Speculation On the Last Four Years

[Pickelhaube808]

3 hours ago, regex said:

The terrain generation as well. That alone... I've been really impressed by the amount of work already gone into this game.

The interesting thing is seeing what parts of the game have more or less polish at this stage. Wonder why KSP2 takes up roughly 10x the storage as KSP1? From a cursory glance, it seemed to be heavily weighted towards textures for the various maps needed to generate the planets' surfaces. They are indeed impressive, especially viewed side by side with KSP1. We will never know the answer to this, but based on what aspects are more fleshed out than others, it feels like the creative side had more time, budget, or overall employees working on those parts. And that is not a slight to anyone, I like how it is beginning to look.

2 hours ago, Monger said:

That is a really common misconception. Cranking out mockups that look like the real thing is suprisingly simple. But it is also less than 1% than the desired final state. Often more like 0%, because you often toss away your prototype and start from scratch once you understand the lessons learned from your prototype. 

I would say that they took their original assets and built a simple scene around it and rendered, but based on some of the choppy framerates seen in some of the promotional footage from the last few years, I speculate there was at least some sort of base game housing the scenes. Otherwise, why not publish a smoothly rendered scene?

 

I haven't watched any in a little while, but I will definitely reply to this thread later after analyzing the footage that is out there.

[mcwaffles2003]

7 hours ago, Moons said:

how can it only have progressed as far as what we see now when it was already in a state like this 3 years ago

This is still presuming the state of the game from short clips which is what @CastleKSide was getting at. You're talking about the state of the game 3 years ago from cherry picked clips, you have no clue what the actual state of the game was 3 years ago. So comparing what we have now to then isn't really possible

Also, as data miners have found, there is a LOT more built in this game than we currently get to interact with. Those systems are just detached currently as the devs want to limit the scope of our play (I believe they want to find all the bugs in what we've been given before they move on to systems that depend on the mechanics we are presented with now)

[Fullmetal Analyst]

On 3/4/2023 at 6:11 AM, Pickelhaube808 said:

No developer of any kind WANTS to release a bad product and then face harsh criticism for it.

they simply dont care, they get paid anyways

[Scarecrow71]

Simply put, there is no excuse the team can give to have pushed out this product with this many bugs.  A lot of this stuff was seen in KSP1 in the really early days and has been cleaned up there.  What have they been doing for 4 years that they can't get maneuver nodes, SAS, flight controls, etc., working?

[Fullmetal Analyst]

19 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Simply put, there is no excuse the team can give to have pushed out this product with this many bugs.  A lot of this stuff was seen in KSP1 in the really early days and has been cleaned up there.  What have they been doing for 4 years that they can't get maneuver nodes, SAS, flight controls, etc., working?

based

[antra]

The original post matches my intuition fairly well. The controversy around Star Theory may be one of the reasons, although I doubt its the only reason: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/kerbal-space-program-2-release-disrupted-by-corporate-strife#:~:text=A few joined their former,until the fall of 2021.

It looks like at least some some heavy hitters / architects / 10x engineers didn't cross over. This must have set the project back. I'm pretty sure the publisher miscalculated during the "negotiation", as it often happens. The business people negotiate on what is, to a large extent, a highly technical issue. Technically minded executives are a rare commodity, they usually can make a better living running their own business rather than working for a large company.  In the end the publisher execs pushed to save pennies, have cost the company years and millions, probably got some political points out of it in the process. 

I kinda blame the ST founders the most for not getting the right lawyers for dealing with T2. Don't mess with a large corp and don't take their business if you don't have an idea how to do it. Not having anti-poaching agreements in place seems like significant incompetence, you don't sign that stuff even if you are getting pushed, you won't get the money anyway (yes, anti-poaching agreements exist, even where restricted, they are just called differently).

Overall, in my experience drama of this caliber dramatically lowers the output of a team for about a year, even if "resolved" to a reasonable level. Creative people don't work/collaborate well when the interpersonal environment is that unstable.

Edited March 5, 2023 by antra

[Vanamonde]

Sarcastic replies removed. Please don't mock each other. It doesn't convince anyone and makes the forum less pleasant. 

[VlonaldKerman]

19 hours ago, Fullmetal Analyst said:

they simply dont care, they get paid anyways

I categorically disagree with the notion that private entities or their employees are willing to forego profits so long as they are able to make some money, or, "get paid anyways." T2 has an incentive to produce a finished game b/c it will (presumably) make more money. This incentive will permeate down the ladder in the form of corporate pressure on the dev team. The dev team wants to do a good job because they want to have a job once KSP 2 is done, and Nate Simpson, for example, wants a reputation. If he succeeds in making KSP 2, that is reputational gold. He is made for life, pretty much. The only factors which mitigate these drives are modifiers that one can apply to expected value, such as risk. You could make the argument that T2 finds funding KSP 2 to completion as a more risky proposition than funding it partially and juicing the KSP community for an unfinished game. However, there would have to be some reason why their risk assessment would have panned out that way, as it's not generally a good strategy. 

There is this idea that business executives are short-sighted/stupid and that they routinely miss the forests for the trees. This idea is not true because if it was, than all of the enlightened people on this forum would start their own businesses that aren't so short-sighted, and eventually outcompete T2. Now, I am certainly not arguing that there isn't massive corporate inefficiency and idiocy when it comes to a large company/project like this. However, I think the degree of this is usually overstated.

I think the most likely explanation is that T2 is skeptical of the dev teams productivity, and wanted to light a fire under them after so many missed deadlines and runs over-budget. They forced them to release a product they aren't proud of, that is facing widespread backlash. T2 probably feels that doing so will ultimately save on costs by making the dev team work faster/more efficiently than they were without any direct community oversight. In other words, T2 is being smart by outsourcing their productivity management to the KSP community.

I've gone back-and-forth on my personal assessment of the outlook of the game. However, as the days have gone by and I've done more thinking, I'm less inclined to believe that T2 intends to bail, or that the dev team doesn't care, or any of that stuff. 

[DerZerschneider]

I dont have an idea about gamedevelopment, but i think youre forget that there is a lot more implemented in ksp2. just adding muliplayer to a game that can actually be played without timelarps is a lot. we know almost nothing about new gamemechanics or how they are implemented.

it was a long time and the still in development EAgame got lot of bugs and will be worked on. but i dont see a bad game there.

so what, it took a while, but its nice to have.  

 

sorry my english isnt very well.

[MaxQ]

Despite your preamble, I sure that I understand the point of this exercise? It would be more worthwhile to proffer a science fiction short story contest with some sort of award than this, which is essentially meaningless gossip. 

I’ve found that looking forward is far more enjoyable than wasting time and energy on the past. Want to be miserable? Keep a ledger of people and events that “wronged” you,  or the mistakes that you made. 

The whole “corporations are greedy and profits are evil” is tiresome as well. The profits are a snapshot, and in this phase of development, are spent on operations and investments before the financial statement is published. People who intimate that it’s all going into someone’s pocket aren’t up to speed on business.

 

Edited March 6, 2023 by MaxQ
Clarification