Explorer Mode / Fog of war style

[vontreigo]

I'd like to see a mode where you start with the basic and can't see anything but a few hundred meters around your base. You only have the runway, and crew building, and must build the others thru a tiered game play. With the fog of war you only see a few hundred meters around your base and is uncovered through visiting those areas. I think you must even build things like a telescope to even view other kerbinly bodies. no access to "M" to see kerbin either. 

I think if this can be implemented you force the player to be a true explorer.

[cubinator]

I like it. Of course most of us already know what all the planets look like anyways, but it'd I'd still be fun to have to discover planets before they even show up in map. You'd also have very poor telescope images of planets when you first discover them, especially far planets and small ones. As tech advances, better telescope can be built to discover more stuff, and rockets can be sent to the planets to get a closer look. This would work well if Distant Object Enhancement was stock, because finding planets without a visual cue is really hard.

[lobe]

I don't think Squad could get the fog down under the area of the planet, unless Squad implements an orbit navigation tool, like what Orbiter or Raster Prop Monitor uses. Map view does more than show other planets, it really helps with making orbital mechanics intuitive. In fact, the only reason why I started playing KSP was entirely the map view, because Orbiter's MFD navigation tool was too confusing at the time.

I can agree the planets and bodies outside of Kerbin's SOI being hidden would make a great game mode, but Kerbin needs a map view to do orbit navigation (without extensive calculations, obviously).

[Motokid600]

I was thinking the same thing, but just hiding planets. And making Distant Object Enhancements stock. To take it a step further the picture of the planet you get in the tracking station and map view is only as good as the one you obtained with a telescope. So at low tech the planets would just be a blurry ball until you get better images. The far side should be blank as well until you observe an entire revolution.

Itd open up a whole new imaging science.

Edited April 18, 2016 by Motokid600

[todofwar]

Ive seen other versions of this suggested and it is definitely one of my favorite suggestions. Only problem is it really only works for your first playthrough unless you bring in procedural systems which is a whole other can of worms. Still, even if it is just the kerbal system I think it would be awesome to implement.

[Pthigrivi]

I've always felt like this is something that seems like a good Idea until you start to think about how this would actually play out in gameplay. The core hook of the game is that when you first open it up you can build a rocket and put a guy in it and go to space. As lobe mentioned without a sense of kerbin as a sphere you don't have a sense of what reaching orbit requires or even looks like. It seems cool and exiting, but in practice it impedes the player from experiencing the core joy of the game.

 

Then there's hiding planets. In this case they're either locked somehow which requires unlocking them in sequence and adding an oddly artificial constraint on  playstyle freedom or else injects a telescope mechanic. Again the telescope sounds realistic enough but think about how tedious and frustrating it would be to stare at your screen scrolling around the sky and time warping for hours on end looking for tiny specks.

 

Next is blurring the surface. My main question here is: so what if it's blurred? Does it change how you play the game? You're still just going to fly into orbit and land any old place because the first time you land on a planet there's no special reason to land anywhere in particular and therefore nothing that blurring the planet hides. I do agree that discovery and exploration should be key to this game but I'd much rather see an investment made to actually populate the surfaces of the planets with things to discover than hide what's already there. 

Edited April 18, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[James M]

On 4/18/2016 at 7:56 AM, Pthigrivi said:

I've always felt like this is something that seems like a good Idea until you start to think about how this would actually play out in gameplay. The core hook of the game is that when you first open it up you can build a rocket and put a guy in it and go to space. As lobe mentioned without a sense of kerbin as a sphere you don't have a sense of what reaching orbit requires or even looks like. It seems cool and exiting, but in practice it impedes the player from experiencing the core joy of the game.

 

Then there's hiding planets. In this case they're either locked somehow which requires unlocking them in sequence and adding an oddly artificial constraint on  playstyle freedom or else injects a telescope mechanic. Again the telescope sounds realistic enough but think about how tedious and frustrating it would be to stare at your screen scrolling around the sky and time warping for hours on end looking for tiny specks.

 

Next is blurring the surface. My main question here is: so what if it's blurred? Does it change how you play the game? You're still just going to fly into orbit and land any old place because the first time you land on a planet there's no special reason to land anywhere in particular and therefore nothing that blurring the planet hides. I do agree that discovery and exploration should be key to this game but I'd much rather see an investment made to actually populate the surfaces of the planets with things to discover than hide what's already there. 

