12 hour gameplay feedback and recommended priority list

[twich22]

Played 12 hours yesterday. Mostly pushing the limits of the game and seeing what it was capable of. Having gone through the development process with KSP 1 and understanding what the game needs, here are my recommended priorities, in order, starting with #1. 

1. Performance improvement. The game is unplayable launching a vessel and any time near kerbin with lower end graphics cards. This makes testing the game, finding bugs, and suggesting improvements, very difficult. I would be willing to save up some money to buy a new computer if I thought that it was necessary. But I dont believe that it is, and my My CPU usage remains very low during gameplay which tells me that its possible to make this game playable for a wide audience and at very exciting scales. Clearly something is causing major issues with GPU performance. Engine plumes also seem to be causing performance issues, and likely other elements of engines. My recommendation is to get rid of all unnecessary graphical elements of the game. Or have a button in the settings that gets rid of them all at the very least. We dont need them during an alpha/early beta launch of the game. We dont need pretty stars and a pretty surface and pretty engine plumes and pretty lighting and pretty space craft parts to be able to test out physics systems and flights and UI and all the other critical elements of this game. Granted it is all very pretty and impressive, but lets leave the bells and whistles for when we have a stable base and when the bells and whistles are actually optimized. 

Once I escape from being close to kerbin my game speeds up to a playable speed, maybe 20 fps. Once I dump most of my engines it speeds up even more. So the game IS playable, even on a lower end computer. I didnt seem to have issues when approaching Jool or crash landing on Jool so its not planets themselves causing issues, nor atmospheres, but kerbin itself. This tells me that the game is fixable too and should be playable with much less intense GPU's. So please get on it! 

Also, there is definitely a memory sink somewhere, unsurprisingly. The longer I play the game, the slower and slower it gets. When I exit out of the game completely and reload everything it moves faster again. I think I remember this being an issue way back in KSP 1 at some point so its probably the same issue. 

2. After performance, fix VAB building. Again, this is a critical element of the game. You cant fly craft if you cant build them. Performance is slow in VAB, and should be improved early on to make it much faster and more responsive. Again, worry about bells and whistles later down the road. Many of the issues in the VAB were also present in KSP 1 during development. You can probably find all of the bugs posted in the KSP 1 forums and hopefully what was done to fix them somewhere during development. There are major issues with struts. Issues with copying elements and moving them. Issues with accidentally clicking things that you didn't mean to. One of the most egregious examples is accidentally opening the parts manager. The parts manager is unfortunately very slow and unwieldy, especially with larger craft. and since right click is what you are using 99% of the time in the VAB as you move around your craft, and since right click also opens the parts manager, this is a problem. Many times when building a craft you will unintentionally open the parts manager with right click and have to wait for it to load and then close it only to have it happen again and again and again. I suggest changing the right click function within the VAB, at least for now, to avoid this. 

Struts break all the time. since these are a critical component of building a stable craft, this is a problem. These were always an issue in KSP 1 as well. If you build a strut, and then decide you dont like it, or you accidentally put it somewhere you didnt like, and then decide you want to CTRL-Y to undo your action, you might just break all the struts that you have placed. Loading craft might break the struts. Merging craft might break the struts. trying to delete struts might break struts. 

When copying groups of parts and trying to paste them to another part of your vessel, they often break. Fuel tanks may suddenly be in totally different locations, or tilted sideways, and the connecting part may have changed to a different part so now you are anchored to the wrong location. It seems to have to do with copying a part and then dragging it across your ship to the intended location. As you drag it across other possible placement locations it jumps around and does all sorts of weird things and then breaks sometimes, so that by the time you have dragged it to its intended location and placed it, it no longer has the same shape and form as it originally did. 

Saving craft is annoying. It can take up to 3 clicks to save a craft. This is totally unnecessary. One click will do just fine. I also do not understand why a craft needs 2-3 different names. There is the name at the top next to the save button. There is the "vessel name" once you click the save button and open up the save UI. And then there is the workspace name, which is the one that seems to be the most important. Sometimes the name at the top is not the same as the vessel name. Sometimes the workspace name is displayed in various UI's, while rarely the vessel names are displayed. It is all very confusing and seems very unnecessary. And slow and cumbersome. And quickly annoying to a user. 

