TackleMcClean Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 7 hours ago, Nate Simpson said: [...] like the update Easter Bunny [...] Well we could dream, still!? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robgraham Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 7 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. Nate, To be fair one of the advantages that Harv had especially in the early days was that he could just push builds out and get people to test them, that is part and parcel of it being Early Access, stop and look at the original build cadence some times we got multiple builds in a day (especailly with the early pre 0.13 release) because they realised that in part because it was Early Access / Alpha product that people wanted fixes NOW not a month down the line. I know (having done it) how normal AAA testing happens, builds get done, they get tested by the devs as it gets coded typically on a nightly build then gets put over to testers to check for major bugs then eventually a code free, a final 'RC build' that then goes to QA for final testing and 'approval' from the higher ups and then pushed, which is what you've described above. The issue with that is it's fine for when your doing a game that is complete and the 'bugs' might be a list of things that are impacting one or two people, but when somethings a buggy EA mess that has a community screaming that it is broken and needs hotfixes, saying nope just wait is border line slapping the fans and purchasers in the face (in my opinion), especially when you could easily have a 'release' and a preview build in the steam list with preview being more rapid fire updates that get pushed to release in one big hit. What I think has a lot of people upset at the moment is that you (the company, not you personally) have charged us (the players) a lot of money for a EA product when most things in this type of state are 1/2 the price, your asking near full release AAA price and then unlike when we had the product for free or even 7$ we are being told 'no, your gonna have to wait for patches for weeks at a time'. Stop and look at how that is likely to be seen by the community. Harvester and his small group of programmers could throw out at times 4 versions in as little as a few days when it was nothing but really a love project at the time, while the company formed around literally making the sequel can't and then wonder why the community is 'well why?'. I do work in the industry and even I am wondering, WHY a studio formed specifically for this purpose can't match a few guys working as their parent company lets them from time to time could. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mushylog Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 Based on what I read, on both the KSP2 team and the people complaining, I think the team is going to make things a lot better, and I think the players who are deeply disappointed (haven't seen that many personally, just one or two on Steam refunding the game) just expected too much - or maybe they didn't realize it was an Early access... And to be fair I was surprised too, to see that it was EA! I actually thought it was done and finished. I wasn't expecting much, in fact I had no idea what to expect, I just know that the latest trailer really hyped me up! Especially with that last scene with all these giant space crafts - the cinematic is just mind blowing, and the song emphasizes it all! The feeling of exploration and a brighter future ahead. Anyway, all this to say that I trust the team! I made the decision the pay for the game at this stage; it's like a bet. And I think KSP2 has more to lose on it than I do. Fifty bucks come and go. Meanwhile, I'm having a lot of fun with the game, even with the bugs haha and especially with streamers I discovered, such as Billy Winn Jr, who just has a lot of fun with the game even when he fails! It's just such a positive community, I just want to play the game every day! 40.5 hours of game time, gotta go make that number grow now! Bye! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emiliofloris Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 2 hours ago, Nate Simpson said: We chose that song exactly because it perfectly sums up both the experience of playing and making this game. I'm so happy that everybody understood our meaning! Glad to hear you are happy. It has become so rare to see happy people these days, especially in the KSP community. One quick question: Could you name any specific aspects that actually got better since the "first real gameplay" video was released three years ago? Just to silence the naysayers. Also, I would really love to know the ratio between the respective budgets for marketing and QA and how you managed to do all that crazy testing without being able to save the state of the game reliably. Being somewhat involved in software testing myself, I would love to be inspired by your innovative methods and techniques! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Runkleman Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 14 hours ago, Nate Simpson said: Hang in there, we’re working very hard on this right now! Thanks for the info Nate. I think it's safe to say, "We know you are". The vast majority of users understand what early access entails. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Aziz Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 13 minutes ago, emiliofloris said: Could you name any specific aspects that actually got better since the "first real gameplay" video was released three years ago? 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ExtremerBG Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 15 hours ago, Nate Simpson said: own in more detail in our patch notes when the update goes out): Hello Nate! Can you give us any updates on the Re-entry heating and thermal systems? Will they be turned on in this patch or extra time is needed to tweak them more? