Patch 1.4.3 to be released next week!

[klgraham1013]

1 minute ago, silverfox101 said:

I don't think people leaving team KSP is anybody's business, people change jobs.

Maybe not, but it certainly reflects on Squad, the company.  Especially the quality of those who left, and that they all left at the same time.  ...and Porkjet left not long before that.  People changing jobs doesn't say much about that person.  Employees leaving a company en mass does say something about that company.

What it says is up to interpretation.

[silverfox101]

True enough brother klgraham1013

[Lisias]

17 minutes ago, Errol said:

Maybe a little more transparency would help dispell incorrect guesses about an obviously coloured past. 

Sausages, laws and software: too much transparency and it will affect your stomach. :-)

The "level of transparency" is not that bad - you can find the information (or infer it) with proper research and perception - and this appears to be the problem.

I think the problem is on the Communication level - and this can be happening even inside the Team itself, and the communication problems with the customers is more an effect than a cause.

Edited April 23, 2018 by Lisias
typos. but you already knew that...

[LoSBoL]

2 hours ago, sarbian said:

"SNIP"

Wow, thank you, thank you for all your work both with Squad for creating this wonderful game AND for sticking around to continue to create and maintaining mods for us!

[Errol]

28 minutes ago, Lisias said:

...

The "level of transparency" is not that bad - you can find the information (or infer it) with proper research and perception - and this appears to be the problem.

I think the problem is on the Communication level - and this can be happening even inside the Team itself, and the communication problems with the customers is more an effect than a cause.

You are unnecessarily splitting hairs here. My point is that I did do research, and it is still not clear, and that is indicative of poor communication/low transparency. 

Not telling people what is going on, or why, is what has caused so many to wonder/guess about what happened. 

[Mark Kerbin]

Is it not technically next week yet?

Or is the patch out and I haven’t seen it k. Steam yet?

[Lisias]

20 minutes ago, Errol said:

Not telling people what is going on, or why, is what has caused so many to wonder/guess about what happened. 

Au contraire, this time is the exact opposite. They said what they think was going to happen ("1.4.3 next week"), something change or gone wrong, and then we have a situation created exactly by the transparency you say is the way to go.

Sometimes we forgot that people do what people do, and not all the people are like "us". I'm pretty confident that such transparency would work with you as much as it would work with me - but it didn't worked for a lot of people, and know the guys have another fire to put out.

The "sweet spot" of communication level is somewhere "lower" than this, if we take in account what's happening on this thread. But, granted, somewhat higher than the usual practice.

20 minutes ago, Errol said:

You are unnecessarily splitting hairs here. My point is that I did do research, and it is still not clear, and that is indicative of poor communication/low transparency. 

I think you're mistaking transparency with communication skills.

Low transparency is actively hiding information. Low communication skills is failing to show that information effectively. These are two different problems that happens to have the same final result - but being different problems, they need different solutions.

"Use the right tool to do the job right"

15 minutes ago, Mark Kerbin said:

Or is the patch out and I haven’t seen it k. Steam yet?

Nops. No new depot on steamdb.

Edited April 23, 2018 by Lisias
typos! argh!!!

[Not Sure]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

If by some reason these new customers declines in number, it affects directly the cash flow and, then, the capability to finance the resources to keep the development! The efforts being (fiercely) applied in some non-critical features (as Mission Builder and Localization) appears to corroborate my thesis: these guys are fighting for cash flow.

 

Totally agree. I hope most of us around here can also agree. Kinda sad, I want Squad to survive but I don’t want to throw out all my money on products not worth it. 

Im thinking about switching over to Orbiter2016, it’s free, made as a hobby and open to modding. Just imagine how amazing the base game would be if modders could pitch in without pay. Money is difficult though, making content for people to sell but you don’t get a share of the money, it’s not very motivating. 

Edited April 23, 2018 by Not Sure

[Lisias]

[snip]

Anyway, the developer's exodus are not just off-topic, but also covered by a thing called NDA, and believe me - you are even more wrong about this than you think. There's not a single chance that anyone, anywhere, would be transparent about this.Not on this case, not on any other case.

