A few questions about KSP2 early release

[K^2]

3 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Well, in this case, we can live without KSP2, at the moment it differs little from KSP1 with mods.

In early access, absolutely, and you're welcome to skip it. Early access is never meant to be a complete, finished product that will be right for everyone.

[Bej Kerman]

6 hours ago, K^2 said:

10 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Well, in this case, we can live without KSP2, at the moment it differs little from KSP1 with mods.

In early access, absolutely, and you're welcome to skip it. Early access is never meant to be a complete, finished product that will be right for everyone.

And we're just going to ignore the immense optimization and tools Squad would have never given us, like non-impulsive maneuver planners?

[K^2]

23 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

And we're just going to ignore the immense optimization and tools Squad would have never given us, like non-impulsive maneuver planners?

That can still technically be a mod. Probably is somewhere out there. And in the early access, enough of the things are unfinished, unpolished, or even just not implemented yet, where you can get to the same state by modding up KSP.

The difference is in how all of these features come together in the full release, because while yeah, individually, pretty much every feature can be a mod, you're not generally going to get all of these mods working together as a coherent whole. This is what's really going to set KSP2 apart from just modded KSP. And it's hard to say where we'll get past that qualitative difference, but I suspect it won't be day one of early release.

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, K^2 said:

30 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

And we're just going to ignore the immense optimization and tools Squad would have never given us, like non-impulsive maneuver planners?

That can still technically be a mod. Probably is somewhere out there. And in the early access, enough of the things are unfinished, unpolished, or even just not implemented yet, where you can get to the same state by modding up KSP.

The difference is in how all of these features come together in the full release, because while yeah, individually, pretty much every feature can be a mod, you're not generally going to get all of these mods working together as a coherent whole. This is what's really going to set KSP2 apart from just modded KSP. And it's hard to say where we'll get past that qualitative difference, but I suspect it won't be day one of early release.

I think you're overselling mods a lot a bit. With KSP 1, you either have a barebones game lacking many critical features, or if you go down the route of using mods, you have a patchy, even buggier mess that also runs badly. The thing that sets KSP 2 apart from KSP 1 is the fact its bug tracker probably won't take up more space in physical form than every edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and that all these critical features KSP 1 didn't have will be made by a cohesive team and not dozens of different people who can't account for each other's ideas on how to structure a feature; you've heard the quip "this game looks like each dev was put in a different room and had no way to communicate with the others" before, well that's the only way to describe modded KSP 1. That's all besides the fact that by the time you've modded KSP 1 to not suck (as much), you're inevitably going to run into a bug that either breaks the game, or looks worrying enough to seed in the back of your head the idea of ditching your current save.

[K^2]

6 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

you have a patchy, even buggier mess that also runs badly

Yeah, but that's kind of my expectation for day 1 of early access, too. It'd be nice if I'm being too pessimistic about it, but there's clearly still work to be done.

To be clear, I fully expect that to be resolved by the time KSP2 fully releases, and by that point any comparison with KSP would be entirely pointless. But early on it might play like KSP with mods.

Edited January 12, 2023 by K^2

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, K^2 said:

Yeah, but that's kind of my expectation for day 1 of early access, too. It'd be nice if I'm being too pessimistic about it, but there's clearly still work to be done.

To be clear, I fully expect that to be resolved by the time KSP2 fully releases, and by that point any comparison with KSP would be entirely pointless. But early on it might play like KSP with mods.

KSP 1 was made by a company that virtually didn't exist and didn't dabble in software before Harvester showed up, and modding turns it from a buggy game with no features into a borderline unplayable game with moar bugs. KSP 2 is being made by developers, so I expect it's going to run better than KSP 1 could ever hope to run.

[K^2]

17 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

KSP 1 was made by a company that virtually didn't exist and didn't dabble in software before Harvester showed up, and modding turns it from a buggy game with no features into a borderline unplayable game with moar bugs. KSP 2 is being made by developers, so I expect it's going to run better than KSP 1 could ever hope to run.

Last major game I shipped was made by a team of ~500 people on a nine figure budget. Some of the people who made it worked for the company for 20 years. Most of the senior people had one to two decades of game development experience. A large chunk of the team was very familiar with the in-house engine and tools, because they shipped other games on it to critical success.

We still shipped a buggy mess that was barely playable on day one and took weeks to get to a good shape.

