Hopes and Wishes for KSP 2

[Lewie]

It’d be awesome if the Kerbals could make noises. Ea, if you’re about to crash they scream(or laugh) depending on their trait. Or when they’d plant a flag they make some sort of happy noise. It’d be adorable. 

[Alexoff]

On 5/17/2020 at 4:52 PM, SpaceFace545 said:

You know you can do all of that in the base game right?

Yeah, I know that now we have only base game. And this means that now there is nothing to do on the planets, only to earn science points that have nowhere to spend

[KaşifBey]

Turkish language support pls

[Soylent_keen]

I wanted to throw my 2 cents into this thread as well.  I have been playing KSP since beta and touch back into the game at least once a year to run a new space program and over the years I have my list of (more or less) essential mods I use whenever I can when playing KSP.  A combination of several types of mods but collectively they greatly improve my overall experience with the game.  While yes, all these are mods, having to rely on mods for what I would consider base game play is unreliable.  Many of these mods listed below play into each other and really expand on the science elements (more variety has always been better for me), or more meaningfully expand on the kerbals themselves.  I find I care much more about the game when I have to consider the needs of the kerbals themselves, giving them a meaningful purpose to be included, and really ups the immersion and realism factor up for me.  

*SCANSat: Basically the first mod I ever load.  Greatly enhances the unmanned phase of my exploration.  Gives a meaningful purpose for sending out probes and playing with orbits so I can map out a planet and use that information for planning ahead to my landing phases (maned or unmanned).
KAS (Kerbal Attachment System): Basically an essential mod for me.  I love the aspect of having my kerbal's function in a reasonable way.  Gives them a more meaningful purpose to actually send manned mission beyond planting a flag.
KIS (Kerbal Inventory System): Basically an essential mod for me.  I love the aspect of having my kerbal's function in a reasonable way.  Gives them a more meaningful purpose to actually send manned mission beyond planting a flag.

USI Life Support: Kerbals gotta eat!  In my mind this is a necessary/essential element to my game play.  Needing to factor in the needs of my kerbals into my ship designs and overall space program adds a realistic and fun challenge.  Makes the Kerbals more meaningful from a sandbox perspective.  Base game makes them feel much more like cargo.

*MechJeb: Pretty much an essential mod.  Being able to autopilot operations means I can walk away at times (for life reasons), or have an autopilot handle some of the trickier maneuvers I am not good at.  Greatly improves my enjoyment of the game and I consider to be essential to my gameplay.
Kerbal Engineer Redux: should really be base functionality.
Chatterer: Just makes for a funner, and more immersive game play experience.
Easy Vessel Switch (EVS): should be base functionality.
Community Tech Tree: Quality of Life (QOL) 
TextureReplacer: Nice to be able to personalize my kerbals more.
USI Kolonization Systems (MKS/OKS): I only play with this lightly, mainly for the expanded parts so I have more base type elements to build.  I believe much of this is being addressed in KSP2 already.
Transfer Window Planner: Quality of Life (QOL) 
Maneuver Node Evolved: Just makes flying better.
[x] Science!: Basically anything that adds more "science" type things I will add to my game.  Exploration and science is the name of the game for me, and doing it in a way that I keep my kerbal's alive.
JSI Advanced Transparent Pods: Just a fun aspect to add, though mod support is spotty, so has limited effect.
Magic Smoke Industries Infernal Robotics: Having this type of functionality I really wish was base game.  The mod itself I have never had reliable results with and usually ditch it, but having robotic arms (etc), would be a fantastic addition to the game.
Science Alert: Quality of Life (QOL) 
Contracts Window +: Quality of Life (QOL) 
Field Training Lab (FTL): Expands on the focus I like to have with Kerbal's themselves.  The base game has a fantastic focus on the ship building/flying/etc, so having more attention on the kerbals themselves is fantastic to me.
KSP Craft Organizer: Quality of Life (QOL) 
WorldStabilizer: Hopefully won't be needed in KSP 2
DMagic Orbital Science Presents: Probe and Rover Science Pack: Again, more science!!

Kerbal Planetary Base Systems: Just more parts and the aesthetics are really nice.  Plays well with USI Life support.
OPT Space Plane Parts: Just love this parts pack.  Makes for some fantastic large scale designs.
Tarsier Space Technology Continued: Again, more science
DeepFreeze Continued: Expands on the focus I like to have with Kerbal's themselves.  The base game has a fantastic focus on the ship building/flying/etc, so having more attention on the kerbals themselves is fantastic to me.
Surface Experiment Pack - Deployable science for KIS/KAS!: Frankly an essential mod for me.  Gives kerbals a reason to be on a surface.
Universal Storage II: Just really love and appreciate the molecularity of this mod pack.

