SPOILER-FREE: Data-mining yields good news

[tstein]

31 minutes ago, Periple said:

It would be nice if more studios let fans in earlier in the process so you can see how a game takes shape. It’s a lot of fun to see it come together. It would also dispel a lot of misconceptions.

You don’t usually make games one thing at a time. You make the whole thing and then near the end you make it work properly. Alphas are usually really rough! Sometimes even rougher than the vertical slice which you get earlier in the process, that one you do try to polish because you use it to get your production pipelines working which means you need to be able to get assets to game ready quality.

(And also to have something to show the publisher when you want more time and money )

That is a very bad practice that has been  erased in most of software industry but for some reason  game develop   did not evolve.  That way of doing things  result in  higher costs and less reliable software almost always.

[Periple]

24 minutes ago, tstein said:

That is a very bad practice that has been  erased in most of software industry but for some reason  game develop   did not evolve.  That way of doing things  result in  higher costs and less reliable software almost always.

I know! The game industry is terrible in many ways

[Bej Kerman]

3 hours ago, Alexoff said:

22 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

And this is what I've been trying to tell @Alexoff et al. KSP 2 is already big for how young it is, that's not even considering the roadmap features that the devs have been working on over the same three years as the core experience. Glad to hear it from professionals

Everything big in the game seems to be a roadmap with no dates. As I understand it, the game will become an adult in 18 years, when most likely no games will be interesting to me due to age. And today it is very bad, I am not going to give any advances to developers.

I'm probably the only one having trouble parsing this message, but do you mind rephrasing?

[omega2003]

5 hours ago, THE_KERBAL said:

It is a preview to the public that helps them find the underlying issues and develop the game we want.  Our negative feedback matters. I am confident that the game will be “playable” in the next months.  

How do you want to help them find the rarest bugs when you continually come up against an army of bugs that the developers must have found even before EA? Almost all bug reports made by players are probably useless because they describe problems that the developers could not ignore. Maybe in a few months the situation will be different.

[Alexoff]

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

I'm probably the only one having trouble parsing this message, but do you mind rephrasing?

What difference does it make, you are not going to change your mind, since many people tend to rationalize their actions committed on emotions

[K^2]

7 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

What difference does it make, you are not going to change your mind, since many people tend to rationalize their actions committed on emotions

Sometimes, not even actions. Sometimes, you just claim something's bad, because you're frustrated over some aspect of it, and then you don't want to take it back, so you keep finding reasons for why it's bad, whether or not it is so. Happens very often. I'm sure you can think of examples.

[Alexoff]

On 3/4/2023 at 2:28 AM, K^2 said:

Sometimes, not even actions. Sometimes, you just claim something's bad, because you're frustrated over some aspect of it, and then you don't want to take it back, so you keep finding reasons for why it's bad, whether or not it is so. Happens very often. I'm sure you can think of examples.

Yes, I know that when it comes to KSP2, everything turns out to be an exception. Well, I heard a lot of interesting things from you about KSP2 long before the release, has your opinion changed?

[K^2]

11 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Well, I heard a lot of interesting things from you about KSP2 long before the release, has your opinion changed?

Not particularly. We're seeing a good alpha build of the game. It's 4-6 months behind schedule compared to what I expected from a year ago, since I would have expected the game to ship in Dec-Jan, but a 3-year project slipping by 6 months isn't unusual. And as I expected, multiplayer is the part that's the most behind the schedule. The only part that surprised me is PD pushing for an early access in this state, which makes me think that some of the hurdles might have been hit relatively late, when the schedule has already been set.

Looking at the list of what I would call A bugs vs what the team is focusing on for the first patch, so long as that gets delivered in the next week or two, I think everything's on the right trajectory. If the game's still as difficult to play then as it currently is, I'll start worrying. Otherwise, about what I'd expect to see internally presented to publisher at 4-6 months away from game's release. You don't usually get to see a game in this state if you're not working on one, but that's what it looks like. Welcome to the sausage factory.

My only bit of real criticism is about some sort of a communication breakdown between marketing, community, and development teams. I don't know what they thought would happen, but doing a polished-looking launch trailer for the early access with no context whatsoever and then just dropping an alpha onto the Steam store has predictably led to confusion and frustration. People clearly expected an open beta type situation, and somebody should have done a better job to make sure that people know this ain't it.

tl;dr, the next patch is crucial. If it fixes the A bugs and gets us to a clean, stable alpha, everything's good. If it still has as many problems as it does now, bad news.