It's not just about the team and the budget. It's about how big the scope of the game is in relation to that team and how tight the release schedule is for that scope. Intercept is working with a small team. Their experience looks solid, but there still aren't a lot of them, and KSP2 is a very big game. The original KSP that Squad made available on their website was the kind of game one makes over a weekend for a game jam - obviously with more polish than you can squeeze out in a jam, but only just enough to make it commercially viable. It has grown from there, but still remained fairly barebones. Intercept is meant to make a game that's ten times larger in one third of the time. Yes, intercept's team is larger, but it's not 30 times larger than Squad. This is a very tight schedule for a sizable game.

Early access is going to come in with a lot of the features unfinished and unpolished. You should expect bugs, you should expect performance problems, and you should expect things that are broken or look ugly. They'll get fixed, but there's a reason we're getting an early access instead of the full release. And, honestly, that's a good thing. It means the game is getting the work it definitely needs instead of getting rushed out. You don't always get the time to finish a game that needs more time, and I'm always happy to see it when developers get the time to make things ready. And we still get to see a peek at what they've been working on and ask for corrections with the early access.

Edited January 12, 2023 by K^2

[Bej Kerman]

55 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Last major game I shipped was made by a team of ~500 people on a nine figure budget. Some of the people who made it worked for the company for 20 years. Most of the senior people had one to two decades of game development experience. A large chunk of the team was very familiar with the in-house engine and tools, because they shipped other games on it to critical success.

We still shipped a buggy mess that was barely playable on day one and took weeks to get to a good shape.

The product you shipped is still better than if the same game was built off a base best suited for barely a mobile game and patched together into a half-playable mess using mods that are janky in their own right 

[K^2]

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

The product you shipped is still better than if the same game was built off a base best suited for barely a mobile game and patched together into a half-playable mess using mods that are janky in their own right 

I mean, "better" is a relative term. Fancier FX, art, physics, and less janky (marginally)? Sure. More fun to play? I can quote a number of prominent game critics and probably a few of the team members, if I promise anonymity, who would disagree.

(Seriously, you think you're ready for Zero Punctuation review of the game you've worked on, but you're so not ready. )

But my point is that with big projects, the problems are also big. If a small, feature light game isn't quite ready, it can be made ready in a couple of weeks. If a big game isn't ready, it's going to miss the mark by a much greater margin. A game with a lot more effort going in can look a lot more broken and unfinished simply because there are so many features that are all not quite ready in their own unique way.

Again, to be absolutely clear, I think we'll be playing a nice stable version of KSP2 well before the console release happens. But I don't think it's going to be February 23rd. And I'm not saying this to be mean to Intercept. Just the opposite, I want people to cool the expectations a bit, and appreciate the hard work Intercept put into this game by enjoying the parts that work even if we have to take some ugliness with it.

[Bej Kerman]

48 minutes ago, K^2 said:

I mean, "better" is a relative term. Fancier FX, art, physics, and less janky (marginally)? Sure. More fun to play? I can quote a number of prominent game critics and probably a few of the team members, if I promise anonymity, who would disagree.

(Seriously, you think you're ready for Zero Punctuation review of the game you've worked on, but you're so not ready. )

But my point is that with big projects, the problems are also big. If a small, feature light game isn't quite ready, it can be made ready in a couple of weeks. If a big game isn't ready, it's going to miss the mark by a much greater margin. A game with a lot more effort going in can look a lot more broken and unfinished simply because there are so many features that are all not quite ready in their own unique way.

Again, to be absolutely clear, I think we'll be playing a nice stable version of KSP2 well before the console release happens. But I don't think it's going to be February 23rd. And I'm not saying this to be mean to Intercept. Just the opposite, I want people to cool the expectations a bit, and appreciate the hard work Intercept put into this game by enjoying the parts that work even if we have to take some ugliness with it.

Sonic 2006 was a better game than KSP 1, especially modded KSP 1. Intercept doesn't have a high bar to clear. To be explicit about my position, mods don't do any good (definitely not as much good as you think) and I've never found a set of mods that didn't add 10x more jank to the game than the amount of features they added.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, K^2 said:

That can still technically be a mod. Probably is somewhere out there. And in the early access, enough of the things are unfinished, unpolished, or even just not implemented yet, where you can get to the same state by modding up KSP.

I get your point, and your experience is a welcomed addition to the usual atmosphere of these forums, but I think that, as @Bej Kerman said, you're overselling modded KSP1 a bit.

Let's not talk about the technical part, and focus a bit on the mere artistic side, KSP1 seems to be made out of assets raided from 20 different games. The fact alone that KSP2 has an art direction makes it better, something that even Restock+ struggles to do.
Let's talk about the new VAB system, an unified building environment, with the same rules for both planes and rockets and all that magic happening with saving crafts and sub-assemblies and working together on multiple of them in the same environment without having to go though loops. I spend more than half my time in the VAB, that alone for me personally is worth 20-30€ if it was a KSP1 DLC.