I think you're incorrect on most cases actually. First point; Start the game and have the "Fog" surround the planet Kerbin. You can see the biomes on Kerbin but outside of that all you see are blurry figures on the maps with a question mark over them. I also think having their orbits untracked would keep us from knowing whether or not they're planets/moons/asteroids. Second Point: Instead of a telescope, have it so each time you upgrade your tracking station, each planet gets dramatically less blurry and you gain a little more info on it's apparent gravitational pull, current orbit and other useful information like that. On the second, they could start tracking asteroids and specifically differentiate what's a planet/moon and what's not. Upon the final upgrade, you'd know exactly what the planet looked like (Which helps you to determine if it even has an atmosphere in the first place) and you'd have enough data to tell you how much delta V and Parachutes you'll probably need. 

Now if you wanted to just go to said blurry figure with your early game mun lander and attempt a landing with no info, fine, do so at your own risk. But when you don't have the delta v for a landing and a return, it won't be the ship's fault, it'll be yours. 

[Baricus]

While this feature sounds like it would add a nice feature to the game at first glance, it seems to me like it wouldn't make much sense at all in the way it was suggested.  If a "fog of war" was implemented on Kerbin, in a manner similar to many strategy games, it would only break the player's immersion.  It makes very little sense for the home planet of a species to be entirely covered by clouds or some other representation of the unknown until you happen to fly a plane over it.  I doubt that the Kerbal race needs to put a telescope in a polar orbit to be able to tell where a mountain is (I could see it adding more detail to the existing map).  

All other planets also shouldn't be completely hidden from view.  Its possible to simply look upwards and see five of the eight planets in the sky.  Of course that tells us little about them, but we know that they exist and their orbits can be calculated from their motion.  If some sort of system to obscure the planets was implemented, it would make more sense for it only to reveal information about the planets.  Perhaps before you get into a planets sphere of influence, they appear as grainy, rough photos in the map view (or if you wanted to go all the way, they would be colored circles).  Once you enter, it takes the best photo's that you have about the planet and uses them in the map view.    The issue with this approach though, is deciding when you are close enough to take a better picture.  A special camera part could be added, designed for taking photos of planets, but that might require a satellite in polar orbit to get the best pictures of a planet, due to its field of view.  If there isn't a special part though, then exploration would wind up rather arbitrary.  

Overall, I don't really see a way that this feature could work and add something to the game, unless hiding knowledge from new players is considered an addition.  It seems like something that would be great when considered by itself, but when applied to KSP, it does not create an incentive to explore and it does not fit with the general concept of the game.  

[vontreigo]

 We do you have a tech tree that in itself is a fog of war. Any map that is generated by uses fog of war. For the planets we can have them be discoverable through science points.

[numerobis]

If you imagine KSP as starting roughly in the 1950s or 60s, we had flown over every spot in the world by then and we had pretty decent imagery of the Moon from telescopes. We knew very well where all the planets were, how massive they were, and had a pretty good idea of their density, and similarly the larger satellites, asteroids, dwarf planets, etc. On Earth we were just discovering the mid-ocean ridges.

We had little to no idea what Venus was like under the clouds, we didn't have a good idea of what the surface of any other planet or satellite was like, we didn't know of any KBOs other than Pluto, we didn't know what comets or asteroids looked like. It took until the 1980s to get fly-bys of most bodies (and as we flew by them, we discovered an awful lot of new, tiny moons), it took until the 1990s to realize there's a lot of KBOs out there and Pluto is just one of the larger ones, and it took until last year to fly by Pluto.

So for fog of war kinds of ideas, it would make sense to have a camera scientific instrument that can send back photos (costs a *lot* of bandwidth though). Until you do, or until you send a Kerbal, the surface is fuzzy -- increasingly so as the body is far away. Some objects like Bop and Pol might be just hidden until you get closer, but all the big ones would be known. Similarly, you have no idea what's on Eve until you land there or scan it with radar -- and with radar you'd be able to get a nicer picture of the ocean floors.

There's already precedent for a hidden celestial body in the game: asteroids and, rumor has it, something near Duna.

[James M]

5 hours ago, Baricus said:

Overall, I don't really see a way that this feature could work and add something to the game, unless hiding knowledge from new players is considered an addition.  It seems like something that would be great when considered by itself, but when applied to KSP, it does not create an incentive to explore and it does not fit with the general concept of the game.  

So you're telling me that by hiding the things we're looking to find, we wouldn't be tempted to try and find them? I somehow don't believe you  I mean, after all, that's really what exploration is right? Attempting to discover the unknown?

[Pthigrivi]

I just think you're trying to hide the wrong things. We don't need to hide that Duna exists, just what we might find there. I do like the idea that valuable information about atmospheric and biome information would be hidden, but I think it would be better to determine that information by sending probes ahead to do experiments rather than having it automatically pop up on building upgrades. 

[tater]

13 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I just think you're trying to hide the wrong things. We don't need to hide that Duna exists, just what we might find there. I do like the idea that valuable information about atmospheric and biome information would be hidden, but I think it would be better to determine that information by sending probes ahead to do experiments rather than having it automatically pop up on building upgrades. 

