Kerbal Space Program Breaks Ground with a New DLC!

[Ahres]

6 hours ago, M.M.I said:

Just noticed that on Eve picture there is wiring between the solar panel aparratus and the one behind it! And it does not seem to be a single item. If that is the level of visuals in connecting items on surface, I am really really impressed.

Someone upthread pointed that out! I hope you’re right. It’d be really fun setting up something that good-looking on the surface of the Mun!

[iemaderp]

finally!

[Lisias]

On 5/10/2019 at 8:47 AM, steve_v said:

#BlameManagement. I don't know whether that management was T2 at the time or some suit at SQUAD, but I'm not a big believer in coincidence.
Given SQUADs history of #BlameUnity though, it could go either way.

You #BlameUnity and you will be right about… 85% of the time.  Hard to criticize them for doing that.

However, Good 3D Engines are expensive. You pay serious money for support, or you pay serious money to people that does it for you. So I think you are on the right track - unholy agreements on the top brass of two companies to push a bad product is not uncommon at all (Microsoft anyone?). I hope we don't get involved on some kind of UnityGate.  

 

On 5/10/2019 at 8:47 AM, steve_v said:

Unity is a tool. If it doesn't do the job, fix it or replace it, lest ye resemble the old adage regarding poor workmen.

You are not wrong, but IMHO you are right on the wrong way.

In the past, the workmen were responsible for choosing their tools. Now, someone above the guy is the one that choose the tool - however, there's a break rupture on the chain of responsibility here - the one that calls the shots is not the one being blamed by the bad results.

It's almost schizophrenic : the workmen manages to get something from that bad tool, managements gets the glory. The tool is so bad that he could not get the needed result, workmen gets the fallout. And management lives to ruin another day.

Of course we also do screwup a lot. Kraken knows how many times the team had to burn the midnight oil for something I had borked marvelously - but this is the difference: good workmen screws up, good workmen take the responsibility and fix it as soon as it's possible (what's not the same as soon as you wanted).

This sacred chain of events fails miserably when one, just one person on that chain of responsibility is allowed to walk away from his borks. From this point on, workmen spend most of their time defending themselves from each other instead of doing their jobs.

 

On 5/10/2019 at 12:34 PM, steve_v said:

True. The better option would be to bypass Unitys broken input stack altogether and use SDL directly, as AFBW and Advanced Input do. It's not a particularly difficult problem, and example code is readily available.

What really grinds my gears here is the total lack of action on SQUADs part, as well as the weasel-speak and deflection used in defending that inaction.

If the response on the bugtracker is to be believed, the existence of those mods excuses SQUAD from doing anything at all, and if SQUAD did fix it themselves it would likely take longer than waiting for Unity...

Politics, IMHO. Ditching Unity on the input stack in favor of a freely available open source solution will play havoc to Unity's image (as they need our help on this, uh?).

I said before, and I will say again: using Unity on the beginning of the project was not a mistake. KSP would not reach what it reached using C++, I have to shove my proud somewhere else and admit that C# played an important role on this.

But the time to find alternatives is more than due.

The World is going UNIX for good. Even Microsoft (with the Linux subsystem) had yielded to that - not to mention MacOS and PlayStation (FreeBSD derivatives). If Squad doesn't does something soon, someone else will - and this guy will harvest what was seeded by KSP.

 

On 5/10/2019 at 12:34 PM, steve_v said:

Yet here we are 406 days later, and still nothing has been done. Oh, and of course the whole problem is the fault of Unity and "the open source community", no way does SQUAD have anything to do with it.

No one works for free. We always want something back - Open Source is about the Stone Soup (yeah, I'm that old), not about 'working for free'.

People work for something - and it's better for everyone when everybody knows what each other want.

 

On 5/10/2019 at 12:34 PM, steve_v said:

Shall we ask nlite how long it took one person to write AFBW, part time?

Allowing volunteer modders to extend your game is awesome, relying on them to fix your screwups and justify inaction on regressions is utterly pathetic.

