Kerbal Space Program 2 - Pre-Release Notes

[linuxgurugamer]

On 2/17/2023 at 1:32 PM, Intercept Games said:

Our first modding priority in the coming months will be to provide greater access to part modders. We'll release more information on modding support once Early Access is underway.

I hope you don't forget about coding.  There are lots of mods (parts mods oncluded) which depend on some code to make them work.

For example, a life support mod absolutely would need code support

[Kerbart]

7 minutes ago, AlphaMensae said:

This emphasises the "Early" in Early Access. This is not the final game, far from it. It's like a mix of pre-v0.13.3 KSP and the v1.1 Experimentals builds that Squad released, and those were a buggy mess.  

But the narrative, and the retail price, suggested that we'd get a game without the roadmap features (because feedback was needed). Looking at what we've seen so far, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't need feedback from the community as it's painfully obvious that a Work In Progress was shipped. Things clearly missing, horrible performance... Anyone hoping to see Science within three months will be disappointed, as it seems to be an all-hands exercise just to get the game in a proper (both game elements and performance) state first.

It's showing a lot of promise, definitely, but those that were complaining about the price tag do have a point, at the moment. Yeas, it's Early access but at nearly full price. For the state it's in, $30 would have been more reasonable. I know, you're going to spend 10-30× of that on hardware, but it still leaves a sour taste.

[darthgently]

4 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

But the narrative, and the retail price, suggested that we'd get a game without the roadmap features (because feedback was needed). Looking at what we've seen so far, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't need feedback from the community as it's painfully obvious that a Work In Progress was shipped. Things clearly missing, horrible performance... Anyone hoping to see Science within three months will be disappointed, as it seems to be an all-hands exercise just to get the game in a proper (both game elements and performance) state first.

It's showing a lot of promise, definitely, but those that were complaining about the price tag do have a point, at the moment. Yeas, it's Early access but at nearly full price. For the state it's in, $30 would have been more reasonable. I know, you're going to spend 10-30× of that on hardware, but it still leaves a sour taste.

I agree on the pricing and the obvious bugs that shouldn't require EA to notice.  I will give a lot of slack given the economic bomb COVID and the various govs' reaction to COVID exploded on the world, but yeah, it time to be less slick and more meat and potatoes oriented.  I for one would defer any work on painting and decorating craft and instead focus on physics performance and glaring UI buggery.  But that is just me.  Overall, it clearly provides a stronger spine to build a game upon than KSP1 

[regex]

Looks good!

On 2/17/2023 at 10:32 AM, Intercept Games said:

When launching from a launchpad, the first staging input triggers a ten-second countdown that automatically ends with a launch. If you wish to skip the countdown, simply stage again and your vehicle will lift off.

This absolutely needs to be toggleable. X -> space should immediately launch the rocket if so desired.

[www2]

First KSP2 Hype!!!

He ksp2 devs at this writing i watch EJ_SA stream but i notes that the color manager have no HEX or RGB input fields.

I like one of Both of this input fields to be include in the color manager for color constitution.

[Poodmund]

11 minutes ago, regex said:

Looks good!

This absolutely needs to be toggleable. X -> space should immediately launch the rocket if so desired.

It is

[The Space Peacock]

Whew, can’t believe we’re only days away from launch! I’m so excited to experience this game’s growth and development firsthand during early acces!

[Vl3d]

On 2/17/2023 at 8:32 PM, Intercept Games said:

There are still a few gremlins in our serialization code, and very rarely (especially when building high-complexity vehicles) your vehicle may collapse into an unrecoverable pile of parts on the floor of the VAB. For now, it’s a good idea to save frequently.

This made me LOL. Kerbals vs Gremlins!

On 2/17/2023 at 8:32 PM, Intercept Games said:

you may have some challenges associating selected parts with their data in the Part Manager. We’re making several changes to the current UI so you can expect this experience to improve over time. This is a particular area within which we welcome your feedback.