I admittedly don't know anything about what's going on under the hood, but on the thing I can see, whenever they speak or show anything I see an amount of competence and thoughtfulness that was never there with KSP 1 development.

I'm already taking into account bugs and feature missing at launch, I'm pretty sure we're not going to get the automated supply runs systems until much later in the EA as they're probably going to ship it with resources, and I'm not going to be surprised if the non-impulsive maneuver planner is missing to from the first release, and I wouldn't certainly start to plan some long lasting save file with a tour of the Kerbolar system on the launch day release, but as someone that had my last two big interplanetary projects blocked by the Kraken bugging out random parts of my mother-ships I say that basically the same applies to KSP1.

[Bej Kerman]

3 minutes ago, Master39 said:

I spend more than half my time in the VAB, that alone for me personally is worth 20-30€ if it was a KSP1 DLC

Preach!

I don't get the stigma around the EA structure. All these QOL improvements from day one will make the experience a million times less painful, in addition to having a dev team that's much less likely to outright ignore game-breaking bugs like Squad did. I don't anticipate that Intercept will ever end up in a position where even Shadowzone, coinnoseur of big Krakenbait rockets, has to beg them to pay attention to the bug tracker. You know, having actual developers on the team and all

[Luriss]

8 minutes ago, Master39 said:

I get your point, and your experience is a welcomed addition to the usual atmosphere of these forums, but I think that, as @Bej Kerman said, you're overselling modded KSP1 a bit.

Let's not talk about the technical part, and focus a bit on the mere artistic side, KSP1 seems to be made out of assets raided from 20 different games. The fact alone that KSP2 has an art direction makes it better, something that even Restock+ struggles to do.
Let's talk about the new VAB system, an unified building environment, with the same rules for both planes and rockets and all that magic happening with saving crafts and sub-assemblies and working together on multiple of them in the same environment without having to go though loops. I spend more than half my time in the VAB, that alone for me personally is worth 20-30€ if it was a KSP1 DLC.

I admittedly don't know anything about what's going on under the hood, but on the thing I can see, whenever they speak or show anything I see an amount of competence and thoughtfulness that was never there with KSP 1 development.

I'm already taking into account bugs and feature missing at launch, I'm pretty sure we're not going to get the automated supply runs systems until much later in the EA as they're probably going to ship it with resources, and I'm not going to be surprised if the non-impulsive maneuver planner is missing to from the first release, and I wouldn't certainly start to plan some long lasting save file with a tour of the Kerbolar system on the launch day release, but as someone that had my last two big interplanetary projects blocked by the Kraken bugging out random parts of my mother-ships I say that basically the same applies to KSP1.

To expand on this, I've seen this idea of KSP 2 just being a modded KSP 1 thrown around far too much.

You can technically do everything KSP 2 promises in a heavily modded KSP 1 game. The problem is as soon as you leave the realm of technicality and enter reality, you find out very quickly that KSP 1 is a game held together by duct tape and string.

Take for example a Mun colony;  you'll at best get 15 FPS, the 5 mods required to make it work turns the resource system into an opaque mess, and there's a 50/50 chance the colony will phase through the ground when you load it.

The further out and more complicated things get, the worse it gets. By the time you go interstellar you're looking at single digit frame numbers.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Luriss said:

By the time you go interstellar you're looking at single digit frame numbers.

For a simple 50m long nuclear mothership, you're already looking at this. Squad bothering to implement fuel switching so you can have bigger liquid only tanks could have already saved a lot of fps and sliced the part count by 4. But then again, when the bug tracker calls out and extremely simple suggestions are made that could save a lot of headache, Squad just plugs their collective fingers and yells "lalalala!".

5 minutes ago, Luriss said:

there's a 50/50 chance the colony will phase through the ground when you load it.

That's on a good day! If you're unlucky, the planet will disappear entirely, and maybe the infamous Hell Kraken will pay a visit 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Luriss said:

You can technically do everything KSP 2 promises in a heavily modded KSP 1 game. The problem is as soon as you leave the realm of technicality and enter reality, you find out very quickly that KSP 1 is a game held together by duct tape and string.

Take for example a Mun colony;  you'll at best get 15 FPS, the 5 mods required to make it work turns the resource system into an opaque mess, and there's a 50/50 chance the colony will phase through the ground when you load it.

