Week One Adventures

[Bej Kerman]

2 minutes ago, Temeriki said:

Ksp1 early access:  Hey guys heres our buggy game at a reasonable price, please break it and let us know how you broke it so we can try to fix it, we will most likely break it more trying to fix it and repeat over and over while we all have a blast so please be patient.  Since you helped us fund the game super early were gonna give you all future dlc for free cause you guys are awesome and we love our community.  Hey modders, heres some early release update candidates so you can try to get your mods current when a new update drops so everyone can have as much fun as possible.

Ksp2 early access:  Heres a AAA priced pile of poop, youll get updates when we think their ready, so just shut up and pay us to QA our releases whenever we get around to them cause despite us saying we wanted to recreate the amazingness that was ksp1 community engadgement we have no plans on actually doing so.  Hey modders, theres no sdk and no documentation, well get around to it whenever, deal with it.



Something something money changes people I guess.

A strawman of the most egregious type.

[MARL_Mk1]

13 hours ago, Pickelhaube808 said:

I am so far impressed to see that I got an emailed response back from a real person after submitting bugs and feedback in and seeing many of those end up on this upcoming changelog. I was most likely not the sole discoverer for any single bug in particular, but it is still a nice feeling. It is also impressive to see an email from a real person when I surmise that everyone over there is running around with their hair on fire and taking flak from all sides...

 

Which feedback/bug system did you mainly use for those? I'm currently sending them via the launcher, but the launcher only says "You can close the window now" so I don't know if they're being sent properly lol

[Temeriki]

2 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

A strawman of the most egregious type.

You wouldnt understand cause you werent around way back when.  Some of us were there, 3000 (12) years ago when updates were fast and loose and modders got priority and early access to updates cause the community was actively engaged.

 

[Delay]

2 minutes ago, Temeriki said:

Some of us were there, 3000 (12) years ago when updates were fast and loose and modders got priority and early access to updates cause the community was actively engaged.

 

Quote

Sure, but if I remember correctly, the first version of KSP 1 had a... dare I say, pathetically tiny scope in comparison to what the game evolved into.

[MARL_Mk1]

58 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Hail.

That's such a cop-out lmao. "It's still on the website", yeah sure it is buddy, just not on the front facing part of it anymore, only where the diehard fans are. I'm not saying they're evil, I'm saying they clearly realized they uhm... have "overstated" a lot in their dev blogs and it'll be better to take some of that stuff off a place that was 1 button away from the front page.

 

A risk of the job. That's why you hire PR people to manage the communication with your fanbase.

I fail to see any further context other than Paul describing his job, which he hasn't yet fulfilled based on what's publicly available. KSP2 is not performant, stable, neither did it arrive on time. The second quote has even tighter context, as it directly states their view for the launch product, which they've completely failed to meet.

Saying "muh context" without providing what you understand as the context doesn't make a very clear argument, specially because I took the job of quoting the previous and following sentence and not just the highlighted bit.

You got your argument handed back in a silver platter. The posts are still there. None is deleted and a simple Google search will throw them up in the first page.

The convo topic is now derailing with pride conservation as the only goal.

[Bej Kerman]

10 minutes ago, Temeriki said:

16 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

A strawman of the most egregious type.

You wouldnt understand cause you werent around way back when.  Some of us were there, 3000 (12) years ago when updates were fast and loose and modders got priority and early access to updates cause the community was actively engaged.

I've been playing the game since 0.18 and Squad squandered most of its potential on focusing on novelty features rather than refining the core of the game. Your comparison is, frankly, a shallow, dishonest and lazy analysis of the situation. You lying about the devs' attitude to receiving bug reports is all I need to hear from you. And, just remember, if the developers didn't do an EA, they'd have continued all the way until the 1.0 launch thinking this stinking community liked the wobbly rockets of KSP 1. <s> But do continue banging on about how Intercept are evil demons who just want money and Squad are just innocent developers who can only do right and didn't do a terrible job on KSP 1, how they didn't have tens of thousands of bug reports piling on while they continued to add superficial features that only held novelty value. </s>

[The Aziz]

41 minutes ago, Temeriki said:

please break it and let us know how you broke it so we can try to fix it, we will most likely break it more trying to fix it and repeat over and over while we all have a blast so please be patient. 