 

Thanks for the read!

 

[boidtman123]

I wish that they would add alien ruins on at least  one planet in kerbal space program 2.

It  would add a lot to exploration and discovery.  i am not asking for living sentient aliens, just the ruins of a long lost civilization.

 

 

[DStaal]

30 minutes ago, boidtman123 said:

I wish that they would add alien ruins on at least  one planet in kerbal space program 2.

It  would add a lot to exploration and discovery.  i am not asking for living sentient aliens, just the ruins of a long lost civilization.

Given that there's alien ruins on Kerbin, it would fit. 

[Mikenike]

18 hours ago, boidtman123 said:

It  would add a lot to exploration and discovery.  i am not asking for living sentient aliens, just the ruins of a long lost civilization.

I would like to see living 'aliens'.

[DStaal]

1 hour ago, Mikenike said:

I would like to see living 'aliens'.

While it would be nice to see - I think it would be a lot of development work for not much benefit to the game.  To get it anything close to realistic you'd need to design at least a few hundred different types of animals and plants, and program their behavior, both to each other and to Kerbals, make sure the ecosystem is balanced, etc.

All for something that the average player is going to land on the planet once, look at for five minutes, and then proceed to mostly ignore.

So while I would agree they'd be great to have in the game, I don't see them as adding enough to the experience to make it worth it.

If you're talking about fully intelligent aliens, well you'd need to do all of the above for their homeworld, and then give them an AI good enough to interact with the player - and if you don't want to turn this into Stellaris or Civilization in Space you'll have to work out how to do that interaction without it becoming fight/trade/ignore.

[SpaceFace545]

36 minutes ago, DStaal said:

While it would be nice to see - I think it would be a lot of development work for not much benefit to the game.  To get it anything close to realistic you'd need to design at least a few hundred different types of animals and plants, and program their behavior, both to each other and to Kerbals, make sure the ecosystem is balanced, etc.

All for something that the average player is going to land on the planet once, look at for five minutes, and then proceed to mostly ignore.

So while I would agree they'd be great to have in the game, I don't see them as adding enough to the experience to make it worth it.

If you're talking about fully intelligent aliens, well you'd need to do all of the above for their homeworld, and then give them an AI good enough to interact with the player - and if you don't want to turn this into Stellaris or Civilization in Space you'll have to work out how to do that interaction without it becoming fight/trade/ignore.

Then you’ll need weapons and currency to trade with these aliens and the, whoa wait, this is a shooter already!!

[Alexoff]

And now I hope that KSP 2 will be released in fall 2021, notin fall 2022...

[dnbattley]

2 hours ago, Oneiros said:

i hope that it gets released at all rather than abandoned due to overly ambitious developers and feature creep gone out of control.

I'll re-quote myself from early February (additional emphasis added):

Quote

Let me preface everything I say by saying: I am not worried about KSP2. If it doesn't live up to expectations then I will be sad, but life will go on (and I'll continue playing KSP1).

However, I have a theory as to why there has been a lack of engagement, and that theory is: re-writing a physics engine is proving significantly harder that ST expected. What do I mean by that? I believe that the early payable demos we saw were effectively re-skinned KSP1, with work on assets proceeding on target, hence the new launch pad etc. However, it is no secret that the Squad physics implementation is a patchwork of sticking plasters, exacerbated by internal issues and staff turnover over time. Case in point: wheel physics has been reworked several times, but had to be dumped when they were found to be so easy to exploit (see some of Danny's videos on this, in which they were dropped at the last minute from 1.2?3? after he was routinely destroying the universe using them). In short, it works but behind the scenes it is a mess, and since then the robotics add on and self interaction have likely made the mess worse.

My hypothesis is that ST put in Squad's physics code with the view that they could "streamline" it for V2. However, I think that they are finding so many problems with that approach that they will have had to decide whether or not to re-write everything from a much lower baseline (effectively from scratch). They will have looked at the pros and cons: a better, faster, more capable engine which can allow more interesting mechanics, including multiplayer, to be used to more interesting effect, but with huge developmental cost, or basically maintaining the existing code and hoping that they can finagle the new features they want, plus risk community backlash if KSP2 is just seen as an expensive re-skin.

Given recent issues with Bethesda, ActiBlizz etc. I really hope they make the right decision.

Since then, we've seen the developer change (ST staff brought in house to T2; new hires made - including for core physics engine coders) and now this acknowledgement of a significant delay: I see my hypothesis as still being supported by the evidence, but still remain confident that the end result will be worth it.

