Where are the devs?

[MarcAbaddon]

2 minutes ago, tstein said:

Publisher actions are not limited to an on off switch. Much before this there is:  demand of a plan and  lots of milestone meetings,  then if that does not work,  the call to the studio and demand  changes and management with someone they bring from somewhere else. Only then  an investor (a publisher is an investor)   thinks on switching the lights off.

Most of the time, that's true and I imagine it would be here as well. The thing is that we don't know how much of that already happened, since this is usually not public. The take-over of the Star Theory team and the decision to go open access at least point towards some of that. Only thing we know is that they have not changed some of the team leads. There's really no way to delay game like this and not get at least several uncomfortable calls.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Do you really think that the development team- those who wrote the code etc. to create the game- we’re unaware that there were issues before the launch? They had a deadline and no doubt tried their best to meet said deadline with the best version of the game they could make in that timeframe. There’s only so much testing even 50 people can do compared to 50 thousand users who will often try things nobody in the dev team thought to test.

Once the initial “waaaah it’s totally broken!!!1!” backlash has subsided a bit, people will realise that actually KSP2 has a lot of good things about it too, albeit with some major issues that get in the way of fully enjoying the game. To paraphrase Carnasa on his livestream yesterday, once you accept that there are problems and start working around them the game is actually a lot more fun; mods are already out to fix the wobbly rockets, disappearing orbital markers and a few of the other more egregious issues to make KSP2 more playable and enjoyable; some of the issues might not even be KSP2’s fault- I’ve heard that running the .exe directly can result in much better FPS than running via Steam and there’s a bug in Unity itself (the underlying system the game is built in) that’s causing some of the problems in KSP2.

I’d much rather the dev team were working on fixing bugs and optimising the game’s performance than getting embroiled in pointless twitter wars that won’t make the game any better.

[Scarecrow71]

I'm torn in this discussion.   Up front, I am hoping the devs are where they should be:  at their desks working hard on patches and updates.  That is the only place they should be.  Period.

However, I have to ask what they have been doing for the last 4 years.  KSP2 was announced several years ago, and then delayed several times.  And what we finally got is less than what KSP already is.  There are controls in KSP that should have been migrated right off the bat (I'm looking at maneuver nodes, for starters) that don't exist or don't even have the most basic functionality.  Missing parts.  Major graphical bugs.  Some of this can't be helped...but it seems all they worked on for the last 4 years was textures and graphics.  Yes, we are told that they rewrote the physics engine, and I am quite positive that took time.  But was it really impossible for them to add a lot of the basic stuff that KSP already has?  They couldn't copy/paste/edit code (which i do on a daily basis)?

Even basic math makes me scratch my head.  A team of 50 people working 40 hours per week (which is way underestimated) comes out to 416,000 man-hours of development.  And we can't even get working maneuver nodes?

Edited February 27, 2023 by Scarecrow71

[VlonaldKerman]

3 hours ago, Periple said:

Ultimately the game will stand or fall on its own merits, and for something like KSP2, that will only be determined much later than the first week of EA. If KSP2 loses the YouTubers and won't see them coming back, that would be worrying

My concern is that without communication soon, they will lose the faith both of the YouTubers and the community. What so many on this forum who defend the game fail to realize is that the reason people are critical/pessimistic about the game is not just the state it’s in (to which they reply: But it’s early access!!!), but rather, that without some major improvements, fast, the game may be dropped by T2 and never be finished.

Communication and quick response to the rough launch are tools the devs can use to keep the community on-board and reassure us the game will be finished (if that’s true), thus creating a positive feedback loop and making it more likely that the game will actually be finished.

[Kerbart]

The game was released on Friday, after what I assume where many sleepless nights to get some of the pre-release issues resolved.

It's Monday morning now. Relax.

[Guest]

22 minutes ago, J.Random said:

you don't understand game development

Do you?

[tstein]

6 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I'm torn in this discussion.   Up front, I am hoping the devs are where they should be:  at their desks working hard on patches and updates.  That is the only place they should be.  Period.

However, I have to ask what they have been doing for the last 4 years.  KSP2 was announced several years ago, and then delayed several times.  And what we finally got is less than what KSP already is.  There are controls in KSP that should have been migrated right off the bat (I'm looking at maneuver nodes, for starters) that don't exist or don't even have the most basic functionality.  Missing parts.  Major graphical bugs.  Some of this can't be helped...but it seems all they worked on for the last 4 years was textures and graphics.  Yes, we are told that they rewrote the physics engine, and I am quite positive that took time.  But was it really impossible for them to add a lot of the basic stuff that KSP already has?  They couldn't copy/paste/edit code (which i do on a daily basis)?

