Stock Game not very fun without Delta-V & TWR readout

[GoSlash27]

4 hours ago, JamesL86 said:

There is no tutorial that walks you through the calculations or what have you.

JamesL86,
 There are, actually. I've linked one upstream for mathematically designing stages. There are others for determining your stage's DV, and others for determining the DV of "mixed bag" stages.

*EDIT* I'm sorry... or do you mean an in game tutorial? If so, then you're right and I agree. There ought to be an in- game tutorial or reference for this.

Best,
-Slashy

Edited March 18, 2018 by GoSlash27

[GoSlash27]

6 hours ago, Kobymaru said:

This idea that withholding information is fun really boggles me. It might work in a novel, but not a game about engineering.

Kobymaru,
 Clearly, it does boggle you. That's not what's important, though. What's important is that there are others who (for whatever reason) *do* find it fun. Their preferences must be respected just as much as yours.

Best,
-Slashy

[JamesL86]

59 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

*EDIT* I'm sorry... or do you mean an in game tutorial? If so, then you're right and I agree. There ought to be an in- game tutorial or reference for this.

Best,
-Slashy

Yea I think a nice way to do it would be to go step by step with what the math is and what it means and then give you the option on the amount of information the game gives you after that.  Like do you go full KER or do you do it like you do with Excel etc.

[SkyKaptn]

What does Squad themselves say about why there is no dV / TWR readout? I have not yet read any "official" statement on this topic.

Edited March 19, 2018 by SkyKaptn
typo

[suicidejunkie]

2 hours ago, SkyKaptn said:

What does Squad themselves say about why there is no dV / TWR readout? I have not yet read any "official" statement on this topic.

Middle of page 2:

 

[eddiew]

^^^ Which I find to be a terribly frustrating response (in an old article, tbh)... Giving stock a delta-v readout is not filling in the crossword for us, it is providing the clues that make it a crossword. Right now we have a grid of white and black squares.

I can only imagine how many players drop the game after going to Mun because they can't work out how to plan interplanetary missions.

[klgraham1013]

23 minutes ago, eddiew said:

I can only imagine how many players drop the game after going to Mun...

Better question.  How many people dropped the game after not being able to get to the Mun because the game doesn't teach them anything.  

Edited March 19, 2018 by klgraham1013

[John FX]

So many times we have had this thread.

By now we can all agree some basic points so we can move on.

1,  some people really do like to calculate Dv by hand

2,  many many more people do not want to do this even if the maths were explained to them

3,  a lot of players get turned off by the lack of information in the stock game

4,  if a Dv readout were to be introduced there is no reason it should take away from the game of the players who do not want to use it.

5,  of course a Dv readout would not cope with every single case

6,  `5` does not matter because the people who build those `edge case` craft are mostly the ones who do not care so much about Dv

 

I see from the posts above we are at `3`, could we move this on to the conclusion please?

The conclusion is that it should be introduced, as an option, and with a caveat that it is not perfect in every case.

Then we might get onto the conversation about a transfer window planner...

On 3/18/2018 at 4:24 PM, GoSlash27 said:

Kobymaru,
 Clearly, it does boggle you. That's not what's important, though. What's important is that there are others who (for whatever reason) *do* find it fun. Their preferences must be respected just as much as yours.

Best,
-Slashy

point 4

[Red Thought]

I would agree to this post to the degree that it really should be added into the console versions at some point, as they can't mod.

[John FX]

On 3/17/2018 at 2:29 PM, Just Jim said:

I absolutely do NOT want to know if something is going to work before even putting on the launch pad

point 4

On 3/17/2018 at 3:13 PM, Kobymaru said:

I was just wondering how the devs envisioned the stock game experience, without any mods.

They envisaged it as more fun than it actually is unless you regard typing numbers into Excel `fun`

 

also point 3

3 minutes ago, Red Thought said:

I would agree to this post to the degree that it really should be added into the console versions at some point, as they can't mod.

This could be point 6 actually, console players do not even have the choice of KER or any other mod so any solution MUST be stock.

This would eliminate fun for the majority of players (IMHO) once they want to do something like a tylo lander, or many things outside kerbin SOI.

Yes, we know you would still enjoy it but you are not the majority of players.

Edited March 19, 2018 by John FX

[Pthigrivi]

I will absolutely concur that there is a stage at which doing the trial-and-error thing is truly interesting and valuable. For folks already familiar with or willing to do online research on basic manual orbital mechanics calculations this phase could stretch for months or years of play. Ima be honest though, I don't think most people are as dorky as I am. I just don't think they have the stomach for it. I think for the average player, even real-nerdy engineer friends of mine, they pretty much spent themselves in a month or 2 and never landed on Duna. That's a problem. I think most modern gamers expect the game itself to provide the information necessary within the game to excel at it. If the game is going to show dV in the maneuver node we shouldn't need to download a mod to tell us how much dV our ship has left. If the game is going to provide planets beyond Kerbin we shouldn't need to download a mod to tell us when the next transfer window is. Give players, especially console players, the basic information they need to play the game.

