Doom posting

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

57 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

Your continued persistence to have someone look at that post is concerning me. 

you misunderstand,I want him to tell me what that avatar is!

[ZooNamedGames]

2 minutes ago, Brainlord Mesomorph said:

you misunderstand,I want him to tell me what that avatar is!

Ah I see  .

[Guest]

11 hours ago, CloudlessEchoes said:

It doesn't count as stock because it isn't stock. Which means it can break something in ways the devs don't know about.

KAC is not stock. But, the author is part of the Squad staff. KAC hasn't been a problem before and really, it's not any more of a problem now than any other mod. The problem is mods in general. Let me explain further. I didn't see a single crash while playing stock. Granted, that was only a couple of weeks of play time, not really a big sample size, but as soon as I added KER I started getting crashes, albeit rarely. The more mods I started adding in, the more often the game was crashing with most of the crashes being in the SPH and VAB.

Now, one could argue that KSP's popularity stems largely from it's moddability (that's probably not word) and the enormous amount of mods that are available. If all the sudden we can no longer safely mod the game, well, it doesn't bode well.

In summary, it's my opinion that leaning on the "it isn't stock" excuse is not going to help.

[Snark]

7 hours ago, Columbia said:

What is it about that argument that's bad? Pondering that there *might* have been better results if the prerelease was extended doesn't require many assumptions to make

Well, sure, and nothing wrong with that!  Everyone's entitled to their opinion.

My own posts weren't directed at people "pondering that there might have been."  Rather, it was to people asserting that there would have been (often with the context that the assertion is obvious or self-evident), when they're really not in any position to make such an assertion.

7 hours ago, Columbia said:

a lot have said that they would have no problem or frustration if Squad spent a few days more.

And anyone who says that would be wrong.

For folks who don't know what software development is like:  Bug fixing is like a lot of other activities:  it's subject to diminishing returns.  Explanation in spoiler section.

Spoiler

In the early days of a product, when it is crammed full of bugs, then they're easy and fast to find and fix, relatively speaking.  That's because there are lots of them (so they're easy to find), and also a lot of them are very simple ones that turn out to be a quick one-line fix or something.

(And when I say "crammed full of bugs," I mean actually full of bugs.  Not like 1.1.x, which isn't-- hyperbolic complainers notwithstanding.  If you think that KSP, or any released software product is "full of bugs", you really oughta see what it's like in the very early stages before they've put all the tons of QA work into it.  It's orders of magnitude worse.  I'm not singling out KSP here, I'm talking about any software product.  It's how things work.)

But when you get closer to release, and the bugs are much fewer and farther between, it gets a lot harder.  The bug-find rate goes down, since all the easy-to-find ones have already been spotted.  The time taken to fix each bug goes way up, because the easy ones have already been shot down.  It's mathematically impossible to get to zero bugs:  basically, you end up in a place where you need more and more time to fix fewer and fewer bugs, and eventually you get to the point where you have to decide to draw the line as "not worth it", and that's when you ship.

(Exactly where you draw the line is a matter of judgment, resources, etc., and certainly one can play "armchair general" and try to make a case that it should have been drawn in a different spot than it was.  But the fact remains that there is a line, and there will be bugs in the finished product, simply because getting to zero would require infinite time and infinite money, which nobody has.)

...What it boils down to is that when you're at the tail end of the QA curve, the few (known) bugs remaining are the ones that are very difficult and time-consuming to fix.  Realistically, "a few more days" wouldn't have made much difference.  Heck, even if you don't know anything about software development at all, a simple bit of common sense is:  If it were that easy, then 1.1.3 would have already shipped.

Would the quality have been higher if they waited longer?  Sure.  Nobody's arguing with that.

But I contend that it would have taken considerably longer than "a few more days" to make a significant difference.  Would you have been willing to wait an extra month?  How about two months?  Or four?  ...And even that doesn't take into account potential human factors.  The devs had been crunching for a solid year without a break, and speaking as someone with a couple of decades in software development, I can tell you that that is not fun, and people have limits.  And neither you nor I are in any position to judge what the energy or stress levels may have been for the devs by the time they shipped, so all I'm saying is-- let's not be too quick to judge, okay?

