Please, give the community KSP1's source code

[Lisias]

35 minutes ago, WhatALovelyNick said:

I tried and this topic went dead for about two months.

Perhaps we should try reddit?

 

3 minutes ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

That shaky and mouldy foundation has been perfected over a decade with direct user feedback.

It can’t be worse than starting from scratch + you have to remember the appeal of KSP1 made it possible to get away with a 50$ rather early EA.

No one is proposing rewritting KSP1. The goal is to patch its flaws and give the Franchise a bette chance on the short term.

 

4 minutes ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

I think there’s still life left in that puppy.

There's life everywhere else - ESA has teamed up with Jundroo to launch a ESA mission inspired update for Juno:New Origins. Do I need to say more?

The time is now. Tomorrow is too late.

[WhatALovelyNick]

2 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Perhaps we should try reddit?

Yeah, we may, but I don't have a high rep account there and my recent reddit experience was... nasty.

Btw, is "/r/KerbalSpaceProgram" one and only KSP related sub there?

[Bej Kerman]

39 minutes ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

As easy as that.. Good luck with KSP 1's shakey, mouldy foundations, the likes of which inspired KSP 2 in the first place.

That shaky and mouldy foundation has been perfected over a decade with direct user feedback.

No, no it hasn't. It's still just as shaky as it was over a decade ago, only with tape hiding the cracks. Many of KSP 1's problems are caused by the fact it's all built on Felipe's 2011 passion project. Do you think making that tower of spaghetti code, easy fixes and quick patches taller is going to fix the root of all these problems?

34 minutes ago, Lisias said:

The goal is to patch its flaws

That is exactly KSP 1's problem. Patching it is not a choice.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[Lisias]

24 minutes ago, WhatALovelyNick said:

Yeah, we may, but I don't have a high rep account there and my recent reddit experience was... nasty.

nasty, perhaps. But it's effective? Some pills are bitter to swallow, but they still are the pill to cure us.

 

25 minutes ago, WhatALovelyNick said:

Btw, is "/r/KerbalSpaceProgram" one and only KSP related sub there?

As far as I know, it is.

 

7 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

That is exactly KSP 1's problem. Patching it is not a choice.

Patching is the only choice. We are not the publishers, we can't just recompile the damned thing and republish it ourselves.

They had years to fix things. They didn't. It's time to @HarvesteR  what they had sowed.

[Bej Kerman]

2 minutes ago, Lisias said:

13 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

That is exactly KSP 1's problem. Patching it is not a choice.

Patching is the only choice.

Well then "KSP 1 Remastered" is never happening even if you have the source code because the community will just end up clawing at the same wall Squad has clawed at for over a decade.

[Lisias]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

Well then "KSP 1 Remastered" is never happening even if you have the source code because the community will just end up clawing at the same wall Squad has clawed at for over a decade.

You are not well acquainted to the KSP Modding Scene, are you?  

Such affirmation from someone out there that never had played KSP before is understandable, but from someone that its a frequent user on this Forum, it's quite hard to believe that you had said that.

KSP is highly modular. There're a lot of things that can be made to work around almost all flaws on it - all of them way easier to accomplish when we have access to the SC and know exactly what's happening, instead of taking days on black box test sessions in order to finally nail down some ancient bug that nobody was able to detect before.

There're a lot of internal mechanisms that we don't know exactly how they work, and once we manage to get a grasp on it, will help us a lot to accomplish exactly what you said is not accomplishable - and following the Forums' Guidelines and the EULA.

[Bej Kerman]

3 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Such affirmation from someone out there that never had played KSP before is understandable, but from someone that its a frequent user on this Forum, it's quite hard to believe that you had said that.

KSP is highly modular. There're a lot of things that can be made to work around almost all flaws on it - all of them way easier to accomplish when we have access to the SC and know exactly what's happening, instead of taking days on black box test sessions in order to finally nail down some ancient bug that nobody was able to detect before.

There're a lot of internal mechanisms that we don't know exactly how they work, and once we manage to get a grasp on it, will help us a lot to accomplish exactly what you said is not accomplishable - and following the Forums' Guidelines and the EULA.

Wide-eyed idealism here, there's not a lot I can say if it at all even implies that a community-driven effort at saving KSP 1 wouldn't work. You're not patching a bug here and fixing a quirk there, you're rewriting the entire game.

9 minutes ago, Lisias said:

You are not well acquainted to the KSP Modding Scene, are you?  

With all due respect, mods are a bit crap and invariably break on long missions when part modules get involved.

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

7 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

With all due respect, mods are a bit crap and invariably break on long missions when part modules get involved.

Sorry but you are very wrong. 
KSP’s modding scene has to be one of the strongest in PC gaming, right up there with Bethesda’s games.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Wide-eyed idealism here, there's not a lot I can say if it at all even implies that a community-driven effort at saving KSP 1 wouldn't work. You're not patching a bug here and fixing a quirk there, you're rewriting the entire game.

Sir, you are completely misguided. We are not free cheap work-force that will drive all the work for them.

You don't need to rewrite the entire game, the absolutely most terrible bugs are rooted on silly mistakes and mishaps on the code - and a few bad decisions, granted. 