@desert had a very good idea to integrate the Parts Menu icons in the Parts Manager (as vertical icons to the left of the list) - so the parts are grouped and we can easily find what we're looking for.

Also I would add..

BAD:
- the camera still clips underground
- the (ship) icons in map view are too pixelated

FEEDBACK:
- have a setting to select between 5 seconds and 10 seconds countdown
- make the ripple effect shows the point of interception in map view a little more transparent / smaller

Thank you for your great work!

[BeastHunter]

2 hours ago, Vir4030 said:

There's an easy solution to your problem.  Don't buy the game until it comes out of Early Access.  Then you won't have to be incredibly disappointed about anything except waiting for the launch date.

Very good point. I am buying it launch day with the assumption that the game will get better. I’d rather buy an unfinished game at a lower price and play around with some things in it than wait longer to buy it at a higher price. It just makes me wonder what parts of the game took three years to deliver this product.

[Profugo Barbatus]

1 hour ago, snkiz said:

This bullet point explains a lot of the performance problems all on its own. I'm surprised that such a large complaint of the first game (Lack of computer resource utilization.) Didn't get top billing, but I'm not a programer. Please, use it all! I paid for 16 threads, I want to see them hurt. Use all the ram, everything. I see why the specs are what they are, and I feel bad for the team. I don't honestly think that anyone thought it was a good idea. I know you guys are not making the next crysis. But a deadline is a deadline and here we are. Good luck and fingers crossed for some sanity in the coming months.

If only it were so easy - Multithreading of programs is practically a science all of its own. Separating off-screen, non-dependent elements like unloaded vessel resource utilization and such is relatively easy. Spreading active gameplay load over cores is a huge burden, and can actively be significantly performance detrimental if the separated loads aren't 'big enough' to make the extra overhead worthwhile. Its also a problem when a program is wired to the gills for an expected number of cores, and it doesn't have them, so you'll usually find that programs well optimized to multithread still cap out between 2-4 threads. More than that can cause serious problems to the normal folks running 4 and 8 core systems (Even if it only uses 4, other programs are running, and threads need to be available for them) which is the console and home computer lower average.

58 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

I hope you don't forget about coding.  There are lots of mods (parts mods oncluded) which depend on some code to make them work.

For example, a life support mod absolutely would need code support

The fact that part support is even limited at launch has me concerned. Its basically an open statement that mod support is functionally non-existent out the gate, which is disappointing. Its understandable that its not a priority, but its less understandable how it hasn't been developed ground up to support even just parts and params being dropped in freely like that. We will have to see what expanded support actually looks like in practice, but considering it was a shortfall worthy enough of being called out in release notes, I'm going to assume its falling on the bad side, as opposed to 'recreate any system kind that already exists'.

[linuxgurugamer]

6 minutes ago, Profugo Barbatus said:

The fact that part support is even limited at launch has me concerned. Its basically an open statement that mod support is functionally non-existent out the gate, which is disappointing. Its understandable that its not a priority, but its less understandable how it hasn't been developed ground up to support even just parts and params being dropped in freely like that. We will have to see what expanded support actually looks like in practice, but considering it was a shortfall worthy enough of being called out in release notes, I'm going to assume its falling on the bad side, as opposed to 'recreate any system kind that already exists'.

My guess is that the part files will be visible, so I would think that part modifications will appear very quickly.

Depending on how it's coded, they are probably putting in the support for code, but aren't doing what's necessary to expose it at this time

[t_v]

1 hour ago, regex said:

This absolutely needs to be toggleable. X -> space should immediately launch the rocket if so desired.

This is what they meant - throttling up and starting the first stage will skip the countdown. What I want toggled is the automatic launch - if I need to spend some time on the launchpad, I don't want to have the rocket start flying semi-unexpectedly. 

edit: I just saw Poodmund's post, I hope that if 'Skip Launch Sequence' is toggled to on, it just means that the launch sequence doesn't happen. 