[Periple]

59 minutes ago, K^2 said:

tl;dr, the next patch is crucial. If it fixes the A bugs and gets us to a clean, stable alpha, everything's good. If it still has as many problems as it does now, bad news.

I'd be willing to be a little bit more lenient than that. If the first patch fixes most A bugs and doesn't introduce too many new ones, demonstrating tangible progress, then I think it'll be fine if it takes one or two more patches to get to a relatively clean and stable alpha. But if it's still in this state come April then yeah it'll be worrying!

[K^2]

25 minutes ago, Periple said:

If the first patch fixes most A bugs and doesn't introduce too many new ones, demonstrating tangible progress, then I think it'll be fine if it takes one or two more patches to get to a relatively clean and stable alpha.

The game-breaking bugs we see now should be relatively easy to fix, so long as they have a good foundation underneath. There are some inconveniences and design problems that might require rework based on feedback, but that's not what I consider game-breaking. Stuff like KSC teleporting to orbit is. And if that's just your basic origin relocation bug that got introduced by some of the work on MP, that should be a trivial fix now that it's known. If that sort of thing is hard to fix, that would be signaling underlying problems. And yes, I do suspect that there is still work being done on colonies, science, and so on. It's not necessarily all bug fixing. So if some new, unrelated bugs show up, that might not mean anything. But if we're seeing the same systems broken in new ways, it would be a significant red flag. Not an outright condemnation by itself, but an indicator that there is rot beneath the paint.

It sounds from bits and pieces reported elsewhere like a lot of the flimsiness of the rockets and the relocation bugs have been found and addressed. That still leaves some critical breakages in save system and vessel physics. These are the ones to watch for, IMO. They are a little less trivial, but also would be far easier to fix if there is a clean architecture these systems are built on, and a nightmare if it's really bad.

[MarcAbaddon]

I've mentioned it before but the most concerning bug to me is the one where your AP/PE change without input (and out of the atmosphere obviously), because it seems to track down to there being something wrong with the local coordinates. So basically the local origin bug you refer. Is that linked to MP? Because you need to use local origins anyway, but I suppose they might have changed the implementation to be more multiplayer friendly.

But regardless of how it was introduced, that's a fairly fundamental system to the entire game and one of the few systems that should have been very solid by now and it might be possibly very hard to fix depending on their implementation. 

There's also no way no one picked up on this before release (or if no one did, that's an issue in itself). 

[Alexoff]

On 3/7/2023 at 11:40 AM, K^2 said:

We're seeing a good alpha build of the game.

What is a bad alpha build in a game?

On 3/7/2023 at 11:40 AM, K^2 said:

3-year project slipping by 6 months isn't unusual

Three years? I've heard that development began in 2017, it's much more than 3 years.

On 3/7/2023 at 11:40 AM, K^2 said:

The only part that surprised me is PD pushing for an early access in this state

And what is the state? Good or bad? You have to decide somehow.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Alexoff said:

On 3/7/2023 at 8:40 AM, K^2 said:

3-year project slipping by 6 months isn't unusual

Three years? I've heard that development began in 2017, it's much more than 3 years.

3 years ago was when the aggressive takeover happened and development likely restarted.

[Alexoff]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

3 years ago was when the aggressive takeover happened and development likely restarted.

And what was taken from whom? Have there been any lawsuits? The stories from a couple of employees how they worked hard and the game was almost ready, and the evil corporation took it and destroyed everything look extremely unconvincing. In Alcatraz, too, almost all the innocently convicted were. I would like to see real data from several sources.

[Bej Kerman]

8 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

The stories from a couple of employees how they worked hard and the game was almost ready, and the evil corporation took it and destroyed everything look extremely unconvincing.

Because it conflicts with the "developers = evil scammers" narrative?

[Alexoff]

48 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

"developers = evil scammers"

Considering what kind of game fans have received, this narrative is quite plausible

[Bej Kerman]

4 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

54 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

"developers = evil scammers"

Considering what kind of game fans have received, this narrative is quite plausible

Because publishers totally haven't ever screwed well-meaning developers over before... 

