1.3 And More: Confirmed Features

[Spartwo]

20 hours ago, Foxster said:

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the super-secret things is a dV and TWR display. 

Seems to fit in the theme of immense disappointment.

[Snark]

3 hours ago, Zhetaan said:

Just to clarify on my end, at no point do I assume that you speak for Squad

Great, glad to hear it.    My comments were mainly directed not at you per se, but at anyone-who-might-be-reading.  It's a not-uncommon mistake for folks to assume that the moderators work for Squad or are "insiders" of some sort-- they don't realize that we're just volunteers, and the only difference between us and a regular forum user is that we have insider info on (and superpowers in) the forums themselves.

So any time I ever have occasion to comment on what I think about Squad, I always make sure to make it crystal clear, so that there's no chance of misunderstanding.

[Fearless Son]

As another software engineer (SDET, specifically) I thank @Snark for writing all that out, saving me the effort of doing so.

8 hours ago, Snark said:

For example, suppose you're a game company working on a major new release, and a big gaming convention like E3 is coming up nine months from now, and your business model and marketing and such is critically dependent on having a big "wow" release at the convention, and if you miss it you'll go out of business because you don't have enough venture capital to last another year until the next one.  In that case... you gotta make that date.  So you'll do whatever it takes to hit that date, which may entail working some long hours... but it also may entail scaling back the planned feature list and cutting features until you've whittled it down to something that you can get done by the deadline, but still has enough stuff in it to be sellable.

This is also part of the reason why big advertised features end up getting cut.  Suppose they need to do that "wow" thing at E3, they have an idea of something that they would like to have in the final product, but it is no where near ready to be shown off.  So they will sometimes hack together a quick-and-dirty implementation that looks good on screen during a scripted presentation, but is not nearly robust enough to be a full feature.  Smoke and mirrors.  Sometimes this gets replaced with a more comprehensive version that goes into the final product, but other times it can end up being more trouble to do the full version than it was initially thought, and the feature gets cut to make the scheduled release.  This leaves players wondering, "Hey, when do we get to that awesome thing all the trailers had?" and never getting an answer.  

8 hours ago, Snark said:

Then you have the Type B company.  These tend to be run by business types who are focused on short-term gains.  They've made the business decision that developers are a consumable resource.  "Churn and burn" sums up this type of company.  Hire lots of young, clueless fresh college CS graduates, whom you can get for cheap.  Run them ragged with ridiculously long hours and unpleasant working conditions, squeezing every scrap of code out of them you can get, until they burn out and quit-- when you replace them by hiring the next young, clueless, cheap engineer.  Use 'em up and spit 'em out.  As long as the supply of fresh faces holds out, a company that does this well can keep going for years and make tons of money.

I should point out that this type of company is statistically more common in the game's industry than it is in general software development.  Unfortunately, the incentive to treat employees this way is greater in games because games are the "sexy" side of the software industry that all the young and naive types are excited and energized to be part of, and they are the easiest types to accept low pay and long hours in the name of "making it".  A few years of contract jobs or hire/layoff cycles tend to burn that passion out of a lot of them, sadly.  

I also want to say that sometimes even small indie game companies can fall into this type, but do so entirely by accident.  If the people in the company are all themselves fresh out of college types with little experience in the industry outside of class, their lack of organizational discipline or candidate vetting can cause burnout and re-hiring at a rate higher than they might have intended.  Some of these companies eventually get their act together than turn into a Type A, but more commonly they end up as a Type C.  

Edited February 16, 2017 by Fearless Son

[Wjolcz]

On 14/02/2017 at 3:57 PM, TheEpicSquared said:

I think a career overhaul.

I really almost spat my coffee after reading this. Fat chance. I really doubt they will be adding any big features and changes in the future updates. The game is already "released" and "complete", amirite?

Edited February 19, 2017 by Veeltch

[FleshJeb]

On 2/14/2017 at 5:01 AM, monstah said:

Yay. Good ole' grumpy regex is back  

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

[sal_vager]

Squad is, of course, adding all of regex's mods as stock

[Guest]

3 hours ago, sal_vager said:

Squad is, of course, adding all of regex's mods as stock

Let's see...