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Navoan Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 This kind of communication is great. I've been trying to enjoy the game but some of the bugs listed (and not) are making it quite difficult, really hoping this first round of patching helps the biggest issues. Performance isn't even the biggest issue, but the crashes and bug when in VAB, decouplers not working making a whole missions progress mute. But really, keep up the good work. The game will eventually get where it needs to be, even if it's a rocky start. Heads up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RayneCloud Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 9 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. I was there with him, learning from him, and you'd be 100% correct Nate, there were things the team dealt with regarding builds even back then including builds failing outright. So you have my sympathy and continued respected Sir. Seeing this update from you was exactly what I think the community wanted and needed and what I personally was hoping for. Keep it up, we have your back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grem Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 What a disappointment... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tstein Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 Well seem I was right and GUI spend a lot of the performance in the game, that is a bane in Unity on most recent games for god's know what reason. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scarecrow71 Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 @Nate Thank you for the communication! Seeing that list is awesomg and reassuring. One thing I don't see mentioned is the broken SAS controls. Ships spinning uncontrollably during flight, and/or SAS not being properly held when performing maneuvers. Has this been discussed by the team? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jatwaa Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 17 hours ago, Nate Simpson said: What a week! First off, a huge thank you to all of the people who have decided to join us here at the beginning of Early Access. It’s been so exciting to see what you’ve done with KSP2’s new parts, and even though there have been some bumps in the road, it’s been so fun to explore the new Kerbolar System through your eyes. At the end of each day, our team has enjoyed camping out in the official Intercept Games Discord’s KSP2 screenshots channel and basking in the endless waves of creativity, innovation, and pure insanity. This community does not disappoint! Early Access has also yielded its first crop of bugs for us to fix, and we’re already making good headway. Our first Early Access update, which is planned to take place in the next couple of weeks, will contain the following fixes (as well as many other improvements that we’ll break down in more detail in our patch notes when the update goes out): Performance/Optimization Optimization: Main menu loading time reduced for min spec machines Optimization: runway light geometry simplified Optimization: engine exhaust CPU usage reduced Optimization: 50% reduction in main thread time spent on UI Flight/Physics Fixed: KSC and other objects follow vehicle to orbit Fixed: Engine plate floating node joints less rigid than other stack node joints (were not receiving multijoint reinforcement) Fixed: Planned trajectory enters runaway state when switching between flight view and map while engine is burning Fixed: Kerbals fall through ground when traversing ground near launchpad Fixed: Spotlight/headlight parts have dim bulbs and low effective range Fixed: Low-mass parts never stop moving on low gravity celestial bodies Fixed: RoveMax TR4 wheels sink into ground and spring craft upward when returned to focus Fixed: Loss of vehicle control when reverting to launch on runway Fixed: Physics impulse occurs when engine runs out of one fuel type, causing loss of vehicle Fixed: Game breaking when loading to VAB or loading a saved game with a vessel in flight Fixed: Animation stutters when EVA Kerbal is running Fixed: Large ladder disappears when base of ladder outside of camera view Environments Fixed: Ground decal applies to vehicles traversing margin of KSC grounds (removes Predator camo effect applied to rovers at edges of KSC) Fixed: Kerbin atmosphere and ocean vanish after returning to KSC from non-atmospheric celestial body Improved: Floating rocks/mesh scatter (floating reduced) Fixed: Kerbol lens flare still visible when observer is close to star Fixed: Improved collision for structures around KSC, including parking garage and fuel facilities Fixed: Clouds missing from celestial bodies when viewed from long distance Fixed: Atmosphere missing from Kerbin when viewed from the Mun’s SOI Fixed: Laythe atmosphere appears broken in map view User Interface Fixed: Camera middle-mouse movement axis does not switch to horizontal when in horizontal build mode Fixed: Launch Assembly tool breaks after repeated use in VAB Fixed: Debris not targetable Fixed: Time warp controls not accessible on KSC landing screen Fixed: Debris trajectory lines only appear after switching to flight and back to map Fixed: Some graphics settings adjust to “medium” after setting quality preset to “high” Fixed: Game crashes when returning to the main menu from VAB Fixed: Broken/empty Kerbal portraits in flight view Fixed: No orbit line after loading a saved game Fixed: Some difficulty settings don’t persist after ESC menu closure Fixed: No portrait representation in flight for probe cores We appreciate your patience as we continue to bring improvements to the game, and we thank you for your help in continuing to identify bugs and report them to us via our Customer Support page. In addition to the above bug fixes, you’ll notice a number of refinements, including increased vehicle part polish and an updated map interface. Ongoing performance improvements will also surface in this and future updates. We will provide a more detailed blog post soon to give you a better view into the ways that we’re assessing performance data, as well as what steps we’re taking to improve framerates on all platforms. Hang in there, we’re working very hard on this right now! Finally, if you have any questions about the game, please check out the FAQ, which our community team has been diligently updating to address today’s most frequently-encountered questions. *- Highly requested by the community Fantastic work! It's alot to tackled, but the team is up to the task. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