Even basic math makes me scratch my head.  A team of 50 people working 40 hours per week (which is way underestimated) comes out to 416,000 man-hours of development.  And we can't even get working maneuver nodes?

ooo but  you can PAINT Your rocket! And you can see the kerbal inside the capsule if you manage to  fight your camera and point it into the tiny window at a very specific angle!  The issue of the game  clearly is "priorities"

 

To not say I am being always negative, they did made a good job in the sound system.

[VlonaldKerman]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

Since @RayneCloud doesn't have the energy (and I don't blame her, these narratives are sticky -- narratives that are simple, compelling, and wrong often are), I'll try to explain why it's very wrong.

"5 years in development" – that sounds pretty normal for a game this size and this complex. The thing with KSP (1 and 2) is that they do a lot of stuff that most games just don't do. If you're making, say, a driving game, a first-person shooter, or an open-world aRPG, you're dealing with a known quantity. The engines are made to support just that kind of game. There's still a ton of stuff to do but it's all known problems with known solutions.

KSP2 needs stuff like precise time-warpable orbital mechanics, multiplayer that takes into account that players may be in different timelines, and even very basic assumptions don't hold. For example, consider the angst about the clouds. It is true that game engines make it pretty easy to design beautiful clouds. The thing is that they're predicated on the assumption that the clouds live in a skybox somewhere at optical infinity. That's not the case for KSP when you can fly right through them and away into the cosmos, until you reach another planet with different clouds. Because you can't "just add clouds" like the game engine expects, you have to come up with a custom solution. That takes time and is hard to estimate and may go wrong in unexpected ways. Ditto for precise and stable orbital mechanics. Ditto ditto for timewarp. More so for multiplayer that accounts for players being in different timelines. On top of that, you need to make a driving game (wheels, driving physics), a construction game (duh!), and so on and so forth. 

"Delay after delay" -- Par for course IMO. The first big delay was an effective reboot of the entire project. You can't just continue production as if nothing happened when you start a new studio, even if you hire some of the old developers. It's also likely that the material constraints for the development were changed so drastically that the only thing that carried over was (some of) the design work. Then there was the covid delay. And finally the push into 2023 rather than 2022. All that is completely normal. Not ideal, mind, but normal -- lots of games do a lot worse.

"Rarely any updates" -- KSP2 has gotten more developer updates earlier on than most games, by far. Although TBF this is most likely because it was announced prematurely; under normal conditions they would've gone radio silent until they were ready to announce a release date.

"An EA that is purely for funding" -- extremely unlikely. KSP is a "long tail" franchise. If TT wants ROI, they need to keep the franchise a going concern for years. If they felt that it was more profitable to add another delay than to go with EA now, that's what they would have done. A company like TT does EA for two reasons: to get a reading on how much interest there is in a franchise ("for X amount of kerbucks in a marketing campaign, how many EA sales do we get?") and secondly to turn the EA process itself into a marketing effort by getting it into a positive feeback loop, building a community, and eventually creating positive word-of-mouth, especially among influencers. A rocky start to the EA means nothing, it's a year-long campaign at least. 

"Wouldn't be surprised if the plug is pulled" -- TT treats KSP as a franchise, not even as an individual game. KSP2 is the keystone of that franchise. If they start to seriously worry that the game is going to tank/not get finished/the studio needs help getting it done, then they will put the studio on a tighter leash, appoint a bunch of tough producers known for Getting Stuff Done, and maybe do some ruthless featurectomies. They will only pull the plug if they determine that there isn't enough interest in the franchise. The current state of the EA barely even factors into that decision.

From TT's point of view, the more social media uproar there is over KSP2 at this point, the better -- it signals interest in the franchise. At this stage in the game, there really isn't any bad publicity: it doesn't matter what they say as long as they get the name of the game right. Besides which, redemption arcs are super compelling.

They will only pull the plug on KSP2 if people lose interest. As long as people signal interest, they will keep it going. 

(Oh, and, the state of the game? I would put it at about six months from production-ready with the current feature set. About a year or two from the full feature set, depending on what the state of readiness of those systems is -- I've no doubt they've been working on them, they're just disabled in the EA build.)

I think it’s important to remember KSP isn’t a massive IP. Including marketing, I think it’s reasonable to assume KSP 2 has cost somewhere in the tens to low-hundreds of millions of dollars. Evidently, it’s still years, and millions and millions of dollars, away from release. I wouldn’t be surprised if at this point their break-even on this game will be at 4-5 million copies, when all is said and done. That’s totally feasible IMO- if game development proceeds smoothly and efficiently and community interest is maintained.