Isn't that exactly what's happening now?

41 minutes ago, Temeriki said:

Since you helped us fund the game super early were gonna give you all future dlc for free cause you guys are awesome and we love our community. 

A terrible business decision, that was.

41 minutes ago, Temeriki said:

Hey modders, heres some early release update candidates so you can try to get your mods current when a new update drops so everyone can have as much fun as possible.

Did that happen within a week of first public release?

41 minutes ago, Temeriki said:

youll get updates when we think their ready

You'll*, they're*
But, yes, that's kinda how it works? Are they supposed to release unready updates?

41 minutes ago, Temeriki said:

despite us saying we wanted to recreate the amazingness that was ksp1 community engadgement we have no plans on actually doing so

[citation needed]

[0111narwhalz]

53 minutes ago, Temeriki said:

Since you helped us fund the game super early were gonna give you all future dlc for free cause you guys are awesome and we love our community.

No, that was because the early EULA had an insane clause that promised all future content for free. They were legally obligated to give future DLC for free, but as soon as they acquired legal advice that clause evaporated (which is why the cutoff is when it is).

[Temeriki]

15 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

I've been playing the game since 0.18 and Squad squandered most of its potential on focusing on novelty features rather than refining the core of the game. Your comparison is, frankly, a shallow, dishonest and lazy analysis of the situation. You lying about the devs' attitude to receiving bug reports is all I need to hear from you. And, just remember, if the developers didn't do an EA, they'd have continued all the way until the 1.0 launch thinking this stinking community liked the wobbly rockets of KSP 1. <s> But do continue banging on about how Intercept are evil demons who just want money and Squad are just innocent developers who can only do right and didn't do a terrible job on KSP 1, how they didn't have tens of thousands of bug reports piling on while they continued to add superficial features that only held novelty value. </s>

Ive been playing since it was free, you came in around the first major rewrite for a unity update.

Squad screwed over its developers on pay and had a few mass cullings when devs started pushing back on it.  I never claimed they were innocent but were not talking about squad and their evilness, were talking about how squad handled early access.  And yeah I remember bugs piling up, I also remember when they were able to port the game over to the next version of unity how it fixed lots of them (and broke other things).  I also remember the devs talking about how bugs were related to the specific version of unity and how work was being done on updates since devs talked to the community constantly.

Ksp1 went through like 3-4 versions of unity each requiring rewrites of huge chunk of the base game, these coincided with the periods of time where update cadence slowed.  But again the devs kept the community updated on the status of the rewrites.  During those big rewrite times updates tended to include "superficial features" as you said.

[Klapaucius]

7 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Just by the looking at it, I can. The environments are much prettier, there's no volumetric clouds in the old one, planets are no longer just high res reskins but are pretty much completely new, the textures have higher resolution, the plumes are better, so is the steam cloud on the launchpad, Kerbal animations are much better... There's probably much more than that.

This whole thread:  

 

[Temeriki]

1 minute ago, 0111narwhalz said:

No, that was because the early EULA had an insane clause that promised all future content for free. They were legally obligated to give future DLC for free, but as soon as they acquired legal advice that clause evaporated (which is why the cutoff is when it is).

It only seems insane cause you are used to getting dumped on by publishers.  We had no reason to trust squad way back when, they were an advertising company who let an employee make a game through said advertising company so they sweetened the pot to get people to buy in early and fund the development.  The clause disappeared in like 2013 two years after development started.

[sunnyssk]

15 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

Since I have asked similar questions about other games in the past, I have a lot of empathy for this perspective. Now I must do my penance by explaining what it looks like from the other side!

I'm sure one of our producers could give you a more precise answer, but here's the general idea: every time we release an update, we essentially take a snapshot build of the game and then test it like crazy. That uses up a huge amount of QA bandwidth, and for a game like KSP2 it really is a non-trivial amount of work to test it in a way that approximates the range of activities that the entire community might get up to in the game. As they test that snapshot build, they sometimes discover bugs. Many of them (hopefully most of them) will be known bugs that are already tracked and that we're already working on. But some of these bugs might actually be new bugs that have emerged since the last update. Those point to unintended outcomes related to recent checkins -- i.e. by fixing one problem, we have created a new problem. We are trying very hard to hold ourselves to the standard of "the game should get better with every update," and that means that we take this sort of bug very seriously. This means that when such a bug arises, production and engineering go over these issues with a fine-tooth comb and figure out what broke, and then additional fixes are applied to the build until it's in a good state.

