Rooting for JUICE

[jost]

2 hours ago, thabuckwizar said:

Can you please just drop the PR speak and address the fans honestly? Just for once come out and say "yeah, we launched a big stinking 50$ turd and the fans deserve better". All of this "we could never have found all the bugs in a million years of QA" or "we are focusing on the positive player experiences", etc etc. And the softball AMAs. Its so blatantly PR speak its disrespectful. You can't keep asking us to be respectful "or else the team loses their motivation :(" but then also gaslight us every week. The Steam player count is now under 500.

Why should he (or any other member of the KSP2 team) publish such a statement? It can only result in his dismissal without notice, why should anybody do such a thing? To risk their job to please a crowd of angry and entitled  teenagers?
I'm sorry if this angers somebody who is  is actually older than 20 but I can't help it:  The KSP2 discussions  reminds me of an old blog post by Jamie Zawinskis (former netscape developer):
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/10/big-daddy/ 
 

Quote

My favorite part about Bioshock is how it functions as an innoculation for the virus known as Objectivism. What group is most suspeptible to that disease? Fourteen year old boys. Who's the target audience of most video games? Exactly.

 

[Fluke]

12 minutes ago, jost said:

former netscape developer

You're gonna lose the "target audience" with that reference 

[Socraticat]

4 minutes ago, Fluke said:

You're gonna lose the "target audience" with that reference 

"I have the internet right here on a CD-ROM if you'd like an installation!"

[Emanuel01]

Personally I don't mind waiting longer for updates if that means the game development overall gets more efficient. Nonetheless, I'd be happy to have more frequent updates on the game development side. Currently I'm having more fun reading developer posts than playing the game lol

[RocketRockington]

22 minutes ago, jost said:

Why should he (or any other member of the KSP2 team) publish such a statement? It can only result in his dismissal without notice, why should anybody do such a thing? To risk their job to please a crowd of angry and entitled  teenagers?

Lol this argument is so old and tired.  All fans who dislike a product are entitled teens, and that's why developers should feel free to hype, lie and gaslight them.    Get over yourself. 

The community works when the product is good, like it did during the KSP1 era.  You deliver something good and then you get to say it's good.  Anticonsumer crusaders like yourself who wants to justify any bad behaviour on the devs part by blaming the audience don't improve a single thing ever.

[regex]

1 hour ago, RocketRockington said:

 when the product is good, like it did during the KSP1 era.

[snip]

 

Edited May 6, 2023 by Vanamonde

[Fluke]

11 minutes ago, Socraticat said:

"I have the internet right here on a CD-ROM if you'd like an installation!"

Just imagine the horror if people found put Firefox was originally rewritten Netscape Navigator! Sounds a bit familiar 

[RocketRockington]

1 hour ago, regex said:

[snip]

KSP1 94% positive reviews on Steam. 5million+ copies sold.  Despite being developed by amateurs.  The fact that you personally disagree is more a you thing that an objective reality thing.

[regex]

57 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

KSP1 94% positive reviews on Steam. 5million+ copies sold.  Despite being developed by amateurs.  The fact that you personally disagree is more a you thing that an objective reality thing.

]snip]

Keep going dude, this is comedy gold!

Edited May 6, 2023 by Vanamonde

[Strawberry]

2 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

And yet those other companies, at least the ones that a succeeded, managed to do a lot better, doing both updates and bug fixes - I guess other companies can chew gum and walk at the same time.  Sons of the Forest launched to EA at the same time, and has done 4 patches and 7 bug updates in the same period.

Basically, I'm saying I don't take anything Nate has to say at face value, nor should anyone else after the years of overhyping and overselling.

The game is released, and the proof is in the pudding now.  When it comes to the KSP2 pudding, I'm pretty sure you have some idea what flavor I think it is, and it's not chocolate.