The biggest frustration I had about KSP pre-2019 was when I saw a few clips of a youtuber sending this huge and complex colonization ship to Duna. It had dozens of containers filled with all the resources, crafts and equipment needed for this huge project.
Frustration because that youtuber clearly said multiple times that, despite him having a top of the line PC the framerate wasn't playable, what we saw in the video was speeded up to be viewable, and that it required plenty of quicksaves and backups because of things constantly bugging out.

That frustration of knowing that I would never be able to make missions like that, that I can't trust the game to be stable and in working order whenever I do anything simpler than a direct mission with a couple of crafts, that If I try to plan to reuse the same mother-ship for multiple missions I have to take into account that things start bugging out if you undock and redock the same crafts too many times.

I can't simply trust the game for anything more complex than planting a flag and then running home immediately and with the lowest part count possible.

I started hoping for a new studio to pick up the KSP idea and properly making a game out it a long time before they even announced KSP2.

And that's not to crap on KSP1, on Steam I have 1400 hours, but I know that's only a portion of the time I've spent on that game, I know the limits of a first game made by an indie studio that wasn't even a game development company, it's a good game for the tools they had.

[Bej Kerman]

51 minutes ago, Master39 said:

The biggest frustration I had about KSP pre-2019 was when I saw a few clips of a youtuber sending this huge and complex colonization ship to Duna. It had dozens of containers filled with all the resources, crafts and equipment needed for this huge project.
Frustration because that youtuber clearly said multiple times that, despite him having a top of the line PC the framerate wasn't playable, what we saw in the video was speeded up to be viewable, and that it required plenty of quicksaves and backups because of things constantly bugging out.

That frustration of knowing that I would never be able to make missions like that, that I can't trust the game to be stable and in working order whenever I do anything simpler than a direct mission with a couple of crafts, that If I try to plan to reuse the same mother-ship for multiple missions I have to take into account that things start bugging out if you undock and redock the same crafts too many times.

I can't simply trust the game for anything more complex than planting a flag and then running home immediately and with the lowest part count possible.

I started hoping for a new studio to pick up the KSP idea and properly making a game out it a long time before they even announced KSP2.

And that's not to crap on KSP1, on Steam I have 1400 hours, but I know that's only a portion of the time I've spent on that game, I know the limits of a first game made by an indie studio that wasn't even a game development company, it's a good game for the tools they had.

I only play this... this... this pile because literally the only other alternative is SimpleRockets 2 which itself is light on features and only seen as ambitious because SimpleRockets 1 was Baby's First (2D) KSP, complete with such planet names as "Smearth" and "Smercury". The only thing SR2 has going for it is an implementation of persistent thrust and the ability to orient yourself under timewarp. Other than that, it's incredibly plain and the autostaging isn't much better than what KSP had back in 0.7.3.

I'm sure you can see why all the "what's the point of KSP 2 EA if Modded KSP 1 has more features?" absolutely baffles me when it's plainly obvious KSP 1 would have died way before 1.0 if there was any real competition in the casual rocket science genre. Even without the Put-Put engine, KSP 2 is going to more than blow KSP 1, modded or vanilla, way out of the water. Even if it's a little sloppy on launch, it will simply not be the "takes up 3x its own size on HDD in paged RAM after 8 scene changes, most of which are redundant a la Sonic 2006 because Squad couldn't be bothered coming up with a better way to switch to the VAB without reverting than an intermediate scene" kind of sloppy. Just to reiterate, you can see why it baffles me that people don't want to look at KSP 2 and all the optimizations it has, just because some bells and whistles will have to be waited for.

Edited January 12, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[Alexoff]

14 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

That's all besides the fact that by the time you've modded KSP 1 to not suck (as much), you're inevitably going to run into a bug that either breaks the game, or looks worrying enough to seed in the back of your head the idea of ditching your current save.

I have seen quite a few bugs in the game related to mods. Of course, I didn’t check everything, but much more often, the stock game arranged surprises for me.

[Kerbart]

6 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I only play this... this... this pile because literally the only other alternative is SimpleRockets 2 which itself is light on features and only seen as ambitious because SimpleRockets 1 was Baby's First (2D) KSP, complete with such planet names as "Smearth" and "Smercury". The only thing SR2 has going for it is an implementation of persistent thrust and the ability to orient yourself under timewarp. Other than that, it's incredibly plain and the autostaging isn't much better than what KSP had back in 0.7.3.

They renamed it "Juno" and it's quite appealing now. I just opened it to take a look at it. The interface will take some work and yes, not as feature rich as KSP but an interesting take on the genre.