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Gameplay Trailer + Release Map

Intercept Games

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Intercept Games

Intercept Games

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  • KSP2 Alumni
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Hello Kerbonauts!

Just one week to go until Kerbal Space Program 2’s launch into Early Access! As the gameplay trailer shows, we are hyped up for all the amazing things the community will be able to do. The whole Kerbolar system will be available day 1 and there will be some new secrets to find. So, build a plane, rocket, or rover and get ready to launch Kerbal Space Program 2!

So, when is it releasing? We made this nifty map that shows the UTC release timing. Kerbal Space Program 2 will be releasing globally at 6AM Pacific Time.

KSP2_ReleaseTimeline_V6 (1).png

 

Global Release Times by City: 

  • Honolulu – 4AM  
  • Seattle/Los Angeles – 6 AM 
  • Mexico City – 8AM  
  • New York City – 9AM  
  • São Paulo – 11AM  
  • London – 2PM  
  • Berlin – 3PM  
  • Helsinki – 4PM  
  • Dubai – 6PM  
  • Mumbai– 7:30PM 
  • Bangkok – 9PM  
  • Taipei – 10PM  
  • Tokyo – 11PM  
  • Sydney – 1AM  
  • Auckland– 3AM  
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Derpiesaurus

Derpiesaurus

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Posted (edited)

Just to preface, I have a lot of criticising comments which I can't help but want to express (pretty much the whole reply is that... just so you know), but overall I'm still excited for the game.

 

I want to point out the lack of distance/atmospheric scattering on Kerbin, it is really needed. IMO it's the thing that really ties together an upgrade in graphics quality, but without it, all you see are the hugely blurred textures of the mountains in the background and a fairly flat unrealistic looking landscape (due to the lack of fog that allows you to get a feel for the distance).

I also found that some textures look nice, but most of them seem to look pretty 5+ year old game-y to me. Kinda blurry without much detail. I really hope this is recorded on low - medium settings for textures, because modern games' textures, or even just updated games' textures (COD, Escape from Tarkov, Squad, etc) have some serious fidelity to them, and I'd expect KSP2 have similar quality, especially given the price, and that it's at that price for early access alone.

Vegetation and rocks' scattering seem pretty lacklustre as well. I can't help but want to bang my head against something every time I see a lack of detail, now that Unreal Engine 5 is out. I'm obviously ignoring some issues here (the biggest of which is that KSP2 was already in development before UE5 was released), since otherwise all game studios would use it, but you can get away with virtually infinite detail, and infinite objects in UE5, with incredible path traced global illumination (it's called something like that), which means no unity shadow glitchiness. It would legitimately look like the reveal trailer, but in real-time. My point here is that I feel like there's not much point scattering rocks around if there's only a few of them every 50 metres, and those rocks seem to be blurry and have about 25 polygons in them anyway (unlike what was shown in a few of the "test scene" screenshots, which looked great [and is what you'd get in UE5]).

One of the most recent screenshots on the Discord server has sort of given me hope here, but the clouds still just look pretty bad in my opinion, and not even stylized vs realistic bad, just in general. This is the main thing that's leading me to believe a lot of the footage could be old, and stitched quickly together to make a trailer, since the most recent thing we saw (that Discord image) looked great. (Can't help myself, but, ahem, another thing that UE5 has that you can literally drag and drop into a scene, is some of the most realistic, and customizable volumetric clouds to ever grace a game engine.

The VFX seem pretty old-looking as well. The launch effects with the exhaust is made using a bunch of 2D textures stitched together and animated, it just doesn't fit into the world of super realistic looking space-craft and planets, for me at least. Same with explosions, it's 2D textures layered on top of each other. I hope I get used to it and come to like them, but after seeing the VFX in Squad, an 8 year old game, I feel like that has ruined all the VFX in any other game for me (these aren't even the best ones I've seen in-game, but I can't find a good compilation of effects apart from that one)

Anti-aliasing, or the lack there of. Some clips have it, some don't. To me this adds heavily to the theory that this is just developer footage, which sort of leads me onto the last thing:

There seems to be unnecessary effects added to the video as well as a pre-rendered scene of 3 Kerbals? To me it's pretty clear that the part of the 3 Kerbals getting blasted by exhaust is pre-rendered because of the depth of field, slight increase in lighting quality. Maybe they needed to render it out in order to capture the reflection in the Kerbal's helmet, but honestly in 2023, most games have some type of raytracing, this should be possible in engine, in a perfect world. The unnecessary effects are the dust added at 1:00 in the video. I suppose it works as a transition, but why add dust in a way to make it seem like the lander is causing it, if that's not part of the game, in the gameplay trailer...? EDIT: I forgot to actually lead from the previous bit to this bit, I meant to say that it's a bit weird to have old footage that doesn't really have all the graphics settings bumped all the way up, combined with rendered out footage that is more like a cinematic.