Worst. It's dangerous. Every hour a good developer spends trying to fixing Unity and Squad's screw-ups, is an hour he/she is not improving the game - or enjoying themselves doing enjoyable things.

What's defeats the reason we bought the game at first place.

Given that most Add'On authors are not professional developers, and the ones that are, do not necessarily have the skills to lead a project, it's reasonable to conclude that a lot of problems will arise from the Add'Ons themselves (as most as from Unity, I say). Relying on this scene to provide a vital, core business feature (INPUT DEVICES, BY KRAKEN`S SAKE!) is, essentially, feeding the competition.

Edited May 14, 2019 by Lisias
Good thing I'm a good coder. My grammar sucks!

[klgraham1013]

6 hours ago, MR L A said:

Also sounds like it would be criticised for being a paid-for version of the community challenges we already have.

That's what the mission builder actually is, and, yes, it was criticized for just being community challenges.

6 hours ago, MR L A said:

Also sounds like it would be criticised for being something that not too many people actually want.

Actually, many were hoping the mission builder was custom contracts for career.  Unfortunately, that was not the case.  There was much disappointment.

6 hours ago, MR L A said:

ALSO, are we actually sure modders can't do this on some level anyway?  

Modders can add almost anything to the game.  Doesn't mean such a thing shouldn't be a candidate for stock implementation.  As far as I know, there has not been a custom contracts UI mod built into career.

[ElJugador]

I used to be very against the idea of DLC or expansions for KSP as well, but seeing the example of Paradox won me over to the other camp. What it comes down to is, Snark much earlier in the thread is exactly right. Whatever you may believe, developers and their time do not come cheap, and even millions of dollars can disappear with shocking speed when you're paying many people yearly. The base game probably only gets a trickle of sales now, and another cashflow is needed. If they can make the expansions consistently good and it helps the game continue into the future, then I'm all onboard.

[panzer1b]

I dont get why there is so much complaining about DLC existing.  Yes i agree with many here that making history could have been much better.  From my perspective the only thing cool in it was a handful of parts (namely structural panels and tubes which i can get in like 4 different mods anyway and at larger sizes), and the launch sites (doesnt really make or break teh game, but its actually kinda fun launching stuff from that northern site because its not exactly in plane that youd expect to launch from).  Other then that, mission builder seems to be a complete failure especially considering community challenges which are more or less teh same exact thing mission builder could do without the ability to script in mission failures (arguably not a very useful feature anyways).  It was a good concept, but given that its paywalled (so you cant share the missions with everyone unlike community challenges), and has no career links (not that i play career but itd actually be neat to make the 2 connected), its sorta meh.

As for this DLC, the robotics alone, assuming they are not super kraken inducing, are well worth getting the DLC imo, and the rest is just nice extras which will be neat and hopefully can be used to give the rather lackluster landscape something to do.  Now if only they shipped some texture revamp of the planets to go along with this, and itll be perfect for everyone (the last thing stock desprately needs is a land retexture, the textures are both low res and extremely tiley on many planets (Eve, Gilly probably the worst 2 that ive been to recently).  So yeah, even if its not perfect, im so getting this DLC to both support the devs (which are still trying to improve the base game) and to get my hands on some battlemech and tank parts (stock turrets, stock legs/arms, and well we already have stock weapons so i got all that covered).

[steve_v]

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

You #BlameUnity and you will be right about… 85% of the time.  Hard to criticize them for doing that.

Except when it's not Unity... There was one rather nasty issue that turned out not to be a Unity bug, and yet persisted for quite some time as #BlameUnity. I'm not going to tell you which one though, as that would violate the confidence of the person who told me.

Even when it is Unity at fault, I will quite happily criticize SQUAD if it doesn't get sorted out in a reasonable timeframe - SQUAD picked Unity, SQUAD picked which Unity build to target for a release, and SQUAD decided to release with broken input support and do nothing about it. They get to deal with the fallout of those decisions.
 

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

People work for something - and it's better for everyone when everybody knows what each other want.

