The potential modability of KSP2, split from an unrelated thread.

[TaintedLion]

6 hours ago, Beale said:

In KSP 2, I plan this yes.

Do we know how moddable KSP 2 will be?

[The Dressian Exploder]

Not really, but at least as moddable as KSP1

[EvilSpace]

I don't see any point in KSP now, it's an outdated product. Vanilla KSP 2 will immediately have its own waterfall and customization of parts, which simplifies modding and deprives the original KSP of any meaning.  You did the right thing by finishing Tantares for KSP 1

[Friznit]

3 hours ago, EvilSpace said:

I don't see any point in KSP now, it's an outdated product. Vanilla KSP 2 will immediately have its own waterfall and customization of parts, which simplifies modding and deprives the original KSP of any meaning.  You did the right thing by finishing Tantares for KSP 1

I completely disagree.  KSP2 is still in development.  Once released it will take a few months of patches to iron out the inevitable bugs.  We don't yet know what the workflow will be like for modding and even so it will take many months (even years) for big mods like Tantares to get ported over or remade.  KSP still has a lot of life in it yet.

[Beale]

6 hours ago, EvilSpace said:

I don't see any point in KSP now, it's an outdated product. Vanilla KSP 2 will immediately have its own waterfall and customization of parts, which simplifies modding and deprives the original KSP of any meaning.  You did the right thing by finishing Tantares for KSP 1

Consider that I (and other people) might know things that you do not know?

 

 

RD-250

Edited March 20, 2022 by Beale

[linuxgurugamer]

3 hours ago, EvilSpace said:

I don't see any point in KSP now, it's an outdated product. Vanilla KSP 2 will immediately have its own waterfall and customization of parts, which simplifies modding and deprives the original KSP of any meaning.  You did the right thing by finishing Tantares for KSP 1

There are many old games which people still play.  KSP 2 will be a different game than KSP, and there will still be people who play and write mods for KSP for years to come.

If you feel that way about KSP, then you are free to leave the forums and not respond to people.  No one is stopping you

[GoldForest]

4 hours ago, Beale said:

Consider that I (and other people) might know things that you do not know?

That's kind of ominous... 

[EvilSpace]

On 3/20/2022 at 1:13 PM, Friznit said:

I completely disagree.  KSP2 is still in development.  Once released it will take a few months of patches to iron out the inevitable bugs.  We don't yet know what the workflow will be like for modding and even so it will take many months (even years) for big mods like Tantares to get ported over or remade.  KSP still has a lot of life in it yet.

KSP2 after release will probably take not months, but years to fix, maybe even 2-3 before it is a stable product. But... even on release, it will be 100 times better than this indie game from 2011, where at the beginning there were graphics of the 20th century level and parachutes opened in space.
The entire life path of KSP1 was like eternal suffering, the end of which is KSP2.

[TheShadow1138]

On 3/20/2022 at 4:01 AM, EvilSpace said:

I don't see any point in KSP now, it's an outdated product. Vanilla KSP 2 will immediately have its own waterfall and customization of parts, which simplifies modding and deprives the original KSP of any meaning.  You did the right thing by finishing Tantares for KSP 1

I can certainly understand that sentiment.  I would point out though, that a macOS version of KSP2 is yet to be confirmed, unless I missed an announcement.  Coupled with Apple's move away from Intel processors, KSP1 may be the only way we Mac players can enjoy KSP in any form, barring moving to console.

Edited March 24, 2022 by TheShadow1138

[Vl3d]

So there's this idea floating around: allowing modders to add planet packs directly to the KSP2 universe through a curating + voting system. Players could explore them with telescopes and download them in-game when planning a journey.

What do you think?

Edited April 9, 2022 by Vl3d

[Bej Kerman]

7 hours ago, Vl3d said:

So there's this idea floating around: allowing modders to add planet packs directly to the KSP2 universe through a curating + voting system. Players could explore them with telescopes and download them in-game when planning a journey.

What do you think?

What advantages does this have over just choosing the mods yourself? Quite frankly, outside of multiplayer I don't want any online functionality.

[darthgently]

7 hours ago, Vl3d said:

So there's this idea floating around: allowing modders to add planet packs directly to the KSP2 universe through a curating + voting system. Players could explore them with telescopes and download them in-game when planning a journey.

What do you think?

Yeah, what a great idea that happened to be floating around.  Good thing you found it.

[MARL_Mk1]

As long as we get proper Steam Workshop integration for mods + intentions of Intercept to eventually release official modding tools, KSP2 will lay the foundations to be one of the best moddable games in the history of this industry.

[micha]

On 3/20/2022 at 8:54 PM, linuxgurugamer said:

There are many old games which people still play.  KSP 2 will be a different game than KSP, and there will still be people who play and write mods for KSP for years to come.

