A official Rss Support

[tawpik]

I think a official RSS support would be very welcome, i'm just not comfortable with 2300 m/s orbital speed.

I would suggest a just minor tweak for physics to make kerbin as big as earth and have to reach 8 Km/s to orbit ,  and same for other planets. i think if we can choose RSS and Kerbal system when creating new saves would be awesome.

I really hope devs will consider this, because ksp is not only a game, its best education and simulation software for astrophysics. Besides i don't think only tweaking physics engine and model parameters without using new textures wont be too hard at all. I believe that's achievable in less than a week.

At least a make a beta version and see the communities response would be much appreciated.

[Snark]

Hello, and welcome to the forums! 

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

I believe that's achievable in less than a week.

At least a make a beta version and see the communities response would be much appreciated.

A word of caution:  unless you're a professional software engineer who ships commercial code for a living... be very very careful with pronouncements like that.  Chances are extremely high that it is, in fact, far more time-consuming than you think.

(Speaking as a professional software engineer of >25 years' experience, here.) 

In addition to taking a lot more time than you probably think it does... it also comes with a lot more risk, too.  Any new feature carries bugs with it, and finding/fixing those bugs (which needs to be done as much as possible before release) is time-consuming and expensive.  Even simply keeping track of the known bugs, triaging them, managing reports, etc. itself takes a lot of time.

A few things that occur to me right off the bat, which make this an expensive feature to develop and support:

• The planets' terrain would need a total redesign.  If you scale up the dimensions of the planets 10x without changing any of the heightmaps involved, then that means all slopes will be only 1/10 as steep.  The "mountains" near KSC would become gently sloping hills, and anything that's not already a really steep mountain would become such a gentle rise that you'd be hard-pressed to notice it much.
• The rocket parts would need a total rebalance.  KSP comes with a wide variety of rocket parts, which have been designed and balanced to make for "appropriate" gameplay (hard enough to be interesting, easy enough not to be too frustrating) on a planet where it only takes a bit over 3000 m/s dV to orbit.  If you suddenly require several times more dV to get to orbit, then either you make it ridiculously difficult for players, or else you have to take the time to rescale all the parts.  Which is a non-trivial operation, because a lot of those parts interact in non-obvious ways, plus you also have to rebalance atmospheric heating physics and a bunch of other stuff.
• You'd need to set up all the options for how players choose "what kind of solar system do you want to be in", since obviously you don't want to force all players to move to some newly-designed system.
• Bear in mind that swapping out planets, dimensions, etc. isn't something that's built into stock KSP.  Making it able to do that would take a lot of design work, too.  For example, pretty much every solar-system-modifying mod these days is based on top of Kopernicus.  Kopernicus is a huge undertaking; it's a big mod, and has had multiple people working on it for years.  If KSP wanted to add such functionality to the stock game, they wouldn't be able to stand on Kopernicus' shoulders, so they'd have to do all of this from scratch.  Doable?   Sure... but it ain't cheap.

So, all in all, that would be a major commitment of engineering and QA resources.  I could easily see it occupying the entire dev team for an entire quarterly release cycle (maybe longer)... and also open KSP to introducing lots and lots of potential new bugs, which would then bedevil the players and Squad would probably need to take multiple iterations to find and squash them all.

So... huge cost.  Doesn't mean "don't do"... but big costs need to be justified by correspondingly big benefits.  And in this case... honestly I'm hard-pressed to see much benefit, from the perspective of the community as a whole.  Would it be kinda neat?  Sure.  But although I'm sure some players (such as yourself) would really really like to have this... an awful lot of players don't particularly need it.  (I don't, for example.)

I can't speak for the whole community, of course, but I'd hazard a guess that the vast majority of KSP players simply don't care all that much about this-- they've gotten used to the pint-sized kerbal solar system, and are happy with it.  I've been around the forum for a few years now, and there are some features that the community has been loudly and repeatedly demanding over the years (having a dV meter being one of the most common ones, for example-- finally got it in 1.6).  However, "give us a scaled-up solar system in stock" simply hasn't been one of those-- it's not something that most people are demanding.

And sinking all those resources into this feature would mean that they wouldn't be able to spend them on other features that do have broad popular demand, which would be doing the community a disservice.

So, dedicating enormous resources to implement a feature that only a tiny percentage of users want (or would even use if it were there) just simply doesn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff, from a business perspective.

