Please, give the community KSP1's source code

[Hotel26]

1 hour ago, pss88 said:

It would be possible with Squad. It will never happen with TakeTwo.

I think if and when T2/PD is ready to give up on KSP2 (and it is *way too early* to be talking about that, but only then would the KSP1 source code ever be released), Squad (if it still exists) should "buy it back" For Peanuts^[TM] and enlist the mod community to fix the bugs and then curate some sensible KSP1-style development.

For the record, I never thought the KSP2 fork (under the management of conventional gamer wisdom) was a good idea.  We're now seeing actually how good the KSP1 vision & effort was.  The mod community still know.

Spoiler

Also for the record, I've just made a (rare) statement about KSP2 and I have no intention of disputing it with others.  All of the KSP2 discussion has been, from inception, futile and unreasonable, and I will not be getting (further) involved with such.

KSP2 has been the worst thing that has ever happened to KSP1.

 

Edited May 25, 2023 by Hotel26

[Lisias]

On 5/25/2023 at 7:51 AM, pss88 said:

It would be possible with Squad. It will never happen with TakeTwo.  

I have a problem with this statement - not because I think you are wrong, but because I fear it may be right

 

On 5/25/2023 at 8:40 AM, Hotel26 said:

I think if and when T2/PD is ready to give up on KSP2 (and it is *way too early* to be talking about that, but only then would the KSP1 source code ever be released), Squad (if it still exists) should "buy it back" For Peanuts^[TM] and enlist the mod community to fix the bugs and then curate some sensible KSP1-style development.

That's another statement I have a problem with, by exactly the same reasons.

Assuming this will ever happen this way, there will be no Community around anymore and, so, opening the Source will be of little to no effect.

 

Spoiler

On 5/25/2023 at 8:40 AM, Hotel26 said:

For the record, I never thought the KSP2 fork (under the management of conventional gamer wisdom) was a good idea.  We're now seeing actually how good the KSP1 vision & effort was.  The mod community still know.

Also for the record, I've just made a (rare) statement about KSP2 and I have no intention of disputing it with others.  All of the KSP2 discussion has been, from inception, futile and unreasonable, and I will not be getting (further) involved with such.

KSP2 has been the worst thing that has ever happened to KSP1.

Making clear that what follows is only my opinion, and not an argument about yours (we may be both wrong, we may be both right):

I liked KSP2 - most of it, but not all.

For the good part, KSP2 gave us some serious eye candies and usability improvements, and (hopefully) a saner game engine to tinker with, and a lot of promises of better feature integration for what now, on KSP(1), is a loosely tied bunch of code and assets.

For the bad part, I'm afraid they dumbed down the game too much, as by losing the LEGO effect by "abusing" (please note the quotes) procedural parts. I think it's ok to have procedural parts (in the same sense that it's OK to have TweakScale- warning: shameless self-promotion! ), but the game should be playable without them. I'm playing Juno now and then, and I like it too - but KSP did better on the challenging area. Just don't try to mimic Real Life™ crafts, do your own thing, and KSP suddenly is more fun than Juno when building your ships with the current constrains.

LEGO style parts make progression meaningful - besides KSP's tech tree having a urgent need to being reworked. And I still want my The Barn DLC, damnit!!  

Now, about the effect KSP2 infringed on KSP1, yeah. The Steam Charts made it absolutely clear and I reluctantly agree with you. The whole KSP2's development history is littered with terrible decisions over the years - since 2016, as it appears, and I'm pretty sure KSP(1) would be in a way better shape if it didn't had been used as a test ground for nuclear weapons prototyping KSP2 concepts and ideas.

They really screwed the pooch on this.

 

On 5/24/2023 at 2:30 PM, dskzz said:

Reuse of assets can probably be accomplished without source code, right?   Images and textures for example are often packed into an executable file.  As for like the 3d animations, well, honestly its not like Jeb or random rocket parts are that hard to string up and animate.   And you dont need to include those in the Git repo anyways; Space Engineers specifically doesnt.

Yep. And had I mentioned that these assets are already installed on our rigs (no matter we had legally acquired the game or not?)

Everything, absolutely everything (including the source code) is already available to anyone that knows how to use some tools - it only happens that doing so without a legal access to the Source Code is a violation of the EULA and to the Forum Guidelines.

And most authors around here are not willing to do it this way, me included.

It's interesting how people don't know their own History.  