 

All of this requires a huge container of salt, it's just my first impressions after seeing the trailer, I probably won't feel the same way for 80% of this post-launch. This may also seem more like a rant than constructive-criticism because of how much there is, but I think it's hopefully all constructive in some way, or at least attempts to give reason I feel that way? If not then, actually, my bad. I don't want to be that guy that just throws around complaints and doesn't give solutions of any kind, but I'm also a little too tired to go over it properly and consider it all again (was about to head to sleep and then they had to release this to keep me up for even longer :D).

Edited by Derpiesaurus
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Bej Kerman

Bej Kerman

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, Derpiesaurus said:

One of the most recent screenshots on the Discord server has sort of given me hope here, but the clouds still just look pretty bad in my opinion, and not even stylized vs realistic bad, just in general

How so? They look fine to me, and work even better with the cartoonish Kerbals than the UE5 or Blackrack clouds would.

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Vl3d

Vl3d

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Gotta love those reflections in the paint!

Spoiler

vlcsnap-2023-02-16-18h58m52s215.png

About the shadows - there's just a faint shadow of the exhaust material here. Shouldn't the smoke leave a shadow too?

Spoiler

vlcsnap-2023-02-16-19h01m07s147.png

And I don't understand the round shadow on the building here..

Spoiler

vlcsnap-2023-02-16-19h03m47s209.png

 

Edited by Vl3d
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Derpiesaurus

Derpiesaurus

Posted
Posted
Just now, Bej Kerman said:

How so? They look fine to me, and work even better with the cartoonish Kerbals than the UE5 or Blackrack clouds would.

Definitely possible that they look more fitting than the more realistic clouds you'd find in UE5 for example, but the clouds shown on the trailer just look like their colour was made to a static #FFFFFF colour, are slightly transparent and use a terrain height map to make their shape. They just look really bad; again, to me at least. For clouds to look good, I think they need to interact with light properly by absorbing, diffusing, etc, and have a noise pattern that is made specifically for clouds. I think they did this, in that most recent screenshot with clouds, since I think those ones look great, but maybe they just don't have up-to-date footage of them?

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Guest

Guest

Posted
Posted
15 minutes ago, Derpiesaurus said:

Just to preface, I have a lot of criticising comments which I can't help but want to express, but overall I'm still excited for the game.

 

I want to point out the lack of distance/atmospheric scattering on Kerbin, it is really needed. IMO it's the thing that really ties together an upgrade in graphics quality, but without it, all you see are the hugely blurred textures of the mountains in the background and a fairly flat unrealistic looking landscape (due to the lack of fog that allows you to get a feel for the distance).

I also found that some textures look nice, but most of them seem to look pretty 5+ year old game-y to me. Kinda blurry without much detail. I really hope this is recorded on low - medium settings for textures, because modern games' textures, or even just updated games' textures (COD, Escape from Tarkov, Squad, etc) have some serious fidelity to them, and I'd expect KSP2 have similar quality, especially given the price, and that it's at that price for early access alone.

Vegetation and rocks' scattering seem pretty lacklustre as well. I can't help but want to bang my head against something every time I see a lack of detail, now that Unreal Engine 5 is out. I'm obviously ignoring some issues here (the biggest of which is that KSP2 was already in development before UE5 was released), since otherwise all game studios would use it, but you can get away with virtually infinite detail, and infinite objects in UE5, with incredible path traced global illumination (it's called something like that), which means no unity shadow glitchiness. It would legitimately look like the reveal trailer, but in real-time. My point here is that I feel like there's not much point scattering rocks around if there's only a few of them every 50 metres, and those rocks seem to be blurry and have about 25 polygons in them anyway (unlike what was shown in a few of the "test scene" screenshots, which looked great [and is what you'd get in UE5]).