I've been playing a long time (5 years abouts?) and I've found it honestly one of the most informative, enjoyable games I've played in my life. There's a real gem here. I'm running a 1.3.1 career save right now with dozens of active flights to most planets in the system. I really love managing the chaos of it all, shuttling station components and fuel tankers and probes and new interplanetary exploration landers. None of this would really be enjoyable without KER and KAC though. I need to be able to plan on when the next vessel needs to burn or rendezvous. Im not going to spend 2 hours designing a crewed moho lander and hours more flying it if I don't know that its going to run out fuel before it even captures. There's a whole world of gameplay, mining Ike and landing on Eve and bases on Laythe, and they're open to so many people, they just need the basic tools to see it through. 

 

Edited March 20, 2018 by Pthigrivi

[SkyKaptn]

@SQUAD Please implement dV / TWR readouts in the next patch as an optional feature in the settings. Everyone wins.

[LoSBoL]

2 hours ago, SkyKaptn said:

@SQUAD Please implement dV / TWR readouts in the next patch as an optional feature in the settings. Everyone wins.

Additionally, a toggle to hide engine thrust and ISP values, along with hiding tank content values would be nice.  For people who enjoy guestimating if their rocket can reach Dres.

[SkyKaptn]

2 hours ago, SkyKaptn said:

@SQUAD Please implement dV / TWR readouts in the next patch as an optional feature in the settings. Everyone wins.

Quoting myself for further thoughts about the topic:

A dV / TWR read-out could also be enabled as a very tiny physicsless part (thinking i.e. something like a MechJeb chip but much smaller). A reasonable time to unlock this could be at the time one unlocks the first landing struts. The first sub-orbital flights, and first fly-by of the Mun should not need this "read-out part". Having it as a part will still make the read-out an optional feature for hard core math enthusiasts.

[Warzouz]

19 hours ago, suicidejunkie said:

Middle of page 2:

 

Maybe I'll be somewhat iconoclast but that's not really relevant. Devs don't play their game, they create it. I would very much like to know how many devs really played without mods a Jool mission with some landing  and how long was it ? How many planets did they visit outside Kerbin SOI and When was it ? How many time did they go through then Career game ? I bet the answer is none to very few

I was close to the lead designer of Trackmania. He was amazed of what te community would do. As I wrote a 40 pages documentation about game resources locations for moders, he said to me, few years later that my personal documentation was still used internally...

Notch also said something like that for Minecraft : he haven't understood why people would spend so much time to build stuff in a survival game.

And more recently, the lead designer of Factorio which, after playing trough the whole game, which he haven't done for years discovered his game was too complex and he should stop adding to it.

Developers are not players of their own game. Never forget that. They don't really know (or understand) what causes irritation to players.

[GoSlash27]

17 hours ago, John FX said:

This could be point 6 actually, console players do not even have the choice of KER or any other mod so any solution MUST be stock.

This is an excellent point. Console players need the option of displaying DV and TWR.

17 hours ago, John FX said:

Yes, we know you would still enjoy it but you are not the majority of players.

This, OTOH, is *not* a good point. This is just an argument for tyranny by majority. We should always try to avoid that.

Best,
-Slashy

[Jimmidii]

It's a bit late for this now, especially for the players that have been around for a long time, but if we'd have known what KSP would become, science experiments could have been used to fill out the information panels on planets, eventually leading to research in the R&D dept. telling you what the (minimum) required delta v for transfer, takeoff etc. would be.

Once upgraded it could tell you what the delta v of craft you've built is, and a part could have been used to get in flight delta v.

I calculate delta v myself by hand (or a rough figure that's probably good enough in my head), and I don't mind doing that, but having it in game would be nice.

[GoSlash27]

9 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

If the game is going to provide planets beyond Kerbin we shouldn't need to download a mod to tell us when the next transfer window is.

 Actually, you don't need a mod or even math to tell you that. You can twiddle the flight planner and get it to tell you when the next window is.

Best,
-Slashy

[KSK]

On 20/03/2018 at 3:08 AM, Pthigrivi said:

Lots of good stuff

I'm not going to post it all again but - what Pthigrivi said.