The first time I "modded" a game I was a kid toying with disk sector editors on Apple II games - essentially translating text to PT-BR just for the lulz, trying to add more lives or just to understand how in hell that dudes managed to read the analog joystick and reading the keyboard latch at the same time without screwing up the framerate.

The second time I was tinkering with QuakeC, unpacking and repacking the Quake1 PAKs with the tools the very developers themselves had published for us and being kicked from Team Fortress (the first!) matches by using macros to make easier to do rocket jumps.

Hacking Apple II games didn't harmed Activision neither LucasArts Games - all of them passed through this era with flying colours into MS-DOS Gaming and became a Legend on their own.

Publishing the tools needed to (legally!!) hacking the Quake's PAK files (not to mention the QuakeC source code used to script the game!) didn't harmed ID at all, as the following publishings clearly demonstrates.

 

On 5/24/2023 at 2:30 PM, dskzz said:

So then there are only 2 arguments against opening the source - someone rebuilding the thing wholesale with their own assets or someone using proprietary algorithms in their game.   Assume someone made a knockoff using source and their own assets, like with Smerbils or something.  Yeah thats a cease and desist all day.   IF they could get Vanilla Ice on Our House, yeah doubt Smerbil Space Program would stand up in court.    And would that even make money, with the original thing and the anticipated version 2 upcoming?  Doubtful.     

As a matter of fact… It's theoretically possible to build a KSP knock off right now. KSP is so open, so tinkering friendly, that it's perfectly possible to replace the whole GameData with new content, as long someone is wiling to do so. And using the knowledge already available on the myriad of git repos scattered on the wild.

And there's nothing preventing such entrepreneur from selling this new GameData replacement on the wild - it only happens that he/she[snip] would not be able to advertise this work here on Forum, but the rest of the Internet is wide open to him/her[snip].

What such a entrepreneur would not be allowed to do is to embed a copy of the KSP's essential binaries (the "managed" stuff on the KSP_x64 folder), so he/she[snip] would only be able to sell the thing to people that had bought KSP (or to people that acquired it on… non Forum Guidelines compliant ways. ) 

So, even that such knock off ended up being a success, people willing to run such knock off will still need to have bought (or to buy) KSP. So, and again, no loss of revenue here neither.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Lisias
Redacted by moderator

[Bej Kerman]

  [snip]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

8 hours ago, pss88 said:

It would be possible with Squad. It will never happen with TakeTwo.  

I have a problem with this statement - not because I think you are wrong, but because I fear it may be right

There's probably a name for this razor, but if a company is willing to release the source for their game, they probably would have done it on their own initiative already.

Edited May 25, 2023 by Starhawk
Redacted by moderator

[Vanamonde]

Some comments removed. Keep it on-topic, please. 

[Lisias]

Back to the discussion at hand:

On 5/24/2023 at 2:30 PM, dskzz said:

OTOH if the game isn't close enough to KSP to cease and desist, then it really wouldn't impact the sales of KSP then would it?   

Had the sales of Juno: New Origins had been impacted by KSP's add'ons being open source? (rhetorical question)

Because, you see, there's a lot of features on KSP's add'ons published around here that mimics some of Juno's almost perfectly. The same rationale applied against opening KSP's Source may be used to justify a hypothetical Jundroo decision to go cease and desist or even injunction against KSP's Add'Ons, right?

There's this weird thing on business called competition. Of course you have competition, and of course anything you do may be used against you by the competition. As well anything you won't do. You need to measure pros and cons, and then look for the best cost/benefit.

Now, bear with me, what would make a major damage to your competitiveness: having your old, legacy features being cloned by your competition in an attempt to fight for any scraps you let drop from your table, or leaving bugs unchecked for years eroding the trust of your paying customers on your product? (hint: Steam Charts have the answer).

Of course, I'm ignoring the obvious 3rd option: offering a tightened product, that had its bugs fixed over its lifespan and now, at it's dawn, there's not too much left to be done except doing some promotions to keep things alive while the new iteration is not ready to hit the shelves - but this ship, obviously, had already sailed some time ago.

 

On 5/24/2023 at 2:30 PM, dskzz said:

As for argument 2, proprietary algoriths...apart from maybe the physics engine there's probably nothing especially proprietary in there anyway.   I mean its running Unity, not some custom blazing fast 3d rendering pipeline that yeah you woulnt want to put out there.   Doubt anything is proprietary enough to outweigh the benefits of keeping KSP 1 rolling, commercially viable and still supported by new hardware/platforms.  At least while we all wait for 2 to be feature complete.