Kerbal Renamer is partially in there, in spirit, with the localization changes. Should make it easier to have Renamer in the first place.

Some code snippets from KSCSwitcher might also be there but that's also partly NathanKell's code.

They did add a feature I built into Precise Node to the version of KSP directly after when I added the feature, which really hacked me off because I asked for art on these very forums for it.

Tank Lock? I hope so, that's one for the future.

PIDTuner (covered and done better by many other mods) will never be seen in the game.

All the collab mods I've worked on have been for RSS/RO so that would be pretty darn cool.

vOv Wouldn't be the worst thing they've done.

[Vanamonde]

Overlapping threads have been merged. 

[LukasKerman]

On 22.1.2017 at 3:42 AM, MR L A said:

Something they've been teasing for a while now, but I noticed it wasn't mentioned at all in the last dev blog. I would really love them to have implemented PorkJet's RPO properly. I've been using the mod version since it was released, I can't stand to use the original 1.25m tanks anymore, they're hideous by comparison. Also, the engines looked great, perfect amount of realism whilst still remaining distinctly kerbal. The upgrade ability for career was cool too! I realise it won't likely be this though, they said in a dev post a while back they considered this project "shelved" for the time being.
 

I believe Uomo mentioned in a Squadcast that Porkjets parts won't be continued by Squad since they are his. If the modded parts were never part of a contract they can't simply use them. But Uomo also said they work on an overhaul of some sort and my guess is they will come up with something entirely new. My personal hope is that at least some parts will have multiple looks. Upgrading your space programm small fuel tanks could start out as some kind of scrap and develop over time to become lighter and more mass efficient. The end state would have only high quality parts which all share a common aestetic rather than mounting scrap on your SLS booster.

Besides the rocket part overhaul I also hope for a new terrain in the more distant future. It would be really cool if Kerbin would look more like earth considering the whole system looks similar to ours. It doesn't need to be 100 accurate but it would make you think are we Kerbals before of after humanity? Then you find all the anomalies to get some clues about the past in a "planet of the apes" style.

To have more reason to explore the solar system I could also imagine some kind of procedural asteroid impact system. Having some satellites arround a planet they could detect impacts and you could send a mission to investigate the site to maybe find some valueable resources or science inside the craters. Each biome could have its own impact features. If you are not one of the patient types you could of course grab an asteroid and redirect it trajectory towards a planet or moon. The Joolian system would have extremely rare to no natural occuring impacts so this would be the end game content. The precious high level loot craters where you have to build an entire station arround an asteroid to boost it on a trajectroy towards Laythe. I think such kind of gameplay would fit KSP really well. It's a little but not too silly and would give you a good reason to redirect them.

Should there every be a multiplayer I would personally create a separate game mode just for that. Instead of having the whole solar system you just had the Mun for example which would also be a litle closer you you would not need to time accelerate. You would start a game with 2, 3 or 4 players and the goal would be to go the the Mun, gather resources and bring them back to Kerbin. This would fill up a bar und til the win condition is reached. However, you could also sell those resources to get more funds to develop bigger rockets and so on. I think if you build a mutiplayer it had to have some kind of competitive element to it. Most successful multiplayer games are competitive i would say. It would also open up a whole new world of optimizing a strategy on how to win. On modded servers you could also use weapons to attack your opponents and disturb their progress  

Before that can happen they had to find a way to make multiplayer work at all. A way to maybe do that efficiently would tbe using MechJeb? Instead of syncing and reading persistent files rapidly the opponent players would feed MechJeb on your game which would copy whatever they do if it is happening in physics range. However, I have no idea if that's as easy as it sounds. Multiplayer is probably the most unlikely thing to happen and I would personally not mind if they discarded it. 

