Daydreaming: Dynamic career science, terraforming and cinematic cameras

[solashira]

Just three wild ideas dropped on my head while I was drooling thinking about how the game would eventually be like.

Terraforming: I've been playing a lot of Surviving Mars, that game focuses heavily on terraforming mars. Although rationally I agree with the mainstream view that terraforming Mars would not be as easy or as necessary as our modern day Sci-fi depicts. But gameplay-wise, I can hardly think of a better end game goal for colony management gameplay. I'm saying this because it's already pretty obvious that colony management would very likely become a vital part of KSP2 gameplay. 

 If I chose to be a colony-minded player, after a hundred hours into the game, all the resources and technologies I pooled together on Duna would surely be rather sizeable. Eventually I'll need a rewarding sink hole to dump them into, terraforming would fit in just right as such a sinkhole.

 

Dynamic career science: Now this is a heavy one, it's in some ways a revamp of the contract and milestone system.

I can't honestly say that I'm satisfied with the "point buy" system the current science tree relies on, it's grindy, static, immersion breaking, and makes very little sense.

I wish to see science point become more subtle.  The player, instead of purchasing nodes in the tech tree with "blue points" earned by biting extraterrestrial dust, complete certain milestones to stimulate the development of the scientific progress in that particular area.

For example, the "Basic Construction" tech has a progress bar which grows by 1 point each day, representing the day to day science development. It will unlock itself after some time, along with some other techs of the same tier even if you do absolutely nothing other than time warping forward. However, if you complete the mysterious goo and material bay related milestone, the achievement would give its progress bar a plain point boost as well as applying a modifier to the natural growth of the material related techs, for a certain period of time.

I believe this is somewhat closer to how space programs impact our science progress in real history. And instead of grinding for contracts and repeating experiments, the player should be rewarded for planning their space programs strategically.

The anomaly hunting would fit in well with this system, the player should receive some very unique boost should they detect and properly study an anomaly.

This should also synergize well with the colony system, because a colony is inherently, time sensitive. Time becomes a vital resource with this system, a successful colony, be it a scientific outpost or a giant habitat, provides sustained boost to science progress, but it also requires maintenance and supply from time to time. This system should encourage the player to design and plan their colonies strategically so as to achieve net positive output with their investments.

 

Cinematic Camera: This one is somewhat trivial in comparison with the overhauls above, but with KSP2 aspiring to be such a beautiful game about such a beautiful universe, it would be weird if the player is not granted the proper tools to capture such beauty. I wish to see more sophisticated camera tools implemented into the game, with lenses, apertures, focal lengths, even camera rails, tail-followings, etc. I can already see players taking pride in their own creations, why not let them film their own documentaries?

 

I guess that's all for my daydreaming, I'm looking forward to seeing other players expanding upon these ideas in this thread.

And thank you, team Squad, for such a fabulous game.

[intelliCom]

4 hours ago, solashira said:

Eventually I'll need a rewarding sink hole to dump them into, terraforming would fit in just right as such a sinkhole.

It would be a cool feature, but eventually, a lot of planets would look the same. They'd end up being Kerbin clones with different terrain. At the very least, I suppose the effect of terraforming is purely on the atmosphere, so you see a planet's atmosphere become more visibly blue as terraforming progresses. Turning these planets into Kerbin clones just doesn't make them special anymore. Going a bit off-topic, I could offer one aesthetic suggestion for the colonies: Seeing the light of your colonies from orbit. Shouldn't be too difficult to implement, just calculate the total amount of light across a certain space and put a dot of light relative to that light at the location of the colony. Greater area means greater radius of the dot, and greater light means greater light on the dot.

4 hours ago, solashira said:

I wish to see science point become more subtle.  The player, instead of purchasing nodes in the tech tree with "blue points" earned by biting extraterrestrial dust, complete certain milestones to stimulate the development of the scientific progress in that particular area.

I'm not sure how similar my idea was on this, but I thought about how the science experiments you perform could actually be used to get specific parts. For example, analysis of a planet's atmosphere or air pressure leads to aerodynamic parts. Analysis of temperature researches more thermal parts and engines. Perhaps it's analysis of specific planets that leads to specific tech, meaning that players may want to visit certain places first because they provide certain things when the player needs them. I suppose one potential issue with this is that it could be tricky to figure out how to organise it all. (e.g., using a fluid spectrometer Jool's atmosphere or the Mun's regolith leads to Helium-3 fuel and engines.)

Good post, btw. I like to see ideas like this shared, and hopefully seen by the team over at Intercept.

