Kerbal Space Program 2: Episode 3 - Next Gen Astronauts

[Guest]

The wings!!! OMG the wings!!!! so much better than ksp 1

[Jack Mcslay]

Now I want big buff kerbonauts

[Serenity]

1 hour ago, pandaman said:

I don't think it is disresoecfuk, it highlights one of the major flaws KSP1 has.  It is incredibly hard to just open it up and play,  even enough to see if you like it.  Not impossible I know, but very off putting to many, especially if they have nobody  on hand to ask how things work.  You shoudn't need to have to resort to youtube to even learn the basics, that info should be accessible in game.

I really hope the tutorials in KSP2 cover the UI game functions as well as they seem to be covering the 'rocket science'.

It probably wasn't the perfect choice of word to use but that's how it felt for me.

I feel there is a very difficult balance between limiting the creativity and being accessible and easy to use.

Lately the trend for games is to be more ''mobile'' oriented with very narrow paths to explore and utilize or as someone else said, simplistic.

I understand its almost impossible to satisfy both sides but it scares me to see the industry going to the lets keep it as easy it can be and straightforward.

I don't want games to be like interactive movies that guide me in every step.

Not saying this is gonna happen with Kerbal it's only my fears but i am hopeful.

Edited May 15, 2021 by Serenity

[pandaman]

3 minutes ago, Serenity said:

It probably wasn't the perfect choice of word to use but that's how it felt for me.

I feel there is a very difficult balance between limiting the creativity and being accessible and easy to use.

Lately the trend is for games to be more ''mobile'' oriented with very narrow paths to explore and utilize.

I understand its almost impossible to satisfy both sides but it scares me to see the industry going to the lets keep it simple and straightforward.

I don't want games to be like interactive movies that guide me in every step.

Not saying this is gonna happen with Kerbal it's only my fears but i am hopeful.

I completely agreee with this. 

I don't like the idea of a 'story mode' for anything other than a specific tutorial series of missions.

I very much doubt that KSP2 will be dumbed down at all, in fact they have said as much.  They just want to give players the appropriate tools and information to actually play and enjoy it.  That way they will retain more players that would otherwise give up after a few hours because they get frustrated with it.

 

[DJDoesKSP]

5 hours ago, ShadowZone said:

At 02:21 that appears to be our first look at a redesigned Tylo, or am I totally mistaken? It looks forboding... as it should!

The planet shine with Jools green being reflected by (the assumed to be) Tylos surface looks cool too!

Edited May 15, 2021 by DJDoesKSP

[DJDoesKSP]

Looking a little too deep into the new feature video

"The Sticky Notes"

Thes sticky notes show up (from what I could tell) 3 times in the feature video (order below), they all have the same pattern, as if they're all connected, hence my profile pic, 

 4:31

 5:57

 6:35

If it has something to do with the colors, its spells out "Bob" (Blue, Orange, Blue), which would be a fun easter egg. I dont know what else it would mean though, so, thats it for this. (Im also pretty sure this is nothing)

"Glitchy Text"

This glitchy text could have somethin, Idk, but most likely is just for the glitch effect

some of the other stuff I would mention have already been mentioned by other people (such as the probable 8th kerbol system planet, and the noise at the end making an image)

 

Edited May 15, 2021 by DJDoesKSP

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Serenity said:

I feel there is a very difficult balance between limiting the creativity and being accessible and easy to use.

Lately the trend for games is to be more ''mobile'' oriented with very narrow paths to explore and utilize or as someone else said, simplistic.

I understand its almost impossible to satisfy both sides but it scares me to see the industry going to the lets keep it as easy it can be and straightforward.

I don't want games to be like interactive movies that guide me in every step.

Not saying this is gonna happen with Kerbal it's only my fears but i am hopeful.

There are some cases in which accessibility can be an obstacle for the creative vision of a game, fast paced combat games or puzzle games comes to mind, but that's not the case for KSP. 