Edited February 17, 2017 by LukasKerman

[W. Kerman]

Serious infection of Wall-of-textia  here, calling the CDC

 

But really, I think 1.3 will be awesome, even if nothing is added, having a less broken game in terms of crashing is always nice.

[INTERKOSMOS]

On 21.01.2017 at 7:42 PM, Garrett Kerman said:

3. Planetary systems outside of Kerbol.

That would be great, but I belive the only reasonable way to implement this, is to make Kerbol a binary star system. It would still take many years to reach other star, but with proper part selection (something useful for real colonisation, like ability to build advanced base with simplified version of VAB and SPH) this would totally make sense. And they don't have to be very far from each other, In fact K and M class stars (each having I'ts own stellar system) could be in a distance of less than 4 AU from each other (less than semi-major axis of Jupiter). Scale it down to usual 1/10 scale used in the game, and we have something like 50-60 mln km, very much within range.

 

Edited February 21, 2017 by INTERKOSMOS
I ment K, not F class star, of course

[Unknown account x1]

 dobra idea ja zelim jos zvezde u igrici

Edited February 27, 2017 by Unknown account x1
wrog spelling

[Gaarst]

On 13/02/2017 at 4:42 PM, Gaarst said:

Spoiler: it's localisation.

I CALLED IT

[klgraham1013]

4 hours ago, Gaarst said:

I CALLED IT

Nice!

[MinimalMinmus]

*me, seeing there is still only localization*

No, god! No, god please no! NO! NOOOOOOO!

More seriously: localization is neat, despite I won't use it as French is nowhere to be seen.

But it's not hype-able.

[klgraham1013]

So, I'm starting to think the super-secret-you'll-just-love feature was scrapped.  Maybe I'm wrong and we'll discover something amazing in 1.2.9, but I think we can throw this one out back with shmelta vee and the Porkjet parts.

Edited March 3, 2017 by klgraham1013

[Kerbital]

The only thing I want from 1.3 is to have the stutter gone. And then some performance improvements in the way the game handles large vessels so my famerate does not drop to single digits on i7 6700 with 32GB and dual 1080s.

Edited March 3, 2017 by Kerbital

[Wjolcz]

5 hours ago, Kerbital said:

The only thing I want from 1.3 is to have the stutter gone. And then some performance improvements in the way the game handles large vessels so my famerate does not drop to single digits on i7 6700 with 32GB and dual 1080s.

And I want a new game because continuing development of this one seems pretty pointless.

[Kerbital]

19 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

And I want a new game because continuing development of this one seems pretty pointless.

 

Good point. I'd prefer a whole new game too, built around a better engine. But since this thread is about 1.3, I didn't mention that. But I totally agree.

[Garrett Kerman]

Ok, due to new announcements about the features in 1.3, I am going to update this thread to 1.3: Confirmed Features. Read the OP (opening post) for a more in-depth explanation.

Basic Summary:

Localization

Bug fixes

Intergration of mods

and more!

Thanks to everyone that posted on this thread! You're the best! Thanks for 100 rep!

Edited March 12, 2017 by Garrett Kerman

[StupidAndy]

integration of mods? what does that mean? nobody knows? when will it come out? nobody knows!

[Garrett Kerman]

@StupidAndy read the OP if you're confused. The experimentals come tomorrow, so if you're one of the lucky ones, you might be able to test it then. If not, you can grab the prerelease when it comes out Soontm.

[mattinoz]

On 22/01/2017 at 8:57 AM, Jeb-head-mug kerman said:

Stock multiplayer!

I would think stock multiplayer would be a year to 18months of development with 2 or 3 partial multiplayer releases in that time.

[mattinoz]

On 14/02/2017 at 11:08 AM, regex said:

What are they going to add via DLC that I can't already get via mod?

A set of mods could be a DLC pack if there was some commitment those mods in the DLC pack will updated to work at release data.

"USI presents" DLC pack that gets delivered in the update with a switch on the game save to switch on the DLC pack would be real time saver.

[budda]

my funny not optimistic guess is Aliens lol

Edited March 13, 2017 by budda