This.

Any fog of war scenario needs to be rational. If you are ready for a space program, you have already characterized the orbits, and to a large extent the composition (rough density, and spectral data) of the planets. Small moons might be entirely undiscovered, but that's about it. The surface details of Duna would be unknown. The exact parameters of the atmosphere (and hence where to enter for a landing) would be only marginally known. The "blank slate" just isn't a thing.

[Baricus]

14 hours ago, James M said:

So you're telling me that by hiding the things we're looking to find, we wouldn't be tempted to try and find them?

In an oversimplified way, yes.  Just because we cant see something doesn't mean we want to.  The case changes whether you are referring to Kerbin or another planet, but either way it is the same end result.

Kerbin:

Spoiler

If this is about things on Kerbin placing an arbitrary fog over the whole planet doesn't really make anyone want to find things.  Just because you cannot see something doesn't mean its unknown.  Realistically, if a species is able to send someone into space, they have already mapped their planet through triangulation or other means.  Just putting a giant cloud or some other sort of obstruction over the entire planet would just break immersion, not motivate exploration.  There probably would be a few people who would go driving or flying over the entire planet, but sadly many spots on our planets look too similar for that to hold most people's attention.  Most people would simply stick some arbitrary satellite in polar orbit and now suddenly the Kerbal race would suddenly realize what their planet looks like.  That doesn't really incentivise exploration, it instead encourages whatever arbitrary task is chosen to remove the fog of war.  It makes no sense to actually explore the planet in any detail as a satellite in polar orbit works just fine to reveal it (or whatever other task is chosen to represent "discovery").

Other planets:

Spoiler

 

If you are talking about obscuring the other planets that still wouldn't add much.  Really the problem is, no one is trying to find the planets at this point in time.  The furthest in our solar system was discovered in 1846 (1930 if you count Pluto).  Yes we didn't know exactly what they were like, but we knew their orbits, gravity and all the stuff you would need to land there long before.  The only thing a fog of war would simulate is the fact that we didn't really know how they looked until we sent something there.  Take Pluto for example:

This is taken from Hubble and it was one of the best pictures we had until recently.  I would love for planets to look like this before you first went there, but since the system is always the same it would only really work once before coming rather meaningless.  After you unveil each planet by doing some arbitrary task, the sense of discovery would vanish quickly.  Having this sort of fog would also not help encourage exploration, except on the first time you unveil the planets, as after you have done it once you have seen it all.  

 

If your goal is to increase the amount of exploring players do, this is not really a wrong way to go about it, as it would certainly force players to do some sort of "exploration task" that is built into the game, whether it is mapping satellite or just simply getting close enough.  What it does not actually achieve though, is making the player want to explore.  The reason why we explore is not to discover the unknown, it is to satisfy our curiosity about the unknown.  Just simply draping a curtain over the planets makes them unknown, but it does not make you curious about them, especially if the only action necessary to uncover them doesn't even require exploration at all.  Instead, it becomes a quick chore to do before we can do more interesting things, just like sending the resources satellites up before mining.  

In my opinion, SQUAD has already put a way to incentivise exploration into the game.  All they did was make that one monolith easily visible from the space center screen (I assume done while they fixed the other hidden surprises).  In that one stroke, they show the player a peek behind the curtain and hinted at what else there is to explore out in space.  This little easter egg, just by being very badly hidden, hints at all the others that are hiding everywhere in the solar system.  It makes you curious and you start to look for them as you fly your missions.  Eventually you'll find more (or hear about more) and  you soon begin actively searching for them.  To do so you scour each and every body in the solar system, exploring every mountain and valley to see if there is another interesting tidbit that was left there for you.  You'll find the easter eggs, but you will also explore the land and find all the great sights that this game has to offer (unfortunately one of the areas it is lacking).  Just through the easter eggs hidden away in the game, it incentivises you to explore much better than any fog of war system could.

[Codraroll]

On 18.4.2016 at 2:56 PM, Pthigrivi said:

Then there's hiding planets. In this case they're either locked somehow which requires unlocking them in sequence and adding an oddly artificial constraint on  playstyle freedom or else injects a telescope mechanic. Again the telescope sounds realistic enough but think about how tedious and frustrating it would be to stare at your screen scrolling around the sky and time warping for hours on end looking for tiny specks.

I think this could be done simple enough to work in-game:

Consider a three-tier building, the Observatory (or planetarium?). With tier one, the Tracking Station will only show Kerbin and its two moons, plus Eve and Duna (and perhaps Ike, but not Gilly). It would simply look as if there were no more planets in the system. Upgrading the Observatory to tier 2 would show you Dres, Gilly and maybe Jool, but not its moons. Also, more information about the known planets would be displayed (most crucially, launch windows). An upgrade to tier 3 would show more information about the planets (such as a biome list), but not reveal the rest of them. It would, however, unlock new parts: The Space Telescope. Sending a telescope into orbit would reveal the existence of Moho, the Joolian moons, and Eeloo. That mechanic could feasibly be split in two if you like, for instance that a 2.5 m telescope reveals Tylo, Moho and Laythe, while a 3.75 m telescope shows you Vall, Pol, Bop and Eeloo.