Non Disclosure Agreements have this name for a reason. :-)

Edited April 23, 2018 by Snark
Redacted by moderator.

[Curveball Anders]

25 minutes ago, Mark Kerbin said:

Is it not technically next week yet?

It is, and it will continue until late Sunday.

 

[Lisias]

6 minutes ago, Not Sure said:

Im thinking about switching over to Orbiter2016, it’s free, made as a hobby and open to modding. Just imagine how amazing the base game would be if modern could pitch in without pay. Money is difficult though, making content for people to sell but you don’t get a share of the money, it’s not very motivating. 

There's no free lunch. You gain something, you loose something.

I used to play Orbiter until recently. There're fabulous work done there. But writing mods to it is far from being for the faint of heart. C++ is not that easy, it's hard to debug and "exceptions" just crash the whole shebang instead of being logged into a file. :-)

For *real* space simulation, I don't think anything will surpass Orbiter for a long time. But to having fun, both writing mods and playing (with or without mods),  I think that KSP is still the thing.

They're not mutually exclusive, however. We can play both (if we manage to find the time, obviously!)

[Snark]

Some posts have been removed and/or redacted due to making (and responding to) personal accusations.

I know I don't need to remind anyone about the forum rules because you're all already familiar with them (right?), but apparently a brief refresher may be in order:

• Do not make personal accusations.  Rule 2.2.d.
• Do not respond to supposed accusations with more accusations.
  • If you think someone has made an innocent mistake, by all means respond politely and correct them.
  • If you think someone is deliberately misrepresenting you or is otherwise behaving in a fashion that you believe is so egregious that they are actually breaking forum rules, then please do not respond.  It never ends well.  Instead, please report the post and let the moderators decide whether anything needs to be done.  It's what we're for.
• Arguing is fine.  Arguing about arguing is not.

Furthermore, a word to the wise:  Please don't respond to elevated temperature by further elevating it.  Don't leap to the conclusion that the thing the person just wrote is deliberately smearing you in some way.  It's possible they simply misunderstood what you wrote, and are responding to what they think you said.  It's also possible that actually you are misreading what they wrote, and it's not as bad as you think.  It's easy to make mistakes, folks.  This is a text-only medium, which makes misunderstandings easier than IRL, even without taking into account that for a lot of folks here English may not be their first language.  So, life is generally nicer if everyone can cut everyone a little slack, no?

Also, one gentle nudge:  The topic of this thread is the 1.4.3 patch.  That's what this thread is about.  Says so right there in the thread title.  Other, completely irrelevant and unrelated stuff-- such as, for example, the past development history of KSP, and when/why various developers left or stayed or what-have-you, is off topic.  That discussion doesn't belong here.

Thank you for you understanding, and I trust we manage to have a conversation about the upcoming 1.4.3 patch like civil adults.

[Snark]

....Aaaaand that didn't take long.  Had to remove more content, after the above post.

People, when a moderator specifically posts in a thread that a thing is off-topic and please move back to the topic at hand... it's generally not considered appropriate to make a post specifically about that thing not two minutes after the moderator said it's off topic.

(It's also possible to do this "innocently"-- e.g. you start typing a response, before someone posted in the thread-- but that's what the "So-and-so has just posted in the thread" notifications are for.  If you see one of those, it's generally a good idea to check what was posted, before posting yourself.)

The topic here is the 1.4.3 patch.  Thanks.

 

[adsii1970]

Will 1.4.3 be the last patch for a while? I have mods I maintain and I've held off since the release of 1.4.0 just because we were told there would be another patch released.

Not trying to start any drama, but since this is a thread about the 1.4.3 patch...

 

[Snark]

45 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

Will 1.4.3 be the last patch for a while?

I don't believe that's been announced.  (In general, my experience has been that Squad generally doesn't get into details about actual or hypothetical patch N+1 when they haven't released patch N yet.)

I could be wrong about that, of course. 

45 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

I have mods I maintain and I've held off since the release of 1.4.0 just because we were told there would be another patch released.