The point I’m trying to make is: KSP 2 may not be a slam-dunk financial decision, and T2 may have better places to spend their money. ESPECIALLY if they feel there is a competence issue in the dev team. In tech, you are largely betting on people over product, especially when it comes to invention/doing something new, which as far as I know KSP 2 falls into that category (many new technical challenges that they will be the first to solve). That means KSP 2 is probably somewhere between a video game and a software tech project to them. They’re going to treat it slightly differently.

 

note: sorry if my wording sucks. I usually spend more time writing my posts but have a huge headache rn. Will come back and edit for clarity.

[MarcAbaddon]

The dynamic music is really nice, and I expect great things from the part of the game where Nertea was able to bring in his far/near future experience too. There are some promising features in the game, but the thing that is causing me the most worries right now is the maneuver node system. It just feels like something you must know their current node UI is bad if you ever played KSP 1 before.

[BobbyDausus]

8 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

The game was released on Friday, after what I assume where many sleepless nights to get some of the pre-release issues resolved.

It's Monday morning now. Relax.

Sleepless nights at the bar perhaps.If i'm trying to sell something to a community and i receive backlash on my product,i'm pretty sure i won't sleep till i fix the issue.Let the house burn,i won't move a muscle,it's weekend everybody

Edited February 27, 2023 by BobbyDausus

[Kerbart]

Just now, BobbyDausus said:

Sleepless nights at the bar perhaps.If i'm trying to sell something to a community and i receive backlash on my product,i'm pretty sure i won't sleep till i fix the issue.Let the house burn,i need to sleep

If things could be fixed overnight, yes. But they can't. This will take months, and burning out your devs before they even start fixing things will not achieve anything. Also, choices need to be made. What's more pressing? the "launching sideways" bug? Or the the "pause spam" bug? What needs work "right away" and what can wait? Just starting to fix things at random will do more harm then good.

This is Early Access. The product we got is not quite what was suggested, but here it is. Remember that the KSP1 journey was very similar and it was fun to be a part of that. Better to enjoy it (it's a game after all) than to be grumpy over it.

 

 

[BobbyDausus]

13 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

If things could be fixed overnight, yes. But they can't. This will take months, and burning out your devs before they even start fixing things will not achieve anything. Also, choices need to be made. What's more pressing? the "launching sideways" bug? Or the the "pause spam" bug? What needs work "right away" and what can wait? Just starting to fix things at random will do more harm then good.

This is Early Access. The product we got is not quite what was suggested, but here it is. Remember that the KSP1 journey was very similar and it was fun to be a part of that. Better to enjoy it (it's a game after all) than to be grumpy over it.

 

 

Priority is the performance since half of the players can't even play it.I would've pushed out a small optimization by removing what's causing the fps problem.

[modus]

56 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I'm torn in this discussion.   Up front, I am hoping the devs are where they should be:  at their desks working hard on patches and updates.  That is the only place they should be.  Period.

However, I have to ask what they have been doing for the last 4 years.  KSP2 was announced several years ago, and then delayed several times.  And what we finally got is less than what KSP already is.  There are controls in KSP that should have been migrated right off the bat (I'm looking at maneuver nodes, for starters) that don't exist or don't even have the most basic functionality.  Missing parts.  Major graphical bugs.  Some of this can't be helped...but it seems all they worked on for the last 4 years was textures and graphics.  Yes, we are told that they rewrote the physics engine, and I am quite positive that took time.  But was it really impossible for them to add a lot of the basic stuff that KSP already has?  They couldn't copy/paste/edit code (which i do on a daily basis)?

Even basic math makes me scratch my head.  A team of 50 people working 40 hours per week (which is way underestimated) comes out to 416,000 man-hours of development.  And we can't even get working maneuver nodes?

This really sums up my thoughts, thank you for that

Yes, early access, so yes, bugs. Yes, optimalisation issues. Yes, certain features missing. But this? Basic gameplay stuff flat out not working and/or much worse than ksp1? I wasn't expecting that.

That said, I'm playing and having fun, so there's that, at least.

[LameLefty]

15 minutes ago, BobbyDausus said:

Priority is the performance since half of the players can't even play it.I would've pushed out a small optimization by removing what's causing the fps problem.

Do you know what’s causing the fps problem? 