Of course. I want a product that works properly, and SQUAD wants me to buy their DLCs and future games.

Unity, I suspect, wants the SDL devs to finish the GameController API (and populate the device database) and make it do everything they need from it... For free.
Just like they took mono, butchered it, and gave nothing back.

 

With everything else you said, I agree completely.

 

 

8 hours ago, Lisias said:

Kraken knows how many times the team had to burn the midnight oil for something I had borked marvelously - but this is the difference: good workmen screws up, good workmen take the responsibility and fix it as soon as it's possible (what's not the same as soon as you wanted).

You and me both buddy.
If I released some automation code with a major regression and blamed upstream vendors for a year instead of fixing it, I'd find myself out of a job very quickly.

Case in point: Modbus support was dropped from a certain product line we were using, with vague assurances that it would return. Did we say "tough luck customers, it's not our fault, wait for Rockwell to fix it"?
No we did not, we wrote a modbus protocol driver. No big deal, problem solved, happy customers.

Edited May 13, 2019 by steve_v

[MR L A]

11 hours ago, klgraham1013 said:

Actually, many were hoping the mission builder was custom contracts for career.  Unfortunately, that was not the case.  There was much disappointment.

You can say this about literally any update/feature/dlc from squad... many were hoping for X, some people were disappointed. Addressing each of my points is very nice, but ultimately fails to address to overarching point of just what could squad have released that modders couldn’t do and wouldn’t disappoint various groups of people? The answer being, of course, nothing. And unless you want squad to stop developing a profitless game completely I wouldn’t complain about the occasional bit of dlc. After all, bug fixes don’t keep the lights on. 

[GearsNSuch]

A bit late to the party, but great job on the DLC so far! I think that expanding surface exploration is an excellent move, as currently the surfaces are a bit drab. Landers are currently kinda land-flag-return affairs. Now we will have even more reason to randomly ignite their engines and soar off to harebrained, zero success impromptu landings across the surface.

A question, with all that extra science, will we be getting a small career revamp?  Even if it's just a tech tree re-arrangement, that would be great and fit well with the overall theme.

Thank you and keep up the great work!

[Lisias]

13 hours ago, panzer1b said:

 Other then that, mission builder seems to be a complete failure especially considering community challenges which are more or less teh same exact thing mission builder could do without the ability to script in mission failures (arguably not a very useful feature anyways).  It was a good concept, but given that its paywalled (so you cant share the missions with everyone unlike community challenges), and has no career links (not that i play career but itd actually be neat to make the 2 connected), its sorta meh.

IMHO, Mission Builder is the feature that could do a lot better with some support from the PR guys. It's a hell of a interesting feature, it's a way to allow players to create their own content in a technically safe and supported way.

They are going to the right direction, I think.

But there's a thing called inertia - it's exactly the same way a rocket launches: 80% of the energy budget is expended on reaching and stabilizing an orbit - from there, everything is cheaper.

I think that MH is the way to go - but it needs MOAR BOOSTERS.  

 

10 hours ago, steve_v said:

Except when it's not Unity... There was one rather nasty issue that turned out not to be a Unity bug, and yet persisted for quite some time as #BlameUnity.

I said 85%, not 100%.  

But yet, you are right. There's no space for complacence on this industry. We bork? We fix or we fail. Rockets have a very small tolerance for glitches,, by the way.

But yet - that 15% of local failures would be way easier to detect (or, at least, not to hide under Unity's carpet) and fix was not that huge unprotected surface of attack given by the flaws of the engine.

I'm not excusing them. I'm explaining what I think it's happening.

Edited May 13, 2019 by Lisias
tyop! Surprised?

[pandaman]

Looking forward to playing with this.

New surface features to find and 'research' are a welcome addition.  I wonder is a revamp to the search/scan  system that helps us locate the anomalies etc too much to hope for?

[Foxster]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

IMHO, Mission Builder is the feature that could do a lot better with some support from the PR guys. It's a hell of a interesting feature, it's a way to allow players to create their own content in a technically safe and supported way.