Unless you want to bruteforce a century of orbital mechanics studies on your own, there's a lot of informations you need to know to play KSP starting from how the orbital mechanics works all the way up to how the game actually works and KSP doesn't help you at all with it.

People want to play against the actual difficulties planned and designed into the gameplay, not against the UI design and the constant need to pause the game and go to YT or the forum to find often outdated guides and that's clearly what KSP2 is trying to tackle. 

KSP steep learning curve is not given by some careful design made by some clever artist, it more or less grew in to place after several years of multiple hands learning the job of game design while messing directly with the live game. You can say that KSP learning curve has nothing to do with the game itself and resides mostly on Youtube and your ability to find relevant and updated guides in your language.

 

Another thing, sometimes we, as veterans (I started playing when you needed to point and burn prograde when the Mun was 5 degrees over the horizon to reach it), don't see some glaring problems with the game and the new player experience until we have someone new we know that is starting to play.

Example: I'm helping a friend right now, he doesn't have much problems with orbital mechanics and as soon as he picked up the manoeuvre tool he was able to make a Mun free return trajectory on his own, too bad I had to drive him away from Career and onto Science mode to have that tool, because the design of the original completely disregarded the possibility that someone new picked up career as their first Kerbal experience and thus made the absence of vital tools to learn the basics of the game a part of the progression gameplay.

It's like giving the training wheels as a gift to a kid that just finished learning how to ride a bike without them.

What I got from the video is that they're planning to address such problems.

 

If Monopoly was sent without an instruction manual and written in a secret language you have to google on your own to understand it wouldn't be a good thing for the game if most people "never go far past the first board loop" or says that "the learning curve is steep".

[Kerbart]

36 minutes ago, Master39 said:

(...)

People want to play against the actual difficulties planned and designed into the gameplay, not against the UI design and the constant need to pause the game and go to YT or the forum to find often outdated guides and that's clearly what KSP2 is trying to tackle. 

KSP steep learning curve is not given by some careful design made by some clever artist, it more or less grew in to place after several years of multiple hands learning the job of game design while messing directly with the live game. You can say that KSP learning curve has nothing to do with the game itself and resides mostly on Youtube and your ability to find relevant and updated guides in your language.

(...)

Exactly! It seems that a lot of people on the forum think that “making the game more accessible” means “AlLoWiNg NoObS tO fLy LiKe WiNgCoMmAnDeR”

I think I downloaded the trial out of curiosity after a mention in XKCD. That was the 0.18 trial, with no tutorials or any other helpful information. I couldn't build a rocket (from the ground up) because the game didn't let me. That was one Scott Manley video. Trust me, if you have no experience with the game, working your way down from the capsule is not intuitive and explaining that somehow in the game is not “dumbing down the game so noobs can play it" — it's making sure new players stay with the game and don't give up after the first then minutes.

When I finally had put a rocket together and it sat on the launch pad, I encountered my second challenge. Somehow I had figured out that the spacebar was for staging. So I did a countdown and at zero, I tapped the spacebar yelling lift-off!
CHUNK.
A chunk noise and then... nothing? I hit the space bar a few more times until after the last CHUNK the parachute came out, and then... nothing. My rocket just sat there. If it weren't for another Scott Manley video, I would never have learned abouth throttle (I though rocket engines were just on or off), and I would likely never touched the demo again. Instead I eventually landed on Mun and  bought the game right after that. For a $20 indie game that's an ok experience; for a $60 A+ title it's not. If the game isn't accessible it'll be shredded to pieces in reviews.

Remember, accessible doesn't mean easy. Portal wasn't easy to solve, but exceptionally accessible. Keeping the game "hard" by making it inaccessible so new players don't want to play it is the best way to ensure that it will commercially fail. Making entry into the game easy so the players can enjoy the hard challenges that spaceflight offers, is not.

 

[Serenity]

Some good points, let me be more specific about my concerns.

Ideally in a game like Kerbal you want to create the best tools for the players to express their creativity and their ability to overcome obstacles, always maintaining ease of access.