Not to mention that Unity itself publishes its Source code making wide open and available all the knowledge and tools to understand all the data structures, from memory usage to files being loaded - so, really, everything is already on the open to anyone knowing how to use the needed tools. This is the drawback on using Open (or Shared) Source, I concede that: it's pretty, pretty hard to keep secrets from smart people [when publishing the Source], and keeping secrets more often than not pays back on the market.

Besides… Even with KSP2 getting feature complete, a lot of people will still be locked out of it. This thing only works (really fine) on Windows over beefy (and expensive) machines,  not to mention a lot of low power and way more affordable devices that will never be able to run KSP2, but will run KSP(1) marvellously well if someone care to port it (sooner or later we would have KSP running on pregnancy tests too, do you wanna bet?)

And there're also MacOS and Linux users, we still exist!!!  Where is our part on this KSP2 bargain? Such people will stick to KSP1 for some time yet.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Lisias
Tyops, waht esle? - and better wording (hate grammars)

[R-T-B]

Frankly, no.

 

That would be a horrible idea for the games continued sale and commercial value, and we all think it's worth that, right?

Also, anything devs need to do with the source, they can do with reflection and other tools.  KSPCF and Kopernicus have both done such things.  We could use some additonal blessings of course re things like Harmony, but meh.

[dskzz]

More I think about it this is probably the most ideal situation possible.  Given everything, including the history, the atmosphere and philosophy esp of the modders but also the userbase, and the original developers (ugh  Squad vs Take Two comment duley noted).  Also that side note of KSP being the most fun thing you could put on a school PC since Oregon Trail ie there being a public good inherent in the game's continued proliferation that you dont see in like oh Gears of War or such....  And really this could be a neat business model or even like paradigm, fans driving the development of the sequel from outside the studio by efforts at keeping up sales of the original.    Ugh again, if it was Squad Id say they had the stones and attitude to really turn that into something, TT..?

Seems like right here and now, KSP is uniquely placed to try and take a slice from the hide of the closed source corporate dragon

 

 

[jost]

On 5/27/2023 at 4:51 AM, R-T-B said:

That would be a horrible idea for the games continued sale and commercial value, and we all think it's worth that, right?

Also, anything devs need to do with the source, they can do with reflection and other tools.  KSPCF and Kopernicus have both done such things.  We could use some additonal blessings of course re things like Harmony, but meh.

I think we need to separate the business, technical and legal issues.

 

First from a business point of view I agree with you: It's not in the interest of T2 to hurt sales ( of KSP1 and 2) by a open source version. Might be different some years after  KSP2s finalization/cancellation though.

Second the technical side:  I would love to have the source code since it would make fixing bugs/developing mods etc a lot easier. On the political side I'm also a Linux-User for 20 years so I think it would be "doing the right thing". 

Of course there are tools which allow this right at the moment but ( as I don' t need to tell you as Kopernicus maintainer) they are operating in a grey area. So freeing the source under a practical license would be great.

Thus: I absolutely would love to have the source but I don't think it will happen before KSP2 is finished

Edited May 30, 2023 by jost
Fixed auto-correct and T9 errors

[R-T-B]

18 minutes ago, jost said:

Of course there are tools which Allianz this right at the Moment but ( as I don' t need to tell you as Kopernicus maintainer) they are operating in a grey area. So freeing the source under a praktisch license would be great.

Despite my vote, I'm in agreement but think it a rather big ask (hence my vote).  I'd just be happy if they removed the "grey area" as you call it and allowed more open use of some more powerful tools.

Sadly I have my doubts even that will happen.

Edited May 30, 2023 by R-T-B

[Lisias]

Real Life™ and Day Job® teamed up these last days, could only came back to this today!  

On 5/24/2023 at 2:30 PM, dskzz said:

Sure over time revenue drops but there are always an opportunity to expand your market share so long as you do continuous dev - look at Paradox's multi year flagships, EU4 what a decade old still maintained?  So yeah keeping KSP up to date with new stuff, Win 11 in particular - with community supporty (and dont tell me  approving checkins would be an issue, hell let the top 5 modders run the verification) = continuous revenue stream.

But that, IMHO, will not be accomplished by using only Open Source craftsmanship - if they are planning to do that, they will need to rely on professional craftsmanship - there's a lot of internal gobbledygook on a Company that, really, no one is going to do voluntarily.

So, long term (professional level) support is not something that can be used to support our proposal, I think.