[TLTay]

I'm kind of hoping science is a mix of things. From the beginning part selection, you should get new parts from a combo of R&D and experience in using that kind of part. Maybe after getting a rendezvous done, you unlock a basic station part. After some time/experimentation and R&D, you unlock some less basic station parts, and so on. Colony stuff should come from landings and time spent on the surface. I totally get the original "science points" for parts thing, but since when does a magnetosphere measurement from Jool help my scientists design a compact nuclear reactor for a colony on the Mun? I can't wait to hear if there have been any changes to the science system.

[solashira]

11 hours ago, intelliCom said:

It would be a cool feature, but eventually, a lot of planets would look the same. They'd end up being Kerbin clones with different terrain.

Let's restrict terraforming candidates to a few planets.

Maybe terraforming is not the best word, let's call it planetary enginering. I think Duna is a great launch site for me, I'll stripe what's left of its thin atmosphere and make it easier my ships. Or I can just turn it into another Kerbin.

City light should naturally emerge if we can build real cities, but I don't think we can, there is this problem of scale.

Seeing cities from orbit, or seeing your fleet from planet surface would both be really cool though. A good LOD mechanism should do the trick.

11 hours ago, intelliCom said:

. I suppose one potential issue with this is that it could be tricky to figure out how to organise it all. (e.g., using a fluid spectrometer Jool's atmosphere or the Mun's regolith leads to Helium-3 fuel and engines.)

It would be tricky, and fun!

 

[intelliCom]

1 hour ago, solashira said:

It would be tricky, and fun!

I meant tricky for the developers to organise it for proper balance. I suppose the tech tree should still be made as accessable as possible, no matter where you go, but it may take a while before you have the parts necessary to get somewhere that you could've gotten to in just two launches. Requires some heavy re-working of the tech tree to achieve something that isn't too quick or too sluggish.

[mcwaffles2003]

I believe it has been confirmed that terraforming will not exist in the game sadly. It would be a fun addition but I think the devs wanted the terrain to shape our colonies and not the other way around.

As for how science works, my opinion on the subject can be pretty well summed up from these threads I posted a while back:

Spoiler

 

TL;DR: I'm just hoping science can carry a more true place in the game in actually being useful in our exploration of the universe and how we plan ahead and prepare for interacting with the environment. Really wanna see an in-game collected knowledge repository that can be filled out and be readily used as a reference for the player. Hopefully tech progression can divorce itself from science collection a bit and be based more-so on time/money/milestone-achievements so long as wasting time has a consequence.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

22 hours ago, solashira said:

Just three wild ideas dropped on my head while I was drooling thinking about how the game would eventually be like.

Terraforming: I've been playing a lot of Surviving Mars, that game focuses heavily on terraforming mars. Although rationally I agree with the mainstream view that terraforming Mars would not be as easy or as necessary as our modern day Sci-fi depicts. But gameplay-wise, I can hardly think of a better end game goal for colony management gameplay. I'm saying this because it's already pretty obvious that colony management would very likely become a vital part of KSP2 gameplay. 

 If I chose to be a colony-minded player, after a hundred hours into the game, all the resources and technologies I pooled together on Duna would surely be rather sizeable. Eventually I'll need a rewarding sink hole to dump them into, terraforming would fit in just right as such a sinkhole.

 

Dynamic career science: Now this is a heavy one, it's in some ways a revamp of the contract and milestone system.

I can't honestly say that I'm satisfied with the "point buy" system the current science tree relies on, it's grindy, static, immersion breaking, and makes very little sense.

I wish to see science point become more subtle.  The player, instead of purchasing nodes in the tech tree with "blue points" earned by biting extraterrestrial dust, complete certain milestones to stimulate the development of the scientific progress in that particular area.

For example, the "Basic Construction" tech has a progress bar which grows by 1 point each day, representing the day to day science development. It will unlock itself after some time, along with some other techs of the same tier even if you do absolutely nothing other than time warping forward. However, if you complete the mysterious goo and material bay related milestone, the achievement would give its progress bar a plain point boost as well as applying a modifier to the natural growth of the material related techs, for a certain period of time.

I believe this is somewhat closer to how space programs impact our science progress in real history. And instead of grinding for contracts and repeating experiments, the player should be rewarded for planning their space programs strategically.

The anomaly hunting would fit in well with this system, the player should receive some very unique boost should they detect and properly study an anomaly.

This should also synergize well with the colony system, because a colony is inherently, time sensitive. Time becomes a vital resource with this system, a successful colony, be it a scientific outpost or a giant habitat, provides sustained boost to science progress, but it also requires maintenance and supply from time to time. This system should encourage the player to design and plan their colonies strategically so as to achieve net positive output with their investments.