Plus... if you really really want this, it's right there.  RSS is popular and lots of people run it-- and there are mods like RO that provide part rebalances as well.  So, for the few people (such as yourself) who want this... why is RSS + RO + other mods as needed not a reasonable option?  Gives you pretty much what you want, without taking any Squad resources away from KSP development.  Everyone wins, yes?

 

That said, though... you know what I'd love to see?  I'd love to see a major release that opens up the solar system to editing in general.  In other words:  Provide Kopernicus-like behavior in the stock game (i.e. make the solar system more moddable), accompanied by some new stock planets, and perhaps a planet editor.  It's a big ask (see my rant above), which means I suspect they'd need to make it a DLC (like Making History) and charge $$$ for it-- otherwise I'm hard-pressed to see how they could cost-justify the decision.  But if they did do that, I think it would unleash a lot of creative potential in the community, and would make it easier to have functionality such as what you're asking for with less (though still nonzero) functionality needed from mods.

[tawpik]

Thanks for your very detailed reply,

Unfortunately  I am a Software Engineer,And i Love the game, i make my own mods if i need.Enjoy the game far more than I thought.

Reading your reply I'm very disappointed.

RSS + RO is a great mod, made by unofficial developer, that earns barely any money from it. I dont think the modder Has more resources than KSP Dev team. Its not about excuses its about love and Passion.

When i bought the DLC I just realized KSP is shifted from making a great game to making good money. But if RSS comes out as another DLC, I'll buy it.

54 minutes ago, Snark said:

A few things that occur to me right off the bat, which make this an expensive feature to develop and support:

To answer the things you point out, i might give a solution.

first you dont design planets you generate them (noise generating, texture generating and such).

re-balancing parts is also not that bad, you can make a re-scaling of parameters and use it for every related part so you wont need do once per part.

1 hour ago, Snark said:

plus you also have to rebalance atmospheric heating physics and a bunch of other stuff.

Its just parameters to scale. KSP has a Gravity hack in F12 menu, everything is just like that, scaling up to needed value.

 

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

I really hope devs will consider this

I suggest this for official ksp team is because RSS in not supported on 1.6 . Besides its a suggestion, its a wish and passion for the game. you dont have to teach me bunch of stuff that you dont understand yourself,you have to work on that 25 years of experience.

I just hope to see such a feature since its a space simulating game.But hope is not reality, there are mountains in the way.

we're done here.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Scaling it up would just make all the most boring bits of the game (time warping, waiting for things to happen) longer while leaving the interesting bits pretty much the same.

Not the best use of the dev's limited time/resources/potential for a game that aims to grab the casual audience. (We don't have cute little bug eyed green men for nothing.)

If @Snark says it'd be time and work intensive; I am VERY inclined to believe him.

[Snark]

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

Thanks for your very detailed reply,

No problem-- I figure, if I'm going to disagree with someone, it's only polite to be reasonably detailed about why.  Otherwise it's just negativity.

I know I tend to go on and on, sorry about that, it's just how I'm wired.  However, I'm a bit concerned that you may have taken away a different message than I intended.  If you don't mind, take a moment to re-read just the last paragraph of what I wrote-- it's probably the most important bit in that post.

Basically, my whole post could be boiled down to this:

"I like your idea, and would like to see it happen. However, I think that the way you suggest getting there is impractical, because <various reasons>.  Here's an approach that I think would be more practical, in terms of business model, and therefore more likely to enable what you and I would both like to see."

 

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

I am a Software Engineer,And i Love the game, i make my own mods if i need.Enjoy the game far more than I thought.

Excellent, me too!  To everything you just said.  Glad we're on the same page there. 

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

Reading your reply I'm very disappointed.

I'm sorry to hear that.    "Disappointed" how, exactly?  Disappointed that that's the situation we find ourselves in?  Or disappointed because you think I'm incorrect, in some fashion?

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

RSS + RO is a great mod, made by unofficial developer, that earns barely any money from it.

Yup.  I'll grant you that-- in fact, I'd be happy to posit that they make zero money on it.  It's a mod, after all, and nobody's obliged to donate anything.  If they've got a Patreon or something going, so that folks can donate to the tip jar, then that's great-- I hope people chip in.  But even if it does pull in any cash, I would assume that it would be such a small amount that it wouldn't be even vaguely commensurate with the amount of effort put in, if you were to work it out in terms of "dollars per hour".