Granted, the fruits they would gather by opening the access to the Source will surely be reusable on such endeavour - exactly like the current Open Source add'ons available today can be - if not in code, in  lessons learned at worst.

So, it's not an argument against our proposal neither.

 

Spoiler

On 5/24/2023 at 2:30 PM, dskzz said:

I think the whole concept of closed source gaming esp on platforms like Unity is a boogaloo inherited from the days when yeah most pc gamers could have built their games from the source code - simpler games and more sophisticated userbase - and smaller games, and distribution was more difficult - Gamestop vs Steam.   And maybe the idea that FOSS is not commercially viable (wrong, OK no one is going to make money selling gnu tools but grep is hardly KSP!) leads people to conclude that opening their source code up would then kill commercial viability . 

Bottom line: the new universe of PC gaming has made the obsession with locking your code in a vault where it would never again see the light of day totally asinine.    Its Napster level disruption.

And frankly, if there was a game, game company, and userbase that was perfectly positioned to blaze a new trail forward on controlled--open source commercial gaming, it is  KSP, the amazing modding community, and its loyal band of Jebstranauts 

I could not agree more - but we need to pick our fights!   

Right now, I will settle to a Shared Source style (like Unity does) access to the Source Code!  

Not that I consider that ideal - far from it, both sides will "fail to gain" a lot of benefits by using a half-baked Open Shared Source license, but frankly things doesn't happens in a snap, they took time to develop… Having access to the Source today doesn't not means pull requests happening tomorrow, what to say the whole shebang needed for a truly OSI project.

Some people thinks that "Open Source" is like summoning your Patron on a Harry Potter movie: it's enough to say some gibberish and then a Magical Entity will come from nowhere and save the day.

Knowing how short sighted some managers can be (what's not necessarily a bad thing, depending on how things are developing: if your plane is going to crash, who cares if you trashed the engines while securing a safe landing?), using what we already are able to do on the bargain table is way more persuasive than whatever we may be able to do.

Once we have published material, worthy of being merged, around, they will have tangible reasons to go OSI (or, at least, a somewhat more permissive license than "Shared"), not to mention getting the time to build up the whole infra-structure to support an OSI model of development in the mean time. Someone needs to run that show.

From a business point of view, going OSI when you are not going to be able to get the benefits of it will erode your part of the bargain and, so, makes the move less attractive than any other alternative that could bring you some short term benefit. We will not manage to get our part of this bargain without securing them theirs too.

 

On 5/27/2023 at 1:23 AM, dskzz said:

More I think about it this is probably the most ideal situation possible.  Given everything, including the history, the atmosphere and philosophy esp of the modders but also the userbase, and the original developers (ugh  Squad vs Take Two comment duley noted). 

Me too. And I want to add, the most in need situation too, see my most recent posts at this moment. KSP has painted itself into a corner, and we are unable to help from where we are now. We need to build some bridges and, IMHO, right now.

 

On 5/27/2023 at 1:23 AM, dskzz said:

Also that side note of KSP being the most fun thing you could put on a school PC since Oregon Trail ie there being a public good inherent in the game's continued proliferation that you dont see in like oh Gears of War or such.... 

Not only public, but also some organisations and even agencies. I have this weird feeling that KSP would get concrete and direct help even from some space agencies, you know?  

 

On 5/27/2023 at 1:23 AM, dskzz said:

Seems like right here and now, KSP is uniquely placed to try and take a slice from the hide of the closed source corporate dragon

I could not agree more.

 

1 hour ago, jost said:

I think we need to separate the business, technical and legal issues.

I'm unsure if we can, because both issues are intrinsically related when we are talking about licenses.

First, they need to decide what model of Open/Shared Source they are willing to pursue now. OSI? Unity style? Another one, like Microsoft? Without this decision, there's no point on discussing legal issues, because these legal issues are 250% dependant of the model they want to go.

 

1 hour ago, jost said:

First from a business point of I agree with you: It's not in the interest of T2 to hurt sales ( of KSP1 and 2) by a open source Version. Might be different some dears after  KSP2s finalisation/cancellation though.

I'm in the bitter duty to inform you that you are going to the wrong path, already headed to a dead end.

It's not the interest of T2 to hurt sales (from both KSP and KSP2), point. There's absolutely no evidence until this moment that opening the Source (and only the Source) of KSP will hurt their sales, what we have until this moment is exactly the opposite, some examples on how opening the Source can improve the sales by side effect.

