Do you think Life Support should be Vanilla?

[tater]

6 hours ago, CobraA1 said:

Re-entry heat is fine as a concept, but I'm not liking the way it's currently tuned. Aerobraking is practically impossible at several planets. I also think we need the inflatable shield in all sizes.

Reentry is a joke. Is it even possible in stock to have a reentry problem at Kerbin?

 

[78stonewobble]

Well, it would be kinda educational, in the sense that it shows, how much harder long interplanetary missions are in comparison to "just" going to the moons and it could be an incentive to use unmanned craft.

If implemented tho, I do think it should be optional as some sort of difficulty enhancer.

And yes It should definately show how long kerbs can survive on xyz ressource. Personally I also liked the idea that kerbs don't die without their "snacks", but enter hibernation... Fits well with the style.

 

 

[CobraA1]

4 hours ago, tater said:

Reentry is a joke. Is it even possible in stock to have a reentry problem at Kerbin?

I'm talking mostly about other planets. Jool, Eve. Returning from Jool to Kerbin is actually a big problem.

[tater]

2 minutes ago, CobraA1 said:

I'm talking mostly about other planets. Jool, Eve. Returning from Jool to Kerbin is actually a big problem.

It should be.

Stardust holds the record for EDL velocity at 12.4 km/s, slightly faster than Apollo.

[shadragon]

Just make it an option in settings, turned off by default. Beginners can leave stranded Kerbals in orbit until they can figure out a rescue plan, while the ones who want the extra pressure (pun intended) can flip the switch and have limited life support. 

I also don't want to have to explain to my young daughter why Valentina isn't moving anymore. We've already been through that with a sick pet.  

[Andem]

5 hours ago, tater said:

Reentry is a joke. Is it even possible in stock to have a reentry problem at Kerbin?

 

As a matter of fact, yes, it is possible.  If you turn up the reentry heat to 120%.

7 minutes ago, shadragon said:

I also don't want to have to explain to my young daughter why Valentina isn't moving anymore. We've already been through that with a sick pet.  

We've already discussed this in the thread. It's a non-issue. What happens when kerbals get hit with a rocket? They go *Poof!* what happens when they run out of food? They go *Poof!* I understand the concern as a parent myself, but that is an exceedingly unlikely design choice considering the decisions that have been made up until now.

[shadragon]

11 minutes ago, Andem said:

We've already discussed this in the thread. It's a non-issue. What happens when kerbals get hit with a rocket? They go *Poof!* what happens when they run out of food? They go *Poof!* I understand the concern as a parent myself, but that is an exceedingly unlikely design choice considering the decisions that have been made up until now.

There's two basic camps. Having a setting you can turn on or off satisfies both sides. That's all I meant.  

[Alshain]

2 hours ago, shadragon said:

There's two basic camps. Having a setting you can turn on or off satisfies both sides. That's all I meant.  

There are way more than two basic camps.  There is at least a camp for every life support mod there is and one for those who want no life support.  No matter what life support squad implements the majority of players will not like it because they either don't want one or it isn't like the one they use.  Squad would be wasting their time even trying for a very small minority of players that would actually use it. The poll in the thread here is very biassed for example, it lumps together all the various life support mods implementations and assumes they are equal, when they are not.

Edited September 6, 2016 by Alshain

[AlamoVampire]

@Alshain The same holds true of multiplayer. It's fine as a mod, but its going to be rammed down our throats by squad. Not an if. It's a when. Life support is going to be no different. I'd bet my sandbox save on that.

[Alshain]

58 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

@Alshain The same holds true of multiplayer. It's fine as a mod, but its going to be rammed down our throats by squad. Not an if. It's a when. Life support is going to be no different. I'd bet my sandbox save on that.

Not quite what I meant.  With Multiplayer you have 2 options, DMP or nothing.  That means if you were to assume perfect proportions you have 50% of the players.  How about antenna systems, you have Nothing, AntennaRange, and RemoteTech, so that's even split 33% and it looks like Squad is going with a slightly enhanced antenna range so that means 66% will either be turning it off or using a mod in it's place.  The same was true of Resources, 33%... nothing, Kethane or Karbonite.