Now, as you may have noticed, getting a candidate build to a level of quality that it's safe to release involves a lot of coordinated activity among a lot of people who also need to be advancing other areas of the game (for example bringing about perf improvements or working on roadmap features). Our update cadence is therefore carefully balanced against our need to keep pushing the entire game forward toward 1.0.  Of course I would love to drop an update every day like the update Easter Bunny, but the reality is that each update comes with a cost, and we want to have the bandwidth to work on cool stuff like Colonies and Interstellar too. With that in mind, and because we want each update to contain lots of meaningful improvements, we can't release rapid-fire updates. HarvesteR was amazing and deserves his godlike status in this community, and I remember hanging on to his every post back when he was updating KSP. But I suspect that he was also constrained by similar production realities. 

All that said, I think it's safe to say that our key focus today is to correct issues that affect the quality of gameplay, which means performance bugs, bugs that stop some players from being able to play the game at all, bugs that result in loss of vehicle, bugs that result in mission failure, bugs that result in the game crashing, and bugs that ruin campaign saves. When such fixes are complete, we do not intend to sit on them for a long time. One of life's great frustrations is to read a complaint about a bug online and know that it's been fixed internally. As long as the wait between updates may feel on the outside, let me assure you that it feels even longer on the inside! 

Now @nestoris going to yell at me for speaking about this topic in a sloppy fashion, and I encourage him to join me in this thread if he'd like to add more to my explanation. I hope this at least gives you some sense of the environment within which our task assignments take place.   

There would always be controversies against this topic, but I would still like to share some of my thoughts as a part of the community who knows little about the details of the development ... I could be wrong but I don't think these thoughts could be completely nonsense:

• It is everyone's goal to eliminate the unexpected behaviors before publishing something, but in large systems this can be unrealistic. KSP 1 has been released for about 8 years from now and there was still a patch/bugfix last November. Presumably if you want to make KSP 2 perfect it would be another 8 years - no one can wait a single patch for such a long time. A more practical way might be updating in a more frequent manner and optimize iteratively.
• In KSP 2 we have much more features on the way, and thus we can expect more bugs ahead. By sending out patches every several weeks it can be hard to imagine this game leaving the EA stage within several years.
• There are different levels of bugs. The most serious ones at present are significantly degrading the gameplay experience: orbit is unstable upon time warp / EVA, velocities are predicted incorrectly upon exiting SOI of some celestial bodies ... for bugfixes against these issues every minute counts. No one can expect a complete journey to & from Minmus without S/L after a week of the release, and this is even just a satellite around Kerbin. It's okay if we don't have every single string translated correctly in the first week, but it can be lethal for a simulator if it does not have its physics working in a proper manner for a week or more - which is happening.
• The community is way larger than a QA team. It certainly cannot do whatever a QA team could do, but on certain aspects it's way more efficient - that's why we have EA. But to fully utilize this property you would be in need of active responses to it. No player would stay 24/7 in the forum waiting for a solution or update for a single bug uncovered. Nor will a player report similar things to you twice - until a new release is available and the issue still unresolved. If the input from the community is of importance, then please consider more communications and updates. We don't have IT tickets, so the only way to confirm the problem is really being solved is by seeing it eliminated in the coming updates.

Speed is not everything but it is at least not weighed less than quality - at least for significant bug fixes.

Comments are welcomed towards my words above.

[RockyTV]

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

I've been playing the game since 0.18 and Squad squandered most of its potential on focusing on novelty features rather than refining the core of the game. Your comparison is, frankly, a shallow, dishonest and lazy analysis of the situation. You lying about the devs' attitude to receiving bug reports is all I need to hear from you. And, just remember, if the developers didn't do an EA, they'd have continued all the way until the 1.0 launch thinking this stinking community liked the wobbly rockets of KSP 1. <s> But do continue banging on about how Intercept are evil demons who just want money and Squad are just innocent developers who can only do right and didn't do a terrible job on KSP 1, how they didn't have tens of thousands of bug reports piling on while they continued to add superficial features that only held novelty value. </s>

Being the devil's advocate here, SQUAD was a media-focused company and had no experience at all with software dev.