This requires a long period of development time and of course a lot of money.

Neither of those are provided nowadays, there is an immense pressure to release early and usually get underpaid.

Realistically and i can't stress this enough, i hope i am wrong, there isn't gonna be enough time to create what is needed to support multiple playstyles.

So you probably gonna focus in a certain playstyle to be the best at it.

Filling the game with modular designs.

These wings for example, you are encouraged to miss the opportunity to learn and experiment how flight control surfaces work.

Of course it's an amazing way to optimize and solve so many problems current Kerbal has,

but even if we get some limited customizing options the experience will be subpar.

Lets go even further, exploring and colonizing multiple planets, the rockets, the stations, the bases.

Pre-made modular designs, with a few options to personalize them and some few variations of a ''pseudo'' evolve roadmap that will give you 

a sense that things progress, magically appearing and changing, through invisible deliveries of upgrades inside our favorite containers.

Variations that will consume most of the dev time so there will be not enough time to create a more personalized open-world experience in crafting.

So eventually the game will become more of a management style instead of actually creating your own space fairing civilization.

Again this is only a concern, i do not know what will happen, and even it happens it doesn't mean it will be a bad game, just a different game.

Edited May 15, 2021 by Serenity

[Lewie]

Methalox engines!!!!!

(reliant or swivel, I can’t remember) but it’s in the parts’s description. Heck yeah!

On a less happy note, I’m not quite on board with the way parts are displayed on the vab. *shrug* I guess it’s really a ‘it was this way before, so why can’t it be this way now’ moment. Great job ksp2 team!’ It’s looking preeety good!

 

Edited May 15, 2021 by Lewie

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Serenity said:

Ideally in a game like Kerbal you want to create the best tools for the players to express their creativity and their ability to overcome obstacles, always maintaining ease of access.

This requires a long period of development time and of course a lot of money.

Neither of those are provided nowadays, there is an immense pressure to release early and usually get underpaid.

It doesn't seems like they're rushing or pushed to release early to me, on the contrary the don't seem scared to announce delays at all.

 

17 minutes ago, Serenity said:

These wings for example, you are encouraged to miss the opportunity to learn and experiment how flight control surfaces work.

Procedural VS modular wing is a matter of game design, not simplification, and what we've seen for now is only a single wing part with a single control surface and it seemed like you could move and change that control surface around quite a bit (4:01 - 4:03 in the video) it also seems that they put together a single wing piece deforming it from a KSP1 winglet and it seems that the texture is still not on par with the other pieces, I may be speculating to much but it seemed to me an early proof-of-concept to show you procedural wings more than a finished feature.

If you can place, size and change shapes of the wings and the relative control surfaces it already does the same job as KSP1 wings with the same complexity in gameplay, more space for creativity and less frustration and it also opens the door to bring to the player new concepts left out of KSP1 like wing cross-sectional shapes having effects or a ton of other actual wing design things left out of the "a bunch of square and triangular flat panels" design of KSP1.

 

26 minutes ago, Serenity said:

Lets go even further, exploring and colonizing multiple planets, the rockets, the stations, the bases.

Pre-made modular designs, with a few options to personalize them and some few variations of a ''pseudo'' evolve roadmap that will give you 

a sense that things progress, magically appearing and changing, through invisible deliveries of upgrades inside our favorites containers.

Variations that will consume most of the dev time so there will be not enough time to create a more personalized open-world experience in crafting.

KSP1 has nothing comparable at all, so anything they came up with will always be more of the "5 parts for station you can pretend are also for bases" design and we don't know yet how many options, part sets and mechanics we're talking about and all we saw on this side of the game always talked about more complexity if compared to KSP1.

In an earlier video we saw "uranium" as a resource, that means multiple resources and the fuel factories and colonial production hint at a production and crafting tree that's at least a bit more complex than "put this 'ore' dust into a magic IRSU box and you get everything.

