New job posting: Senior Mission Designer

[TLTay]

https://careers.take2games.com/job/3870419

From posting:

The Challenge 

The senior mission designer constructs missions to guide the player in mastering the suite of skills behind building and flying authentic space missions.

What You’ll Take On

This experienced designer will work alongside the lead designer to plan, build, and refine tutorials and missions. This designer must have a comprehensive understanding of the game's systems and how they each contribute to a wide variety of flights a player may perform. They are responsible for teaching players how these systems work in bite-sized pieces and then challenge them in a freeform, sandbox environment where any given mission may be handled in a myriad of creative ways.

Me again: Did they discover that the tutorial system was insufficient to turn a rank noob into a master of orbital mechanics? It mentions "tutorials and missions." Or is this being added for a Making History DLC for KSP2? They mention "authentic space missions" in the posting... I think not many ppl really used the mission system but I could be wrong. Either way, I hope it doesn't lead to another delay... I fear it might be a harbinger of harsh news. Especially that tutorial part.

[Pthigrivi]

Its not a bad idea. Its a complicated game and getting players into their first interplanetary transfers and maybe basic colony mechanics without being a huge intrusion on gameplay is a tricky task. 

Edited February 4, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[intelliCom]

I played the game for over 300 hours before I even knew that "specific impulse" means "efficiency".

Spoiler

But even then, I still didn't understand what the number in particular referred to, or why it's measured in seconds. Just that higher numbers = more efficiency.
Only just recently, I've learned how to calculate the specific impulse of any particular engine. I have almost 1000 hours in KSP and I've only just learned calculation of an engine's specific impulse.
To this day, I am still unsure of why specific impulse decreases in an atmosphere.

I played the game for over 600 hours before I even landed on Laythe.
In all of the time that I have played this game, I have not made a surface outpost with ISRU. Just a simple, small lander that has a few crew cabins in it.

KSP 2 is about to introduce dozens more concepts on top of just those few.

Trust me when I say this: An improvement to KSP 1's tutorials is very welcome.

[K^2]

This is coming in a bit late, but they might have had a departure or are looking forward to DLCs. I don't think this is an indication of delay at this point.

But this is the actual exciting bit.

Quote

We are searching for a person with proven experience in a game design role. They are familiar with Unity and lua scripting, and they are shown they can use a wide suite of tools to guide players.

For these unfamiliar, KSP and KSP2 both run on Unity, all of the coding for which is done in C#. The game engine does not natively support Lua, and outside of some mods, there is no Lua support in KSP.

This means that Intercept explicitly added Lua to KSP2 at least as a tool for mission scripting. The ramifications may range from interesting to absolutely game changing. The main advantage of using something like Lua to script missions is that it gives you a lot more flexibility with the sort of things you can do in the mission compared to something like KSP's graph-based mission editor, while still keeping the custom code for a mission as an asset that can be easily modified by designers. At a minimum, that means more interesting missions, because the Intercept designers would have significantly more flexibility and faster iteration time. But Lua offers additional benefits.

First, because it is a game asset, like textures and craft files, it can easily be made user-configurable. So based on this, it wouldn't be all that unlikely that we would be able to write our own Lua scripts. This can open up a pretty wide field for interesting game modes. Want to do a checkpoint race? Easy. Want to keep a score? Trivial. Want to run a server with factions, player economy, and trade routes? Would take work, but with the right API, that can probably be turned into a Lua-scripted custom mission.

Second, unlike a DLL plugin that can contain all kinds of malicious code, so long as it's properly sandboxed, Lua code is safe to share. Meaning, these custom missions with Lua scripts would be easy to share for a multiplayer game or even via Steam Workshop if there is an integration for it. So if you want to join a server running a custom Lua script and there is a client component to it, the game can just download it from the server. This would require Intercept to set it up as a feature, but it is an option.

Finally, far more speculatively, but now sounding a lot more like possibility, it's possible to implement Lua scripting to provide customized behavior for user-created ship parts. That would open up the door for modded parts that can likewise be used safely in multiplayer games or shared on Steam Workshop. Alternatively, there can be a game part that lets you write Lua scripts for a specific craft, similar to kOS mod, opening up all sorts of possibilities for autonomous craft in the game. Want guided missiles? No need to hunt down a weapons mods. It can literally just be a simple Lua script for a small rocket.

 

What sort of things are possible with Lua? Well, to give you an idea, Roblox games are coded entirely in Lua. If Intercept ends up implementing modding via Lua, it should be possible to create just about anything you'd see in KSP mods and share the results safely for multiplayer games. But even if it is limited to mission scripting, so long as we can create our own, the opportunities are immense. All kinds of new game modes could be opened up for online play.

And yeah, at this point this is speculation based on precisely two words in a job posting, but this could be a hint towards some very exciting things happening with user generated content in KSP2.

[TLTay]

Do "authentic space missions" need authentic space planets and authentic n-body physics? How authentic are we talking, T2?

[The Aziz]

4 hours ago, intelliCom said:

I played the game for over 300 hours before I even knew that "specific impulse" means "efficiency".

I still read ISP as Internet Service Provider.

52 minutes ago, TLTay said:

Do "authentic space missions" need authentic space planets and authentic n-body physics? How authentic are we talking, T2?

I think they're expanding the idea introduced in KSP1, with BepiColombo, Rosetta and Apollo mission recreations. Within Kerbol system of course. We could have a lot more, Venus (Eve) landers, Mars rovers, Messenger, Parker Solar Probe, New Horizons, Voyagers, Juno etc. But this time actually planned with tools available for devs.

