Large Info Dump

[pandaman]

Hmmm....

Whilst it is no bad thing to 'feedback' on the images of the UI we have seen, and other things too, the tone from a lot of posts seems to be assuming that what we see is what the final version will look like, but why assume that? 

Release is over a year away.  Stuff will almost certainly change, some out of necessity and some for purely aesthetic reasons, and to me the UI looks a little 'unfinished' anyway, which it most likely is.  I will reserve my judgement until nearer the time, and probably when I can actially try it in action.

Many (many, many) years ago I had a brief 'go' at digging with a JCB back bucket. At first glance the controls seemed really odd as the joysticks worked slightly diagonally, but in use it was very comfortable as it was a much more natural hand movement, something that is a really, really, big deal if you do it all day, every day.  Same thing with graphical UI, until you actually try it properly it can be difficult to fully evaluate. 

But hopefully they will incorporate customisation options to cator for different tastes and needs.

 

[Jacke]

Quote

Anyway, I don't actually like the proposed new UI, mostly the navball looks too 'flat' so to say, and the Kerbals IMHO should be moved to the side. Topside? Downside? Don't really care. I Think it is okay to have them, as they give the funnier approach to the game that, at the end of the day, the publisher may need to attract more customers. But not in the middle of the screen, please...

The best way to think about the navball is that it's actually looking at the inside of a bowl.  This translates best to the sky around the craft.

Vertical space is precious, especially in the middle of the screen.  If the Kerbal portraits are put there, they'd better be easily movable in the UI to some place else.

 

2 hours ago, pandaman said:

Whilst it is no bad thing to 'feedback' on the images of the UI we have seen, and other things too, the tone from a lot of posts seems to be assuming that what we see is what the final version will look like, but why assume that? 

Release is over a year away.  Stuff will almost certainly change, some out of necessity and some for purely aesthetic reasons, and to me the UI looks a little 'unfinished' anyway, which it most likely is.  I will reserve my judgement until nearer the time, and probably when I can actially try it in action.

Rest of your comment is awesome.  However....

We can't assume the UI will change before release if we're not told it's still being worked upon.  Nor get a true feel for its nature.  Especially, as you do bring up, when we don't have a test article to *use*.

The only thing that gives me true hope is that a delay to "Fall 2021" is much more than what I would think COVID-19 would impose.  That means the KSP 2 dev team has identified that there's a lot more work to be done and have set the release date to accommodate that.

But I think they need to communicate with us more.  And we do need access to the game while some changes can still be done.

Let's look at KSP as an example:

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Version_history

From the initial release of 0.7.3 to just before 1.0, 48 versions of KSP were released over about 4 years.  20 major versions.  Although some of those point releases look like significant changes as well.

I started out with 0.23.  Just in my experience, KSP changed radically going to 1.0.  And that change has continued to a degree.

And that change was done with growing feedback from the KSP modder and player community.  Sure, not at times the best quality feedback.  And not at times the best use of that feedback, especially when it was good.

But KSP became a better game that the vision of its initial developers partly due to it being a game actively used and reported on by its community.

No one wants another 4-year 48-version 20-major-version early access before we see a polished KSP 2.

But we want more information than  we're getting now.  And KSP 2 needs community feedback.  A closed alpha/beta.  An open alpha/beta.  Maybe even a bit of early access.

KSP 2 does not want to be an XCOM Chimera Squad.  Good enough game.  But also gone like a Spring snowfall.

 

Edited June 2, 2020 by Jacke

[mattinoz]

6 hours ago, JorgeCS said:

Maybe in some cases the automatically launched tutorial could just be the basics for the VAB or SPH  

NEVVEEERRRRRR>>>..... With Brut Force everything can fly.

[GluttonyReaper]

2 hours ago, Jacke said:

But KSP became a better game that the vision of its initial developers partly due to it being a game actively used and reported on by its community.

Sure, but it's definitely a trade-off - as a development method, it certainly has it's drawbacks. I have no idea if it still exists (or how I would find it) but waaay back when Squad were working on career mode (0.24?), HarvesteR put out a blog post talking about how they were concerned about releasing effectively an incomplete feature - contracts without a monetary system, something that would be fine if they were developing it behind closed doors. He then cites that as the reason for why they delayed the release to squeeze in funds in the same update, a system which they've made very few changes to since, and is arguably quite inadequate and unbalanced. Point being, early access comes with a lot of baggage regardless of any disclaimers you slap onto it, especially these days as people are more wary of perpetual "early access" games.

