I was showing KSP to a friend...

[Tim_Barrett]

The point of KSP not having a story is the ability to make your own.

Some people just don't have the attention span for that, however.

I was playing minecraft and my friend asked me what it was, so I told him. A skeleton shot me. What did he say?

"dude shoot him with your gun"

This generation sucks.

[mrdest21]

Just tell your friend it's ok, he can buy the game at it's full retail value (I dunno, $30-$50 I am guessing?) when it is finished and released. Remind him the game hasn't yet been optimized, because again, it is in Alpha development. This is a chance to contribute to a game as it grows, but there are some sacrifices that are made during development (such as not being optimized, and being full of bugs). It's a trade off, but it's totally worth it.

Well I addressed this before, contributing to a growing game is a gamble that the game will mature. It's a gamble we were willing to make, it's a gamble others won't make. Some people will see a slow alpha and decide against it and they'll see a 50$ game with no story and decide against it.

Personally, I bought Minecraft for 10$ and while I played hours and hours, yet I'm not sure I would have paid the release price, here's why. These types of games attract a lot of their most loyal customers in the alpha phases, when the cost is low so people will be ready to give out 10$ for an alpha. Then they end up loving it and they end up thinking that the release price is a great deal. But if you don't play the alpha (maybe you think Minecraft looks like crap, which it does), you have no experience with the game and all you see is a 30-50$ game about picking up blocks, fighting skeletons and nothing ever really happens. You don't see the appeal and the new price stops you from trying. I'd be interested to see the sales figures over time for Minecraft.

As for ship complexity, I'm not the best rocket engineer but as KSP adds new planets to go, a certain amount of complexity is required to get there. My rockets mostly lag in the atmosphere of Kerbin where my launcher phase takes up half of the part count. My interplanetary rocket uses 600 parts (including an excessive amount of support beams for stability).

[samstarman5]

As for ship complexity, I'm not the best rocket engineer but as KSP adds new planets to go, a certain amount of complexity is required to get there. My rockets mostly lag in the atmosphere of Kerbin where my launcher phase takes up half of the part count. My interplanetary rocket uses 600 parts (including an excessive amount of support beams for stability).

You may want to browse the spacecraft exchange as well as KSP videos to see where you can trim things down considerably. After tons of trial and error, I finally came up with a design for an interplanetary craft that is only about 12-18 parts that I feel confident I can take to visit each planet and moon Voyager 1/2 style. I only need build a launch platform to get it into a high enough orbit to leave Kerbin's gravity well. Considering my craft isn't very large, the launch stage won't have to be, either. Therefore I won't have to worry about any impact on video performance which I would have to try very hard to achieve significantly. (Which I did going overboard with one of my probe designs, but even that was bearable.)

Games like KSP and Minecraft which allow people to get in on the ground floor on are not games that will cost $50. I highly expect Minecraft will never go over $30, and I doubt Squad has thoughts of a pricetag even that high. $50+ price tags are for games made by the bigger publishers and developers that for one, have more mouths to feed, and another, have a lot more put into their games. Then there is also the thought that a few of those publishers are just greedy lunatics. While the likes of Activision, EA, and Ubisoft are all for gamer contribution in beta versions of their games, they are not the type who will ever want outside help or influence when their games are in alpha. Why? Because they are so butt-hurt worried over piracy they aren't about to share their game engines and concepts at such an early stage as to allow copies that could trump their game. Never mind that gamer contribution even at that early stage would most likely improve the chances of the game becoming a winner when it hits release. While Minecraft's sales have mellowed since they hit their "Full Release"(which really isn't, by their definition), they are still breaking records and keeping Mojang flush so they can hire more people and work on multiple games at once. I like to think Squad stands a good chance at achieving such goals, if they have thoughts at making more games beyond KSP as well as continually adding to it even beyond its own "Full Release."

It isn't so much what the company puts into a game as to what the gamers do. I didn't know anything about Squad when I downloaded KSP when it was just in its demo stage. The Mun had only just been added when I came on board, but what sold me on the game was all the videos shared by gamers in what they did with their own rocket builds. The fact that ordinary people could achieve a solid orbit in space without the help of a map and only the simple gauges shown on the main screen astounds me even today. But even I can do that, now. What used to be science and math for people with PhD's and other Doctorates is now achievable by anyone who wants to try. While not everything in the game is perfectly comparable to real life, just about 95% of what you do in the game applies to what is necessary to launch a rocket in real life. This is something that sets KSP apart from the likes of Minecraft and just about any other well-known game title today. Who really knew applied science could be so frikkin fun? My best moment so far? Achieving a 1k orbit around the Mun, and just watching the scenery whip by. That was how I got to see one of the Mun Arches, even. Amazing stuff.