I'm seriously questioning your ability to keep this discussion productive, you really appears to do no understand about what you are talking about.

 

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

With all due respect, mods are a bit crap and invariably break on long missions when part modules get involved.

Some of them, yes. Some others, are rock solid as soon as you detect where KSP is breaking them and work around the problem.

 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

There are different ways inside KSP to accomplish some things, including how to deploy some really deep fixes. I had detected them in the past, but never managed to understand how they work precisely by not being able to see the Source Code without breaking Forum's Guidelines and the EULA.

Really, you need to stop thinking that every add'on Author is a kid trying their way to see what happens.

There were (and still are) very skilled professionals around here, and that's the reason it's important to do some things right (as access to SC) - because professionals can't break the law without consequences to their day-jobs.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Lisias
Kraken damned Autocompletes

[Bej Kerman]

37 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Sir

53 minutes ago, Lisias said:

the absolutely most terrible bugs are rooted on silly mistakes and mishaps on the code

And of course, you know that because you've been peaking at the source code against the EULA, right?

39 minutes ago, Lisias said:

you really appears to do no understand about what you are talking about.

This isn't the first time I've seen people boldly proclaiming the community as some sort of saviour that can fix the game as soon as things go open source. Plenty of open source projects have crashed and burned. You've got projects like Blender that do better than closed source counterparts like 3DS Max, but why not also look at projects like GIMP that do worse than their counterparts like Photoshop? People's confidence in the community is completely misplaced. The community is not some kind of saviour that will avoid treading the same ground Squad trodden. Maybe IF the game goes open source, you might find out what ugly monster kept Squad from fixing these issues, and maybe things won't look as easy to fix as soon as those issues are in front of you and cannot be ignored.

49 minutes ago, Lisias said:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

This and gratuitous latin do not help you further your point.

50 minutes ago, Lisias said:

There were (and still are) very skilled professionals around here

Yes, greatly outnumbered by the aforementioned people who think a patch here and a wipe there will do anything to address KSP's core problems.

55 minutes ago, Lisias said:

We are not free cheap work-force that will drive all the work for them.

For who?

[Lisias]

15 hours ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

KSP’s modding scene has to be one of the strongest in PC gaming, right up there with Bethesda’s games.

I'm afraid it was, sadly.  

 

13 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

This and gratuitous latin do not help you further your point.

[snip]

From now on, I'm afraid the best line of action is to mutually ignore each other. [snip]
Have a nice day.

Edited May 9, 2023 by Starhawk
Redacted by moderator

[zer0Kerbal]

6 hours ago, WhatALovelyNick said:

Yes but it will harm their reputation. A lot.

I mean, look at KSP2, it has 355 online players in Steam. I mean, currently. Meanwhile KSP1 has almost 2k. Now. Online. Only in Steam.

PD is... in a bad shape. The update releasing is slowing down. I'm not a very pessimistic guy, but there is a possibility, that we will never see The Second part in full.

If we could get access to the SC -- we must try it. It will be better for the community. After all -- we love this game and we care for it.

and as a plus - all the work done by modders like myself will only build KSP2 - for when KSP2 is officially supporting and sanctioning modding. Plus open source should help TT find and fix bugs in the code they undoubtedly reused from KSP to KSP2.

In fact, that reused code from KSP into KSP2 might be the only reason TT doesn't OS KSP code.

4 hours ago, WhatALovelyNick said:

Btw, is "/r/KerbalSpaceProgram" one and only KSP related sub there?

there is at least one other: r/KerbalAcademy/

you are right - hit and miss there, just like here.

If you can't win a fight - call the person a r@ ... and/or ad hominem them (like we are seeing in this thread)

Edited May 8, 2023 by zer0Kerbal

[zer0Kerbal]

Patching is probably a poor choice of words. If KSP were to go open source it should go into a TT/Squad controlled repo on GitHub where there should be releases/issues/discussions/pull requests - and the open source community would provide changes/improvements that would fix/improve many long festering bugs.

[Bej Kerman]

13 hours ago, Lisias said:

From now on, I'm afraid the best line of action is to mutually ignore each other

No apology for misgendering me? Alright, I guess. [snip]

So long.

Edited May 9, 2023 by Starhawk
Redacted by moderator

[Royalswissarmyknife]

I think the idea of having it be open source is a great idea. 

Not sure about what TT would think though. 

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, zer0Kerbal said:

Patching is probably a poor choice of words. If KSP were to go open source it should go into a TT/Squad controlled repo on GitHub where there should be releases/issues/discussions/pull requests - and the open source community would provide changes/improvements that would fix/improve many long festering bugs.

It's a way out of the problem, probably the best.

But this would involve expending resources that, at this time, I don't think they have available - I don't think they have even a budget to hook these expenses right now. This kind of OpenSource may get expensive to run, you need skilled people available to code review the pull/requests - you become responsible for every commit you merge in your repository (and, yeah, there's always a risk on merging ARR code into your ARR code). I had already said it in the past (premonition!!! hehe), one of the best examples of a ARR code base going Open Source is the Netscape, not only due the huge success they had in the past, but also due the major screw ups they had to survive - and, boy, they had a steep learning curving to cope with!  

