Tech Progression Editor.

[SOXBLOX]

In other threads, some folks have voiced justifiable concerns about the presence of certain engine types in the game. I posted some ideas which I thought might be acceptable compromises for all involved. One of these ideas was that the game should include a tech progression editor, a tool used at the creation of a game to decide where, when, and whether the player unlocks certain parts, classes of technology, etc. This is essentially just turning a toggle for X propulsion system into a system for greater personalization.

For example, one could remove all fusion drives, or make Vectors available early in the progression. Tweaks to the progression could push players to build SSTOs or reusable rockets earlier in the game by making other tech unavailable, or increasing cost, or whatever.

The pros are that one does not have to use mods to alter the progression, one can easily remove unwanted tech from the game, and also more customization. The con, I believe, is that the community could lose a sense of a common gameplay progression. Although, this doesn't seem so negative, considering that any misconceptions could be resolved by a simple explanation to another player. "I'm playing with torch drives moved up to mid-game, and Orion drives removed" or something.

So, I've got the poll for you guys. If you like parts of the idea, but not others, tell me down below. I expect someone will find whatever cons I overlooked, as well.

[prestja]

No. The decisions made by the developers have to revolve around balance - and to do this they have carefully selected a number of speculative technologies to introduce into the sequel. The time and effort it would take to create a custom progression system would entirely defeat the balance the developers are so delicately trying to achieve. Regarding your point that a player should be allowed to remove technologies they have no interest in - they can simply ignore any parts they've unlocked and don't plan to use. To those players wishing to shake up and re-balance the game to their liking - this is fine, but I wouldn't expect nor desire Intercept to take time our of their schedule to accommodate such players. There's simply bigger and more important features to work on. I fully expect that changes to the progression of KSP 2 will find their way to players through mods - but for now I believe Intercept should work on multiplayer, stability, and colonies as a priority.

Edited August 10, 2020 by prestja

[SOXBLOX]

43 minutes ago, prestja said:

Regarding your point that a player should be allowed to remove technologies they have no interest in - they can simply ignore any parts they've unlocked and don't plan to use.

Yeah, I tried telling them that before. They didn't like it. 

What I was trying to do with this was expand a toggle for tech X into a cool feature for customization, but your point is solid; this would be too complicated to implement. I will reconsider my opinion on this feature.

[mattinoz]

No because.... Fertile ground for mods. Especially good for mods to cluster around a conceptually different tech tree to expand the game.

Yer but no, this doesn't diminish console players the console makers should just work-out how to allow modding.

[LittleBitMore]

I think this would be a great addition, hence my vote, but I dont see this happening; ergo I'll put up a mod request when the game releases

Edited August 13, 2020 by LittleBitMore

[Guest]

...because this is what mods are for.

[MechBFP]

There will be an editor. It's called the Unity SDK.

[Bej Kerman]

On 8/10/2020 at 5:50 AM, mattinoz said:

Yer but no, this doesn't diminish console players the console makers should just work-out how to allow modding.

Great plan. Can't beat this.

If KSP wants to be all flexible and moddable, the least it can do is let console players customize this stuff or have a built in PA-like mod installer.

[pandaman]

4 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Great plan. Can't beat this.

If KSP wants to be all flexible and moddable, the least it can do is let console players customize this stuff or have a built in PA-like mod installer.

That's all well and good, but my guess is that is out of the control of T2 unfortunately.

[Guest]

At least not at launch.

KSP1 tech tree is something that needs to be messed with to be good, we don't know if that will be the case with KSP2 and encouraging the players to mess with the stock progression following some preconceptions matured on KSP1 (that has a very different scope and balance) it's a recipe that will only result in a lot of people having a terrible first run of KSP2.

After 5 or 6 months, when everybody will have tried the stock progression and formed an opinion based on the game they're playing and not on its predecessor, then it could be a great addition.

[Guest]

It should be as easy as modding parts. That is, all changes should be possible to do in the configuration files with a text editor. No need for Unity, plugins or anything like that. Planet modding should be that easy, as well (they're saying they made it easier, so may be it'll be). 

[SOXBLOX]

I hope so. Any way to bring the feel of modding to the community at large is a win for me. I want to try it!