Since the post-1.4 patches have been just that-- patches, i.e. minor bugfixes-- I haven't seen any changes that would break mods, nor do I have any particular reason to think that upcoming 1.4.3 (or any patches that may follow) would break mods, either.  Certainly none of the recent patches have broken any of my mods.

Speaking as a modder, my suggestion would be to just go ahead and update.  When a later patch comes out, just a quick check to verify that "yes, they're sitll working" (which they almost certainly will be) would be all that's needed.

That's what I do, anyway.  Up to you. 

[adsii1970]

1 minute ago, Snark said:

Since the post-1.4 patches have been just that-- patches, i.e. minor bugfixes-- I haven't seen any changes that would break mods, nor do I have any particular reason to think that upcoming 1.4.3 (or any patches that may follow) would break mods, either.  Certainly none of the recent patches have broken any of my mods.

This is what I was thinking. I suspect that once I've recompiled for 1.4, I am hoping it will be good for a while. I think I only ran into one patch (1.3 to 1.3.1) where I actually had to recompile a mod, which at the time I thought was pretty strange.

2 minutes ago, Snark said:

Speaking as a modder, my suggestion would be to just go ahead and update.  When a later patch comes out, just a quick check to verify that "yes, they're sitll working" (which they almost certainly will be) would be all that's needed.

I'll do this then. But after I finish grading the 45 rough drafts and 22 exams I need to grade before this Friday. Heck, let me be more honest than that... it probably won't happen until next Friday, May 4th since grades are due on the 3rd.  

Thanks for the heads up, @Snark.

[Mark Kerbin]

We are going to have to clone @Snark if squad ends up needing to do 1.4.4.

on a more on topic note, has anyone seen any images or info of the new launch pads? I need to plan where to deploy my base so it’s not redundant 

[MarvinKosh]

It's easy to take a backseat and say 'that mistake was so obvious.'

If you have limited time and or resources to test, you're going to try to test the things that are likely to break as a result of changes. So yes, things which seem like obvious and glaring mistakes do get missed. I'm not apologising for the developers, I'm just dispelling the notion of an idyllic development environment where things are squeaky smooth.

I'm a modder for a game called RimWorld. Even though I've been modding the game for a few years now, I still occasionally manage to break stuff and then it makes it into a mod release and then I have to chase it up with fixes. These days I'm more cautious and put out lots of test versions for brave souls who like to live on the edge. I do more testing myself to make sure I haven't missed anything, but I'm still just one guy and my detection rate is nowhere near a hundred percent.

That's why I said that the KSP community should have been involved in the 1.4 testing process. With many eyes you have a higher detection rate and can log more bugs, then fix the major ones as a priority. The people who aren't interested in testing potentially buggy software don't see the worst of it. This time around, we've all seen KSP at it's buggiest.

I hope that the management at TTI realise that setting arbitrary release dates just results in an arbitrary product quality, which is unlikely to please new or existing customers, and likely to impact the game's future review rating. For reference, the review rating for Making History currently is 54% positive (Mixed) which is probably more than it deserves considering its present state. A rating of 'Mixed' is very bad on Steam. Few customers will buy something with that rating unless they're really invested in what the product will become, which is not many people these days.

[Mark Kerbin]

As @MarvinKosh said, yeah a lot of the current issues are obvious, but the thing is,  it’s software and unity. Some things may not be obvious unless you really really look at them, or hear about it from others. I had no idea the engines were off until I saw something on forums. With SAS on it was totally invisible. I may have never noticed until I saw a fix in patch notes.

The great thing about this community and forums is that when one person sees an issue, we all do, and can often boot up ksp and have a look for ourselves. The devs can simply work on fixing things they know about and let us find the stuff they didn’t have the resources to test for.

That being said, I would love if squad made use of steams opt in beta system, and let the more daring kerbals find issues before everyone does when a release comes out. Again, totally agree with @MarvinKosh. Like squad has been doing with the bug fix dates, I would prefer to be kept in the dark about when exactly the release is going to be. I like the suspense, and I would assume the devs would enjoy having a looser deadline. Humans in general don’t do well under stress.

Edited April 23, 2018 by Mark Kerbin

[Snark]

50 minutes ago, Mark Kerbin said:

We are going to have to clone @Snark if squad ends up needing to do 1.4.4.