And since I really doubt they would release the code under a OSI license (what, frankly, may backfire on them later), allowing pull-requests into an ARR code may be legally tricky - not impossible, tricky. And this may be a one trick more than are willing to handle at this point. P.D. is in a messy state, whoever is trying to cleaning it up need to be careful to do not add yet more burdens to their shoulders.

Having the source code in an archived/read-on git repository (it may be bitbucket, it may be gitlab - you know, this CoPilot thingy is really a concern for everyone willing to publish code on github!!) [edit] under an Unity's style Share Source license [/edit] will be, by itself, a huge difference for the best by itself.

Even by not being able to apply patches, being able to clone it into a local repository and submit the codebase to some tools (or even compile it under debug mode and firing it up) will by itself be of a huge service. At very least, will make my work on Recall insanely easier and safer - and this is only me, just imagine what the others Authors may be able to accomplish - from Waterfall to Principia.

Make no mistake, I would love your solution - but IMHO we need to aim first into the ones they may manage to afford. You can always go further later, these are not mutually exclusive alternatives.

 But, in a way or another, this is not a decision to be made lightly.

Edited May 9, 2023 by Lisias
I forgot a detail. Added it under [edit] tags.

[WhatALovelyNick]

10 hours ago, Lisias said:

nasty, perhaps. But it's effective? Some pills are bitter to swallow, but they still are the pill to cure us.

'key.

I did it, let's see what'll happen.

[Reusables]

3 hours ago, WhatALovelyNick said:

'key.

I did it, let's see what'll happen.

Seems like it is getting ignored, as it is quite unrealistic. PD might rather rid of the franchise altogether.

 

11 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

but why not also look at projects like GIMP that do worse than their counterparts like Photoshop

Soo GIMP is an open source competitor to photoshop in your mind? Lol. Also quite interesting bringing adobe's photoshop an indie ~ AA game, said like adobe is of similar scale with Squad.

[WhatALovelyNick]

2 minutes ago, Reusables said:

Seems like it is getting ignored

More likely, that it's my special "curse" -- inconspicuousness. 

[Starhawk]

A number of personal remarks have been removed.

Please keep your discussion civil.  Discuss the arguments, do not discuss other members, their posting habits, their motivations, their character, etc.
These are simply out of bounds.

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[Lisias]

4 hours ago, WhatALovelyNick said:

More likely, that it's my special "curse" -- inconspicuousness. 

No, it's just how reddit works. You need time to get traction on a post there, and in the mean time, you need help to prevent people from downvoting you enough to remove you from the main page.

You need help to upvote your post to counter-measure the downvoting from the trolls.

The trick is to monitor the voting count, and every time it reaches 0, someone upvote to get it positive again. Lots of people upvoting preemptively not necessarily helps, because all the trolls need to do is to use their ghost accounts to downvote and the work is undone.

The trick is to upvote gradually, just enough to get to 1, and then start monitoring again until the trolls attack again - rinse, repeat.

[Nazalassa]

On 2/25/2023 at 2:57 PM, WhatALovelyNick said:

Literally that.

Since the development team would and will be focused at KSP2, could you give us the source code, so we might look at it and, maybe, fix some things in it to make KSP1 a better game.

I'm begging you to do it. 

Why haven't I seen this thread before? I 100% support this.

 

47 minutes ago, Lisias said:

No, it's just how reddit works. You need time to get traction on a post there, and in the mean time, you need help to prevent people from downvoting you enough to remove you from the main page.

You need help to upvote your post to counter-measure the downvoting from the trolls.

The trick is to monitor the voting count, and every time it reaches 0, someone upvote to get it positive again. Lots of people upvoting preemptively not necessarily helps, because all the trolls need to do is to use their ghost accounts to downvote and the work is undone.

The trick is to upvote gradually, just enough to get to 1, and then start monitoring again until the trolls attack again - rinse, repeat.

I can help if needed.

[Lisias]

6 minutes ago, Nazalassa said:

I can help if needed.

We need every single bit of help possible, and yours will be hugely appreciated!

Thank you!

[WhatALovelyNick]

10 minutes ago, Nazalassa said:

Why haven't I seen this thread before?

Dunno. 

10 minutes ago, Nazalassa said:

I can help if needed.

That would be great!

[AtomicTech]

On 5/8/2023 at 11:10 AM, Lisias said:

NOW is the time propose solutions for long standing problems that the previous management ignored or didn't was able to fix.

Definitely! It'd be great to see what things we could do with KSP's source code!

Spoiler

Maybe even a revival of the Wii U port by us fans or, heck, even a homebrewed port to the Switch!

 

On 5/8/2023 at 5:14 PM, Lisias said:

I'm afraid it was, sadly.  

Yep...

It was really having a sort of renaissance before the release of KSP 2! It would've been great to see where it would've gone!

9 hours ago, Lisias said:

No, it's just how reddit works. You need time to get traction on a post there, and in the mean time, you need help to prevent people from downvoting you enough to remove you from the main page.

You could also talk with the admins to see if they'd be willing to pin or showcase your post. (If Reddit does that lol)