[mattinoz]

On 8/14/2020 at 6:24 AM, pandaman said:

That's all well and good, but my guess is that is out of the control of T2 unfortunately.

All the more reason to stand ground and make the PC version better because it's modable.

If Consoles want to lockdown that is their business choice they shouldn't inflict on others.

[K^2]

I can't imagine them making something that's simple, intuitive, and does everything it needs to do as a built-in tool. This feels like it should be left to mods.

[Superfluous J]

50 minutes ago, K^2 said:

I can't imagine them making something that's simple, intuitive, and does everything it needs to do as a built-in tool. This feels like it should be left to mods.

I feel essentially the exact opposite. I can't imagine a mod doing it well (I mean, look at all the great tech tree editors we have right now) and hope for a baked-in solution. Preferably coupled with well-documented text file configs.

 

[K^2]

39 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

I feel essentially the exact opposite. I can't imagine a mod doing it well (I mean, look at all the great tech tree editors we have right now) and hope for a baked-in solution. Preferably coupled with well-documented text file configs.

I don't mean editor as a mod. I mean mods with an already modified tech tree.

If you want to make your own tech tree, you really ought to be prepared to take an extra step and make a mod.

[Superfluous J]

19 minutes ago, K^2 said:

If you want to make your own tech tree, you really ought to be prepared to take an extra step and make a mod.

Again, I will respectfully disagree.

Mod making and tech tree design are totally different skills. It's like expecting a writer to know how to code a word processor. Or a programmer to write a novel. Sure there are some who can do both but there are far more who can only do one.

I wonder how many good tech trees we don't have because those who would create them couldn't or simply didn't want to figure out how. I know I for one gave up after an hour or so, simply because it wasn't worth my time.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Superfluous J said:

Mod making and tech tree design are totally different skills. It's like expecting a writer to know how to code a word processor. Or a programmer to write a novel. Sure there are some who can do both but there are far more who can only do one.

No, it's like expecting a game designer to know how to write a simple script. A skill, I can assure you, they are expected to know.

1 hour ago, Superfluous J said:

I wonder how many good tech trees we don't have because those who would create them couldn't or simply didn't want to figure out how.

Very few if any. From personal experience, if you aren't going to take the time to learn how to write a simple script for a mod, you aren't going to put in time to properly evaluate, balance, and test something as complex as a tech tree.

Design work has a lot of creativity in it, granted, it might be even the main quality. But it also has a lot of critical thinking, logic, and even some fairly gnarly math in form of statistical analysis involved with the trade. Best designers I've worked with had no trouble jumping in and making modifications to the engine code, and I've never met a successful one who'd be blocked by requirement to make a simple mod.

If you're looking at someone with no prior experience, but a lot of ideas and desire to learn how to implement them, tech trees aren't the best place to start. KSP isn't a toughest case for a tech tree by a long shot, but even here, this is something fundamental to the entire progression system and how the game is presented. I don't think Squad did a great job with it, and somebody with an overly complex editor with lots of moving parts isn't going to do any better, unless the do have experience designing game systems. So again, no problem at all with it having to be a mod.

[mattinoz]

4 hours ago, K^2 said:

I can't imagine them making something that's simple, intuitive, and does everything it needs to do as a built-in tool. This feels like it should be left to mods.

These sorts of tech trees are in so many games you'd think there would be a standard app and file structure that would work across many many games.

[K^2]

2 hours ago, mattinoz said:

These sorts of tech trees are in so many games you'd think there would be a standard app and file structure that would work across many many games.

It's not that it's an unreasonable expectation in itself. It's... How do I explain game development to a sane person? You've ever seen Wallace and Gromit? Now picture game developers making games like Wallace makes his breakfast. Except, with deadlines and requests from marketing. I don't know if it's environment making the people or people making the environment, but it's a unique industry. And part of it is huge contrast between "This is how you do X," and "These are the specific tools you use for X". The former is at the foundation of almost all design - it can get pretty dogmatic on how things are done. But then you get to actual implementation, and there are going to be almost as many of these as there are teams working on it. There are some rare exceptions. Pretty much everyone uses Photoshop for 2D assets. Pretty much everyone uses Visual Studio for code. There's just a handful of 3D editing tools that everyone is using. That sort of thing. But standard editor for a tech tree? Unless you're working with a specific engine, like Unity or Unreal, we don't even get a "standard" way to draw UI.