Personally, I would quite like to see a take on KSP that follows the more traditional route of "some people have a vision for a game, and then sit down for 3 years and make a game", rather than the very reactionary model that KSP1 used (although personally I disagree with the direction KSP2 in general is taking from what we've seen, but that's a somewhat different discussion)

[Jacke]

2 hours ago, GluttonyReaper said:

Sure, but it's definitely a trade-off - as a development method, [ early access ] certainly has it's drawbacks. I have no idea if it still exists (or how I would find it) but waaay back when Squad were working on career mode (0.24?), HarvesteR put out a blog post talking about how they were concerned about releasing effectively an incomplete feature - contracts without a monetary system, something that would be fine if they were developing it behind closed doors. He then cites that as the reason for why they delayed the release to squeeze in funds in the same update, a system which they've made very few changes to since, and is arguably quite inadequate and unbalanced. Point being, early access comes with a lot of baggage regardless of any disclaimers you slap onto it, especially these days as people are more wary of perpetual "early access" games.

The problem with career and funds wasn't early access.  The problem was lack of attention to fixing it (too little too late).  The aero system was dramatically changed towards the end of early access.  As flawed as it still is, it does shows it's possible.  Development still needs to be sufficient, paced, and appropriately focused.

 

2 hours ago, GluttonyReaper said:

Personally, I would quite like to see a take on KSP that follows the more traditional route of "some people have a vision for a game, and then sit down for 3 years and make a game", rather than the very reactionary model that KSP1 used (although personally I disagree with the direction KSP2 in general is taking from what we've seen, but that's a somewhat different discussion)

A unified creative vision is vital.  But that doesn't preclude having feedback and providing closed/open alpha/betas/early access with enough time before release to incorporate changes.  And this isn't a brand new project, it's a successor game to KSP, where connecting with the existing community of players and modders is vital to KSP 2's success.

The solution isn't putting it all behind close doors, because that's a common mode of game development right now and it has a wide range of success, from very good to abject failure.  In another topic, I had a post that goes into detail how to make opening the development of KSP 2 work.

 

On 6/1/2020 at 4:35 PM, Jacke said:

I would hope that devs are aware of the critical factor of almost all feedback: it's not a representative (ie. random as well as large enough) sample of the player population, so that feedback can differ greatly from the whole player base in many ways (overly positive, overly negative, overly divisive, too quiet, too much interest divergence, etc.).

But if there's no effective feedback, ie. giving us a real alpha/beta release with enough time and resources to listen to any feedback and take measures considering it, it's all on them.  The game may have a unified creative vision, which is vital, but the developer team is effectively just another non-representative sample from the player base.  What they think of KSP 2 can be too far from what the players will think of the game.

The way around this conundrum is to honestly and critically examine all feedback, from both the developers themselves and the player base who respond--like we are now--to KSP 2 information as well as from playing with alpha/beta releases.

As for player feedback, we've not been able to *use* the current UI, versus seeing one still photo of it.  The proof of the pudding is in the making--and the eating.  To be sure we have to play with KSP 2.

But if we're not given a real alpha/beta, we won't be able to play with it until it's released.  At which point so many features will be fixed and virtually unchangeable.

So if we don't get that alpha/beta access, all we can do is the best we can with the information that's there.  And in this case, a lot of us still have concerns, both from what's been released and what hasn't been released.  That can only be solved with more information on KSP 2.  And hopefully, a real external alpha/beta feedback series.

 

[pandaman]

12 hours ago, Jacke said:

However....

We can't assume the UI will change before release if we're not told it's still being worked upon.  Nor get a true feel for its nature.  Especially, as you do bring up, when we don't have a test article to *use*.

True, yes.  But as the game is obviously still in development, and it's well over a year before the scheduled release.  It would seem more logical to 'assume' that it is not finished unless they said 'This is the final UI'.

At this stage, I would say the 'whole game' is still being worked on, so lots could change.  Yes many things will have been pretty much finalised, but not everything, and especially not graphic type 'things' as these may well need to change if a gameplay reason requires it.