If anything every bit of news we have about that side of the game is about a game much more complex than anything we've ever seen in KSP1 and maybe that's we they felt like making a reassuring video talking about the better onboarding and tutorials.

 

1 hour ago, Serenity said:

So eventually the game will become more of a management style instead of actually creating your own space fairing civilization.

It surely going to be different, you can't expect to micromanage every single Kerbal of an entire civilization like you do with Kerbonauts in KSP1 and KSP1 has no need to manage resource and crew transfers continuously, without a supply system you basically have to be able to mine everything from everywhere and that would make the whole fuel refining / ship building gameplay more simple and less interesting.

 On the other hand I don't think exploration is going to be much different from KSP1 aside from the addition of actually useful bases and stations.

 

[AtomicTech]

10 hours ago, ShadowZone said:

At 02:21 that appears to be our first look at a redesigned Tylo, or am I totally mistaken? It looks forboding... as it should!

Huh, I missed that, thanks for pointing it out! It didn't click in my brain as it just seemed too shiny and I figured that there was another gas giant with a metallic moon.

Edited May 15, 2021 by Atomic Engineer

[SOXBLOX]

The procedural wings! Be still, my heart!

At any rate, hooray! And I watch these Easter eggs with interest...

[shdwlrd]

4 hours ago, Serenity said:

Pre-made modular designs, with a few options to personalize them

I asked about colony construction when the fuel factories were previewed. Nate's response gave me the impression that after the module is placed, you can greeble to your hearts content. The colony modules will have the ability to surface attach along with stack attach. If parts like piping, catwalks, antenna, window decals, lights, etc. are being added into the game, you can personalize your colonies how you want.

[Pthigrivi]

In addition to all the wonderful thought thats going into this I gotta say everyone has great shirts. A+ shirt game y'all. 

Edited May 16, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[Guest]

I was gonna jump in and go PROCEDURAL WINGS WOOOO too but since everybody else did,  here are a few thoughts on some other stuff.

First off, I really like the focus on UX in construction. At this point I’ve almost learned to ignore just how finicky it is to build wings or clip boosters on decouplers or deal with various symmetry issues and so on. Super stoked that we have a bunch of professionals focusing specifically on that. I do a bunch of UX design myself and that stuff is hard and in a way thankless because people only notice if you’ve done it wrong; if the UX is right it just feels so natural and easy you’re not even aware of it. It’s also super encouraging that they’re focusing on it so early, building it in as it is — it’s a common thing to just start working on that ”when everything is working” and at that point it can be much harder.

Second, the tutorials. It’s hard to tell from this how good they will be and how well they’re integrated with the game, but I like the objectives. I’ve been trying to get a few people I know interested in KSP and it hasn’t really worked; they give up because of the early difficulty curve, and I haven’t had the possibility to just sit with  them for the several hours it would take to get them over that hump. It’s a hard problem but an important one and I’m happy they’re working on it.

Someone ITT was worried that KSP2 won’t be fun anymore. I’m not seeing that. This still looks fun and it looks like there’s the space just to goof off if you want to, we saw Val in a command chair sitting on a rocket. I don’t really have any concerns on that score at this point.

So yeah — great update! Hype level ticked up a notch.

(Also, WOOOOO PROCEDURAL WINGS )

[stephensmat]

If I was these guys, I would make the Tutorials into the demo. Get everyone studying the Tutorials before the game even released; so you can jump right in.

[pandaman]

1 minute ago, stephensmat said:

If I was these guys, I would make the Tutorials into the demo. Get everyone studying the Tutorials before the game even released; so you can jump right in.

If they do a demo version then not including the relevant tutorials would be a major oversight, which I can't really see them making to be fair.  

I hope a demo in some form is made available.  It was the option to play a demo (v0.18) that enabled me to decide to 'waste' some of my limited  spare resources on it.  Without it I would have either waited much longer or, much more likely, not got it at all.  8 years later and I'm still here eagerly awaiting KSP2.