7 hours ago, Columbia said:

And if my game crashed consecutively and I can't fix it, my first instinct would be to rant really aggressively before managing to get a hold of myself.

Well, sure.  Me, too.  It's only human, as I observed a few posts above, which is why I sympathize.

But then, learning to control impulses can be a good thing, too.  A rant can be productive or constructive in the right circumstances... but then, an awful lot of them aren't.  So one can only hope that people will learn to take a deep breath and count to ten before pushing the button, or whatever works for them, and think before they post:  is what I'm about to publish actually useful or constructive for anyone?  And then post according to their best judgment.

[DChurchill]

4 hours ago, Brainlord Mesomorph said:

you misunderstand,I want him to tell me what that avatar is!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Otis said:

The problem is mods in general. Let me explain further. I didn't see a single crash while playing stock. Granted, that was only a couple of weeks of play time, not really a big sample size, but as soon as I added KER I started getting crashes, albeit rarely. The more mods I started adding in, the more often the game was crashing with most of the crashes being in the SPH and VAB.

Now, one could argue that KSP's popularity stems largely from it's moddability (that's probably not word) and the enormous amount of mods that are available. If all the sudden we can no longer safely mod the game, well, it doesn't bode well.

 

Except that if you have a case such as you describe, where it's pretty clear that the mods are indeed what's crashing the game, then:

1. it's not Squad's fault, so complaining at them is pointless
2. there's nothing Squad can do about it (since they didn't write the mod code)
3. the only person who can fix the problem is the mod author whose mod caused the crash.

If you've got a problem, by all means, raise it. But raise it to the right person.  It is absolutely and utterly pointless to complain to Squad about something that they didn't do.  If you've got a crash in stock, then yeah, by all means, that's Squad's bailiwick.  But complaining to Squad about a mod-caused crash is like complaining to the cable TV technician about how much you hate some TV show.

Discussion about the difficulty with mods in spoiler section.

Spoiler

The move to 1.1 from 1.0 was a hugely disruptive one.  That's why it took Squad a solid year of development to work (most of) the kinks out of their own stuff.  It's unavoidable that mods are going to be hard-hit, too.  Huge numbers of mods became completely non-functional after 1.1. and needed an update to work.

But you know what?  It's not a simple switch to flip; it's not as simple as a mod author going in and making some trivial change and the mod magically works as well on 1.1.x as it did on 1.0.5.  Mods are code, too, and subject to the same labor-intensive law of diminishing returns with bug-finding and bug-fixing that production code is.  With the crucial difference that mod authors don't do this for a living.  They don't get paid for it, they've got day jobs, these mods are what they do for a hobby.  And they generally don't have a dedicated QA staff.

When a mod author posts an update to their old, 1.0.5 mod, marking it as "now works on 1.1.x", that doesn't magically guarantee that there are no remaining bugs left from the move.  It simply means that the mod author has made what they think is a reasonable effort to get it working, and they've poked at it enough to establish that it's not egregiously broken, and they think it's okay.  It does not mean that a dedicated, paid QA staff have spent weeks testing it, because there's no such staff.

So it is totally unsurprising that there are going to be lots and lots of supposedly 1.1.x-compatible mods that turn out to have obscure, hard-to-pin-down bugs in them that can cause a crash, which the mod author doesn't even know about.  Heck, I've had a case (even pre-1.0.5) where my own mod had a crash in it that stuck around for quite a few months between version updates, that I was completely unaware of until someone finally pointed out to me.  The move to 1.1 was far more disruptive than anything we've had since practically forever, so there are going to be mod problems with that.  It's mathematically unavoidable.

And yes, I know this is frustrating to you, but the plain hard fact is that that is how the real world works.  Until such time as mod authors find and fix the bugs in their various mods, the crashes from those mods are going to happen.