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

  

2 hours ago, dnbattley said:

wheel physics has been reworked several times, but had to be dumped when they were found to be so easy to exploit (see some of Danny's videos on this, in which they were dropped at the last minute from 1.2?3? after he was routinely destroying the universe using them)

The Wheel of Doom

 

[Incarnation of Chaos]

18 hours ago, dnbattley said:

I'll re-quote myself from early February (additional emphasis added):

Since then, we've seen the developer change (ST staff brought in house to T2; new hires made - including for core physics engine coders) and now this acknowledgement of a significant delay: I see my hypothesis as still being supported by the evidence, but still remain confident that the end result will be worth it.

There's two problems here though

#1- They've already said that KSP2 will be a complete rewrite on a software level.

#2- They Never mentioned what was the ultimate cause of the delay. It could be completely unrelated.

And as for the Game Engine, nothing is built for KSPs gameplay and that's not even mentioning KSP2 is going to scale everything up. So they're not going to benefit from moving to another.

And if they were to write one from scratch a year delay wouldn't even begin to give them enough time for it.

So I don't see anything here which supports your hypothesis. It's just game development being game development.

[dnbattley]

11 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

There's two problems here though

#1- They've already said that KSP2 will be a complete rewrite on a software level.

#2- They Never mentioned what was the ultimate cause of the delay. It could be completely unrelated.

And as for the Game Engine, nothing is built for KSPs gameplay and that's not even mentioning KSP2 is going to scale everything up. So they're not going to benefit from moving to another.

And if they were to write one from scratch a year delay wouldn't even begin to give them enough time for it.

So I don't see anything here which supports your hypothesis. It's just game development being game development.

I don't see any problems in what you suggest: I'd love to get a source on the re-write point, as I hadn't heard that from the developers, and indeed if you look at the KSP 2 Develop story trailer it is quite explicit that we are seeing "pre-alpha footage" and "pre-alpha gameplay" complete with ringed planets and new engine types. That alone appeared to suggest they were significantly advanced on the (new) game engine - which was the starting point for the theory that we were simply seeing re-skinned KSP1 in the footage - and the fact that the original timeline (at that point) was far too ambitious to suggest the project was only just starting then. Now I agree that game development of a complex game will always take time, but the change of developers/hiring new staff and changing dates is far from "just game development being game development" - unless you have a far more chaotic (pun not intended) assessment of game development than I.

Of course I might be wrong, and it *is* just a hypothesis, but absent the evidence of #1 then I see no new information that can confirm or disprove it.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

1 minute ago, dnbattley said:

I don't see any problems in what you suggest: I'd love to get a source on the re-write point, as I hadn't heard that from the developers, and indeed if you look at the KSP 2 Develop story trailer it is quite explicit that we are seeing "pre-alpha footage" and "pre-alpha gameplay" complete with ringed planets and new engine types. That alone appeared to suggest they were significantly advanced on the (new) game engine - which was the starting point for the theory that we were simply seeing re-skinned KSP1 in the footage - and the fact that the original timeline (at that point) was far too ambitious to suggest the project was only just starting then. Now I agree that game development of a complex game will always take time, but the change of developers/hiring new staff and changing dates is far from "just game development being game development" - unless you have a far more chaotic (pun not intended) assessment of game development than I.

Of course I might be wrong, and it *is* just a hypothesis, but absent the evidence of #1 then I see no new information that can confirm or disprove it.

I'll admit that's it's not something that i should portray as "Typical", and it's often a sign of "Development Hell". But it's far more common than i think most people realize; why do you think most developers are very cautious about setting firm dates now? There's plenty of games that have made their way out of it, and turned out fantastic regardless though.

But honestly as far as confirming/denying anything; all the sources i could provide would still be from before the move. So i think the only thing that would confirm or deny anyone's suspicions at this moment would be a decent info dump from the developers of KSP2, and at this point i think it's warranted. Because honestly? There's so much that could have changed between the last round of interviews and now, that i can't trust the information out there ATM.

Even just them reconfirming the information we think we know would be better than where we are right now; which is basically the void.

[AlexSol]

I hope that there will be a different race of characters. Cucumbers are sick of no worse.

Please post in English outside of the other-language forums. --Moderator. 

Quote

I hope that there will be a different race of characters. Cucumbers are sick of no worse.

 

Edited May 22, 2020 by Vanamonde

[KerikBalm]

On 5/19/2020 at 6:09 PM, Soylent_keen said:

... touch back into the game at least once a year to run a new space program and over the years I have my list of (more or less) essential mods I use whenever I can when playing KSP. ...