As such, the space telescopes would not require hours of manual scanning. Just plop them in a stable orbit, perhaps above a certain altitude, and the scientists will figure out the rest. It's not completely realistic, but it does add a gameplay element of exploration. Of course, sending probles to the planets would also mark them as discovered in the Tracking Station, but good luck finding them without a telescope.

[Pthigrivi]

6 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Of course, sending probles to the planets would also mark them as discovered in the Tracking Station, but good luck finding them without a telescope.

Well this is kind of the thing--if they aren't marked on the map its actually impossible to find them. I don't see any real advantage to this. Part of what is great about KSP is how open the world is. You can go anywhere, and your only restriction is your skill and creativity. If players can put together a probe capable of reaching Jool at tier 1 more power to them! Rather than restricting this players should be rewarded for ambitious missions like this. 

Part of whats going on is that most of the valuable flight information is currently absent from the game. All you're really given when you view planet information is some teaser text. You actually have to mod or leave the game to find dV costs, biome maps, anomaly locations, and atmospheric information. This is the kind of thing that experiments should provide. I love that Kerbnet is going to start showing some of this, but down the road I'd love to see a scanner added that could produce a full biome overlay. You could also have the gravoli detector unlock dV information and the barometer unlock trajectory prediction factoring drag. You could fold tracking station upgrades into this, unlocking mission planning tabs and alarm clocks and so on, but even this should really happen on the first upgrade so players can get started sending probes and filling in the data. Not only would this be just generally helpful for players it also makes science feel like real science and makes experiments relevant even after the tech tree is complete. If this is what discovery was about the flavor text and overview we're currently provided with would just be there to let players know what to strive for. You shouldn't really have to go to the wiki to find out duna exists or that Jool has a cool ocean moon with an atmosphere. 
 

Edited August 12, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[tater]

I'm all for an exploration mode, I've suggested it myself. That said....

At career game start in KSP:

1. All the planets would be known unless there is some sort of OPM that adds Kuiper Belt objects, then some of those objects might not be known. Note that this treats a Kerbol Kuiper belt as if it was the real one, even though Eeloo is about as far from Kerbol as Venus is from the sun, so corrected for that reality, even Kuiper Belt objects in KSP would be known.

2. All major moons, and most minor moons would be known. The Kerbol system is tiny. Make it more analogous to the Sol system, and perhaps minor moons of outer planets are not all discovered.

3. All the orbits would be known, including moons.

4. All the masses would be known to some accuracy.

5. Rough atmospheric composition would be known (there might be some serious unknowns here, i.e.: Venus, IRL).

6. Rotational period would often be known (totally clouded worlds being an exception, Venus was unknown even with attempts at Doppler information on the limbs being checked).

What would NOT be known?

1. Specifics of the atmospheres.

2. Surface features.

 

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah do you think dV and transfer information should be available from the start? I could see an argument for keeping the alarm clock hidden until the first upgrade just to keep things dead simple for new players, but the cost of this upgrade should be pretty low, like right after you get into orbit the first time. 

[tater]

I think dv information should always be everywhere, frankly.

People would learn faster if they had some idea about the implication of "moar boosters." I have noticed kids playing and it is counter intuitive to many people that making a craft smaller makes it go farther (a little reduction up top goes a long way). The lack of dv is probably why we see so many huge "contraptions" instead of rockets.

[James M]

On 8/11/2016 at 11:36 AM, Baricus said:

In my opinion, SQUAD has already put a way to incentivise exploration into the game.  All they did was make that one monolith easily visible from the space center screen (I assume done while they fixed the other hidden surprises).  In that one stroke, they show the player a peek behind the curtain and hinted at what else there is to explore out in space.  This little easter egg, just by being very badly hidden, hints at all the others that are hiding everywhere in the solar system.  It makes you curious and you start to look for them as you fly your missions.  Eventually you'll find more (or hear about more) and  you soon begin actively searching for them.  To do so you scour each and every body in the solar system, exploring every mountain and valley to see if there is another interesting tidbit that was left there for you.  You'll find the easter eggs, but you will also explore the land and find all the great sights that this game has to offer (unfortunately one of the areas it is lacking).  Just through the easter eggs hidden away in the game, it incentivises you to explore much better than any fog of war system could.

Lol I play on console so I don't think I've ever actually seen said Monolith xD