22 minutes ago, sunnyssk said:

There would always be controversies against this topic, but I would still like to share some of my thoughts as a part of the community who knows little about the details of the development ... I could be wrong but I don't think these thoughts could be completely nonsense:

• It is everyone's goal to eliminate the unexpected behaviors before publishing something, but in large systems this can be unrealistic. KSP 1 has been released for about 8 years from now and there was still a patch/bugfix last November. Presumably if you want to make KSP 2 perfect it would be another 8 years - no one can wait a single patch for such a long time. A more practical way might be updating in a more frequent manner and optimize iteratively.
• In KSP 2 we have much more features on the way, and thus we can expect more bugs ahead. By sending out patches every several weeks it can be hard to imagine this game leaving the EA stage within several years.
• There are different levels of bugs. The most serious ones at present are significantly degrading the gameplay experience: orbit is unstable upon time warp / EVA, velocities are predicted incorrectly upon exiting SOI of some celestial bodies ... for bugfixes against these issues every minute counts. No one can expect a complete journey to & from Minmus without S/L after a week of the release, and this is even just a satellite around Kerbin. It's okay if we don't have every single string translated correctly in the first week, but it can be lethal for a simulator if it does not have its physics working in a proper manner for a week or more - which is happening.
• The community is way larger than a QA team. It certainly cannot do whatever a QA team could do, but on certain aspects it's way more efficient - that's why we have EA. But to fully utilize this property you would be in need of active responses to it. No player would stay 24/7 in the forum waiting for a solution or update for a single bug uncovered. Nor will a player report similar things to you twice - until a new release is available and the issue still unresolved. If the input from the community is of importance, then please consider more communications and updates. We don't have IT tickets, so the only way to confirm the problem is really being solved is by seeing it eliminated in the coming updates.

Speed is not everything but it is at least not weighed less than quality - at least for significant bug fixes.

Comments are welcomed towards my words above.

The problem is not that we want KSP2 to be completely polished. It's the fact they had to delay the release 3 times, plus the feedback they received from the people they invited to test the game a couple of weeks before the EA release, combined with the fact that they are now behind a multi-billion dollar publisher, to have gamebreaking bugs on launch day and not releasing fixes for bugs that have been around for almost a month now (if you consider the time when they did the ESA playtest event). Game was locked for release? Okay, but do the smart move and release a day-0/day-1 patch fixing some bugs that were pointed out a couple of weeks before.

This is what an early access release is for, something that IG / PD don't seem to understand. There will be bugs? Yes, of course, no one is complaining about that. We just don't think it's fair to charge almost the full price of a AAA game for early access and not have frequent patches to fix game breaking bugs that the company knew about them for quite some time now. EA is made for testing, but they are treating it as if it was a full release, withholding patches to be released just when they have "enough" content or bugfixes.

Edited March 4, 2023 by RockyTV

[Delay]

18 minutes ago, RockyTV said:

It's the fact they had to delay the release 3 times

...the timeline becoming more realistic each time...

18 minutes ago, RockyTV said:

plus the feedback they received from the people they invited to test the game a couple of weeks before the EA release

Cannot comment on this.

18 minutes ago, RockyTV said:

combined with the fact that they are now behind a multi-billion dollar publisher

That doesn't mean they have access to that budget or anything. Why are you bringing it up?

18 minutes ago, RockyTV said:

to have gamebreaking bugs on launch day and not releasing fixes for bugs that have been around for almost a month now

Fixing bugs can take a while. Later on you suggest zero-day fixes as if that's easy, much less possible with a program of this complexity.

18 minutes ago, RockyTV said:

We just don't think it's fair to charge almost the full price of a AAA game for early access

Hey, I can agree with that!

18 minutes ago, RockyTV said:

and not have frequent patches to fix game breaking bugs that the company knew about them for quite some time now.

... never mind.