Edited February 20, 2023 by t_v

[regex]

2 minutes ago, t_v said:

This is what they meant - throttling up and starting the first stage will skip the countdown.

Uhm, no, that's not what they meant:

Quote

When launching from a launchpad, the first staging input triggers a ten-second countdown that automatically ends with a launch. If you wish to skip the countdown, simply stage again and your vehicle will lift off.

Which means X -> space -> space. X -> space means you sit and spin for ten seconds, and then it auto launches. Thankfully we can have the old behavior with a switch.

[t_v]

Just now, regex said:

Uhm, no, that's not what they meant:

Which means X -> space -> space. X -> space means you sit and spin for ten seconds, and then it auto launches. Thankfully we can have the old behavior with a switch.

Thanks, I didn't read it right the first time around. Well, it's good to see that the ship doesn't launch itself until you put in at least one input. 

[Monger]

As someone who spent probably half of their game time in VAB, I greatly appreciate  the paradigm shift you are trying to do. Very eager to try it out myself. 

[IggyHitokage]

4 hours ago, Spartan51 said:

Will my RTX 2060 super be able to get more than 60 fps on medium graphics settings?

Absolutely not. If nothing has drastically changed since the preview build that just got shown off by YouTubers...

It couldn't hold more than 20 FPS on a 4080 with a moderately sized craft (150 parts).

Edited February 20, 2023 by IggyHitokage

[Monger]

2 hours ago, snkiz said:

This bullet point explains a lot of the performance problems all on its own. I'm surprised that such a large complaint of the first game (Lack of computer resource utilization.) Didn't get top billing, but I'm not a programer. Please, use it all!

I am a developer, and I have worked on distributed applications (i.e. computing certain tasks on different machines) for a decade now, and I can tell you there are few things harder than parallelization. Half of the time you try it, performance gets worse and you get weird side effects depending on your hardware.

This is why you optimize late. With a proper architecture you can do it any time, but since you probably need to reevaluate your choices every single time you change something significantly, you do it rather later. 

[Dogywall]

4 hours ago, Spartan51 said:

Will my RTX 2060 super be able to get more than 60 fps on medium graphics settings?

Possible, but you will have to be a pretty low settings. (just a guess, im no expert on pc's)

Hopefully they will fix this in the future and make it easier on the graphics cards.

[Arrowstar]

@Intercept Games, can you provide any info on an expected bug fix/optimization update cadence?  We're not going to have to wait for a the Road Map item to complete before we get new software, are we?

[Cytauri]

ALERT ALERT. VAPOR CONES CONFIRMED. ALERT ALERT. 

 

OVERWHEM MODE ACTIVATED

[Meb Kat]

please no more! Every post you devs send makes the wait harder!

But srsly you guys are awesome ;D

[The Aziz]

1 hour ago, IggyHitokage said:

Absolutely not. If nothing has drastically changed since the preview build that just got shown off by YouTubers...

It couldn't hold more than 20 FPS on a 4080 with a moderately sized craft (150 parts).

Yeah but that's not exactly the GPU that's lagging, is it?

[Xelo]

Just now, The Aziz said:

Yeah but that's not exactly the GPU that's lagging, is it?

How do we know for sure its the physics thats lagging and not just extra parts being drawn? 0:

[The Aziz]

Because it didn't lag in the VAB.

[Clayel]

On 2/17/2023 at 1:32 PM, Intercept Games said:

Overview
Kerbal Space Program 2 encompasses many new features, most of which will continue to improve over the course of Early Access. Here’s what’s new:

The Training Center
The all-new training center provides players with sequential lessons that teach the basics of spaceflight, starting with core concepts and then moving into simulated flights that give you an opportunity to try out what you’ve learned. There are currently four main lessons, ranging from basic rocketry to interplanetary maneuvering. You can access any tutorial even during normal flight – simply open the ESC menu and select Training Center, and your current flight will be paused and then automatically resumed when the tutorial has ended. 