For tech tree specifically, there are additional considerations. If all you had was collection of nodes forming a dependency graph, where each node contains a list of items it unlocks, you can make a generic drag-and drop UI for it. Problem is, you're unlikely to ever be happy with just moving the tech between nodes. If I make ion engines more accessible, maybe I should make the consume a bit more power to keep things balanced? Or adjust the I_SP? How many little corrections do you need to actually make a balanced tech tree? All of these adjustments don't technically have to be accessible from tree editor itself, but they have to be accessible somewhere, and if you plan to distribute the settings, these things will have to be stored together. So a generic solution here doesn't seem like it'd cut it.

But like I outlined above, the issue is greater. There are elements that are far more common in games that don't have anything remotely like a standard implementation. If you ever make a game, you will never be satisfied with limitations of your tools or your systems. There will always be special cases you want to handle. Some limitations you'll have to just accept. If you're working with Unity, you're not going to get too involved in changing how simulation or rendering work. But then there's still so much you can do by modifying individual behaviors. Sure, you can probably find a character movement script on the Unity market, but will you be satisfied with what it does for your game? Probably not. And that leads to a culture of reinventing the wheel at every step along the way. We try to be practical as much as possible, but in the end, every game ends up being a Rube Goldberg contraption made up of salvaged components made to do something they were never meant to and a bunch of ad-hoc solutions.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, mattinoz said:

These sorts of tech trees are in so many games you'd think there would be a standard app and file structure that would work across many many games.

@K^2 explained the game development side of why this would not work, I have another side to bring up: game design stagnation.

I don't want KSP2 salvaging how the progression work from KSP, let alone a whole bunch of games having the same kind of progression just because "that's how TechTree 2.42 works".

[shdwlrd]

6 hours ago, K^2 said:

We try to be practical as much as possible, but in the end, every game ends up being a Rube Goldberg contraption made up of salvaged components made to do something they were never meant to and a bunch of ad-hoc solutions.

Hahahaha... isn't that true with most software out there?

[K^2]

9 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

Hahahaha... isn't that true with most software out there?

It's a spectrum. Databases usually take their code pretty seriously. Then come servers and cloud infrastructure. Operating systems have also been migrating into this territory. B2B in general keep their workflows more organized. But then you get more into consumer software, especially apps, and things go a little wild west. Games are actually not the worst. The "**** it, we'll do it live," attitude of game development is at least (usually) balanced by skill and experience of people working on it. There are some tech start ups that lack both the discipline and experience, and then things go bad.

The most "serious" company I've worked for was Google, and it was fine, but very boring. I worked on 3D reconstruction, and it's hard to be more back end than that. The most wild was a startup making chat middleware for games. (We got bought out and restructured, so unless you were really into Clash Royale in early 2018, you probably never heard of it.) But mostly I stick to games, because that's exactly the right balance of structured chaos that keeps things exciting while letting you feel like you're making an impact.

[SOXBLOX]

17 hours ago, K^2 said:

For tech tree specifically, there are additional considerations. If all you had was collection of nodes forming a dependency graph, where each node contains a list of items it unlocks, you can make a generic drag-and drop UI for it. Problem is, you're unlikely to ever be happy with just moving the tech between nodes. If I make ion engines more accessible, maybe I should make the consume a bit more power to keep things balanced? Or adjust the I_SP? How many little corrections do you need to actually make a balanced tech tree? All of these adjustments don't technically have to be accessible from tree editor itself, but they have to be accessible somewhere, and if you plan to distribute the settings, these things will have to be stored together. So a generic solution here doesn't seem like it'd cut it.

A drag and drop node editor is exactly what I'm looking for. I am not worried about balancing the progression. If one does want a balanced progression, one can move the offending tech back a node or whatever. Surely there are many nearly balanced progressions possible with the stock tech. I don't think tweaking would be necessary. And remember, I originally intended this to give those who don't like mmH a way to remove it from the game, and to do so within the game itself.