Now this isn't a perfect science because you don't really know how much of players want what, in fact if the poll above were to be trusted you have rougly 50% that want LS and 50% that don't.  I'm not really sure what to make of the 3rd option.  It doesn't really matter because polls are not an accurate gauge of anything.

So lets put this in perspective.  I'm actually going to reduce the percentage of people who do not want LS in this example and for simplicity call all things even.  We have USI, TAC, ECLSS, DeepFreeze, Kerbalism, and of course Nothing at all (there may be more, these are the ones I know).  So if I'm doing the math right, that is 17% of players you would be programming for.  Now if we did take the poll into account that's ~50% (I still don't like polls, but for curiosity sake here it is) That means 50% divided by the number of mods out there, which is 10%.

So the question arises, at what point is it a waste of time to develop anything at all?  That is complete opinion, and Squad will need to have their own value judgement... and it won't be entirely based on numbers, their vision of the game is also important.  However my opinion is that developing such a large system for 17% of players is way too low and a big waste of time.  Furthermore Squad's previous stance was a firm 'no' to life support, so the vision of the game thing is probably weighted that way.

Edited September 6, 2016 by Alshain

[Pthigrivi]

48 minutes ago, Alshain said:

Now this isn't a perfect science because you don't really know how much of players want what, in fact if the poll above were to be trusted you have rougly 50% that want LS and 50% that don't.  I'm not really sure what to make of the 3rd option.  It doesn't really matter because polls are not an accurate gauge of anything.

Certainly not if you just assume an equal number of people will respond to any given option. The vast majority of people who responded negatively said they'd be fine with it if it came with a toggle, and the vast majority of people who responded positively said they'd prefer to see something akin to USI. Most of the people who voted for the third option said they would like to see LS but are worried about things like difficulty settings and resupply frequency. It seems pretty clear from that almost everyone would be happy with a toggleable single resource LS system with tools to alleviate resupply missions. USI with ISRU integration would seem to fit that bill pretty nicely. Given that most of the development for that mod is already complete I'd say the worry about development time is overstated.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Red Iron Crown]

@Alshain How would you account for players that don't use any mods at all in your calculations? Presumably they would be more likely to be pleased with any implementation rather than a specific mod one (if they are interested in life support at all), and they're likely underrepresented on the forum seeing as the mod sections are the most busy.

[Alshain]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

Certainly not if you just assume an equal number of people will respond to any given option. The vast majority of people who responded negatively said they'd be fine with it if it came with a toggle, and the vast majority of people who responded positively said they'd prefer to see something akin to USI. Most of the people who voted for the third option said they would like to see LS but are worried about things like difficulty settings and resupply frequency. It seems pretty clear from that almost everyone would be happy with a toggleable single resource LS system with tools to alleviate resupply missions. USI with ISRU integration would seem to fit that bill pretty nicely. Given that most of the development for that mod is already complete I'd say the worry about development time is overstated.

Where are you getting your majorities from.  There has been no majority at all.  That is my point.

 

17 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

@Alshain How would you account for players that don't use any mods at all in your calculations? Presumably they would be more likely to be pleased with any implementation rather than a specific mod one (if they are interested in life support at all), and they're likely underrepresented on the forum seeing as the mod sections are the most busy.

Presumably whether they use mods or not, they would prefer one of the implementations available over the others or prefer not to have it at all, so they would still be counted.  You could break it down into specific features rather than mods, but the end results would still be similar. Whether or not they currently use a mod is irrelevant.

[Superfluous J]

19 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

@Alshain How would you account for players that don't use any mods at all in your calculations? Presumably they would be more likely to be pleased with any implementation rather than a specific mod one (if they are interested in life support at all), and they're likely underrepresented on the forum seeing as the mod sections are the most busy.

Or players like me who tend to generally prefer the stock implementation but also happily mod in things that aren't stock.

(Though I seriously doubt I'd use stock Life Support, except to try it out and see what it's like)

[Pthigrivi]

9 minutes ago, Alshain said:

Where are you getting your majorities from.