In reality, “the fps problem” is itself likely a symptom of several overlapping issues, not all of which affect every system, every craft file, every save file, or every flight/mission identically.  I’m sure if the devs could find a magic bullet in the code that fixes performance issues for everyone, they’d have already found it. 

[Bej Kerman]

2 hours ago, RayneCloud said:

Thanks @Periplethis is all been quite a ride and I just ran out of energy to keep  trying to explain things from a dev perspective. Intercept is not above or immune to criticism over this, and peoples feelings are valid and they're allowed to refund, not buy it, give feedback, compain, etc. I just hate the personal attacks on the character of the dev team, when actual dev ops usually has very little say in things. 

Completely this and what Periple said.

I keep seeing obviously bad faith forum members slamming the developers for saying "we killed the Kraken!" without even BOTHERING to check what they ACTUALLY said 

"We're going to kill the Kraken!"

Not "We killed the Kraken".

Now obviously I can't name and shame and even if I could I still wouldn't because it's just not a good thing to do, but I will say that some members need to take themselves down a peg.

33 minutes ago, BobbyDausus said:

Priority is the performance since half of the players can't even play it.I would've pushed out a small optimization by removing what's causing the fps problem.

"I would've pushed out a small optimization by removing what's causing the fps problem" is a disgustingly bad oversimplification of development.

[J.Random]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

Do you?

Go ride an elevator.

[MechBFP]

2 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

"I would've pushed out a small optimization by removing what's causing the fps problem" is a disgustingly bad oversimplification of development.

What, they can’t just remove the terrain?

[RayneCloud]

Just now, MechBFP said:

What, they can’t just remove the terrain?

That is one of the problems. Terrain LOD's and terrain occlusion culling. Under the KSC f or example is duplicate set of rendered terrain with scatter objects, ocean, terrain itself, etc. This isn't being occluded by the looks of it, and also by the looks of it, the KSC itself was placed down as a sort of prefab over top the PSQ generated terrain instead of integrated properly. I could be dead wrong, but this would nee quite a bit of work to fix up.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, MechBFP said:

What, they can’t just remove the terrain?

Funny you say that...

https://spacedock.info/mod/3256/LagRemover

"mods are going to fix the performance before the devs do!" 

[Kerbart]

16 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

I keep seeing obviously bad faith forum members slamming the developers for saying "we killed the Kraken!" without even BOTHERING to check what they ACTUALLY said 

"We're going to kill the Kraken!"

Not "We killed the Kraken".

Not to mention that "Kraken" seems to mean different things to different people. Some associate it with any glitch they see — good luck with that, don't expect that Kraken ever to be slain. You'll always find glitches, somewhere.

Others associate it with the original floating point errors, and ships suddenly glitching/bucking after reloads — a very specific bug we're seeing far, far less, even in KSP1, these days.

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Launching anything on Friday is.. questionable, to say the least, because as game dev you're facing a flood of feedback after the weekend. Unless you stayed at work.

 But I have seen community managers popping up here and there few times already, so they're with us.

Not sure it matter that much for an single player game.  

[The Aziz]

11 minutes ago, RayneCloud said:

This isn't being occluded by the looks of it, and also by the looks of it, the KSC itself was placed down as a sort of prefab over top the PSQ generated terrain instead of integrated properly.

In one of the early videos you can see devs modeling the KSC. It is indeed a one chunky prefab put in a place where normally there would be a bay. You can even see where it meets the terrain. 

I don't know if this is because modelling the terrain chunks is impossible to have it look like it does or what (though the KSP1 peninsula was beautifully flattened).

But I do have a lot of frame drops whenever I look at the surface of Kerbin, something that did not happen yet on the two moons I've been to. They both have smooth framerate.

[BobbyDausus]

24 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Completely this and what Periple said.

I keep seeing obviously bad faith forum members slamming the developers for saying "we killed the Kraken!" without even BOTHERING to check what they ACTUALLY said 

"We're going to kill the Kraken!"

Not "We killed the Kraken".

Now obviously I can't name and shame and even if I could I still wouldn't because it's just not a good thing to do, but I will say that some members need to take themselves down a peg.

"I would've pushed out a small optimization by removing what's causing the fps problem" is a disgustingly bad oversimplification of development.

But it is a simple proccess ,removing stuff is easier than fixing,but i guess that in order to make the game run better,they'd have to remove the planets and leave us in space basically :))

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, BobbyDausus said:

But it is a simple proccess

And you're speaking from 0 experience or research, presumably.

[Guest]

25 minutes ago, J.Random said:

Go ride an elevator.

Only if it's a SPACE ELEVATOR!