New tutorials will be added to the training center as the game grows during Early Access. Your input on the effectiveness of these learning tools is extremely valuable, so please feel free to submit your feedback via the launcher feedback tools.

Vehicle Construction and Workspaces
When you save your work in the VAB, you don’t just save one craft file anymore. Instead, you save a workspace that may comprise several subassemblies. Since KSP2 allows players to work on multiple assemblies simultaneously, you may want to think of a workspace save as a snapshot of everything that’s being worked on for a given engineering project. There are a few new concepts that come along with this change:

• You now have a Vehicle Name and a separate Workspace Filename. Your vehicle name is what you’ll see in the Tracking Station when your vehicle is in flight - for example, “Kerpollo 11”. Your Workspace Filename, on the other hand, should change every time you want to create a unique save of your construction progress — so ”Kerpollo 11A,“ ”Kerpollo 11B,“ etc. would make good workspace filenames.
• You control which subassembly in a workspace will go to the launchpad when you select the Launch button. The Launch Assembly tool, which lives on the VAB toolbar at the bottom of the screen, can be used to designate which subassembly in the workspace is your flight-ready vehicle.
• The Part Anchor tool at the bottom of the screen controls which part within a subassembly is its root part – eg. the part of the subassembly that will be its main point of manipulation/attachment. To change which part of a subassembly is its Anchor, select this tool and then click on the part of the vehicle you wish to set as the root part.

In contrast to the separate Vehicle Assembly Building and Spaceplane Hangar of the original KSP, KSP2 has only a single VAB within which all vehicles are created. To switch between vertical (rockets) and horizonal (planes and rovers) construction modes, toggle the workspace orientation button at the lower left corner of the screen.

You’ll find a few other new capabilities in the VAB, as well:

• By selecting the View Cube at lower left, you can enter and exit Plan View, which gives you an orthogonal perspective of your vehicle from one of six directions. This is handy for lining up edges and making sure that angles are just right.
• Clicking and dragging the middle mouse button allows you to track the VAB camera along the vehicle’s long axis. To focus the camera on a particular part, middle-click that part. Use the scroll wheel to zoom.
• To change the color of all or part of your vehicle, select the color picker on the VAB toolbar. This tool allows you to assign both a primary color and an accent color to your vehicle. If you only want to change the color of a single part, select the Part button at the top of the dialog. You can control the visibility of both primary and accent colors via the transparency slider to the right of the color swatch. If you want to see only a primary color on your part, select the accent color and drag the transparency slider all the way down. If you want to see no paint on the part at all, select the primary color and drag the transparency slider all the way down. Shiny!
• There are three new types of procedural wings: Wings, Stabilizers, and All-Moving Control Surfaces. After placing one of these parts on your vehicle, you can modify its shape and attributes by selecting the wrench icon that appears above the part on mouseover. For Wings and Stabilizers, this editor also allows you to toggle the presence of integrated control surfaces, as well as the shape and placement of those control surfaces. Here’s a handy tip: you can create compound wings with interesting silhouettes by attaching multiple wings end-to-end!
• Interstage shrouds, which bridge the gap between an upper-stage engine and the decoupler placed beneath it, are now also procedural, allowing them to flare or taper to match the core sizes of the parts they’re connecting.
• If you want to attach multiple engines to the bottom of a stage, first add an engine plate beneath the stage above. You can attach any number of engines to an engine plate - just select a symmetry mode and place the engines in whatever configuration you like. Engine plates will automatically deploy interstage shrouds, just like any other engine. You can modify the vertical distance of the floating node (the connection point to which something placed beneath the engines will attach) by right-clicking on the engine plate and adjusting the Floating Node slider in the Part Action Manager.
• There is a Favorites category at the top of the part picker. To add a part to your Favorites tab, select the star button on that part’s entry.