10 pages of responses to this thread

[Alshain]

4 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

10 pages of responses to this thread

That is as irrelevant and meaningless as the poll.

 

I'm not saying they can't do LS, but in a perfect world, it's priorities would be well behind most other features that get discussed.  The visual improvements/part revamps, the multiplayer, all of that would come first because it has the greater potential to affect a larger number of players.  That assumes, of course, that Squad even wants to do LS.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Alshain

[The_Rocketeer]

Let's not forget the console player-base, which (if Squad/FTE get their act together) is set to be the fastest-growing demographic of KSP players - this is KSP's current hopeful cash-cow. Currently the total absence of popular game-feature mods (rather than effects/partpacks) is one of the biggest drawbacks of owning on console vs owning on PC. Since mods can't be added to the console game, implementing stock-mods (by which I mean toggleable stock game features/systems that were previously found only in mods) is the only way to extend those elements of the whole game-experience package to console users. It could very much be in Squad's interests to increasingly endorse and assimilate certain mods - LS being one.

[Pthigrivi]

@Alshain Are you sure? A lot of people have spelled out their expectations, its not difficult to arrive at an aggregate impression. Anyway if LS were to have a toggle so you could turn it off and was based on USI and therefore didn't take up much dev time its hard for me to understand why anyone would be against it. Maybe just let the 60-70% of us who want it have our fun?

Edited September 7, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Alshain]

6 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

@Alshain Are you sure? A lot of people have spelled out their expectations, its not difficult to arrive at an aggregate impression. Anyway if LS were to have a toggle so you could turn it off and was based on USI and therefore didn't take up much dev time its hard for me to understand why anyone would be against it. Maybe just let the 60-70% of us who want it have our fun?

But you don't know what percentage of which groups lie where.  Just because everybody who plays USI made it to this thread doesn't mean it's the most desired.  That's why I simplified it and evened out the groups.  I showed you my logic, it's not perfect, there is no way to have it perfect but you are making up numbers like 60-70% so I can't argue against completely random numbers pulled out of the air.  At least evening the groups gave everyone the same potential.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Alshain

[Pthigrivi]

60-70% is the number of people who say they want LS (yes) plus the people who say they would like to see LS but have reservations (maybe). This doesn't include the huge numbers of people who responded to this thread saying they voted no but are fine with LS so long as it had a toggle, which it would obviously have. Its not perfect but at least its a data set. Go ahead and read back. I would say out of 10 pages of responses less than 5 people said they don't want LS even if it had a toggle, and I didn't see anyone say they'd rather have TAC or DeepFreeze. Evening these groups out isn't just arbitrary, there's actually clear evidence to the contrary.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[mattinoz]

12 minutes ago, Alshain said:

That is as irrelevant and meaningless as the poll.

 

I'm not saying they can't do LS, but in a perfect world, it's priorities would be well behind most other features that get discussed.  The visual improvements/part revamps, the multiplayer, all of that would come first because it has the greater potential to affect a larger number of players.  That assumes, of course, that Squad even wants to do LS.

Several of these will take multiple releases to do in any sensible fashion. ie Multi-player.

So assuming Squad are want to commit to at least another year of development to get a workable multi-player system then there would seem to plenty of time for other features to be developed in parallel. I mean It's not like Porkjet or RoverDude are going to working on multi-player seeing their skills seem to be more sexy parts and resource mechanics would seem a waste to have them sit around along the way to Multi-player, then they could be tackling features to get people to play each release along the way. 

Assuming Squad even wants to continue development.

[The_Rocketeer]

6 minutes ago, Alshain said:

At least evening the groups gave everyone the same potential.

Except it didn't, because you didn't treat those who voted against stock LS in the same way as those who you split out into the different mods. Essentially you're splitting up one demographic (for), and thereby diminishing its voting power, and not treating the other demographic (against) in the same way, suggesting a unified voting power without any evidence for that. If you're going to treat all groups as having the same potential, it needs to be all groups, including groups who would only want the mod under certain conditions.