But don't try use the tagline 'Science is Fun' to a newcomer. The best sales pitch you can do is download the demo, and go hog wild building rockets. Don't refer to the forum and don't refer to the Wiki. Learning by doing is the best way to play KSP, and being able to crash and explode rockets without consequence is the best sales pitch. Once your friend has had a bit of that to experience, that is when you tell him that $18 gets him a game that is about ten times bigger than the wee demo that already offers so much. Considering a high-endish and well known game like Torchlight II only sells for $2 more, it helps give just the right amount of perspective to make a sale. When the next update to KSP hits, it will seem to that person as if they just had a second birthday.

[Richy teh space man]

I can happily say with the latest update (0.17) its something I think was well worth getting. Its already given me hours of playability already and I think even if I did go off and play another game theres still enough to do that I'd be drawn back to it again..

[Steelfury]

While there may be issues with really complex multi-stage spaceships at the moment, I've loved this game from the moment I bought it, being able to design a spaceship or a spaceplane and then fly it is an incredible experience, and the level of difficulty makes it feel like a great accomplishment when you do manage to land it on your destination. As to the lag: have you tried using poodle engines on a second stage with mainsails on the first stage? As long as you add a couple of struts and go steady on the throttle with the mainsail engines I find I can get some pretty large ships into orbit without the dreaded framerate issues associated with using tons of smaller components.

[FlandersNed]

The point of KSP not having a story is the ability to make your own.

Some people just don't have the attention span for that, however.

I was playing minecraft and my friend asked me what it was, so I told him. A skeleton shot me. What did he say?

"dude shoot him with your gun"

This generation sucks.

Are you saying it's bad because he thought you could just shoot the skeleton with a gun, or that he didn't remember what you had told him earlier?

I also have friends like that. They don't think all games have guns, but they say that they aren't willing to sink the amount of time KSP requires.

[phoenix_ca]

I'd say that the thing that makes KSP a good bet is mods. The dev team has already made it pretty darn easy for modders to add parts and plugins (things that actually add code...that's...a very rare thing indeed). I think that shows that they know just how important a healthy modding community can be.

To compare it to Minecraft: I didn't buy MC until I found Tekkit. Until I found-out there was a comprehensive pack of mods to the game that would add lots of functionality and various cool things for me to do, even a freakin' 16-bit computer (Yeah, I totally learned Forth just to program RP2's computer), I was utterly bored by Minecraft. Sure, I could build a few things, but there was so little complexity, and no real beauty to any of it. The most depressing thing about that was when I found out just how hard it is to modify Minecraft. You first need to decompile the source code (a monumental task if there ever was one), then learn how it all works, then kludge in your own code and classes, overwriting the official code, then recompile the whole mess. It's a really, really brute-force way of customizing a piece of software (and would be an even worse nightmare if they obfuscated their code better or wrote it all in C...eugh).

Comparatively, life is very, very simple when modding KSP. You write your own library of code, a simple line in the part.cfg invokes that class, and presto, you have a working mod that adds functionality, a GUI, and new awesome things. And better yet, we don't need to decompile Squad's code to do it, which is arguably better for both parties. Mod support this early in development shows a great deal of foresight on their part.

[Person012345]

You should remind him that it's still in alpha stage. It will most likely be optimised more later on. I certainly hope it is.

Edit: then again, by the time it is I may not need it to be.

Edited October 4, 2012 by Person012345

[Markus Reese]

I do understand where he is coming from, your friend that is. there always comes points where optimization needs outweight features. Right now, I can do most stuff fun by using larger mod parts allowing only need for one tank instead of 10 and not needing the struts for it is a bonus too. However some people like vanilla and I have a dunar spaceplane set up capable to return, but the lag when I reached duna meant I pretty much aborted landing attempts (yes, lag flights I will quickload repeated attempts) and settled for a low orbit. Sadly, it worked fine on kerbin. Bit of a bummer since it was part of a multiflight mission.

[CannonFoddaUK]

I play on a i3 laptop with on-board GFX support. Feel my pain.

[mrdest21]

My laptop is an i3 with HD 3000 intel graphics. It does not like KSP at all for anything bigger than a lunar rocket. On that machine, KSP with lag is unplayable. I tried to get to Duna and there was a 8-10 second delay between hitting T and having the SAS engage or disengage.

[bainbridge]

Had to OC my 2500k to 4.6GHZ to get reasonable framerates on takeoff, one of the most cinematic bits of the mission IMO. Even after the overclock I had to reduce the number of sepatrons to get a smoothish launch.