Camera movement in the VAB is slightly improved from KSP 1, but ONLY because of the middle mouse click function. It is truly amazing being able to focus the camera on different parts, and truly makes building large craft way better. But thats the only improvement. Scrolling forward and back sometimes breaks, so you cant zoom out for a few seconds. Scrolling up and down is very slow. It should be much faster, smoother, easier. 

The various part alteration functions are clumsy and often broken. The '2' function for adjusting location and rotation of parts is very clumsy, slow, and difficult to use correctly. It can be difficult to 'grab' the correct arrow when trying to move a part. When you finally do grab the correct arrow and start moving the part, the part might jump around and not move smoothly and then break and get stuck in an unwanted location. Adjusting the rotation of a part is even more difficult. Often a player wishes the rotation of their part to align with a particular surface, either the ground or the vessel itself or the attached part itself. Its very unclear how this all works in KSP 2. There are 2 different alignments but neither of them seem to help in aligning the rotation of a part. whats more, the UI does not give any indication of how much you have rotated the part and whether its level with your intended reference point like it does in KSP 1. So at some point this should be fixed, although its not a critical game breaking issue. 

The anchoring buttons seem to be broken. Selecting an anchor point on your craft doesnt seem to work at all. However selecting a new launch vessel anchor does seem to work somewhat, so the current work around is to set your new intended anchor part as the launch vessel anchor, and then change the launch vessel anchor back to the original anchor when done. However, the launch vessel anchor button often gets stuck on, and in order to return to the regular move and edit part function you need to first change to the rotate/translate function and then change to the normal move and click function. 

Symmetry modes and radial symmetry modes dont work great just like they did in KSP 1. The end result could be uneven symmetry or strange doubling or tripling of your intended parts or extra parts being placed in random unintended locations, things like that. 

When building planes. You might unintentionally build your plane backwards, so that your cockpit is facing one way and then your engines are facing backwards, towards the cockpit. and then when you load the plane its facing the back of the runway. None of these are gam breaking obviously but should be fixed in due course. 

3. Kraken and Broken craft when radially attaching parts. Large fuel tanks radially attached to each other often bug out and break and explode very easily. This was a problem with KSP 1 way back when. This makes building large craft or complex craft extremely challenging, often taking hours and hours of debugging and fine tuning just to make it so a particular part will not explode immediately upon loading a craft. Whats more, the debug console is fairly useless. While it tells you the name of the part that broke, if you have 20 other parts with the same name it makes it very difficult to locate the problem area of your vessel. If you want to have a debug console, consider making it more useful by having it point to the broken part in some more specific and exact way. 

4. A million other non-critical bug fixes and quality of life improvements. I could go on and on but the things I have listed are the priorities and will take a good while to iron out. The rest can wait. UI improvements, Flight improvements, Maneuver node improvements, time warp improvements, throttle improvements, and thats just to get us into orbit and moving around. I haven't even started playing around with rovers, EVA's, docking craft, transferring resources, balancing fuel weight, on and on. 

Overall I am excited at the possibilities that this game could one day offer, but for now lets get the bones running smoother!!!

[twich22]

I forgot to mention that placing parts in VAB can also be a nightmare, just like it was in KSP 1. Trying to get a part to anchor with another part, while surrounded by the rest of your craft, can be challenging, as it was in KSP 1. I recommend adding a toggle or key bind or other function to turn on/off radial attachment of parts. When you want to place an engine or fuel tank or other part directly onto an attachment node an no where else, allow players to turn off free attachment mode so that the part will snap to its correct attachment node location without doing interesting maneuvers with your camera to get the angle just right so that your engine will snap to the attachment node under your fuel tank. 

Similarly, radially attaching parts can be difficult/buggy. Sometimes parts will try to radially attach in the reverse orientation/inside the other part, or upside down, or sideways, etc. Not game breaking issues, you can usually fix it or work around it by toggling on or off the 'C' keybind and manually placing a part in its intended location and orientation. but this should be fixed at some point. I know it has to do with specific parts and how they interact with other parts and all that good stuff. 