Agreed. And besides which, unless things have changed which I haven't heard of, KSP2 will be Windows-only (or at least, not Linux). Which will exclude a lot of people who currently play (and mod) KSP.  Overall I think this is a really poor decision by the devs. Yes, the Linux playerbase is tiny in comparison, but by developing something on multiple platforms, _especially_ when using a cross-platform engine anyway, you can discover a lot of bugs and poor coding practises during the development stages and mitigate them early on. The long-term cost savings in post-release support is, I think, worth the initial investment of building the game for multiple platforms.

As for modding, one of the core architectural changes which I really hope KSP2 brings to the table is dynamic loading of mods. Basically I'd like each save-game to be able to specify which mods (and ideally, which versions of those mods) it uses. Icing on the cake would be a CKAN-like mod-manager built right into the game.

[stephensmat]

2 minutes ago, micha said:

Agreed. And besides which, unless things have changed which I haven't heard of, KSP2 will be Windows-only (or at least, not Linux). Which will exclude a lot of people who currently play (and mod) KSP.  

Is that confirmed? I never found that...

[micha]

38 minutes ago, stephensmat said:

Is that confirmed? I never found that...

It's been confirmed non-Linux since pretty much forever.
The official line is "There is no announcement for these platforms at this time." - https://steamcommunity.com/app/954850/discussions/0/2686880925155743711/

I believe it's also been mentioned (officially) in various other places using different wording - Google is your friend.

People are still hopeful that it may eventually be ported to Linux; given it's still based on Unity the actual technical work should be minimal. So it depends on how much it costs them to support another platform vs the projected sales on that platform.

(Getting a touch OT for this thread though...)

[t_v]

Linux and Mac might be a thing. I think that this shouldn’t affect mods too much, although any mods that use libraries only present in one operating system will have a hard time (I don’t know if that is the case for many KSP mods)

[Gotmachine]

On 4/19/2022 at 3:32 AM, Lijazos said:

As long as we get proper Steam Workshop integration for mods + intentions of Intercept to eventually release official modding tools, KSP2 will lay the foundations to be one of the best moddable games in the history of this industry.

It probably won't happen, but as a modder I hope they won't directly use Steam Workshop and instead implement a decent mod loader / game launcher.

Steam Workshop is fine for "additional content" stuff, but it is definitely not up to the task for a complex modding ecosystem like KSP involving complex chains of hard dependencies, optional dependencies, mod conflicts, etc.

The only benefit of Steam Workshop is that it offer free hosting for large mods (this is arguably the weakness of the KSP+CKAN model where most mods are hosted on GitHub, resulting in slow download speeds for end users).
Maybe they can have their own custom mod manager with extended functionality built on top of the SW API, but I have some doubts this is a supported scenario.

As for "official modding tools", we don't really need much. Hopefully KSP2 will abandon the custom model format mess of  KSP1 and modders will be able to create assets using the regular Unity Editor toolchain.
This being said, it would be incredible if they release an "Unity Editor" version of the game with whatever custom internal tooling they have in the form of an Unity package.
Not sure how technically feasible this is, but that would be quite awesome for developing and debugging plugins, configuring visual stuff like planets or engine effects, not to mention making UIs (which is a real pain in KSP1).

[x170doom]

On 5/6/2022 at 5:55 PM, Gotmachine said:

It probably won't happen, but as a modder I hope they won't directly use Steam Workshop and instead implement a decent mod loader / game launcher.

Steam Workshop is fine for "additional content" stuff, but it is definitely not up to the task for a complex modding ecosystem like KSP involving complex chains of hard dependencies, optional dependencies, mod conflicts, etc.

The only benefit of Steam Workshop is that it offer free hosting for large mods (this is arguably the weakness of the KSP+CKAN model where most mods are hosted on GitHub, resulting in slow download speeds for end users).
Maybe they can have their own custom mod manager with extended functionality built on top of the SW API, but I have some doubts this is a supported scenario.

As for "official modding tools", we don't really need much. Hopefully KSP2 will abandon the custom model format mess of  KSP1 and modders will be able to create assets using the regular Unity Editor toolchain.
This being said, it would be incredible if they release an "Unity Editor" version of the game with whatever custom internal tooling they have in the form of an Unity package.
Not sure how technically feasible this is, but that would be quite awesome for developing and debugging plugins, configuring visual stuff like planets or engine effects, not to mention making UIs (which is a real pain in KSP1).

I would say that another issue with moving to steam workshop is that steam's EULA will prohibit you from hosting a mod elsewhere if you at any point upload it to the workshop, effectively making it exclusive to the workshop. seems like it could be an issue for modders who say keep a rolling dev build available on github, as they would either have to ditch using dev builds or constantly push unfinished updates to the workshop