Umm, I don't think much of the player base agrees with you there based on how it has been pretty much ignored entirely by players once they'd had a quick play and decided it wasn't for them.

Squad took a punt on a big feature that no one had asked for. It was a big miss. Luckily this time around they are delivering stuff that a lot of folks have been asking for. Should fare better. 

[Lord Aurelius]

On 5/9/2019 at 4:04 PM, Pthigrivi said:

I think there could be a middle-ground solution that gave Career mode a bit more structure without losing the open-ended play. What I'd love to see is just a better fleshing out of the story mode/world first/milestone invisible mess we have right now into a simple progression of non-linear headline missions. It could start off with the same altitude, speed, and distance records, move on to reaching orbit, then offer up docking and missions to flyby, land on, and return from the Mun and Minmus. Once a player has returned from the Mun and Minmus the rest of the kerbol system should open up. It may take a little restructuring in Mission Control but these missions really need to be up front and persist so players get that they are the primary goals of the game and have the ability to get advances and weigh the rewards. 

The other thing I'd love to see as a way of solving the conundrum of time-based rewards (something thats even more important now that we have duration based experiments,) would be World First Bonuses. If you land on the Mun or Duna before X date you get a bonus reward in funds and reputation. Its just a gentle, scalable incentive process that would cause players to question time warping to get rewards, and could make the inclusion of other time-based mechanics like construction and research time more meaningful than just another thing to warp through. 

And for LS I personally prefer USI. I feel like if you're gonna go for life support we should really make it something special, with separate parts for recycling and greenhouses and a habitation mechanic to give meaning to station and base hab parts. Just like USI it should start gently, so you barely have to think about it going to Minmus or the Mun. Its later when you start going interplanetary and builidng up long term bases and stations when a little more noodling is required. Add a few fancy VASIMR engines and some reactors and you've got a pretty solid DLC. 

What you're suggesting is pretty much what I said about career mode. It would be awesome if that were overhauled and got a bunch of contracts and time-based mechanics (which is why I also suggested incorporating KCT so players also need to consider how long it will take to build a rocket).

The story campaign missions I also suggested would be more akin to mission builder scenarios arranged to tell a story and including some cutscenes like we've had for launch trailers. Many of those cutscenes were hilarious and I would like to see a game mode that incorporates them and tells a funny story and effectively serves as a tutorial for the more open-ended modes. The existing tutorial could still be offered, and the campaign missions would jump off from there. This is not a replacement for the career modes, but another way to play the game.

I like the extra complexity for life support personally as well, but there needs to be a balance. A lot of players in the past have downvoted me for even suggesting that life support should be stock, so any stock implementation of this would need to be relatively simple and completely optional. Probably should have a way to refill life support using ISRU units as well.

[Lisias]

9 hours ago, Foxster said:

Umm, I don't think much of the player base agrees with you there based on how it has been pretty much ignored entirely by players once they'd had a quick play and decided it wasn't for them.

That's my point. No one should agree or disagree with me. They should agree or disagree with the PR/guys. Where are they?  

Good products don't sell by themselves - don't believe on this lie. Products are sold by what people think from them. You have a good history of excellent services ? Your customers will do the PR for you.

Otherwise you need to hire some PR guys.

The best product on the World worths squat to me if I don't know it exists - or I don't know what it can do for me!

Edited May 14, 2019 by Lisias
(sigh). grammars is (mumble. mumble)….

[Pthigrivi]

3 hours ago, Foxster said:

Umm, I don't think much of the player base agrees with you there based on how it has been pretty much ignored entirely by players once they'd had a quick play and decided it wasn't for them.

Squad took a punt on a big feature that no one had asked for. It was a big miss. Luckily this time around they are delivering stuff that a lot of folks have been asking for. Should fare better. 