Granted, there's no certainty of success neither - as everything you do (or don't), things can go south. They need to measure pros and cons of opening the source on a shared model; on a truly OSI model; or just forget about and keep things as they are now.

We have strong evidences that keeping things are they are now appears to lead to less than desirable results on the short term, with some historical evidences suggesting the same for the medium term. On the long term, I don't think we will be able to do even an educated guess, because these would involve T2's business strategies that they definitively will not share to anyone.

On a personal note, I don't think KSP2 will flop due technical issues, I'm pretty confident that the dev team is more than capable of delivering it, as long they have sufficient resources (time included) to accomplish the tasks.

I think its obvious that keeping the franchise alive and kicking in the mean time is a very decent and effective way to secure resources for KSP2's development, and IMHO opening the Source (and only the Source, even in a restrictive way) is a viable way to secure interest into the franchise on the short and medium term.

 

1 hour ago, jost said:

Thus: I absolutely would love to have the sozrce but I don't think it will happen before KSP2 is finished

My opinion about it is that after KSP2 is finished, there will be little to no point on releasing KSP's Source, as I don't think P.D. would be able to harvester   any concrete benefits from it. It will be a nice P/R stunt, no doubt, and some people will get beneficed for sure - but what P.D. or T2 would gain from it at that point?

Where is the aggregating value on opening KSP source when there will be little to no interest on it anymore? Right now, we have real and immediate benefits on opening KSP's Source, even under a restrictive license: tackling down bugs that are plaguing the game and improving the existing Add'Ons, keeping the public interest high enough to even sell some additional KSP copies (as expecting KSP2 to sell right now is, well, somewhat wishful thinking) - as well gathering knowledge and lessons learned that may be of interest even for the KSP2 team.

Edited May 30, 2023 by Lisias
Entertaining grammars made slightly less entertaining.

[ColdJ]

I will admit that I have skimmed, so sorry if this has already been suggested.

What about a controlled release to interested and passionate programmers under a free licence that includes a non disclosure agreement for the source code.

Passionate programmers like @Lisias go through and find issues and create fixes while the access allows them to create their own properly intergrated addons like Tweakscale.. They in turn send back to the company their insights and fixes. The company then, once verified, release a patch containing the fixes so that the rest of their customers can enjoy the improved game.

The risk is then minimised when it comes to losing control of their software.

If the model works it could also open up the possibility of doing the same for KSP2 which would be a win win as they would get a non payed for, passionate set of programmers, error checking and providing fixes for the game while the loyal and passionate customer base would get a more stable game, that much sooner.

And as stated, a more stable game with great content will get recommended by word of mouth and sales will increase.

[darthgently]

10 hours ago, ColdJ said:

I will admit that I have skimmed, so sorry if this has already been suggested.

What about a controlled release to interested and passionate programmers under a free licence that includes a non disclosure agreement for the source code.

Similar has been suggested, but it was awhile ago and your description adds ideas.  Not redundant at all

[dskzz]

On 5/30/2023 at 8:48 AM, Lisias said:

Right now, I will settle to a Shared Source style (like Unity does) access to the Source Code!  

Not that I consider that ideal - far from it, both sides will "fail to gain" a lot of benefits by using a half-baked Open Shared Source license, but frankly things doesn't happens in a snap, they took time to develop… Having access to the Source today doesn't not means pull requests happening tomorrow, what to say the whole shebang needed for a truly OSI project.

Some people thinks that "Open Source" is like summoning your Patron on a Harry Potter movie: it's enough to say some gibberish and then a Magical Entity will come from nowhere and save the day.

Knowing how short sighted some managers can be (what's not necessarily a bad thing, depending on how things are developing: if your plane is going to crash, who cares if you trashed the engines while securing a safe landing?), using what we already are able to do on the bargain table is way more persuasive than whatever we may be able to do.

Once we have published material, worthy of being merged, around, they will have tangible reasons to go OSI (or, at least, a somewhat more permissive license than "Shared"), not to mention getting the time to build up the whole infra-structure to support an OSI model of development in the mean time. Someone needs to run that show.

From a business point of view, going OSI when you are not going to be able to get the benefits of it will erode your part of the bargain and, so, makes the move less attractive than any other alternative that could bring you some short term benefit. We will not manage to get our part of this bargain without securing them theirs too.

Baby steps, roger that.  Let them feel their way into a new paradigm.    The news that KSP is trying something new, bold, brave, where no Kerbal has gone before... it would boost interest and therefore sales apart from anything else.  