[RocketRockington]

4 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

3 years ago was when the aggressive takeover happened and development likely restarted.

And then they announced they'd be shipping in late 2021.  So apparently either they thought they're such wunderkind devs that  they'd be able to build a new team and rebuild the game from scratch in 1.5 years - or they project wasn't actually restarted and the whole 'restart' aspect is a fan theory that only comes up to excuse faith in a project that's failed to deliver.

If its the first case - then wow, they are TERRIBLE at planning, just totally wildly insanely optimistic to believe they could get all the features of KSP1 and all the promised features done in such a short time frame.

If its the latter - which is much more likely the case - then they're also awful at planning and absolutely failed to see how much more they had to do and how long it would take.   But it's not as bad as the case above.

[VlonaldKerman]

3 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

And then they announced they'd be shipping in late 2021.  So apparently either they thought they're such wunderkind devs that  they'd be able to build a new team and rebuild the game from scratch in 1.5 years - or they project wasn't actually restarted and the whole 'restart' aspect is a fan theory that only comes up to excuse faith in a project that's failed to deliver.

If its the first case - then wow, they are TERRIBLE at planning, just totally wildly insanely optimistic to believe they could get all the features of KSP1 and all the promised features done in such a short time frame.

If its the latter - which is much more likely the case - then they're also awful at planning and absolutely failed to see how much more they had to do and how long it would take.   But it's not as bad as the case above.

I, too, am slightly unclear on the timing of what is supposed to have happened. What state was the project in, and when? What circumstances led to them announcing a release date in 2020, then delaying it several times, only to release an alpha build in 2023? I've never heard a clear explanation for how this supposedly happened. I'm open to hearing it, but I haven't seen anyone articulate a possible story clearly. 

Is anyone arguing that they had to start over in 2019, and that it was reasonable to announce a release date in 2020? And then they only initially delayed to 2021?

 

I'm not as down on the game as Rocket or Alexoff, but timeline issues like this, coupled with the pricing, prevent me from being totally bullish either.

 

[RocketRockington]

20 minutes ago, VlonaldKerman said:

I'm not as down on the game as Rocket or Alexoff, but timeline issues like this, coupled with the pricing, prevent me from being totally bullish either.

 

I'm not pessimistic just to be pessimistic.  I'm pessimistic because the pessimistic version is far more, to me, logical and likely. 

There's no consistent version of events where the devs (esp. in the form of Nate S) were relatively honest (not perfect honesty, I still expect normal amounts of spin), the game was consistently developed in a professional manner, the team is not dysfunctional, and the only issues were COVID and the buyout.   

They have to do backflips to explain how Star Theory didn't utterly drop the ball (because many of the devs are Star theory vets) but somehow all the work Star Theory did couldn't be salvaged, so it's reasonable for the game to only have been developed over the course of 3 years. 

Most positive theories also rely on a combination of the 'mystery build' - this dev build that is so much better than what was released that had semi-functional colonies and multiplayer that the devs could enjoy but couldn't be released + the idea the devs were forced to release early through no fault of their own  - despite the fact that the game was announced to release so many times.

This reeks of wishful thinking.   But it's the only version they can believe in to hope that the developer team is not dysfunctional - despite the state of the release - and will deliver the game they hope for in a reasonable time frame.

Edited March 9, 2023 by RocketRockington

[K^2]

11 hours ago, Alexoff said:

What is a bad alpha build in a game?

Generally, a bad alpha is the one where some content is consistently unplayable. If a game-crashing bug would happen every time you approached Duna, for example, that'd be a good example of a bug that prevents you from exploring all of the game's content. If it only happens sometimes, that's par for the alpha.

We have access to a good cross-section of parts, most identical to KSP, and pretty much all of the new tech features, save for multiplayer. This is sufficient to demonstrate what the game loop can be like, even if numerous bugs make it too frustrating for some people to play at this time. Again, goal of alpha isn't a nearly-playable game. That's what a beta is.

11 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Three years? I've heard that development began in 2017, it's much more than 3 years.