We've just entered the second week of early access. The second. Week. If a fix is around in another week's time or so I'd still consider that pretty rapid, especially considering the scope of the update. It doesn't just fix one or two bugs, it promises to fix quite a lot of them from various parts of the game, all while bringing performance improvements, too!

What kind of superhuman update frequency are you expecting? It can't be weekly or bi-weekly as that seems to be the schedule right now.
Daily updates? Hourly, perhaps? It's ridiculous, the way you're arguing right now you might've had more success with delaying EA by a few weeks.

Edited March 4, 2023 by Delay

[ShadowZone]

5 hours ago, ski23 said:

At most software development companies I’ve worked at, the answer to this is a crap ton of automated tests that ensure new changes don’t break existing features. This means that you have hardly any manual/smoke testing that needs done. Do you not have any automated testing in place? It would probably help avoid a lot of regressions and human time spent testing. 

This is something I have thought about a lot lately and honestly, I don't see a meaningful way to automate video game testing.

How do you automate a game like KSP2 that gives players immense freedom to build and fly ships? Okay, the vehicles are all .json files, so are the save games. So, maybe build something that makes vehicles with all possible part combinations, put those in different game states (orbit, landed etc) and check the values written into the save file .json against expected values?
Even then you won't be able to catch all possibilities.

Then there are the UI bugs, for instance orbital lines disappearing. How would you automate that? Coming from a few web products, I know there are frameworks like Selenium that offer UI testing that will even provide a generated screenshot to a bug report filed by it. But you can easily script tests for web products, since HTML, JavaScript etc are standardized and widely understood. A custom built UI on the other hand? I don't know how that should work...

Yes, I know Unity has some test automation available, but I have no idea how deep it goes or if it would be even applicable to a game like KSP2.

Would love to hear from game developers or test engineers how one could solve this.
 

[DancZer]

2 minutes ago, ShadowZone said:

This is something I have thought about a lot lately and honestly, I don't see a meaningful way to automate video game testing.

How do you automate a game like KSP2 that gives players immense freedom to build and fly ships? Okay, the vehicles are all .json files, so are the save games. So, maybe build something that makes vehicles with all possible part combinations, put those in different game states (orbit, landed etc) and check the values written into the save file .json against expected values?
Even then you won't be able to catch all possibilities.

Then there are the UI bugs, for instance orbital lines disappearing. How would you automate that? Coming from a few web products, I know there are frameworks like Selenium that offer UI testing that will even provide a generated screenshot to a bug report filed by it. But you can easily script tests for web products, since HTML, JavaScript etc are standardized and widely understood. A custom built UI on the other hand? I don't know how that should work...

Yes, I know Unity has some test automation available, but I have no idea how deep it goes or if it would be even applicable to a game like KSP2.

Would love to hear from game developers or test engineers how one could solve this.
 

Not mentioning, that automated testing is developing a software for a software (it is lot of effort to do it good, because it could also have bugs). There are methods like bots or monkey testing, but best would be to teach an OpenAI to play the game. With these methods you can find performance or CTD issues, but you can't find usability, design or UI issues. 

[Casellina X]

1 minute ago, ShadowZone said:

This is something I have thought about a lot lately and honestly, I don't see a meaningful way to automate video game testing.

I think I recall a GDC presentation about Ubisoft developers coming up with a rules driven validator to confirm that changes to their procedural generation didn't do silly things like places lanterns on top of ladders. Of course, something like this is non-trivial and takes a lot of time to set up, get right, and comfortably integrate into the workflow.

[MechBFP]

Automated testing for a video game (other than for very specific use cases) is a bit of a fools-errand because video games simply don't sell for the kinda $$$ that would justify it from a cost or time perspective.

Edited March 4, 2023 by MechBFP

[DrKerbalMD]

So, serious question: what's going on with the physics simulation?  How did we go from "our ultimate goal is to kill the Kraken" to the Kraken being alive, well, and angrier than ever?

To put a finer point on it:

1. What did the dev team do which led Tom to believe the Kraken could and would be tamed?
2. Why didn't it work?
3. What's the plan to wrestle the Kraken to the ground for good?

Edited March 5, 2023 by DrKerbalMD

[RockyTV]

35 minutes ago, Delay said:

...the timeline becoming more realistic each time...