[Wubslin]

On 5/15/2021 at 10:38 AM, DJDoesKSP said:

Looking a little too deep into the new feature video

"The Sticky Notes"

Thes sticky notes show up (from what I could tell) 3 times in the feature video (order below), they all have the same pattern, as if they're all connected, hence my profile pic, 

 4:31

 5:57

 6:35

If it has something to do with the colors, its spells out "Bob" (Blue, Orange, Blue), which would be a fun easter egg. I dont know what else it would mean though, so, thats it for this. (Im also pretty sure this is nothing)

"Glitchy Text"

This glitchy text could have somethin, Idk, but most likely is just for the glitch effect

some of the other stuff I would mention have already been mentioned by other people (such as the probable 8th kerbol system planet, and the noise at the end making an image)

 

Lol 10/10 post. Avatar on point

[TLTay]

On 5/15/2021 at 8:28 PM, Pthigrivi said:

In addition to all the wonderful thought thats going into this I gotta say everyone has great shirts. A+ shirt game y'all. 

Wonder when we will be able to get some KSP2 merch. I need a KSP2 flag to go with my KSP1 flag, also a Jeb plush would be nice.

[SOXBLOX]

I really like what we can see of the interface! It looks sleek and feels easy on the eyes. Makes KSP1 look antique!

Out of curiosity, how are these things designed? Do you sketch out every screen firs, and decide on an aesthetic? Or is there some software you use?

Edited May 17, 2021 by SOXBLOX

[starcaptain]

Loving the new vehicle editor layout. A few things:

TERRESTRIAL/VAB/USER tells me how the game may handle multiple users working on multiple builds at the same time, as well as different editors are arranged and named; there's also the Spaceplane Hangar (or its equivalent in KSP2), Orbital ship editor (maybe) and colony editors (which may be on the surface, or in orbit).

Having collapsible tabs for different part sizes is a huge pleaser for me.

On the left side we see a variety of tools. I'm going to guess they do the following, reading from the top:

• Radial/Horizontal symmetry (rocket mode/plane mode)
• Undo
• Redo
• ((4))???
• Rotate Gimbal
• Part Picker/Context editor (similar to right click in the current VAB?)
• Move Gimbal
• Move Subassembly Gimbal/Root Part?
• Launch Stack Assembly?
• Center of Lift Indicator
• Thrust Vector Indicator
• Center of Mass Indicator
• Radiation Field Indicator

 

[Sky Kerman]

5 minutes ago, starcaptain said:

Loving the new vehicle editor layout. A few things:

TERRESTRIAL/VAB/USER tells me how the game may handle multiple users working on multiple builds at the same time, as well as different editors are arranged and named; there's also the Spaceplane Hangar (or its equivalent in KSP2), Orbital ship editor (maybe) and colony editors (which may be on the surface, or in orbit).

Having collapsible tabs for different part sizes is a huge pleaser for me.

On the left side we see a variety of tools. I'm going to guess they do the following, reading from the top:

• Radial/Horizontal symmetry (rocket mode/plane mode)
• Undo
• Redo
• ((4))???
• Rotate Gimbal
• Part Picker/Context editor (similar to right click in the current VAB?)
• Move Gimbal
• Move Subassembly Gimbal/Root Part?
• Launch Stack Assembly?
• Center of Lift Indicator
• Thrust Vector Indicator
• Center of Mass Indicator
• Radiation Field Indicator

 

I think 4 is symmetry mode

[shdwlrd]

24 minutes ago, starcaptain said:

 

If 1.25m engines and motors are considered small, than what would be considered large? 3x large? Imagine how large the structural and fuel tanks would be.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, starcaptain said:

• Part Picker/Context editor (similar to right click in the current VAB?)
• Move Gimbal
• Move Subassembly Gimbal/Root Part?
• Launch Stack Assembly?

 

Im guessing 1) place/move part, 2) offset/rotate part? 3) place/move subassembly 4) Select craft for launch? I think I remember they've changed the way root/parent parts work?

Edited May 17, 2021 by Pthigrivi