Certainly, I've produced plenty of my own mods, and I have made exactly zero dollars from any of them because I neither have nor want a Patreon because it's a hobby that I do for fun.  Which, I presume, is what pretty much all mod authors do.  I'd be surprised if any KSP mod author makes enough money off their mods to be even vaguely competitive with having a day job.

The good news is that the fact that they don't make money off it is irrelevant.  They make the mod because they like making the mod.  It's a labor of love, not a commercial enterprise.

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

 I dont think the modder Has more resources than KSP Dev team.

Welllll... in the specific case of RSS/RO, it's not clear to me just how much fewer resources they have.  My understanding is that those particular mods are the process of a collaboration of a number of developers who have been working on them for years.  I haven't been involved directly, so I'm not in a position to say just how many engineer-hours have gone into them, but it's a lot.

However, speaking of mods in general, I'll certainly grant you that the average modder has way fewer resources than the KSP dev team, sure.

On the other hand, unlike the KSP dev team,

• The modder doesn't have to rely on money made from KSP development to buy groceries and pay the mortgage.
• The modder has the freedom to do whatever they want to custom-tailor their solution to exactly what they and their narrow target demographic specifically want.  As opposed to the KSP devs, who have to target the entire (very diverse) community and therefore have a much harder job.
• The modder doesn't have to worry about introducing any risk to the established KSP code base.
• The modder has zero obligation to fix any bugs introduced during a release-- and plenty of leisure to fix as and when so inclined.
• The modder doesn't have to compete with other priorities besides their pet project-- they can focus their effort where they want.
• The modder has zero schedule pressure, can work at whatever pace they like, can take as long as they need.  If they stop working on a project for a week or a month or a year, costs them nothing-- as opposed to a business, which has (large) ongoing expenses even if they're not selling anything.

Virtually all mods are hobbies that are labors of love.  Doesn't stop modders from producing some amazing mods, and my hat's off to them.

But they're playing by a completely set of rules than Squad has to, because Squad is a business, which comes with a variety of requirements.  An average modder has a lot fewer resources than Squad does, sure... but they're also solving a much easier problem, with fewer constraints.

 

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

Its not about excuses

You're right.  Modding isn't about excuses.  Neither is developing commercial software.  It's a good thing that neither you nor I nor anyone here thinks "it's about excuses", no? 

So yes, I agree with you.

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

its about love and Passion.

Careful not to mix apples and oranges, there:

Hobbies-- such as writing mods, for free, when you're not depending on it for an income-- are definitely about love and passion, pretty much by definition.  After all, what other reason is there?  It takes a lot of effort, and doesn't really generate income.  You'd pretty much have to love it in order to do it.

However, businesses aren't "about" love and passion.  They are, first and foremost, about making money.  It's what they're for.  Certainly, they can involve love and passion, and it can be great if they do-- but the bottom line has to come first, or otherwise they go out of business pretty darn quick.  Doesn't matter how passionate a company is, if they go bankrupt.

I don't think anyone here is accusing the devs at Squad of not having passion for what they do.  Certainly I would never make such a claim.  However... they do have to pay the bills, and the company has to earn money.  It has to.  Businesses need cash the way that you and I need oxygen.  Cut off the profits, and pretty soon there's no business anymore.

So by all means, call upon "love and passion" if you're talking about modding, because that's what it's about.  And even call upon "love and passion" when talking about a business-- but if you do, better have a plausible explanation for how to convert that passion into sufficient quantities of cash flow to keep the enterprise going.

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

When i bought the DLC I just realized KSP is shifted from making a great game to making good money.

"Shifted"?  When was it ever not about making money?  (And since when are "making a great game" and making a profit mutually exclusive?  Making a great game is how to make money.  If KSP were a crappy game, it would have folded long ago, along with Squad.)

Squad's not a non-profit or NGO or something-- it's a for-profit business, and for-profit businesses are about, well, making a profit.  That's why they exist.  Certainly there was passion, too, among the developers!  But a person like HarvesteR needs a company to provide the funding and resources to allow him to bring that passion to people on a commercial scale.  The developers have to earn their salaries.  They need that to live on.  And that means the company has to make money so it can pay them.

If you want to contend that Squad used to be about "passion", and then shifted to be something different... okay, but could you cite some evidence for such a claim?