While yes, all these are mods, having to rely on mods for what I would consider base game play is unreliable.  Many of these mods listed below play into each other and really expand on the science elements (more variety has always been better for me), or more meaningfully expand on the kerbals themselves. ... giving them a meaningful purpose to be included, and really ups the immersion and realism factor up for me.  

...
KIS (Kerbal Inventory System): Basically an essential mod for me.  I love the aspect of having my kerbal's function in a reasonable way.  Gives them a more meaningful purpose to actually send manned mission beyond planting a flag.

...
Kerbal Engineer Redux: should really be base functionality.
...
[x] Science!: Basically anything that adds more "science" type things I will add to my game.  Exploration and science is the name of the game for me, and doing it in a way that I keep my kerbal's alive.
...
Magic Smoke Industries Infernal Robotics: Having this type of functionality I really wish was base game.  The mod itself I have never had reliable results with and usually ditch it, but having robotic arms (etc), would be a fantastic addition to the game.
...
DMagic Orbital Science Presents: Probe and Rover Science Pack: ...

Surface Experiment Pack -  !

Did you get Breaking ground? It adds "robotics", joints, servos, extendable pistons, rotors + prop/helo blades, a controller to make programmable sequences for the servos and pistons (and more)

It also added scannable surface features that you need to find, some need a robotic scanner arm to give rovers a purpose, others are small enough that a Kerbal can pick it up.

They also added deployed surface experiments that you need kerbals to set up, for which they added an inventory system (kerbals can have 1 surface module in their inventory slot, craft container parts can hold multiple).

Engineers and scientists are useful, because they enhance performance of the power generating or science generating (respectively) surface modules.

So, robotics, more science, and an incentive for some surface exploration with rovers.

I expect KSP2 to bring at least most of the BG elements to ksp2

[Bej Kerman]

On 5/21/2020 at 3:48 AM, Oneiros said:

i hope that it gets released at all rather than abandoned due to overly ambitious developers and feature creep gone out of control.

There's no feature creep.

[SpaceFace545]

5 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

There's no feature creep.

That we know of

[Bej Kerman]

19 minutes ago, Oneiros said:

19 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

There's no feature creep.

features been creeping since 2017.

all they needed to do was update the graphics and physics engine stuff and call it a sequel, that would have been released by now. their plans are causing the delays, not covid.

Update the graphics engine and physics engine? That's not a sequel, that's just the core game but shinier.

[Bej Kerman]

6 minutes ago, Oneiros said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Update the graphics engine and physics engine? That's not a sequel, that's just the core game but shinier.

it's a game that actually gets released rather than repeatedly delayed due to feature creep.

It's a game but it's not a sequel or anything worth buying.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Update the graphics engine and physics engine? That's not a sequel, that's just the core game but shinier.

Yup... Rewrite the physics engine is a whole different beastie than an 'update' . 

Reminds me of the days of Kit cars - you could get a body that looked like a Ferrari... But underneath it was still a VW Bug.  

 

Something I've recognized since returning is that there's a lot of great new content in the game now that adds so much to the enjoyment that did not exist back when... But every time I turn a corner there's something new that doesn't play well with something old - and that's gonna be a problem for getting and keeping new players for KSP2 if not resolved by a physics rewrite. 

I think @dnbattley nailed it in his post above.

With the studio shakeup - fall 2021 was more likely even without Covid (as per the announcement @Alexoff linked to) 

Edited May 24, 2020 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Bej Kerman]

31 minutes ago, Oneiros said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

It's a game but it's not a sequel or anything worth buying.

i'd pay $60 US just to get the load times under 2 minutes and something that looks like it wasn't made in 2010

You'd pay $60 for textures and a couple of performance mods?

[DStaal]

Honestly, a rewrite of the physics engine - including remaking the parts to work with the new engine, and updating the save file format to work with it - is *plenty* for a KSP2 to me.  Everything else is just extras on top.

I'm aware it probably wouldn't sell very well on it's own, as people would look at it and say 'oh, that's all you did?', but it's the core of the gameplay, and the largest part of the game.  That's a big 'all'.  Extra parts, new solar systems, etc. are all very nice and flashy - but compared to rewriting the core physics engine are small, easy jobs.

[KerikBalm]

Updating the physics engine obviously involves making sure  new features are well integrated and not tacked on. Thus is goes hand in hand with new features like on rails thrusting, support for multiple light sources for solar panels, multiple star systems, and colony mechanics. Also, mods like kopernicus won't be needed anymore.

I'd pay money for KSP to run faster or acceptably with higher part counts, so if they do a proper job on re-writting the physics engine, I will buy it