misteryunis Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 14 hours ago, Domonian said: Any fix for decouplers getting stuck on stuff? I can't get a rover to the Mun because I'm not very good at building rockets and my "solutions" all end up having a decoupler get stuck on an engine bell or something and causing issues. If you need to use both parts after decoupling, the best thing is to use stack separators instead. Haven’t had any stuck issues with them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malkuth Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 (edited) only one thing really bothering me with the bugs in todays build. Seems like a lot of the same bugs that were shown by the youtubers when you had your big event at the ESA. That was 2 weeks before release day. Just seems like its a little odd that these made it into release after 2 weeks to work on them. I mean I guess you could argue that code was locked down for release, and you been working on the patch for this long now, and added some of the ones noticed after release. It is what it is though. anyway, seems to me that ships are not getting destroyed (incode) when leaving them, and are blooming up the save file.. Hopefully this is what's meant by fixing save file issues. Its also causing lots of the FPS issues. Edited March 4, 2023 by malkuth Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MechBFP Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 3 hours ago, Sequence said: I'm one of the people that hasn't experienced some of the very aggravating sounding issues with rockets disassembling themselves or with struts not working. I've built launchers with solid boosters and held them steady with struts. I haven't had KSC follow me anywhere either. I find it difficult to believe that it could have anything to do with how I build and design my ships. It must be hardware related somehow. Maybe different chipsets or driver versions are causing issues with the game engine? I think it does somewhat come down to ship building. After all my hours in KSP1 I have an intuitive sense of what will be stable and what won’t, with and without struts, and I haven’t had any issues either with wobbly ships or planes or anything. The problem is that with the state the game is in right now, most people are simply going to shout “BUG!” even if the issue was 100% not a bug but because of a poor design. Now whether or not some of the consequences of a poor design should be in the game is an entirely different discussions. However until the game gets more stable I think it will be difficult for most users to differentiate the difference between what is a bug and what is intentional. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nablabla Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 (edited) 11 hours ago, DocTanner said: As exciting as it is to see updates (and I am excited!) I'm disappointed to see that none of the utterly game-breaking bugs I've experienced are on the list. Just a few: - Fairings essentially don't work at all. - Ships freak out and explode during launch. - Ships freak out and explode on loading a quicksave. - Ships are reduced to their command module on deleting another ship from the same launch. - Ships freak out and explode on landing. - Ships freak out and explode while doing nothing at all. I'm still super hyped for the future of KSP, but seeing a bunch of minor improvements (and feature polish) while the game is essentially unplayable is very disheartening. I'm currently playing KSP 1 right now, just to get my fix. Hi, I am also missing three things from the dev's wanna-fix-list that totally spoiled the experience for me, those are the first two of you list. >>Building interstage fairings is impossible>>. And >>when using a fairing it often explodes on launch<<. And then there is the stuff-falls-out-of-the-sky issue when undocking. All of these three things were visible on many famous youtubers (matt lowne had all three of them). Edited March 4, 2023 by nablabla Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sequence Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 10 minutes ago, MechBFP said: I think it does somewhat come down to ship building. After all my hours in KSP1 I have an intuitive sense of what will be stable and what won’t, with and without struts, and I haven’t had any issues either with wobbly ships or planes or anything. Perhaps. I played thousands of hours of KSP over the last decade. It's my most played game by a huge margin. I've also been building around the bugs I've encountered and have seen reported. I'll try building some ships to intentionally antagonise the kraken as an experiment. But some of the collapsing ship videos I've seen really don't seem like they should have been that fragile. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ski23 Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 11 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. 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PDCWolf Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 Faster updates keep people playing. This is specially true once you take into account the obvious lack of play-testing that went into the release: you're only making us wait more to still not address important stuff, and with a dubious track record for play-testing so you know this "polished" update will be broken as hell. Remember: You had to delete your own threads saying you were making us wait for a performant and polished release. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atomontage Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 11 minutes ago, PDCWolf said: Remember: You had to delete your own threads saying you were making us wait for a performant and polished release. Wait.. what? They deleted threads with promises?! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kerbal3 Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 7 hours ago, Nate Simpson said: We chose that song exactly because it perfectly sums up both the experience of playing and making this game. I'm so happy that everybody understood our meaning! Ha! Knew it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OldManGamerOMG Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 Excellent update. Thank you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Aziz Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 22 minutes ago, atomontage said: promises There were never any promises, let's start with that. Whether something was deleted or not, I can't tell, don't care. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RealKerbal3x Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 39 minutes ago, PDCWolf said: Remember: You had to delete your own threads saying you were making us wait for a performant and polished release. These all still seem to be here, no indication that they were deleted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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