Oh, that's already been done, with mixed results.  Any time you see me post anything that's misinformed, or flat-out wrong, or grouchy, then that's not me.  It's the other me.  They should really fire that guy. 

48 minutes ago, MarvinKosh said:

That's why I said that the KSP community should have been involved in the 1.4 testing process. With many eyes you have a higher detection rate and can log more bugs, then fix the major ones as a priority. The people who aren't interested in testing potentially buggy software don't see the worst of it. This time around, we've all seen KSP at it's buggiest.

A valid suggestion, and it has indeed been tried that way in the past.  However, from a software development perspective, it's not a total slam-dunk:  doing that has costs as well as benefits, and the benefits don't necessarily outweigh the costs.  They can-- but it can also go the other way.  For the curious, a discussion here:

Having been in the software development biz a pretty long time, and having seen it done both ways, there's a valid case to be made on either side-- it generally depends on specific circumstances of a particular release which way (public testing, or not) is better.

I don't work for Squad or T2 and therefore am not privy to the reasons behind their decision not to go with a public test on this go-round, when they did have a public test in the past.

However, even without knowing the specifics here, I have been on board with an awful lot of software releases from various companies in the past, and my experience has been that companies usually have pretty good reasons for making the choices that they do, because software folks tend to be fairly intelligent and prudent and put a lot of thought into decisions.  Since those reasons usually aren't visible to the outside world (e.g. to us, as customers), then the decisions may seem questionable-- but we're often not in a position to question them simply because we don't have the necessary data to be able to judge.

Doesn't mean they never get it wrong, of course.    Naturally, companies can screw up, because they're made of, not to put too fine a point on it, people.  And people-- even smart, prudent ones-- can screw up, and of course nobody has a crystal ball.  But my experience has been that in the absence of information to the contrary, the most likely default assumption is that a company had pretty good reasons for making the decisions that they did at the time.

Is KSP 1.4 (and Making History) pretty buggy?  Yes.  Would it have been better if it were less buggy?  Sure.  But would it have actually been "better" (e.g. less buggy, and other things) if they did a public test release?  Not necessarily, and we're in no position to judge because (as is often the case with companies' decisions) we have zero visibility into the reasons behind their decision.

And therefore we don't have the data to be able to judge.

[Just Jim]

20 minutes ago, Snark said:

It's the other me.  They should really fire that guy. 

Sorry... it's so off-topic, but I have to... lol... 

 

Edited April 23, 2018 by Just Jim

[silverfox101]

I think someone mentioned somewhere about the dev blogs. I also use X-Plane 10 (not upgrading to 11 any time soon) anyway, what I really like about the dev blogs they are quite detailed, what the problems are, why something cannot be implemented at this stage, all very informative. Makes you feel involved even though we are not in control of development, it just gives folks an insight. I think this is one of the occasions when perhaps a more detailed actual dev blog would be appreciated. I dunno, just a thought. 

[Serenity]

1 hour ago, MarvinKosh said:

It's easy to take a backseat and say 'that mistake was so obvious.'

I agree with most of your post but in this case you have two important game mechanics that you need to make sure they will work.

1)Launching a rocket with a fairing.

2)Landing a vessel.

Both of these things take 10 minutes to test before you deploy the patch.

I am still trying to decide what scares me most.

The idea that they tested the patched version and they could't see the problems and the possibility of breaking something that big

or that they didn't even bother to test at all after they patched their version.

 

Edited April 23, 2018 by Boyster

[Jesusthebird]

I think my gripe isnt the delay...but rather its been delayed without anyone saying a word. I consider it polite to state a major patch will be delayed for(insert excuse/reason here) this is highly anticipated...would be nice to see them at least say " we are still working on it, please be patient"

At this point i dont expect this patch to be released by end of the month...its been almost a week past official release date range stated...so its either harder than they thought..or they are taking their time..which.. Either way..keep working..we want a polished bugfix. But some sort of communication would be nice

[silverfox101]

I was going to post an x plane dev blog link for those that maybe would like to see what I mean, but I changed my mind as this is KSP and not .......well you know