But we'd need someone from the developer to actually talk to us first.   Is there any indication they are reading the forums? Anyone with a direct connection to someone with some juice at T2?

[WhatALovelyNick]

On 5/30/2023 at 4:38 PM, jost said:

It's not in the interest of T2 to hurt sales ( of KSP1 and 2)

Excuse me, but are we really talking about KSP2 sales? The game, currently, has less than 200 online players.

I don't think that it will hurt it at all. Because there is nothing to hurt.

[Lisias]

On 5/31/2023 at 2:29 AM, ColdJ said:

What about a controlled release to interested and passionate programmers under a free licence that includes a non disclosure agreement for the source code.

I understand where you are willing to go, but I'm afraid this route will not lead to it.

I know no professional developer, at least skilled enough to do a proper job, that would accept to sign an NDA without getting something back - some significant by the way. It would just not make sense, you would be accepting liabilities without getting anything as payback.

OSI people does Pro Bono work, not "free" (as in beer) work (also known as charity) - these are two completely different things. Makes no sense doing charity work for a Commercial Company, not to mention doing it while accepting legal liability under a NDA...

If I'm going to sign an NDA, I will be properly paid for it. No exceptions.

BUT… There're OSI developers also working as hired guns for private companies, if this is what you are meaning - and perhaps some of them would accept the job under some other terms than money, it's not impossible. It just happens that I will not be one of them - it would make more sense for me under my legislation to just go rogue and creating an alias somewhere else and doing the job under the shady practices it's being used by some people around here.

What would not make too much sense for me neither: if I'm not going to at least being credited by the work, why bothering doing it at first place? (Being credited by the work is the essence of doing OSI!)

 

On 5/31/2023 at 4:00 PM, dskzz said:

Baby steps, roger that.  Let them feel their way into a new paradigm.    The news that KSP is trying something new, bold, brave, where no Kerbal has gone before... it would boost interest and therefore sales apart from anything else. 

I'm afraid this baby is in need to learn to run sooner rather than later… KSP2 flatlined twice this week:

The first time it happened, I ignored it because it could be a glitch on Steam Charts (it happens now and then), but another one 3 days later is pushing the glitch a bit too much, so perhaps KSP2 is really risking flatlining.

Of course this relates only to Steam players, but since this is something between 50% to 70% from the current gamers in the World, we can infer the real results with some confidence.

KSP(1) online players are still holding but, frankly, the current online players is about 30% of what it used to be in last December (before KSP2 being launched), less than half from June 2022 and again one third from June 2021 - a clear sign of decaying.

At the same time, my time is running scarce and, frankly, the huge amount of time I need to pull white and black test cases from my hat to diagnose problems like this one is really, really discouraging. I'm blind in a crossfire, how can I be expected to hit the bandits?

Spoiler

These last two weeks I got a really, really nasty flu.

So I decided that it was time to spend some quality time on KSP instead of investing (wasting?) all my free time diagnosing problems for a change.

Since I was willing to play the damned thing, I resurrected my last KSP rig that was really working for me when I was really playing KSP - a heavily modded 1.7.3 instalment that I call "Company".

Well… It borked. 

I had the presence of spirit of duplicating the whole thing before firing it up (thanks for the CoW, MacOS!), so I still have the KSP.log from the last time I played it. And by inspecting that log I realised that I had entered the Editor and Flight Scenes a couple times without problems, while now the Editor opens up without a single part to be used on the Palette (or the freaking thing just CTD, Oh Crappyness!!).

I managed to pinpoint 3 or 4 Add'Ons being responsible for the mess, but HELL the thing was working as is at that time. On the same machine, on the same MacOS - but granted, with 2 years of security updates and the MONO_THREADS_PER_CPU stunt that I'm now using all the time.

Anyone seeing a trend here? I'm really the only one getting these problems?

Perhaps, just perhaps, this huge amount of annoyances would be one of the main reasons people are fleeing the Scene? Perhaps people would be tolerating all these KSP problems because they were believing KSP2 would be better, but since KSP2 was launched in that appalling state (and, again, I firmly belive this is not a development issue, but a shoddy management's workmanship), people may be losing the hope.

I surely would had lost it if I would not be a developer myself, being able to diagnose and fix a lot of KSP problems in the past.

But hope don't pay the bills - we need something to believe in.

Spoiler

 

My opinion is that if we are able to fix KSP and make it stable and working, people will get confidence that KSP2 will be delivered in a decent state the same.