So, if you've got a crash or similar bug:

1. Take the trouble to at least try to figure out whose bug it is before you complain.
   • If you're running pure stock, then you already know whose bug. 
   • If you're not running pure stock, then you don't know whose bug, until/unless you do work to isolate the problem.
2. If it's hard and you're having trouble pinning down just where it's coming from, then post your question in the Technical Support forum for modded installs.
3. If you've isolated it in pure stock and therefore know it's Squad's problem, report it.
   • File a bug.
   • Post on the forum, if you like, so other folks know about it.
4. If you've narrowed it down to a particular mod, then let the mod author know.
   • Politely.  Remember, they're not getting paid for this, and don't owe you anything-- they're doing you a favor by making the mod available in the first place, regardless of bugs.

 

[CloudlessEchoes]

11 hours ago, Otis said:

KAC is not stock. But, the author is part of the Squad staff. KAC hasn't been a problem before and really, it's not any more of a problem now than any other mod. The problem is mods in general. Let me explain further. I didn't see a single crash while playing stock. Granted, that was only a couple of weeks of play time, not really a big sample size, but as soon as I added KER I started getting crashes, albeit rarely. The more mods I started adding in, the more often the game was crashing with most of the crashes being in the SPH and VAB.

Now, one could argue that KSP's popularity stems largely from it's moddability (that's probably not word) and the enormous amount of mods that are available. If all the sudden we can no longer safely mod the game, well, it doesn't bode well.

In summary, it's my opinion that leaning on the "it isn't stock" excuse is not going to help.

If someone makes a mod and the mod crashes, it has nothing to do with being able to "safely" mod KSP. I'd say KAC is crash free, as I've never seen it cause any issues. But it's still a mod, and accesses the game through methods defined for modding, it isn't directly integrated into the game.

The other problem is that while a mod might work standalone, combinations of mods might cause each other to have issues. There is no way for KSP devs to prevent this, or for individual mod makers to prevent this.

All the above said, I've never had a crash I would attribute to a mod, unless you count going over the memory limit back in 32 bit.  I've only used popular, well vetted mods though.

[John FX]

Personally, the thing I wanted Squad to do differently is the exact course they have taken according to the latest devnotes. They have put a feature lock in place to stop the introduction of more bugs and they are releasing a pure bugfix update.

The other thing I wanted them to do is use the latest versions of Unity and the wheel code, which they are doing.

Now I just have to wait. The current major bugs will be fixed, some by Squad, some by Unity and some by the wheel addon.

Then we get more bugs in 1.2 and 1.3 when we get more features like antenna range, smelta wee and multiplayer (eventually) and then those bugs will be squashed (eventually)

and so the cycle continues.

Report your stock bugs on the bugtracker, report your modded bugs in the modded install support thread or the mod thread then sit back and wait while a whole bunch of people work on making your game experience better.

For free*

 

(*yes for free, you only bought the game as is, no mods, no updates)

[theTyke]

The game is pretty much unplayable since 1.1.x. Most of the times I can't even play one consecutive hour without crashing in the VAB or SPH (the wonderful one which does not create a crashlog). I usually save every few steps so I don't loose my progress but to be honest, I just can't be arsed to start the game at the moment because of this.

[Snark]

1 hour ago, theTyke said:

The game is pretty much unplayable since 1.1.x. Most of the times I can't even play one consecutive hour without crashing in the VAB or SPH (the wonderful one which does not create a crashlog). I usually save every few steps so I don't loose my progress but to be honest, I just can't be arsed to start the game at the moment because of this.

• Are you running stock?
• If you're running mods, what mods are they, and have you made any effort to determine whether they're causing the problem?
• Have you posted in Technical Support (modded or unmodded) with relevant information about your system, so that somebody might be able to help you?

[theTyke]

23 minutes ago, Snark said:

• Are you running stock?
• If you're running mods, what mods are they, and have you made any effort to determine whether they're causing the problem?
• Have you posted in Technical Support (modded or unmodded) with relevant information about your system, so that somebody might be able to help you?

1. & 2. same issue both modded and unmodded (I tried to extrapolate the issue by deactivating mods one by one), therefore irrelevant.
3. To be honest I did not, there were, at the time (May), large threads (in both forums) regarding the issue with a ton of system information for a multitude of configurations.