[twich22]

SAS is also broken as it once was in KSP 1. If you have a larger craft or multiple attached parts and a SAS turned on it will cause the vessel to wobble at a constantly accelerating rate until the vessel tears itself apart. 

[twich22]

Also Launch clamps should always all be in one stage automatically. I cant imagine when you would want them in more than one stage and if you really want it you can do it manually. 

[twich22]

2 hours ago, twich22 said:

SAS is also broken as it once was in KSP 1. If you have a larger craft or multiple attached parts and a SAS turned on it will cause the vessel to wobble at a constantly accelerating rate until the vessel tears itself apart. 

Actually I think its gimbal that broken. Gimbal with many engines on the same ship will cause them to all go into an accelerating pendulum and tear the ship apart. I now remember that this was an issue with KSP 1. Ill keep testing and see if there is any issue with SAS. 

[twich22]

in VAB, Clicking on parts through another UI. Known bug from KSP 1. For example, clicking on something in the parts editor while also clicking on a part behind the parts editor UI at the same time. Causes lots of issues while doing simple things in the VAB. Pretty game breaking issue. 

[twich22]

Again, struts are massively broken. They will disappear with almost any alteration to a vessel. If you copy a part with a bunch of struts on it, the struts on the original part might disappear, and struts on the copied vessel wont work either. If you undo an action, all struts will disappear. If you delete parts sometimes struts will disappear. If you move an assembly the struts might disappear. It seems like, at least sometimes, merging a vehicle will maintain the struts on that vehicle but i need to do more testing. 

Merged craft should be named and saved under the original craft workspace and vessel name, not that of the merged vessel. 

[twich22]

Can now confirmed that merging vehicles with struts will also break the struts. All the struts will change their attachment points to the first merged craft. So if I merge 3 boosters with struts onto an existing craft, all boosters will be strutted to the first booster I merged, regardless of distance. 

At this point, there is NO way to maintain struts across craft or across copied parts or when editing a vessel or in any reasonable manner. This means that, in order to build a stable vessel with struts, you need to first start with a completely unstrutted version, and only at the very end, when you are ready to launch, do you add all struts one at a time by hand to the while vessel. And the best part is, if you want to continue editing that vessel, you are probably safest by starting with the unstrutted version, editing the vessel as you like, and then again at the end strutting the whole craft. 

As you can see, struts are completely broken and useless at this point. 

[dwing]

In VAB its almost impossible to connect a lander to a missile as parts "beam" outside your vessel,  or magically just change their position if you move to start. Also sometimes stages disappear until you move to start again.

[mattihase]

5 hours ago, twich22 said:

I recommend adding a toggle or key bind or other function to turn on/off radial attachment of parts. When you want to place an engine or fuel tank or other part directly onto an attachment node an no where else, allow players to turn off free attachment mode so that the part will snap to its correct attachment node location without doing interesting maneuvers with your camera to get the angle just right so that your engine will snap to the attachment node under your fuel tank.

I believe holding ALT to make things attach to nodes only has carried over into KSP2, surprisingly enough.

[twich22]

1 hour ago, mattihase said:

I believe holding ALT to make things attach to nodes only has carried over into KSP2, surprisingly enough.

Thanks! I actually didnt know that one! been playing for over a decade and still learn new things. 

I can now confirm that parts that are attached freely, an not to a node, are very weak attachments. For example, slapping 2 XL Metholox fuel tanks together side by side. The connection is so weak that the tanks will not even be able to hold one anothers weight and will immediately break. So basically radial attachments do not work. However, the 'radial attachment' part provides a strong connection. So that is my current work around. 

[twich22]

Im sure this has been reported already, but switching between buildings, such as going from a vessel in orbit to KSP and then back to a vessel, can break the entire KSP complex and cause it to spawn in space with your vessel. This bug then follows you across saves, even old saves. So when you load into any vessel, KSP is lurking nearby ready to crash your vessel. And if you try to move away from it will move back close to your vessel.  Can be fixed by exiting game and reloading. 

Edited February 26, 2023 by twich22