 

Cinematic Camera: This one is somewhat trivial in comparison with the overhauls above, but with KSP2 aspiring to be such a beautiful game about such a beautiful universe, it would be weird if the player is not granted the proper tools to capture such beauty. I wish to see more sophisticated camera tools implemented into the game, with lenses, apertures, focal lengths, even camera rails, tail-followings, etc. I can already see players taking pride in their own creations, why not let them film their own documentaries?

 

I guess that's all for my daydreaming, I'm looking forward to seeing other players expanding upon these ideas in this thread.

And thank you, team Squad, for such a fabulous game.

Terraforming just isn't happening, all the planets are on rails. So changing any of the atmospheric properties would likely require a reload, ditto for adding water/ice etc.

Now could it be convincingly faked? Sure, you would reach a milestone at which point the game would apply certain new properties to the planet upon the next load into that save. But each planet would have to have these individually configured, so it would be tedious and probably error-prone.

You really need a very different way of handling planets for this to be a realistic possibility, more procedural elements that can make a decent "guess" on where water would appear for instance after a certain threshold was passed temperature wise(using elevation data to find realistic basins perhaps). That doesn't make it impossible, but you're looking at something with a scope and scale more suited to a DLC expansion than a patch.

Science? We have the vaguest idea how KSP2 will handle it, so this I'm not even going to comment on.

Camera settings? Eh, they might already be there. If not, then someone will make a mod for it.

[solashira]

5 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

That doesn't make it impossible, but you're looking at something with a scope and scale more suited to a DLC expansion than a patch.

Actually I'm open to any and all possible colony management end game, terraforming is just the first thing that pops out of my mind, if KSP2 needs a ground breaking DLC in the future, terraforming might just fit into that role.

6 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

TL;DR: I'm just hoping science can carry a more true place in the game in actually being useful in our exploration of the universe and how we plan ahead and prepare for interacting with the environment. Really wanna see an in-game collected knowledge repository that can be filled out and be readily used as a reference for the player. Hopefully tech progression can divorce itself from science collection a bit and be based more-so on time/money/milestone-achievements so long as wasting time has a consequence.

I love this idea!

Science != technology. In a manner of speaking, we were never able to do science in original KSP, it was like we were exchanging mun/duna/[insert planet/moon name] dust with some mysterious power for technologies.

I too would love to see us piecing together the scope of Kerbal universe, gradually building a knowledge base and expanding the horizon of our science, it would be epic.

10 hours ago, intelliCom said:

I meant tricky for the developers to organise it for proper balance.

I have several friends who work in the game industry, from what I learned from them, there're ample talents in the industry who could easily complete the balancing

10 hours ago, intelliCom said:

Requires some heavy re-working of the tech tree to achieve something that isn't too quick or too sluggish.

Whatever it turns out to be, it would still be more linear and smooth than what we have in KSP1. Remember that first mun mission you launched? The moment your return pod touched the ground, boom, technologies popped like, well, popcorns. It was fun by its own right, but really, someone should do something about this.

23 hours ago, TLTay said:

After some time/experimentation and R&D

Yes, I think the "Test Part" family of contracts we have in KSP1 was meant to address that, but it was tedious and unrewarding. It shouldn't have been like that.

23 hours ago, TLTay said:

but since when does a magnetosphere measurement from Jool help my scientists design a compact nuclear reactor for a colony on the Mun?

*Nodding in tears* Field experiences create need for engineering, which then translate into/from novel science, that's how it was supposed to work.

[Pthigrivi]

The science thing is tricky. A lot of good ideas have been thrown out and thankfully it sounds like intercept is taking a good hard look at this and KSP2 will be pretty different from KSP1. There are some pitfalls though that aren't entirely obvious. For instance if you have science accumulate over time you need a check to prevent time-warping through the whole tech tree that also doesn't punish people for time-warping to Jool when they need to. It's not insurmountable, but it is a challenge. One way to do this is to have 'raw data' that needs time to be processed, so you can time-warp a certain amount of science at which point progress would halt until you collected more data. Another check could be an exhaustible life-support system of some kind, but ideally any life support system would be to some degree set-it-and-forget-it once properly supplied so you could time-warp years at a time to other star systems without having to go back and babysit each colony along the way. I've also suggested in the past having goal-dates for different discoveries that give players extra rewards for getting out and doing things quickly. It's also unclear so far whether ISRU resources themselves will be depletable over time.

The other pitfall would be making a system thats overly prescriptive or distracts from key missions. A lot of folks have complained that generic science points 'don't make sense' but they do one crucial thing: allow players to do the missions they want to do and get science along the way. If you link specific parts to specific tasks you've actually created a linear set of missions that players must do more or less in order whether they like those types of missions or not because its only way to unlock what they need. A non-specific point-buy system allows players to go out and collect science while doing the missions they want to do and then buy the parts they want to buy. I've been of the opinion that its not the points themselves that make KSP1 grindy, but all of the repetitive clicking and scrounging it takes to get them. 