This is like saying that Duke Nukem Forever was developed for 14 years. Star Theory went defunct. It never made the game they started in 2017. Development on KSP2 that we are seeing now started in 2020. There has been some asset reuse, but if you go by that metric, KSP2 has been in development since 2010, because there are some assets that have been upresed from the original KSP as well. This isn't how development timelines work, though. Intercept started production of KSP2 in 2020.

If you continue arguing that we should be counting 2017, then start by explaining why we aren't counting from 2010. Or 2005, with first release of Unity. Or 1962, when Steve Russel made Spacewar! for PDP-1. Because, clearly, some concepts from that game have been reused in KSP2.

11 hours ago, Alexoff said:

And what is the state? Good or bad? You have to decide somehow.

Good state for an alpha, bad state for a public release with a marketing push. I'm enjoying it, but I enjoyed getting HL2 leak to work on my PC, because that's what I do with games. I tinker. Most people want a finished product. If a company starts selling access to something in an alpha stage, I don't think there's a problem with it, but I think better warning to people would have been nice. Some KSP fans clearly had different expectations of this early access. In either case, it's not a problem with how the game's being made. Just with how it's presented to the general public.

[VlonaldKerman]

5 hours ago, K^2 said:

Development on KSP2 that we are seeing now started in 2020.

What did they have at the time that they announced the game in 2019? They said it would release in 2020. You're saying they restarted right before the other game was close to releasing/being done?

[VlonaldKerman]

On 3/7/2023 at 5:45 AM, MarcAbaddon said:

So basically the local origin bug you refer.

I think this could also have to do with interstellar scales. I think part of their solution to the problem of the massive distances is to shift the "origin" around. I could be wrong, though. 

[MarcAbaddon]

5 minutes ago, VlonaldKerman said:

I think this could also have to do with interstellar scales. I think part of their solution to the problem of the massive distances is to shift the "origin" around. I could be wrong, though. 

Yeah, that is the same thing, just phrased it differently. This is really one of the few bugs that worries (as I am sure I said already a lot elsewhere) since this is the kind of fundamental system where you want to have a solid proof of concept version that is working properly early in the process. So shifting AP and PE seems weird at this stage.

[Datau03]

On 3/2/2023 at 2:32 AM, VlonaldKerman said:

 I just came across this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/11caznb/psa_from_a_dataminer_stop_calling_the_devs_lazy/, in which a person claims to have found a lot of promising things in the code. The spoiler-free, tldr, is this:

Many (most? all?) of the key selling-point features of KSP 2 are in fact present in the code of the current build in an unfinished, but relatively advanced state. It seems as though the intention was to not have an early access, but a full release, at some point in the future, and thus, all of these features (including the ones in the current build) were worked on simultaneously, with the intention of them all being finished around the same time. Presumably, at some point before last October, an edict from T2 came down that something was to be released by March 2023, and so they scrambled to finish certain features more in order to push out a premature EA release. In other words: contrary to many other EA releases, which focus on perfecting more the core gameplay experience before touching the other, more advanced features, in order to release into EA in a timely manner, the intention wasn't, until recently, to release an EA at all, and so a smaller proportion of the devs' time was spent on the stuff that we are playing with now than is typical of EA releases.

There is also another thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/11b8s6f/comment/j9wocuy/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share in which someone claims to have found that the physics engine in KSP 2 has in fact been rewritten, from scratch.

Please correct me if I've made any inaccuracies here- I wrote this up as quickly as I could after coming upon this information. If it's true, I think it's important for this content to be up on the forum, as many people, myself included, prefer this forum over the other places in which KSP 2 is discussed, and this information gives me huge optimism for the game moving forward, when I was just feeling the most pessimistic that I've ever felt about KSP 2's future.

It's unfortunate that it's not really feasible for the devs to come clean about the bureaucratic process that seems to have led to this PR meltdown and botched release, but hopefully we as a community can put the pieces of the puzzle together and spread awareness of the facts concerning how the release came to be, in its current state. That is, assuming these are the facts.

 

Am I wrong? Missing information? Not allowed to discuss things like datamining on this forum? Please let me know before too many people get the wrong ideas! As far as I know, I haven't made any factual errors, but information is spread about in so many places, and I'm currently too busy to do full on journalism. 

GODSPEED KSP 2!!!  

 

 

100% agree, very well said

Edited March 9, 2023 by Datau03