[intelliCom]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

For these unfamiliar, KSP and KSP2 both run on Unity, all of the coding for which is done in C#. The game engine does not natively support Lua, and outside of some mods, there is no Lua support in KSP.

It is clear from many screenshots of development that KSP 2 is being made in Unity, which means that they're using some form of non-native integration of Lua into Unity.

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

Want to run a server with factions, player economy, and trade routes?

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

So if you want to join a server running a custom Lua script and there is a client component to it, the game can just download it from the server.

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

That would open up the door for modded parts that can likewise be used safely in multiplayer games or shared on Steam Workshop.

This is sounding a lot like Garry's Mod. You don't have the mods that the server needs? It'll just install the necessary mods before joining.

Garry's was also coded in Lua, so the parallels- assuming this optimistic speculation is true- are extremely close. I love it.

[Zhetaan]

7 hours ago, intelliCom said:

Trust me when I say this: An improvement to KSP 1's tutorials is very welcome.

I agree, but I will also say for the sake of posterity that one of the drawbacks of KSP1's tutorials was that the tutorials were made while the game was still in alpha.  Thus, a lot of the tutorials were incomplete because they didn't cover new features, or existing tutorials were broken when things were changed.  For one example, the change to the atmospheric model between .90 and 1.0 completely ruined most stock aeroplanes.  For another example, the updated engine models (and deprecation of the engines that they replaced) broke one of the rocket design tutorials--the tutorial looks for a part that no longer exists, and of course it won't complete until the user places that part on the rocket.

KSPedia helped a lot, but it's not the same thing.

Spoiler

I can answer your implied question about specific impulse decreasing while in atmosphere:  specific impulse is directly related to the rocket engine's effective exhaust velocity.  Exhaust velocity, in turn, is a function of the nozzle pressure, but that's not the complete story:  while in an atmosphere, there is ambient atmospheric pressure 'pushing back', so to speak, which therefore reduces the exhaust velocity, thus decreasing the specific impulse.

Put another way, the effective exhaust velocity (and thus the specific impulse) depends on the pressure difference between the inside and outside of the engine's combustion chamber.  When in a vacuum, that difference is at a maximum (since the exterior pressure is zero), and it only decreases from there.  One can imagine, for example, an atmospheric pressure so great that it matches or exceeds the combustion chamber pressure--in that case, the rocket cannot force out its exhaust against the pressure and the exhaust velocity (and specific impulse) drops to zero.  The efficiency also drops to zero, which should make sense because such a state consumes propellant while producing exactly zero thrust.

 

[PlutoISaPlanet]

This all sounds great, but PLEASE, do not delay the game over this. If anything, add this in post release.

[intelliCom]

23 minutes ago, Zhetaan said:

One can imagine, for example, an atmospheric pressure so great that it matches or exceeds the combustion chamber pressure--in that case, the rocket cannot force out its exhaust against the pressure and the exhaust velocity (and specific impulse) drops to zero.  The efficiency also drops to zero, which should make sense because such a state consumes propellant while producing exactly zero thrust.

Question: What makes the stronger engines in KSP (Vector, Mainsail, etc.) have less vacuum ISP than a lot of the weaker ones? (Terrier, Poodle, etc.)

[Maria Sirona]

I'll take this as proof that KSP-2 is nearly complete. After all, missions require vehicles, and vehicles require parts! 

[Starhawk]

2 hours ago, intelliCom said:

Question: What makes the stronger engines in KSP (Vector, Mainsail, etc.) have less vacuum ISP than a lot of the weaker ones? (Terrier, Poodle, etc.)

Since the thrust produced by a rocket depends on moving material away from the rocket engine the thrust will decrease when there is atmospheric pressure around the engine which resists the material moving freely from the engine bell.
Atmospheric rated engines have very different bell geometry than vacuum engines for this reason.  And that is why some engines have a higher ISP in atmosphere than other engines.  At the surface of Eve the atmospheric pressure is high enough that only a few engines can produce sufficient thrust to lift off.

Happy landings!

We now return to the topic at hand, already in progress.

[TheOrbitalMechanic]

Looking at the original dev diary about tutorials, the guy says that:

Quote

The completed storyboards and animatics for all 32 tutorial scripts added up to 47 minutes of animation — half an animated feature! Which is kind of a lot for one guy (me) to produce and more importantly, way too much for the players to sit through. So we redistributed the content, making skill-based lessons into interactive sequences, while reserving the animations for scientific concepts.

So I would assume that this job posting is related, at the very least, to the interactive sequences mentioned (one of which we've already seen some of). It could also lead to some interesting possibilities with modding and mission designers, as others have mentioned.

[gussi111]

2 hours ago, Maria Sirona said:

I'll take this as proof that KSP-2 is nearly complete. After all, missions require vehicles, and vehicles require parts! 

Wouldn't you in theory be able to design missions at any stage of the development?

[K^2]

3 hours ago, gussi111 said:

Wouldn't you in theory be able to design missions at any stage of the development?

Yeah. Game designers can work with fairly barebones implementations or even completely "on paper".

[Alexoff]

It is not very clear what missions we are talking about. These are routine missions for the daily delivery of the flag to Moon or some special separate missions like in the DLC. In the first case, it is rather sad to read, first an employee will be found, then he will get up to speed, when will we see the game? This should have been done not in the year of release! But lua is good, I wrote a lot of scripts in this language for other games