Cannot comment on this.

That doesn't mean they have access to that budget or anything. Why are you bringing it up?

Fixing bugs can take a while. Later on you suggest zero-day fixes as if that's easy, much less possible with a program of this complexity.

Hey, I can agree with that!

... never mind.

We've just entered the second week of early access. The second. Week. If a fix is around in another week's time or so I'd still consider that pretty rapid, especially considering the scope of the update. It doesn't just fix one or two bugs, it promises to fix quite a lot of them from various parts of the game, all while bringing performance improvements, too!

What kind of superhuman update frequency are you expecting? It can't be weekly or bi-weekly as that seems to be the schedule right now.
Daily updates? Hourly, perhaps? It's ridiculous, the way you're arguing right now you might've had more success with delaying EA by a few weeks.

Except that the OP says the fixes are at least a couple of weeks away, by the time they are released the game will have reached 3 weeks or a month into EA before receiving its first patch.

If you think releasing a patch in a couple of days after release is superhuman frequency, I don't know what to tell you. As we've mentioned before, HarvesteR managed to pull it off with a much smaller team and with less resources than Take2 can give PD/IG. And yes, I keep bringing it up because they supposedly can ask for more resources if needed, pretty sure Take2 isn't just making IG crunch and receive a lot of profit from their hardwork while IG doesn't get to enjoy the benefits of having a triple-A publisher backing them.

Other triple-A games that were launched into EA had patches just a few days after release, it didn't take long, and if they were game breaking bugs they would have the top priority. What I mentioned about a day-0 patch is simple, if the game was locked for release, you can work on a patch, release the game, if everything went well, release the patch you've been working on for the past weeks. But it doesn't seem like IG was working on anything after the launch and it looks like they just found out about the bugs after the EA release. Which brings to another point, how come their QA team didn't pick up the issues most players are having now? Do they even have a QA team? Maybe their QA team needs to realize they actually need to play the game instead of just checking if the game "works".
 

[Pickelhaube808]

2 hours ago, MARL_Mk1 said:

Which feedback/bug system did you mainly use for those? I'm currently sending them via the launcher, but the launcher only says "You can close the window now" so I don't know if they're being sent properly lol

Directly emailed the support email from the site and titled it "(current build number for KSP2) Bugs + Feedback"

 

Included in the email was screenshots of every bug I found and an explanation of what and how it happened, along with some positive feedback thrown in for the things that work.

[0111narwhalz]

I know Factorio has extensive automated tests, but that is a game about automation. A bit of a different situation. All the same, there are potential automated tests for some things, like the dV calculator. It's just a matter of what is worthwhile.

[Delay]

27 minutes ago, DrKerbalMD said:

How did we go from "our ultimate goal is to kill the Kraken" to the Kraken being alive, well, and angrier than ever?

One's a goal, the other is a current state.

28 minutes ago, RockyTV said:

As we've mentioned before, HarvesteR managed to pull it off with a much smaller team and with less resources than Take2 can give PD/IG.

HarvesteR also had a game of much smaller scope to deal with, a game where Kerbin didn't even orbit a bright singularity in the sky and spacecraft would break apart because they moved a little too quickly. Heck, Kerbin was flat at one point!

28 minutes ago, RockyTV said:

Which brings to another point, how come their QA team didn't pick up the issues most players are having now? Do they even have a QA team? Maybe their QA team needs to realize they actually need to play the game instead of just checking if the game "works".

Are you talking about KSP 1 or 2?

[Spiffa]

Great work guys, glad to see that you care so much about your community and are getting right to work on making this game into something everyone can enjoy!

[PDCWolf]

2 hours ago, MARL_Mk1 said:

You got your argument handed back in a silver platter. The posts are still there. None is deleted and a simple Google search will throw them up in the first page.

The convo topic is now derailing with pride conservation as the only goal.

Nah, that's just the same 10 people club that are chronically in the forums thinking they know some magic context they refuse to mention whilst calling you names under the mod's eyes.

Most people look at the steam store page, and then at the website, which is where the posts were deleted from. This forum is barely a wasteland of the same 100 people and has been that way for the past 5 or so years since the KSP1 modding scene fell off.