To me, the existence of the DLC simply demonstrates that they have a business model.  And, personally, I'm really happy about that.  I can't imagine that the stock game itself is going to keep generating company-supporting revenue forever; I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people who are inclined to buy the game have already done so.  Which means that if I want to keep getting shiny kerbal toys from them, they're gonna have to have some concrete reason (i.e. money) to keep cranking stuff out, as opposed to just closing up shop and moving on to some other project entirely.  So when I see them doing something like the DLC, I'm thrilled, because it means that KSP is still economically viable and therefore it's reasonable to expect it to keep moving along.

Which is what I want... because I love this game, and am passionate about it, and would like to see it continue for a long time.

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

first you dont design planets you generate them (noise generating, texture generating and such).

Oh, absolutely you can have procedurally generated planets, such as what you describe.  There are plenty of planet packs out there filled with such planets.  And in my experience, the one thing they have in common is... well, frankly, they're simply not very interesting.  There's a bland sameness about them; the lack of effort really shows, when you put them next to planets that have a lot of personal effort put into them.

Of course, every planet is going to have to have a certain amount of procedural effect, if for no other reason than that even KSP's pint-sized planets have surfaces covering literally millions of square kilometers, and no artist is ever going to have time to sculpt and paint that in detail, even if the player's PC had the capacity for it.  However, in my experience there's a world of difference (no pun intended) between, on the one hand, a planet that's purely procedural and nobody did much effort other than picking a few parameters; and, on the other hand, a planet that's been lovingly crafted with a lot of personal attention.

What do we see in the really best planet packs?  The ones that have hundreds of thousands of downloads, that get rave reviews from fans, that have been around for years and have comment threads stretching to hundreds of pages of posts?  They have gorgeous hand-crafted planets, that's what.  Planets with real artwork in them, and lots of personal time.  Hours of effort put in equals appeal coming out.  Go ask @Galileo how many hours he and fellow developers put into GPP, or @CaptRobau about OPM.  I don't know the answer, but I'd estimate that it's approximately "a whole lot".

That's what sets the bar for what KSP fans expect.  And those mods I just mentioned are completely free.  If Squad were to be putting planets into something they're selling... they'd better aim for a high mark.  If they turned out just some batch of plain-vanilla, pure-procedural planets that didn't have much personal effort put into them, it would show.  And KSP fans would erupt.

They'd eviscerate Squad in the forums-- "Hey Squad, what the heck do you think you're doing, trying to sell us this low-effort stuff?"  (Only they'd be a whole lot less polite about it.)

The fact is, with any product, quality is a function of effort put into it.  People have very high expectations of commercial products-- and rightfully so-- which means they'd likely be unsatisfied with slipshod work.

(Just look at the ongoing debates about the quality of art assets in stock parts, that have been going on for years.)

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

re-balancing parts is also not that bad

Are you kidding?  It's hard, especially given the diversity of the audience they have to please.

Actually changing the numbers is trivially easy, sure.  But you have to figure out what numbers to use and how to make everything work together.  Case in point:  A while back, they came out with Making History, which introduced a set of new rocket engines.  We're talking about, what, half a dozen or so engines?  Which they had like a year of development time to tweak and balance and play-test and try to get exactly right.  And they still took a lot of grief in the forums for their balancing choices, after it shipped-- and, indeed, with KSP 1.6 they significantly rebalanced several of them to incorporate a year's worth of player feedback.

Sure, they could do a "rough draft" rebalance by just blindly multiplying some numbers across the board... but the lack of effort would show, and I contend that it would take significant time and effort to come up with something that would stand up reasonably well to player scrutiny.

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

Its just parameters to scale. KSP has a Gravity hack in F12 menu, everything is just like that, scaling up to needed value.

Shrug.  If that's the case, why did RSS/RO need so many developer-hours put into them?  I don't know what the effort level has been, there, but it's gotta be hundreds of developer-hours, at least.  I'd guess thousands.

If you're going to assert that this is such a quick and easy thing to do... citation, please?  Perhaps you'd like to go to the RSS/RO developers and ask them how much effort the project has required?  I don't get the impression that it was trivial.

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

I suggest this for official ksp team is because RSS in not supported on 1.6 .

Until such time as someone comes along who cares enough about it to bring it up to speed, sure.  If it's so quick and simple and easy, then it oughta be soon, no?

