  Completely redownloading fixed that).

This was a couple years ago, a while before 1.0 came out, so it must have been the 0.18 one. I wasnt impressed.

I might check out the 1.0 demo tho. Maybe its a lot better than the old one.