However hard it is to get this game running on multicores it's worth it.

[Zapp Brannigan]

I hear some of you saying, that we have to wait until Unity manages to utilize multiple cores... how likely is it for that to happen any time soon? Has anyone some information about this?

And if the devs already use PhysX, shouldn't there be a possibility to outsource most of the calculations to the GPU?

I run the game on an i7-2820QM @ 2300MHz, 12GB RAM and a nVidia GeForce GTX 580M and it runs fine once the ship is out of the atmosphere.

What sucks is the time it takes to get a new ship on the pad, because at least for me, it takes a LOT of trials and errors until a new steakhouse rocket handles like a bistro.

Also it takes precious seconds to switch through time multipliers... many brave Kerbonauts lost their lives landing on them Mun 1000 times faster than usual, because I hit the wrong button again... silliy me, but why is there no single shiny "back to realtime" button?

So failure is getting pretty frustrating pretty fast in KSP... and time consuming, too.

But the feeling you get the moment you land something exactly where you've planned it is at least worth 21 bucks, no questions asked

And anyone who can't think his/her own story to play in the Kerbin orbit is just not into space after all, hence a different audience.

[sal_vager]

Well there is this Zapp, it's a few years old but it gives you an idea of the limitations, seems .net functions can be multithreaded but not the Unity core functions for some reason.

PhysX would be nice, for Nvidia users, ATI owners would be out of luck though and does PhysX run on all Nvidia cards? Plus it'd be Windows only so no OSX support.

KSP really needs a loading screen when going to the launchpad, it's possible to launch before the game has finished loading all the resources, take a look and you can sometimes see terrain still updating while you are sitting there on the pad.

You can reduce warp to normal time by clicking the left arrow on the MET display, it'll drop down the time warp controls when you mouse over it, but doing that can result in a bug that knocks your engines off.

And yeah KSP is definitely worth it, we can make our own stories as we go along if we want to

[The Destroyer]

Man, thats too bad. Even so, I get ALOT of lag, on the smallest rockets too. but do i stop? No! its a great game, and plus, once you look away from kerbin, all lag gone!

[sal_vager]

Well, the ocean is known to cause lag, you can halve the PQS value for kerbin's ocean in the settings.cfg, that might help.

Apart from that you can try setting the core affinity to 1 in the task manager, that might help as well.

[mrdest21]

What's the kerbal ship exchange? I've never heard of that. As for youtube videos, it seems like most of them use modded parts, I'm trying to keep it stock as much as I can.

[Zapp Brannigan]

Well there is this Zapp, it's a few years old but it gives you an idea of the limitations, seems .net functions can be multi-threaded but not the Unity core functions for some reason.

I actually read that, understood half of it, read some more, and am now pretty sure, that it is possible to run threads alongside Unity and use actual system functions to parallelize your heavy calculations and feed them back to Unity. So maybe OpenCL would be a great term to mention right here?

Because I am pretty sure there will be much more processing power needed, once realistic wings and better drag and reentry heat and all that stuff should be implemented into the game... I am excited about all that, but also a little worried that it will not compute.

Also Unity4 is about to be released soon enough that you can pre-order it already. I have not read any specific words about out of the box multi-threading, but it seems to focus a lot more on graphics than physics... but still it's nice to know things are coming

Edited October 4, 2012 by Zapp Brannigan

[Markus Reese]

My laptop is an i3 with HD 3000 intel graphics. It does not like KSP at all for anything bigger than a lunar rocket. On that machine, KSP with lag is unplayable. I tried to get to Duna and there was a 8-10 second delay between hitting T and having the SAS engage or disengage.

There is one thing I have started doing unconciously when it lags, is I count the "ticks" to response. For me, it seems commands always have a 5 tick delay. Not sure the coding, but is it a possible clue, dunno?

[phoenix_ca]

Once they get most of the main features in, then they can think about serious optimization. It's a really bad idea most of the time to start optimizing things early, because the changes you make now might make it more difficult to add new features later, or be rendered as time-wasted after you have to tear apart that function/module/thingy again to add more stuff and things.

So...*shrug* One can be fairly certain the code isn't optimized, and won't be until doing so won't be a waste of time. They're still busy adding all sorts of nifty things and stuff, stuff and things, and so on...

[Von Gobble]

Allthough mine doesnt lag much and I can fly my 350~ part plane around @ 60fps, I will tell you now, once you're past the 800 part mark.. it becomes impossible for the auto to fly the ship. And I really wanna get this baby into space..

[Spadde]

My friends just dont have the patience to play this game, all they do is play League of legends