One of the most recent screenshots on the Discord server has sort of given me hope here, but the clouds still just look pretty bad in my opinion, and not even stylized vs realistic bad, just in general. This is the main thing that's leading me to believe a lot of the footage could be old, and stitched quickly together to make a trailer, since the most recent thing we saw (that Discord image) looked great. (Can't help myself, but, ahem, another thing that UE5 has that you can literally drag and drop into a scene, is some of the most realistic, and customizable volumetric clouds to ever grace a game engine.

The VFX seem pretty old-looking as well. The launch effects with the exhaust is made using a bunch of 2D textures stitched together and animated, it just doesn't fit into the world of super realistic looking space-craft and planets, for me at least. Same with explosions, it's 2D textures layered on top of each other. I hope I get used to it and come to like them, but after seeing the VFX in Squad, an 8 year old game, I feel like that has ruined all the VFX in any other game for me (these aren't even the best ones I've seen in-game, but I can't find a good compilation of effects apart from that one)

Anti-aliasing, or the lack there of. Some clips have it, some don't. To me this adds heavily to the theory that this is just developer footage, which sort of leads me onto the last thing:

There seems to be unnecessary effects added to the video as well as a pre-rendered scene of 3 Kerbals? To me it's pretty clear that the part of the 3 Kerbals getting blasted by exhaust is pre-rendered because of the depth of field, slight increase in lighting quality. Maybe they needed to render it out in order to capture the reflection in the Kerbal's helmet, but honestly in 2023, most games have some type of raytracing, this should be possible in engine, in a perfect world. The unnecessary effects are the dust added at 1:00 in the video. I suppose it works as a transition, but why add dust in a way to make it seem like the lander is causing it, if that's not part of the game, in the gameplay trailer...? EDIT: I forgot to actually lead from the previous bit to this bit, I meant to say that it's a bit weird to have old footage that doesn't really have all the graphics settings bumped all the way up, combined with rendered out footage that is more like a cinematic.

 

This may seem more like a rant than constructive-criticism because of how much there is, but I think it's hopefully all constructive in some way? If not then, actually, my bad. I don't want to be that guy that just throws around complaints and doesn't give solutions of any kind, but I'm also a little too tired to go over it properly and consider it all again (was about to head to sleep and then they had to release this to keep me up for even longer :D).

Too long didn't read, can someone tell me if there's something actually interesting in the middle of all that marketing for UE5?

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Vl3d

Vl3d

Posted
Posted (edited)
7 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Too long didn't read, can someone tell me if there's something actually interesting in the middle of all that marketing for UE5?

Clouds look meh, no atmospheric scattering, low-res terrain textures, not enough ground scatter, no anti-aliasing in some images, the VFX look 2D-ish.. the usual, nothing new. The shadows have some issues, the flag kerbal animations have a sudden jump, there's some clipping of the kerbal head in the cockpit.

It will all get polished, not worried.

Edited by Vl3d
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Derpiesaurus

Derpiesaurus

Posted
Posted (edited)
18 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Too long didn't read, can someone tell me if there's something actually interesting in the middle of all that marketing for UE5?

Completely understand, and yeah I'm a sucker for UE5.

TLDR: I just point out some things I was hoping for in KSP2, the main one being that I'm really hoping for realistic atmospheric scattering on Kerbin. and other planets. There was a video on the Discord of Eve with that effect, but even seemingly newer screenshots of Kerbin don't seem to have it. Atmospheric scattering and good looking clouds (honestly, as long as they interact with light nicely - like how clouds become orange or pink in a sunset - it doesn't matter what shape they are) are both of the big things I was looking forward to. But since I was hoping for those things, and they aren't really what I was hoping for (surprise surprise), it's mostly just me criticising.

The reason I bring up UE5 so much is because most of the complaints I have about the trailer are drag and drop fixes in UE5. I'm using it as an example of how modern game engines make this surprisingly easy, and another example of it just popped into my head every time I was thinking of a comparison (can't say it looks sort of old for a modern game if there's no reference to what is modern).

Edited by Derpiesaurus
wow... idk how I made so many mistakes in one message
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