Things like, icon location, adding more detail to the navball, tweaking colours etc are very much 'finishing touches', and even part models and details too.  What matters is that what they have is up to the job they need it for now, they can evaluate it's functionality and assess what is needed and try it out with simple changes that don't ruin what an artist spent hours making 'pretty'.

You don't spend time applying the 'final polish' to your hand made cabinet until you are satisfied that the underlying finish is good enough, just in case you need to sand it all down again.

[MonkeyCan'tDock]

Not sold on the "boom events." I think I prefer the more freeform approach involved in the tech tree.

[The Aziz]

Digging through old interviews, I found interesting thing about something that seemed to create a lot of concern here.

Time zoom. So apparently Nate Simpson used that phrase when he was talking about his early days of ksp1.

[Lewie]

8 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Time zoom. So apparently Nate Simpson used that phrase when he was talking about his early days of ksp1.

Ich.

[Arco123]

Main problem for me is the rcs and advanced controls. Those are NEEDED.  (Bottom Left Tabs.)

Edited June 7, 2020 by Arco123

[Jacke]

4 hours ago, Arco123 said:

Main problem for me is the rcs and advanced controls. Those are NEEDED.  (Bottom Left Tabs.)

Spoiler

 

Agreed.  We also need an second stock RCS quad with the nozzles angled as on the Apollo Lunar Module, with the two horizontal nozzles at 90°, so they can be mounted as on the Lunar Module.

[Gargamel]

On 6/2/2020 at 11:53 PM, Jacke said:

The aero system was dramatically changed towards the end of early access. 

This I never understood.   They worked out a lot of the major issues in the .9x betas, yet decided to, IIRC, change the aero model completely for the 1.0 release.   Didn't make sense to me at the time.   But in hindsight, the full 1.0 release really could have been applied to anything .24 onwards.   KSP has gotten development done for so long that, aside from a couple major changes, there really hasn't been a singular point where SQUAD has said "This is our product, have at it!".   This is a good thing though. 

On 6/3/2020 at 6:43 AM, pandaman said:

It would seem more logical to 'assume' that it is not finished unless they said 'This is the final UI'.

Even when they do, see the above example about KSP's developement.  It went, what, 6-7 years and then they made a couple significant changes to the UI.  I guarantee you, whatever they come out with, they'll listen to feedback and make changes if needed. 

[Jacke]

3 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

This I never understood.

I'm not sure why Squad did that either.

It could be that the aero-heating model was just so wrong.  Most of the gross physics details in KSP are close to reality.  Biggest two exceptions are to get 1g of gravity on a 1/10 Earth-radius Kerbin, you need planetary densities that aren't possible, as well as Kerbol would be an M-type red dwarf and not appear as a G-type star.  (But difference #2 could be considered a side effect of difference #1.)

But in changing that so late, it still took a lot of tweaking through 1.0.x and 1.1.x.  To a degree, it's still not right.  And why didn't they go whole hog and introduce a voxel aero model with compressibility as in FAR?  It's not like it's that much harder or that much more compute intensive.  Might have taken less time to get right.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

19 minutes ago, Jacke said:

I'm not sure why Squad did that either.

It could be that the aero-heating model was just so wrong.  Most of the gross physics details in KSP are close to reality.  Biggest two exceptions are to get 1g of gravity on a 1/10 Earth-radius Kerbin, you need planetary densities that aren't possible, as well as Kerbol would be an M-type red dwarf and not appear as a G-type star.  (But difference #2 could be considered a side effect of difference #1.)

But in changing that so late, it still took a lot of tweaking through 1.0.x and 1.1.x.  To a degree, it's still not right.  And why didn't they go whole hog and introduce a voxel aero model with compressibility as in FAR?  It's not like it's that much harder or that much more compute intensive.  Might have taken less time to get right.

The funny part is that it also avoids MANY of the issues the current stock system has with parts producing full drag in weird situations, occlusion, wings always producing lift regardless of if they have airflow etc.

It would be more intensive to troubleshoot, and even the current FAR has many issues. But by moving to a slightly harder way of doing things, they'd squash so many of KSPs longstanding issues in this regard.

Which is also why it was immensely disappointing that KSP2 is going to keep the same sloppy, unrealistic approximation that KSP1 has.