Its important to note here that sons of the forest has a much smaller development team, so anything will be leaned against them when it comes to fixing amount of bugs, my further points wont be made to insult the sons of the forest team, I havent been following the team but what Ive heard about them has been good, but with that said, most of those bug updates are literally just like 3 bugs fixed. When you count up the amount of bug fixed in raw numbers (note Im not doing this, just eyeballing it), its likely a roughly pretty similar number with it leaning in sons of forest's direction. So this settles this then? The sons of forest team is objectively better at bug fixing, well not quite. In short, sons of the forest and KSP2 are not the same game. 

Sons of the forest is a first person game where you just control a guy with a physics engine which is mostly just focused on making sure things fall down at the right speed, which is the case for roughly 80% of the other games. This means that 1. chances are all the tools and knowledge you need is very likely already there. You can use a lot more of unity for things like visual rendering then you can in a game like ksp2. People found unity tools in KSP2 code, and this lead to speculation that these were used for parts of the code, this is before we found out thanks to mortoc that they couldnt get any of these tools to work so now they sit like vestigial limbs. A game like sons of the forest has much more you can use for outside help then a game like KSP. And also 2. KSP2 is just a lot more complex of a game then Sons of the Forest. If youre in a FPS game and you clip through the floor, 99% of the time itll just be due to bad terrain, if your rocket suddenly disintegrates in midair, it could be a bug with joints, the atmosphere, a specific part, etc. etc. This added complexity makes KSP2 both more prone to bugs, and harder to debug. 

Patch 1 was a big step forward in terms of bugs, though patch 2 was a bit of a mixed bag when it came to stability. Patch 1 inherently had a lot of things in favor for fixing lots of bugs, people worked more then they otherwise would've because they knew that a month long push would be what was needed. Not to mention that patch 1 likely fixed a lot of low hanging fruit, and that patch 1 was nearly solely bug focused, whereas patch 2 focused a lot more on performance.  Patch 2 shouldve had more QA time, but hey look what theyre about to do for new updates. The priority right now should be getting the game playable but the tricky thing is the definition of playable varies a lot for different people. For some players they care a lot about bugs, for some they can overlook bugs if there's content available. We will see how patch 3 performs with its longer development time but I have hope. 

[RocketRockington]

@Strawberry looking at bug counts fixed is not an interesting metric, I'm sure you'd agree.  How severe the bugs are, how many bugs there are to fix, how much low hanging fruit/easy fixes were available, team size, etc, are all factors that can't easily be rectified against other games.

What Sons of the Forest is managing though is to keep its community happy and interested, which is reflected in its reviews. It's in the survival genre with many competitor titles - KSP2 has almost nothing but KSP1 to compete against and is failing even against it's predecessor.

When Nate says the KSP2 velocity is good - that's purely laughable because we can see that not enough is being done.  The many failed deadlines and launching in such a shoddy state shows that even by the metrics of their own development priorities, velocity hasn't been good.  Further comparison against what Squad was managing to do in similar time frames with a much smaller team and no prior art/borrowed code to crib from just further demonstrates this.

So in what world is their pace of development good.  

Edited May 8, 2023 by RocketRockington

[Strawberry]

1 minute ago, RocketRockington said:

What Sons of the Forest is managing though is to keep its community happy and interested, which is reflected in its reviews. It's in the survival genre with many competitor titles - KSP2 has almost nothing but KSP1 to compete against and is failing even against it's predecessor.

With the state of release I dont think a velocity that meets this criteria is possible even if you had John Coding the creator of the computer on the team 

[RocketRockington]

Just now, Strawberry said:

With the state of release I dont think a velocity that meets this criteria is possible even if you had John Coding the creator of the computer on the team 

I know you meant this in jest, but John Coding (or many really good programmers I've known)  would have Science mode - at least a functional version -  finished in far less than 3 months - because it's really not that tall of an order, technically, especially if many of the assets are done.  Don't believe me?  Read what dropped in KSP v0.18( which added science mode) which was only one month after the prior release, with a smaller team than SoTF and much much smaller than KSP2.