Edited June 11, 2023 by Lisias
Hit "save" too soon.

[Bej Kerman]

13 hours ago, Lisias said:

My opinion is that if we are able to fix KSP and make it stable and working, people will get confidence that KSP2 will be delivered in a decent state the same.

Two completely different games, plus a higgledy-piggledy community attempt at fixing a fundamentally broken game can't be compared to the corporate structure of T2. I think to say this is a hideously big stretch undersells how much of a stretch it is. Then again, Bob had a pineapple and the day looked a bit more saturated.

[Lisias]

47 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Two completely different games

Nope, they are not. It was stated before that some bits of KSP were reused on KSP2.

 

48 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

higgledy-piggledy community attempt at fixing a fundamentally broken game can't be compared to the corporate structure of T2. I think to say this is a hideously big stretch undersells how much of a stretch it is.

Every single time an unhappy soul did the misfortune of telling something like that, things backfired badly in his face.

OSI people overweighted Microsoft, see SAMBA. For years Microsoft tried and tried again to actively sabotage the project, without success.

Bill Gates didn't managed to do it, what to say from you?

Wishful thinking is, really, the only weapon OSI detractors can use.

Good luck, you surely are going to need it.

[Bej Kerman]

19 minutes ago, Lisias said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

higgledy-piggledy community attempt at fixing a fundamentally broken game can't be compared to the corporate structure of T2. I think to say this is a hideously big stretch undersells how much of a stretch it is.

Every single time an unhappy soul did the misfortune of telling something like that, things backfired badly in his face.

Not everyone goes by "his", and no, I'm not trying to sabotage this thread's hopes and dreams, I'm just reminding you and anyone else here that a niche effort won't do much besides being niche.

[Lisias]

11 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I'm not trying to sabotage this thread's hopes and dreams, I'm just reminding you and anyone else here that a niche effort won't do much besides being niche.

GIMP was a niche once, how in hell someone would even dream on competing with Adobe Photoshop?  (GIMP 1.0 was a dog, I can tell you that - but I was locked behind Windows at that time, so perhaps my perception got tainted).

Audacity, Blender (still miss Caligari TrueSpace though - a friend that used Amiga showed it to me at that times), you name it. There're a lot of "niche" projects that became incredibly successful once they gone the OSI way. Being niche is not a problem if you have "nichist" people enough around - and, believe me, KSP have it.

And have it on a lot in places that most OSI projects could not even dream of.

Granted, this is not synonymous of profits for KSP's IP owner - things are not that simple, they rarely are (you can't cherry-pick who are going to get interested in the project, for each value aggregating collaborator, you will have a full hand of time wasters to cope with).

But the niche factor, definitively, is a positive factor for KSP: Space Faring, per se, it's a hell of niche full of very, very interesting and competent people. As was said before:

On 5/24/2023 at 2:30 PM, dskzz said:

And frankly, if there was a game, game company, and userbase that was perfectly positioned to blaze a new trail forward on controlled--open source commercial gaming, it is  KSP, the amazing modding community, and its loyal band of Jebstranauts 

 

[Bej Kerman]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

GIMP was a niche once, how in hell someone would even dream on competing with Adobe Photoshop?  (GIMP 1.0 was a dog, I can tell you that - but I was locked behind Windows at that time, so perhaps my perception got tainted).

Audacity, Blender (still miss Caligari TrueSpace though - a friend that used Amiga showed it to me at that times), you name it. There're a lot of "niche" projects that became incredibly successful once they gone the OSI way. Being niche is not a problem if you have "nichist" people enough around - and, believe me, KSP have it.

And have it on a lot in places that most OSI projects could not even dream of.

Granted, this is not synonymous of profits for KSP's IP owner - things are not that simple, they rarely are (you can't cherry-pick who are going to get interested in the project, for each value aggregating collaborator, you will have a full hand of time wasters to cope with).

But the niche factor, definitively, is a positive factor for KSP: Space Faring, per se, it's a hell of niche full of very, very interesting and competent people. As was said before:

 

And would you care to explain how a niche project that may not escape the forums would shift an average person's perspective on KSP 2?

[Lisias]

I think it's time to get back to this pledge.

In the last 10 days I ended up doing lots and lots of black box researches hunting bugs that weren't from our (authors) side of the equation. This is a huge waste of time, and this puts us (authors that are willing to cope with Forum Rules) on a unfair disadvantage  over people that don't care about Community, Forum Rules and sometimes even with specific details from pertinent Legislation.

