Explore even More with a Good Set of Wheels!

[klesh]

So, this is on Squad's twitter. I went looking to see what they're communicating to the folks having lots of problems on console.

https://mobile.twitter.com/KerbalSpaceP

  Are they just trolling or what?  Knowing how bad the wheels are in version 1.1.x, who in their right mind would use this as an advertisement to prospective players?  Hopefully that PR manager gets hired STAT, they sure need one.  How is this appropriate at all is lost on me.

 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Are you confusing rover wheels with landing gear wheels?

I've heard plenty of complaints about the latter, but few about the former. (Personally I haven't had any problems with either to be honest.)

Besides the whole "gear blocked" thing which is mildly annoying (And already confirmed to be going away in 1.2) what exactly is wrong with the rover wheels in your opinion?

[klesh]

Wheels are wheels, they have the same problems but havent been put in the enummerable configurations that the landing gears have.  Check the support forums, there are threads about steering, and blocked and all the rest.  Okay, they'll be fixed next release hopefully, I'm as excited as anyone for that. I have success designing around the problem too, and really its not nearly the highest priority problem they're facing.

 But why, when your twitter is being bombarded by people asking for help with broken savegames, freezing and all the other myriad of problems with the console releases, would you focus instead on some marketing that literally features heavily a part of the game that too is currently broken?  

Their latest tweet is about Roverdude making some cool mod for PC.  It just strikes me as really poor PR going on over there.  

[Rocket In My Pocket]

3 minutes ago, klesh said:

Wheels are wheels, they have the same problems but havent been put in the enummerable configurations that the landing gears have.  Check the support forums, there are threads about steering, and blocked and all the rest.  Okay, they'll be fixed next release hopefully, I'm as excited as anyone for that. I have success designing around the problem too, and really its not nearly the highest priority problem they're facing.

 But why, when your twitter is being bombarded by people asking for help with broken savegames, freezing and all the other myriad of problems with the console releases, would you focus instead on some marketing that literally features heavily a part of the game that too is currently broken?  

Their latest tweet is about Roverdude making some cool mod for PC.  It just strikes me as really poor PR going on over there.  

I certainly see your point from a PR perspective.

Sadly, that's never been SQUAD's strong point.

I'm honestly not sure as a developer if it's better to stick your head in the sand and ignore or address it directly.

[ZooNamedGames]

heheh, you saw that too? I told them in a post below that the post was a horrible lie.

The issue as I see is that wheels seems to lose grip and tip, slide/drift, and so on which happens for both rover a landing gears.

Regardless, the post was in knowingly bad taste. They know how much the playerbase is struggling with these new issues and to publically ADVERTISE something which will lead new players into experiencing the issue is very very poor.

3 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

I certainly see your point from a PR perspective.

Sadly, that's never been SQUAD's strong point.

I'm honestly not sure as a developer if it's better to stick your head in the sand and ignore or address it directly.

They can at least avoid mentioning the issue. Advertise the new upgrade to Unity 5 and the performance benefits, things like that. They don't HAVE to mention solely the wheels which are the issue.

[klgraham1013]

KSP's 1.0 trailer openly laughed at a catastrophic rocket failure, and the imminent death of two astronauts.

 Squad has never been the best at PR.

[vsully]

5 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

KSP's 1.0 trailer openly laughed at a catastrophic rocket failure, and the imminent death of two astronauts.

 Squad has never been the best at PR.

^This lol^

[MaxPeck]

I'm confused.  In every thread about some broken aspect of the game, we get the inevitable reply of "remember... Squad is not a video game company.  This is their first foray into gaming."

Squad's not a game company.  That's true...

THEY'RE A PR AND MARKETING COMPANY!  How can this NOT be their strong suit?  This is literally who they are outside of KSP.  PR and MARKETING.

I'm just at a loss for this one.  I just can't even.