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

Besides its a suggestion, its a wish and passion for the game.

Absolutely!  And I'd love to see that, too.  I hope I didn't give you an impression otherwise.

2 hours ago, tawpik said:

I just hope to see such a feature since its a space simulating game.But hope is not reality, there are mountains in the way.

Again, I agree with you.

But... there are always mountains.  Always.  So if you want to get to the other side... you need to find a path that's feasible, and "climb right over the top" may not be practical if it's steep enough.  So maybe you need to go around, or even tunnel through.  You don't set out to get past a mountain without having a reasonable plan how.

I hope it's clear that I like your idea.

It's just that I happen to think (based on my experience not just as a software developer but from modding KSP and reading the forums for a few years) that it's an idea that's considerably more expensive than you appear to think it is.  Maybe I'm wrong about that, in which case I'd be delighted. 

But assuming-- just for the sake of argument-- that I'm not wrong about how expensive it would be... that doesn't have to mean "no go".  It just means we have to have a way for it to be worth Squad's while despite the expense.  Which means it would need to generate revenue.  Which is math.  It doesn't matter what any of us want, unless the financial numbers work out for Squad.  (I'm not talking about "raw profiteering", simply making a reasonable profit and keeping the lights on.)

So my post isn't about "no no no", even if it might sound that way.  Rather, it's about "how can we turn that into a yes", because that's how things get done.

To take on an expensive project, they'll need to generate correspondingly large revenue.  Which means they'll need to sell it, and it means that they'll have to have something that appeals to a broad base of KSP players so that lots of people will want to buy it.  Targeting a tiny slice of the KSP community won't work; there's just not enough revenue there.

That's why I closed my post thus:

4 hours ago, Snark said:

That said, though... you know what I'd love to see?  I'd love to see a major release that opens up the solar system to editing in general.  In other words:  Provide Kopernicus-like behavior in the stock game (i.e. make the solar system more moddable), accompanied by some new stock planets, and perhaps a planet editor.  It's a big ask (see my rant above), which means I suspect they'd need to make it a DLC (like Making History) and charge $$$ for it-- otherwise I'm hard-pressed to see how they could cost-justify the decision.  But if they did do that, I think it would unleash a lot of creative potential in the community, and would make it easier to have functionality such as what you're asking for with less (though still nonzero) functionality needed from mods.

^ That's me, agreeing with you that I like the idea-- and proposing what I believe to be a practical route to get there, one that I think could plausibly happen.  Make a feature that lots of people want, and which enables your specific request "along for the ride", so to speak.  Then sell it.

[klesh]

In all honesty I would've enjoyed a KSP - Realworld DLC more than that Making History mission builder.  To think how much coding time was wasted on that thing. 

[Tyko]

3 hours ago, klesh said:

In all honesty I would've enjoyed a KSP - Realworld DLC more than that Making History mission builder.  To think how much coding time was wasted on that thing. 

I agree, but comparing this in value to Mission Builder is a VERY low bar. I've literally NEVER launched Mission Builder since I bought the DLC. It's a bit like comparing the number of deaths from some activity to deaths by shark attack.

Mashable 2015 - More people have died from selfies than shark attacks this year    (spoiler: 8 from sharks, 12 from selfies)    

 

Edited January 15, 2019 by Tyko

[klesh]

It was more relevant to how doing RSS would be need “all this work” and I was merely pointing out I wouldve rather that they had done that work than all the work they did for something that was a giant bomb of a product. That was my thinkning at least.

 

Work for KSP that people want vs work we did for a year that we thought they all wanted and turns out no one does.  I hope they ask us before jumping in the deep end this time. 

Edited January 15, 2019 by klesh

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah I mean I'd love to play with RSS but tend to agree that the toy solar system is basically baked into nearly every aspect of the game and it would require much too much effort than would be worth it to scale up now. I'd much rather see the planetary surfaces brought closer to life and realism in other ways that had a more direct way of opening up gameplay.

And it is indeed a bummer that Making History didn't really pan out as hoped. There were a lot of people back then saying the contract system was fundamentally broken and just wanted to define all of their own mission parameters. The thing is you can already do that--its called sandbox--so spending a huge amount of time and effort to codify free play may not have been as worthwhile as it seemed. Glad we got some cool historical parts, though.