Not to mention a uphill battle with such people that just refuses to acknowledge the results of such results, on a circular arguing that can only be really broken by showing the freaking code.

Spoiler

I could be using this time on my own Add'Ons, not to mention publishing some new ones that I have on my pipeline - and, frankly, I think this is what I really should do from now on.

Quote

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”  — Torvalds, Linus.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/437173-talk-is-cheap-show-me-the-code

Really, the Source is already available to people that don't mind shady practices hiding themselves behind disposable nicknames.

This Community needs a change, and a change for the better. The current proposal, that I endorse with a open heart and a educated mind, is still the better option for the Community and probably the whole Franchise.

Until a better solution is proposed, I'm still pledging for Legal, Forum Rules compliant access to the Source Code of Kerbal Space Program (the first).

[Cytauri]

It would be really nice to be able to create a new KSP with the KSP 1 source code. We could add new FX to the game like updated re-entry plasma, vapor cones, destruction fx, volumetric clouds, and more! We could destroy bugs like the Kraken and update the planet textures and the PQS.  We could call it, "Kerbal Community Program" and it could use all the different mods that we the community have made. It's a good idea to have the source code, yet, there could be some legal problems for the public to have access to the game's core.

[Lisias]

17 hours ago, Cytauri said:

It would be really nice to be able to create a new KSP with the KSP 1 source code. We could add new FX to the game like updated re-entry plasma, vapor cones, destruction fx, volumetric clouds, and more! We could destroy bugs like the Kraken and update the planet textures and the PQS.  We could call it, "Kerbal Community Program" and it could use all the different mods that we the community have made. It's a good idea to have the source code, yet, there could be some legal problems for the public to have access to the game's core.

I completely agree, but we need to put ourselves on P.D.'s shoes: why they would do something that would bite them in the SAS? It's not wise to invest your scarce resources feeding the competition unless you are getting even more back (and this last part of the bargain is not consensus around here).

We need to reach a win-win situation: both sides must win enough and loose the less possible to make the solution palatable enough on the worse case, and working on the best. They still have KSP2 to sell, and they are pretty focused on this one.

My original proposal (that I should had reproduced on my last post, by the way) is a Controlled, somewhat Restricted access to the Source Code (in the same way Unity does), allowing us to (legally and under Forum rules) access the Source looking for bugs that we can fix (as I do on KSP-Recall), as well gathering intelligence  about how KSP really do things internally, avoiding a huge waste of time on infinite black box testings - but at the same time in a way that can't be used to "compete" with them.

Spoiler

Since we are here, my opinion about releasing the Source under a GPL style license instead of Unity one is that even if the competition uses the code, they will be forced to publish any modifications they did on it, ultimately beneficing KSP itself.

And since the Assets and Lore will not be released on a permissive license, there's no way to legally build a rip off: the Source Code is just the engine, you need all the rest to have a viable product, and this all the rest should not be published under a Open/Share License.

But this is a secondary battle for now, and can be discussed later. Baby steps.

Frankly, they have none to loose by doing that, because people that don't mind the EULA, Forum Rules and even a few draconian (but perfectly enforceable) legislations in the World are already using tools and shady practices to have access to that Source Code. And these guys don't have anything to loose by using this knowledge the way it best fits to them disregarding everything else  - we don't even know their real names, most of the time.

They can do whatever they want, the Genie is already out of the Bottle. We, people willing to walk on the right side of the road, are the ones with our hands tied.

Opening the Source, even on a controlled and restricted way, will essentially allow more people (the ones still willing to cope with the EULA and Forum Rules, not to mention that draconian legislations) to be able to read it and doing something useful with it - more eyes being able to audit the solutions, more arms being able to do useful work.

And the more eyes you have looking on something, the harder is to someone to "steal" it - and since the King is already naked , there's really nothing to be lost now.

Edited June 24, 2023 by Lisias
Better phrasing.

[Hotel26]

Little noticed, but the KSP audience bifurcated several years ago.  (Left-brain and right-brain, if you want my own metaphor.)

If PD were to release the KSP 1.12 source now, in a controlled way, to genuinely-inclined custodians (the right-brained), it would have absolutely NO impact upon PD's own objectives with KSP2 because this fork is PROFOUND -- and long-gone complete.

Sayonara.

Edited June 24, 2023 by Hotel26

[zer0Kerbal]