[Alshain]

9 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

Except it didn't, because you didn't treat those who voted against stock LS in the same way as those who you split out into the different mods. Essentially you're splitting up one demographic (for), and thereby diminishing its voting power, and not treating the other demographic (against) in the same way, suggesting a unified voting power without any evidence for that. If you're going to treat all groups as having the same potential, it needs to be all groups, including groups who would only want the mod under certain conditions.

I didn't include any of the vote for or against LS.  I said the poll was inaccurate and that is why I went with the 17% instead of the 10%.  You can't divide people that don't want LS into groups, there is nothing to divide them into.  It's not a matter of win or lose it's a matter of how many people would it likely be affected by the development.  You do have 2 groups.  The first group is the people that wouldn't use it, and the second group is the people that would.  However, the people that would use life support but would not like any particular stock implementation would count toward the first group.  They wouldn't use it, turning it off and instead installing a mod.  So if  person would prefer an implementation like Snacks but Squad implemented USI, that person is going to turn it off and use Snacks.  So that person falls into the group that wouldn't use it.+

Edited September 7, 2016 by Alshain

[tater]

16 minutes ago, Alshain said:

But you don't know what percentage of which groups lie where.  Just because everybody who plays USI made it to this thread doesn't mean it's the most desired.  That's why I simplified it and evened out the groups.  I showed you my logic, it's not perfect, there is no way to have it perfect but you are making up numbers like 60-70% so I can't argue against completely random numbers pulled out of the air.  At least evening the groups gave everyone the same potential.

I singled out USILS because the author is someone who has some influence on what LS might actually get added to the game, and he stated intent was to come up with something that had a stock feel to it. It's not at all unreasonable to expect any stock LS to loo rather a lot like USILS, to the point of perhaps being a subset of USILS (as the current ISRU is a subset of RoverDude's work in that area, as well).

I agree entirely with @Pthigrivi that as something that would certainly be a diff-level toggle, how could anyone be against it? It wouldn't even take much work, it's already done (given who would likely write a stock version)---it just needs hooks to the career diff level page.

1 minute ago, Alshain said:

I didn't include any of the vote for or against LS.  I said the poll was inaccurate and that is why I went with the 17% instead of the 10%.  You can't divide people that don't want LS into groups, there is nothing to divide them into.  It's not a matter of win or lose it's a matter of how many people would it likely be affected by the development.  You do have 2 groups.  The first group is the people that wouldn't use it, and the second group is the people that would.  However, the people that would use life support but would not like any particular stock implementation would count toward the first group.  They wouldn't use it, turning it off and instead installing a mod.  So if  person would prefer an implementation like Snacks but Squad implemented USI, that person is going to turn it off and use Snacks.  So that person falls into the group that doesn't want it.

Someone who prefers Snacks! might mess with stock, and decide USILS (sorry, but as I said above, it's the most likely "parent" of any stock LS scheme, given the author) is actually fine. Kerbalism is another awesome contender, except that the author isn't a dev. TAC, ISLS, etc all exist, but might they not use new code hooks to get their desired effect, if one system that was moddable was added to stock?

[Alshain]

13 minutes ago, tater said:

I singled out USILS because the author is someone who has some influence on what LS might actually get added to the game, and he stated intent was to come up with something that had a stock feel to it. It's not at all unreasonable to expect any stock LS to loo rather a lot like USILS, to the point of perhaps being a subset of USILS (as the current ISRU is a subset of RoverDude's work in that area, as well).

I agree entirely with @Pthigrivi that as something that would certainly be a diff-level toggle, how could anyone be against it? It wouldn't even take much work, it's already done (given who would likely write a stock version)---it just needs hooks to the career diff level page.

Someone who prefers Snacks! might mess with stock, and decide USILS (sorry, but as I said above, it's the most likely "parent" of any stock LS scheme, given the author) is actually fine. Kerbalism is another awesome contender, except that the author isn't a dev. TAC, ISLS, etc all exist, but might they not use new code hooks to get their desired effect, if one system that was moddable was added to stock?

They might go to stock, they might not.  Someone who uses stock might go to a new mod, they might not.  That's why I didn't give an edge to any one group in the assessment.  It doesn't change that the likely affected players is significantly low.