Known Issues (currently being addressed)

• Some parts from the original KSP aren't available - a few parts won't carry over — for example, the increased flexibility of the new engine plate system has reduced the need for bespoke compound parts like the Twin Boar and Mammoth engines. Also, the old patchwork wing parts have been supplanted by procedural wings. Other parts (for example A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.s) are still in development and will be added in future updates. And of course Science collection, future propulsion, and colony parts will be added alongside their respective feature updates.
• There are still a few gremlins in our serialization code, and very rarely (especially when building high-complexity vehicles) your vehicle may collapse into an unrecoverable pile of parts on the floor of the VAB. For now, it’s a good idea to save frequently.
• Trip planner – the trip planner occasionally displays inaccurate delta-v numbers for some destinations. All delta-v numbers in the VAB use vacuum specific impulse numbers, which affects their accuracy. This will be addressed in a future update. Delta-v numbers shown in the staging stack during flight dynamically reflect the current flight state.
• The center of lift indicator does not yet update dynamically when you adjust a wing in the editor - to see the effects of a wing modification, you must first exit the editor to update the center of lift.

Flight and Maneuvering
When launching from a launchpad, the first staging input triggers a ten-second countdown that automatically ends with a launch. If you wish to skip the countdown, simply stage again and your vehicle will lift off.

When you turn on the Stability Assist System (also called S.A.S.), your vehicle will by default attempt to maintain its current orientation. When you select one of the orientation buttons to the right of your navball, your vehicle will use S.A.S. to orient in the direction you’ve selected. If you want your vehicle to hold its orientation after that, simply select the “hold orientation” button with the padlock icon. You can also toggle S.A.S. off and back on with the T key if you wish to quickly lock in your current orientation.

There are a few new camera modes, in addition to the auto, orbit, and horizon modes you might remember from the original KSP. Chase mode now follows the vehicle like it’s on a sled, with the camera oriented to the up-direction of whatever command part is controlling the vessel - it’s a great choice for docking maneuvers. The new capture camera allows you to film your vehicle from any angle, and provides handy movement speed controls, dolly and panning controls, and camera roll controls – all of which live on the numpad.

In Map Mode, planetary spheres of influence (SOIs) are now visible - when you pass into or out of an SOI, a ripple effect shows the point of interception. When you create a Maneuver Plan, the projected trajectory depicts the portion of your path that will take place under acceleration - this is shown as a red line. Importantly, the tech that allows us to pre-calculate accelerating trajectories also allows time warp under acceleration, so provided you’re outside an atmosphere you can greatly reduce the amount of time you spend waiting for burns to end.

Known Issues (currently being addressed)

• Re-entry heating and thermal systems are offline - you'll have a brief window here at the beginning of Early Access during which you can re-enter any atmosphere without a heat shield. We’re still buttoning down our heat transfer, ablation, and occlusion systems. Vapor cone visual effects are also still in-progress.
• No collision on trees or rocks - we're optimizing collision for these objects right now, and in the interest of maintaining good framerates we're going to complete that optimization work before letting you crash into these objects. For now, they're holograms. While KSC buildings ARE collideable, they are not yet destructible.
• Framerate stutters/lag - we're continuing to work down the list of performance optimizations, from highest to lowest impact. As we push processes out of the main thread and continue to improve the efficiency of our physics, resource flow, VFX, and graphics systems, framerates should improve for all players.
• Some UI elements can be challenging to interact with - we're still cleaning up the systems that give priority to different classes of information in the map view, and there are times when you need to click a few extra times to get a hold of the maneuver planner. Similarly, you may have some challenges associating selected parts with their data in the Part Manager. We’re making several changes to the current UI so you can expect this experience to improve over time. This is a particular area within which we welcome your feedback.

Modding

One final note - we take modding very seriously, and we're looking forward to working alongside our counterparts in the community to improve the moddability of KSP2. As stability and performance improve, we will continue to devote resources to opening up more areas of the game to modders during Early Access. Our first modding priority in the coming months will be to provide greater access to part modders. We'll release more information on modding support once Early Access is underway.
 

definitely address the performance issues as top priority, cant wait for the release!

Edited February 20, 2023 by Clayel