Edited July 24, 2016 by MaxPeck

[cubinator]

Note that there are now a lot of things about the wheels you can change in the editor. Are they truly "broken" making the game "unplayable" in all combinations of these settings?

[KerikBalm]

i think its mostly a bunch of whining, because the wheels are perfectly usable for me. People just remember how they acted, and don't like change.

I'm doing things with rovers that I never could before.

[pandaman]

I've not had any major issues with wheels either. Kerbal/wheel contact explosion bug aside (which I have managed to avoid do far),  most of the problems I encountered with how they work seemed to be due to me not being up to speed with the way they now function, and the fact that they are now more 'design sensitive' than they were.   I found I can avoid them by designing sensibly, and operating within their limitations.  Being able to adjust friction and traction control etc on the fly though has really helped.  

I can understand why many players are having difficulty though, especially when existing designs no longer work as they did.

[Majorjim!]

On 07/24/2016 at 5:25 PM, klesh said:

Wheels are wheels, they have the same problems but havent been put in the enummerable configurations that the landing gears have.  Check the support forums, there are threads about steering, and blocked and all the rest.  Okay, they'll be fixed next release hopefully, I'm as excited as anyone for that. I have success designing around the problem too, and really its not nearly the highest priority problem they're facing.

 But why, when your twitter is being bombarded by people asking for help with broken savegames, freezing and all the other myriad of problems with the console releases, would you focus instead on some marketing that literally features heavily a part of the game that too is currently broken?  

Their latest tweet is about Roverdude making some cool mod for PC.  It just strikes me as really poor PR going on over there.  

I 100% agree on this. Very poor form Squad, very poor form indeed. 

 

 

Edited July 29, 2016 by Majorjim

[THX1138]

There's nothing to explore! Everything is the same barren wasteland as wherever you've landed!

[qromodynmc]

Wheel problems are bit exaggerated imo, this is space program game, not racing game. I regularly build planes, rovers, sstos, airliners and i havent had much problems, maybe some little problems but they were easily solvable.

On the other hand, console release; Flying Tigers remade the game for consoles, there will be some problems of course, i hope it'll get fixed soon.

As for the PR thing, you seriously expect them to wear blacks and feel sad till they fix problems? Cmon..

[Yakuzi]

6 hours ago, MaxPeck said:

 

THEY'RE A PR AND MARKETING COMPANY!  How can this NOT be their strong suit?  This is literally who they are outside of KSP.  PR and MARKETING.

Squad is originally a marketing company, and has never (as far as I'm aware) been a PR company... please correct me if I'm wrong.

Twits like this are a painful reminder they're not, though its quite intriguing from a psychological point of view.

Edit: From reading the topic title and glancing at the image I thought 1.2 was in QA... Ow well

Edited July 24, 2016 by Yakuzi

[MaxPeck]

I kind of like to think that Marketing and PR go hand-in-hand.  They're very much the same thing - product promotion.

This is a serious amateur mistake.  I mean, they boast clientele such as HP, Coca Cola and Sony.  Try to imagine if HP printers starting catching fire and Squad made an advertising campaign that was something like "Blaze your way into the future with HP printers!"

Poor form, Squad.  Bad play.

Edited July 25, 2016 by MaxPeck

[klesh]

3 hours ago, qromodynmc said:

As for the PR thing, you seriously expect them to wear blacks and feel sad till they fix problems? Cmon..

 

I'd rather see one of the scientist kerbals all standing around an unbranded generic console while holding clipboards, with a caption reading:  "Our boffins are hard at work on our first console update, thanks for your feedback!"

Or something that both acknowledges issues and shows they're being worked on. 

 

Heck, even a couple of Kerbals sitting in the Astronaut complex couch with controllers in their hands playing KSP on console on the TV.  Caption reading: "Accepting new Pilots to the Kerbal Space Program!" Something relevant, positive, and clever.

 

I could see if the picture was released with 1.2, with a caption something like "Now with 117% more fun wheels!" or somesuch.  Sort of poking fun at the bug and themselves while simultaneously celebrating its fixing.  