 Every impression we've been given is that science is not in the next update, which now has an ETA of 3.5 months after launch.  If it's in the update after - that'll be 5 months in.    Or maybe it'll be the one after that.. who knows.  All we do know is that the first two updates only fixed bugs, didn't address enough to satisfy the community, and that the creative director thinks slowing down further is still a good pace.

[Vanamonde]

Some comments removed. Tone down the sarcasm, please. 

[Strawberry]

7 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

I know you meant this in jest, but John Coding (or many really good programmers I've known)  would have Science mode - at least a functional version -  finished in far less than 3 months - because it's really not that tall of an order, technically, especially if many of the assets are done.

Id be shocked if they dont have a branch of science thats functional, however I assume that science was similar to the rest of the game at release, functional but very unstable. I seriously doubt that between release and patch 2 they worked on science because they had much better things to be working on. Pure raw speculation but if I were to guess what needs to be done in between science at release and science update, I think most of it boils down to the experiments themselves. Generally speaking from what we've seen the art team tends to outpace the technical team, so I dont think the hurdle will be on the art asset side of things, and from what we know the tech tree is probably done. I know about as much as you here when it comes to science, but how I take "weird bulbous thing" and Nates idea of "part that requires you to fly through rings" is that each experiment will introduce its own mission constraints. Since at least most of the science experiments will only work in specific situations, this means you need more science parts compared to KSP1, and since each part has its own constraints that means that each constraint needs to be tested. This means that science is especially QA hungry with a game that is already using up a lot of its QA resources. I know as much as you do when science comes out, I think it'll be update 4 or 5 but generally my speculation in regards to timelines has been off so take that with a grain of salt. 

[PDCWolf]

7 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

 

• Our team is fully funded, properly staffed, and completely focused on executing the full vision of KSP2. Our velocity is good and our morale is great. This is still a dream job, and we’re still committed to making this game spectacular
• We want to balance our desire to be Santa (literally the most fun part of my job) against our goal of delivering an excellent product. The update cadence we’re looking at right now extends the previous cadence by 2-3 weeks - structurally, the change is not radical. I know the waiting can be painful, especially when there are still game-breaking bugs. Hopefully, the fact that each update will contain more improvements due to that lower frequency helps to offset some of the frustration of waiting
• This project has from the beginning been viewed as a long-tail endeavor requiring a long-term investment. We are not worried about keeping the lights on, and we will be delivering all of the promised roadmap features over the course of Early Access
• We will continue to post these weekly forum updates to provide visibility into areas where gains are being made. These posts are by no means comprehensive, not least because many of the improvements we’re seeing aren’t necessarily photogenic. They are meant to give you a taste of what’s to come

•Velocity is not good, neither by itself or comparatively to other EA titles, specially when you announced velocity is going down. I understand this can be a subjective metric, but the community's opinion is the one that matters. Of course the community can't just speed you guys up, but at least don't try to say velocity is good when everyone is complaining that it took 2 months for what other EA titles achieve in days.

•You are not being Santa, you're delivering (or will be, rather) on the promises made with the roadmap and other multimedia, to paying customers.

•Good to know EA money is not vital to continued development, this is almost always a problem with people defending spending money on bad EA launches as charity, a fallacy which can finally be put to rest.

•The visibility should also be shared with the community. Darrin spent 45 minutes on a single thread and has already done more for the PR of the game than the entire community team. "We read" is not enough.

Quote

Yesterday, Darrin House, our Director of QA, posted a really in-depth dev blog that I think does a great job of showing the behind-the-scenes reality of testing this game.

A "reality" that can't be proved on account of private, e-mail black hole bug tracking. I've said this before, your black-hole support is what convinced steam to give me an out of window refund.

[RocketRockington]

@Strawberry Yeah of course we're speculating here.  Maybe science will be this amazing experience that justifies the time investment.   However, two things make me doubt that immensely.