Welll... this is tricky. Back around then (certainly before 1.2) there were a lot of people who were frustrated by the generative contracts and wanted to be able to basically define all of their own mission parameters. There's also a pretty vibrant community challenge and historical re-enactment crew and Im guessing the Dev's thought 'hey let's combine these ideas!" I think this was a great instinct and it could have been a whole new game-mode that a lot of people participated in but it just didn't reach critical mass, which is a bummer. For me personally I don't see a need to write my own contracts in career mode. Because I know the Milestones are out there I just go ahead and build the type of missions I want to build, go to the places I want to go to, and I tack on some available contracts if I think its worth it to dovetail them together or kill two or three birds with one stone. I would like to have a bit more direct control over the type and/or location of contracts that are generated, but I don't need to specifically tailor the details of a contract that I can just go ahead and do on my own anyway. That's just me though. 
 

3 hours ago, Lord Aurelius said:

What you're suggesting is pretty much what I said about career mode. It would be awesome if that were overhauled and got a bunch of contracts and time-based mechanics (which is why I also suggested incorporating KCT so players also need to consider how long it will take to build a rocket).

The story campaign missions I also suggested would be more akin to mission builder scenarios arranged to tell a story and including some cutscenes like we've had for launch trailers. Many of those cutscenes were hilarious and I would like to see a game mode that incorporates them and tells a funny story and effectively serves as a tutorial for the more open-ended modes. The existing tutorial could still be offered, and the campaign missions would jump off from there. This is not a replacement for the career modes, but another way to play the game.

I like the extra complexity for life support personally as well, but there needs to be a balance. A lot of players in the past have downvoted me for even suggesting that life support should be stock, so any stock implementation of this would need to be relatively simple and completely optional. Probably should have a way to refill life support using ISRU units as well.

I dig it. And yeah, folks get really worked up about LS. Its really not such a big deal! And OBVIOUSLY it would be on a toggle, so if someone didn't want it they could just turn it off like reentry heat and comnet. And USI is really not that complicated, though I would like to see the Habitation mechanic simplified a little. Loading up Supplies is in some ways easier than estimating fuel and monoprop budgets. The great part is it's not just another thing to worry about, its the thing that drives making cool stations and bases with centrifuges and greenhouses and all that. I think once players saw all the cool things they could build and how much incorporating time into gameplay changes things a lot of players would get into it. 
 

[Xavven]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

Welll... this is tricky. Back around then (certainly before 1.2) there were a lot of people who were frustrated by the generative contracts and wanted to be able to basically define all of their own mission parameters. There's also a pretty vibrant community challenge and historical re-enactment crew and Im guessing the Dev's thought 'hey let's combine these ideas!" I think this was a great instinct and it could have been a whole new game-mode that a lot of people participated in but it just didn't reach critical mass, which is a bummer. For me personally I don't see a need to write my own contracts in career mode. Because I know the Milestones are out there I just go ahead and build the type of missions I want to build, go to the places I want to go to, and I tack on some available contracts if I think its worth it to dovetail them together or kill two or three birds with one stone. I would like to have a bit more direct control over the type and/or location of contracts that are generated, but I don't need to specifically tailor the details of a contract that I can just go ahead and do on my own anyway. That's just me though. 
 

I dig it. And yeah, folks get really worked up about LS. Its really not such a big deal! And OBVIOUSLY it would be on a toggle, so if someone didn't want it they could just turn it off like reentry heat and comnet. And USI is really not that complicated, though I would like to see the Habitation mechanic simplified a little. Loading up Supplies is in some ways easier than estimating fuel and monoprop budgets. The great part is it's not just another thing to worry about, its the thing that drives making cool stations and bases with centrifuges and greenhouses and all that. I think once players saw all the cool things they could build and how much incorporating time into gameplay changes things a lot of players would get into it. 
 

I have Making History and haven't fired up the mission editor once.  I would love it if people could make campaign mission packs that add them as contracts or even a story line into Career Mode, but I just don't have as much interest in completing each mission as its own individual sandbox. I get where Squad was coming from -- there's a whole subforum devoted to challenges, and this just codified it more so you didn't have to look at someone's screenshot log to see they completed the challenge. I honestly don't know why it didn't take off, but that's partly because I was never really into doing challenges on the forum either. Maybe someone who's more into challenges could explain where MH is lacking.