To come out of nowhere during a major product launch and instead tout a part of the game that's been not working so well lately is baffling.

[magnemoe]

10 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Are you confusing rover wheels with landing gear wheels?

I've heard plenty of complaints about the latter, but few about the former. (Personally I haven't had any problems with either to be honest.)

Besides the whole "gear blocked" thing which is mildly annoying (And already confirmed to be going away in 1.2) what exactly is wrong with the rover wheels in your opinion?

I had problem with wheels on my Eve rover until I understood that I had to ramp up friction with the new wheel adjustment feature, for some reason friction is inverse of gravity so rovers on Eve acted like slicks on oiled glass. ramping friction up to max solved the problem.On duna they works well enough, has only used wheels on other bodies for short trips to connect bases and ships. 

[cubinator]

14 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

I had problem with wheels on my Eve rover until I understood that I had to ramp up friction with the new wheel adjustment feature, for some reason friction is inverse of gravity so rovers on Eve acted like slicks on oiled glass. ramping friction up to max solved the problem.On duna they works well enough, has only used wheels on other bodies for short trips to connect bases and ships. 

See? I think people just aren't messing with the sliders enough, I think that would solve a lot of the problems people are having.

[Xyphos]

2 hours ago, cubinator said:

problems people are having.

having to sit through 2 hours of wheel testing and slider adjusting *IS* a problem.
I have a hunch that those sliders were a band-aid fix to the awful physics engine in Unity.

Edited July 25, 2016 by Xyphos

[Alshain]

3 hours ago, cubinator said:

See? I think people just aren't messing with the sliders enough, I think that would solve a lot of the problems people are having.

Because there is no logic to the sliders.  Their behavior can be random and completely unpredictable, not to mention the fact that altering friction is breaking the laws of physics.

16 minutes ago, Xyphos said:

having to sit through 2 hours of wheel testing and slider adjusting *IS* a problem.
I have a hunch that those sliders were a band-aid fix to the awful physics engine in Unity.

Pretty sure they were a workaround.  I'm hoping they are gone in 1.2 (as in, not necessary to even exist)

Edited July 25, 2016 by Alshain

[Arsonide]

13 minutes ago, Alshain said:

Because there is no logic to the sliders.  Their behavior can be random and completely unpredictable, not to mention the fact that altering friction is breaking the laws of physics.

Pretty sure they were a workaround.  I'm hoping they are gone in 1.2 (as in, not necessary to even exist)

You've never heard of people putting chains on their tires to drive through the snow? No laws of physics are being broken, it's just an abstraction for various things an engineer can do to the tire tread. As for the tweakables, we want the player to have as much control over the behavior of the wheels as they need because their behavior largely depends on the configuration and weight distribution of the craft that the player has made. Taking those away would just be taking options away from the player.

[Xyphos]

1 minute ago, Arsonide said:

You've never heard of people putting chains on their tires to drive through the snow?

there's a huge difference between snow chains and random-guessing what friction value unity decides to accept as proper emulation.

[Arsonide]

5 minutes ago, Xyphos said:

there's a huge difference between snow chains and random-guessing what friction value unity decides to accept as proper emulation.

You're right, the slider gives you more control than chains.

[Alshain]

23 minutes ago, Arsonide said:

You've never heard of people putting chains on their tires to drive through the snow? No laws of physics are being broken, it's just an abstraction for various things an engineer can do to the tire tread. As for the tweakables, we want the player to have as much control over the behavior of the wheels as they need because their behavior largely depends on the configuration and weight distribution of the craft that the player has made. Taking those away would just be taking options away from the player.

Funny, I don't see any chains on the KSP wheels.  Also, I don't know of any wheels in real life that have no friction, a physically impossible case.  We both know that isn't the reason its there, its a workaround for crappy wheels.  Properly working wheels shouldn't need the friction slider.

Edited July 25, 2016 by Alshain