Trial-and-error within the Kerbin system is fine. The Map screen does a wonderful job of presenting everything you need to get to the Mun or Minmus in a visually intuitive, exploreable format. Flight plans are relatively straightforward and flight times are short. Going interplanetary in a stock game feels like a big hurdle to clear - your planning tools become less effective and at the same time the missions become longer and more complex. End result - for many players a potentially huge chunk of the game gets locked away behind an artificially high difficulty barrier.

Also, I think that shackling the game to a trial-and-error approach makes it a lot harder to expand in future and much harder to balance now.  Pthigirivi style games - which I have to confess is how I like to try and play and how I imagined a game about running a space program would work - become an exercise in frustration without a bit more in the way of planning tools. Going forward, you're limited in what new gameplay mechanics you can introduce and reasonably expect players to deal with on a trial-and-error basis. Even simple Contracts become a lot harder to balance since you need to account for players needing multiple attempts to complete a Contract. But how many attempts is it sensible to allow for? Or do you just assume people are going to Revert their way out of any problems?

To use HarvesteRs example, having a delta-V readout won't affect my ability to enjoy building a rocket powered surfboard (or, in my case, a hideously uncontrollable VTOL craft  ) and, as a bonus, it will also make my Jool-5 attempt much more fun. And yes - any delta-V readout is better than none. It might not be able to cope with my 24 stage, asparagused monstrosity of a launch vehicle but provided it can handle my four-NERVS-and-a-boat-load-of-fuel interplanetary stage, then we're good.

Edit. For consistency with posts on other threads, this should really have been written in the past tense, as I'm not currently playing any version of KSP for reasons. Just in case anyone decided to dig around in my posting history and get picky with me.

Edited March 21, 2018 by KSK

[John FX]

1 hour ago, GoSlash27 said:

This, OTOH, is *not* a good point. This is just an argument for tyranny by majority. We should always try to avoid that.

It is not an argument for tyranny, it is making the point that while some players like to do calculations by hand, the majority of players do not and to ignore their wishes is to have a minor elite dictating policy to everyone else.

To argue against it is to essentially argue that a dictatorship (or rule by established minority) is more valid than democracy (if you want to go to political systems)

Now that really is something we should avoid.

EDIT :

1 hour ago, GoSlash27 said:

players need the option of displaying DV and TWR.

This, we both agree on. The need is not limited to console players though and it really gets tiring and overly trite when features are dismissed with "Someone has already made that into a mod"

Edited March 20, 2018 by John FX

[GoSlash27]

JohnFX,

That's a false choice. It's not about making the game suitable strictly for the majority *or* the minority, it's about making the game suitable for everyone.

 There are some very valid arguments for changing the stock game, but "this is how we want it and there are more of us" is not one of them.

Best,

-Slashy

Edited March 20, 2018 by GoSlash27

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, SkyKaptn said:

A dV / TWR read-out could also be enabled as a very tiny physicsless part (thinking i.e. something like a MechJeb chip but much smaller). A reasonable time to unlock this could be at the time one unlocks the first landing struts.

No.  Just no.  We have an ingame menu, making it a part is stupid and complicated for no reason.   The reasonable time to have the information is available is right from the start, there's no reason to hide it.  (Not to mention your scheme presumes everyone climbs the tech tree in the same manner/forces people into a path on the tech tree for no good reason at all.)

[Just Jim]

Honestly, I don't see how anyone can say the "majority" like or don't like it... As far back as I can remember, there was never any kind of formal study or poll or survey taken of who does and doesn't want it included. Who's to say what the majority of players really want?

But more important, while I don't want it myself, I agree 100% with @GoSlash27

22 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

...it's about making the game suitable for everyone.

Yes, it's about making everyone happy... which is why I think the best solution is to add it, but also include an on/off switch in the settings, so players like me can disable it. Then everyone gets what they want.

[LoSBoL]

3 minutes ago, Just Jim said:

Honestly, I don't see how anyone can say the "majority" like or don't like it... As far back as I can remember, there was never any kind of formal study or poll or survey taken of who does and doesn't want it included. Who's to say what the majority of players really want?

But more important, while I don't want it myself, I agree 100% with @GoSlash27

Yes, it's about making everyone happy... which is why I think the best solution is to add it, but also include an on/off switch in the settings, so players like me can disable it. Then everyone gets what they want.

Judging by the numerous and endless requests, topics and posts over the years about the subject, do you really need a formal study, poll or survey? It's not hard to make an educated guess

[Just Jim]

19 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:

Judging by the numerous and endless requests, topics and posts over the years about the subject, do you really need a formal study, poll or survey? It's not hard to make an educated guess

I'm not going to argue... or make an "educated guess". Do not try and draw me into that trap. I refuse to fight about it.  

I made a proposal to implement it with an option to disable it, which should satisfy both sides. Now I'm going to go back to bug-testing. Good day.

Edited March 20, 2018 by Just Jim