 

As for life support, totally agree this needs to be an optional stock feature, even if it's in a DLC. It's boring if it's just "add 3 tons of water/food/O2 generators to your rocket" but very fun if you can make self-sustaining bases.

[Lord Aurelius]

4 hours ago, Xavven said:

I have Making History and haven't fired up the mission editor once.  I would love it if people could make campaign mission packs that add them as contracts or even a story line into Career Mode, but I just don't have as much interest in completing each mission as its own individual sandbox. I get where Squad was coming from -- there's a whole subforum devoted to challenges, and this just codified it more so you didn't have to look at someone's screenshot log to see they completed the challenge. I honestly don't know why it didn't take off, but that's partly because I was never really into doing challenges on the forum either. Maybe someone who's more into challenges could explain where MH is lacking.

I'm in the same situation with owning MH but not using the mission editor.

For me at least, I think the reason the mission never really took off was fundamentally due to the lack of an easy and convenient way to find and share missions (they solved this for craft sharing but didn't apply it to MH for some reason). There's lots of other problems as well with things like the inability link missions together to create story challenges and the lack of leaderboards for players to compare how they had done in challenges (something that's very common in community challenges that Squad didn't tap into at all for some reason), but IMHO the failure of this mode really came down to this lack of an easy way to discover and share anything created with the editor, which strongly discourages players from making anything with it in the first place.

The fact that the MH parts were poorly done didn't help either and pushed a lot of players away from the expansion, further reducing the number of players participating in creating missions.

Edited May 14, 2019 by Lord Aurelius

[Xavven]

2 hours ago, Lord Aurelius said:

I'm in the same situation with owning MH but not using the mission editor.

For me at least, I think the reason the mission never really took off was fundamentally due to the lack of an easy and convenient way to find and share missions (they solved this for craft sharing but didn't apply it to MH for some reason). There's lots of other problems as well with things like the inability link missions together to create story challenges and the lack of leaderboards for players to compare how they had done in challenges (something that's very common in community challenges that Squad didn't tap into at all for some reason), but IMHO the failure of this mode really came down to this lack of an easy way to discover and share anything created with the editor, which strongly discourages players from making anything with it in the first place.

The fact that the MH parts were poorly done didn't help either and pushed a lot of players away from the expansion, further reducing the number of players participating in creating missions.

Ah, that makes sense now. Good idea, poorly implemented.

I personally like the MH parts, though. The 1.875m tanks and engines make my rockets much more efficient, and the thrust plates are a welcome addition.

[Lisias]

7 hours ago, Xavven said:

Ah, that makes sense now. Good idea, poorly implemented.

Insufficiently implemented, I prefer to say. It could be better by adding things - and it's still time.

Poorly implemented, in my book, is the support for Add'Ons on the Steam Workshop plugin - just shoving all the installed Add'Ons list blindly on the upload is as good as no information at all - and so, I think they should had just ignored the problem and let the scene handle it themselves (perhaps giving us a hook to fill the blanks).

Insufficiently implemented is not necessarily bad, and it's less worse than poorly implemented things - you don't have to spend resources by doing the same thing again.

Edited May 14, 2019 by Lisias
uh… missed some words.

[ItzBruh]

When is this coming out on xbox

[Chel]

1 hour ago, ItzBruh said:

When is this coming out on xbox

They said it was releasing on PC, no news about the console version getting the DLC

[KerballingSmasher]

52 minutes ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

They said it was releasing on PC, no news about the console version getting the DLC

Rip you... 

[Chel]

56 minutes ago, Kerballing (Got Dunked On) said:

Rip you... 

Not really. I'm not paying for stuff that should be stock features

>quote here for argument<

[klesh]

You used to be so shiny and positive!

[Chel]

@klesh are you referring to me? or the DLC