First, every time Intercept has done this "We just need time, trust us" they've either come up with new reasons for further delays, or they've released something awful.  

Second, they don't hold their cards close to their chest   Anytime they've got something remotely good already, they've posted it as some screenshot - I can't think of a single meaningful thing in the game that was launched in February that was not shown off months or years ahead of time. (Except how buggy it was lol they waited till the ESA event for that )

Squad used to only show previews a couple weeks before release to make sure they were actually going to be able to release what was promised - Intercept has shown bullshots of colonies and interstellar stuff that are unlikely to make an appearance for 4-5 years after they were previewed.

This indicates to me that thier velocity w/regard to getting science,  the first step of the roadmap done is abysmal, as they have nothing worth showing yet, when they should already have a version ready to go if their pace was actually good.

Edited May 6, 2023 by RocketRockington

[cocoscacao]

13 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

For example: we have seen rescalable UI elements in action for the first time this week (with many thanks to our newest engineer Ryan Ekhoff).

Nice to hear that the new devs are getting onboarded quickly. 

[Majorjim!]

15 hours ago, HammerTyme said:

Did I just get a shoutout from Nate Simpson himself?! Yes I did!  Very cool!!   That’s my space station with 2 shuttles in the bottom right of the first image. (Schwing2727)   I never played KSP1.  I’ve been playing KSP2 since launch and maaaaaaan it’s been an awesome ride.  Learning to intercept with other objects in orbit and then docking with them has been a wild experience learning to achieve.  This game is amazing.  

 Thank you for the update and thank you for clarifying some things. You guys are awesome, keep doing what you’re doing! 
 

 

*unhelpful assumtions removed by me

congratulations ! You should really give KSP1 a go! It actually works! Hehe

Edited May 6, 2023 by Majorjim!

[LoSBoL]

3 minutes ago, Majorjim! said:

Are you an intercept plant? 

I will always remember my very first rendezvous and docking, that joyfull moment of personal achievement will never ever be forgotten.

[Majorjim!]

Just now, LoSBoL said:

I will always remember my very first rendezvous and docking, that joyfull moment of personal achievement will never ever be forgotten.

As I will remember mine. And my first (intact) mun landing. Those where the greatest gaming moments I ever had in over 35 years of gaming. 

[LoSBoL]

Just now, Majorjim! said:

As I will remember mine. And my first (intact) mun landing. Those where the greatest gaming moments I ever had in over 35 years of gaming. 

As it was @HammerTyme's judging his post about his experience. 

[Majorjim!]

Just now, LoSBoL said:

As it was @HammerTyme's judging his post about his experience. 

Yes I’m sure it was. I removed my unhelpful, sceptical comment. 

[RaBDawG]

So still no 3rd patch or even a date on when we can expect it and they dangle the simplest of things like rescaling the UI and were supposed to be satisfied, lol? Do people realize how simple of a coding that is and they had to hire a new guy to do it? 

Its been 4 months since the release and the game is as bad as it was on release.  Especially if you have an AMD CPU.  No new content in over 4 months on a EA game at that price along with only two patches(that barely fixed anything) is insane man.

[RocketRockington]

1 minute ago, RaBDawG said:

So still no 3rd patch or even a date on when we can expect it and they dangle the simplest of things like rescaling the UI and were supposed to be satisfied, lol? Do people realize how simple of a coding that is and they had to hire a new guy to do it? 

Its been 4 months since the release and the game is as bad as it was on release.  Especially if you have an AMD CPU.  No new content in over 4 months on a EA game at that price along with only two patches(that barely fixed anything) is insane man.

As much as I'm also dissatisfied with KSP2, try to get your facts straight.  It's only been out 2.5 months. 

 And we do sort of have a next patch date - somewhere between 6-7 weeks after the last patch (Nate said they're adding 2-3 weeks more, and patch 2 took 4 weeks).  So next patch at the end of May, if he's to be believed.