A big one I agree with folks on is the idea that experiments should also give the player useful information. Though I don't personally care about a text-based knowledge repository I'd be very happy to see a robust system of map overlays showing things like altimetry, resource values, scientific interest,  atmospheric information, etc. A big part of planning landing and colony sites should be cross-referencing these maps to pick ideal locations for exploration and expansion. 

Edited June 14, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[intelliCom]

5 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I'd be very happy to see a robust system of map overlays showing things like altimetry, resource values, scientific interest,  atmospheric information, etc. A big part of planning landing and colony sites should be cross-referencing these maps to pick ideal locations for exploration and expansion. 

One thing I've also been very annoyed with in KSP 1 is trying to figure out what biomes I need to go to in order to get more science points. The Mun has 15 biomes. How do you tell them all apart?

[Incarnation of Chaos]

1 hour ago, intelliCom said:

One thing I've also been very annoyed with in KSP 1 is trying to figure out what biomes I need to go to in order to get more science points. The Mun has 15 biomes. How do you tell them all apart?

I think there's a mod that tells you it as you fly, and i think there's also ones that allow you to scan the planets and see it also (but not 100% sure)

[shdwlrd]

2 hours ago, intelliCom said:

One thing I've also been very annoyed with in KSP 1 is trying to figure out what biomes I need to go to in order to get more science points. The Mun has 15 biomes. How do you tell them all apart?

1 hour ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

I think there's a mod that tells you it as you fly, and i think there's also ones that allow you to scan the planets and see it also (but not 100% sure)

The mod that allows you to scan and see the biomes is called ScanSat. Or you can look on the KSP Wiki for each planet. KER will allow you to see which biome you're in while flying/driving. You can also use Kerbnet to find which biome you're in. (I don't use it, the ScanSat/KER combination is much better.)

[intelliCom]

1 minute ago, shdwlrd said:

The mod that allows you to scan and see the biomes is called ScanSat. Or you can look on the KSP Wiki for each planet. KER will allow you to see which biome you're in while flying/driving. You can also use Kerbnet to find which biome you're in. (I don't use it, the ScanSat/KER combination is much better.)

Knowing the biome you're in is ok enough, but the stock surface scanner can do this too. I'm looking for a layout of every single biome on the body's surface, akin to survey scanner ore readouts. That way, I know the biome that I want to go to, not just the one I'm in.

[shdwlrd]

1 minute ago, intelliCom said:

Knowing the biome you're in is ok enough, but the stock surface scanner can do this too. I'm looking for a layout of every single biome on the body's surface, akin to survey scanner ore readouts. That way, I know the biome that I want to go to, not just the one I'm in.

ScanSat is what you're looking for.

[1.10.1] SCANsat [v20.4] -- Real Scanning, Real Science, at Warp Speed! [September 9, 2020] - Add-on Releases - Kerbal Space Program Forums

 

 

 

[intelliCom]

Just now, shdwlrd said:

ScanSat is what you're looking for.

[1.10.1] SCANsat [v20.4] -- Real Scanning, Real Science, at Warp Speed! [September 9, 2020] - Add-on Releases - Kerbal Space Program Forums

This doesn't seem so different to the maps that are already on the KSP wiki. It's not necessarily a requirement since I can achieve the whole tech tree without biomes anyway, but it's annoying to do so.

Besides, this was about how KSP 2 can improve this sort of stuff. I really hope the next game will have something like SCANsat.

[shdwlrd]

5 minutes ago, intelliCom said:

This doesn't seem so different to the maps that are already on the KSP wiki. It's not necessarily a requirement since I can achieve the whole tech tree without biomes anyway, but it's annoying to do so.

Besides, this was about how KSP 2 can improve this sort of stuff. I really hope the next game will have something like SCANsat.

How do you think they got the maps that are used in the wiki?  The thing with ScanSat is you have an interactive map you can see where you're at. So you can plan where to go next. Makes life much easier.

Yes, I hope they do something better for KSP2.

[intelliCom]

39 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

How do you think they got the maps that are used in the wiki?  The thing with ScanSat is you have an interactive map you can see where you're at. So you can plan where to go next. Makes life much easier.

Yes, I hope they do something better for KSP2.

My bad, never thought about that. I thought they were just biome maps in the game files. Why were Gilly, Bop, and Pol's biome maps weird in version 1.2?

[StarSlay3r]

Hello! We recently created a new KSP 2 Suggestions & Development Discussion section, so we'll be moving all related posts (including this one) over there.