What happened to the reworked core systems?

[VlonaldKerman]

I was looking at this thread: 

And it made me think about my KSP 1 save that I'm playing right now. I have over 100 mods installed, including MKS, Galaxies Unbound, and Blackrack's volumetric clouds. I've experienced my fair share of bugs (exploding crafts, editor bugs/craft file corruption, crashes, removing some stars from GU which I've never visited despawned crafts which were in orbit around Mun), and the performance is pretty poor due to poor CPU and GPU utilization levels (~40 fps in orbit), which pretty much nullifies any benefit to my having an RTX 4090, etc. That being said, the gameplay is so rewarding that I still push through the bugs and poor performance.

It made me realize what I really want KSP 2 to be, and what it is basically supposed to be: Modded KSP 1, but with better feature implementation, and VASTLY better performance. Personally, I think MKS does colonization pretty well, and while I'm excited to see what the KSP 2 devs have done with it, I'm mainly looking to KSP 2 to implement the same or better quality features without the bugs and performance issues you have to endure (no matter the hardware) with modded KSP 1. It is through this lens that I view KSP 2's development: not so much whether they're implementing new parts, features or reworked science. These things are nice, but they're not so different from what we already have with FREE KSP 1 mods. The NEW thing I paid $50 for, is the promise of eventually getting these things, plus performance and stability.

The current performance and stability issues KSP 2 has aren't so concerning to me- rather, it's to be expected. What IS a concern, is when a community poll shows that a vast majority people on this forum don't believe the game has the "foundations" to make 1000 part vessels a reality, and most respondents didn't think the game would ever get to that point. This gets to the question of reworked systems, and there is a concerning pattern:

 

- The physics system is supposed to be substantially changed, to make larger crafts performant. According to data miners, they've made some edits to the base unity physics engine, but anyone who's played the game knows that they haven't reworked the physics system in a fundamental way.

- They demoed an atmospheric scattering system that hasn't been integrated. We don't know if it's possible to make it performant and game-ready.

- The reworked terrain system has not yet been implemented. For now, we are stuck with almost the same thing that we had in KSP 1, with some revamped textures and new heightmaps.

- The reworked heating system is not yet in place, though hopefully it will be soon.

- The reworked aero model is fundamentally similar to KSP 1, with maybe some tweaks to formulas and weightings to accomodate procedural wings. 

- The maneuver system has been reworked, but creating maneuvers is very clunky and we don't know if the rework was fully successful due to having no interstellar bodies to test it on.

- The trajectory system was reworked to accommodate long-duration burns and brachistochrone transfers, however it is currently broken. Good luck getting a Tylo gravity assist, I hope Tylo ends up being where the game says it will, but in my experience, it almost never is. 

- We have not yet seen the full persistent supply consumption and transport system that will facilitate colonies.

- I'm not sure if they've implemented the location system which moves the origin to accommodate interstellar distances- if they have, seen my trajectories bullet.

- We don't know what the new science system is going to be, but I suspect it will be fine, so not much worry there.

- We don't really know about multiplayer. Presumably this will require fundamentally new under the hood tech.

- I'm not sure where the tutorial system stands- I haven't really paid attention to it. I remember there being lots of bugs, but presumably those will be fixed. What remains to be seen is if these tutorials will succeed in attracting or onboarding new players more effectively than Scott Manley videos- that question is way up in the air ATM.

- Am I missing a reworked "under-the-hood" system from this list? Do I have inaccurate information? Please let me know- I'm going off memory here.

 

My point is not that we don't have all the features or that it's very early access, or that the game should be in a more advanced state- those debates have been played out (and are still playing out) elsewhere. My point is that, in my opinion, KSP 2 will live or die by these bullet points, not just in the extent to which they are implemented, but that they're implemented performantly and relatively bug-free. These core systems and their quality are what really counts, long-term. I've heard this sentiment expressed elsewhere in the fanbase and I wanted to state it clearly here. I've seen a lot of comments to the effect of: "Wow, KSP 2 obviously has a great team of visual artists. They are good at designing parts, planets and they are good at having ideas for the game. But we have no idea if that beautiful planet texture and terrain tessellation will make it into the game, and we don't know if they physics system will allow players to make use of those massive interplanetary transfer parts." Are they doing well at implementing reworked core systems? We just don't know.

I asked this question for both of the Q&A's, and despite the fact that, in my view, it is the single most important question facing KSP 2's development, I don't believe they addressed it (at least not in my brief review of the transcripts). Does anyone have information that I'm missing on this? Or just interesting opinions? I feel like I see a lot of yelling about "BUGS BUGS BUGS" and a lot of yelling about "IT'S EARLY ACCESS OF COURSE IT'S LAGGY", but these conversations tend to miss the point if the cause of the low FPS is a fundamental issue rather than bug-hunting or other optimization problem.

Edited May 15, 2023 by VlonaldKerman

[Alexoff]

16 minutes ago, VlonaldKerman said:

We don't know what the new science system is going to be, but I suspect it will be fine, so not much worry there.

I think it will just be copied from KSP1, since the developers did not show us anything in the gameplay videos that would not be in KSP1 mods. But the texts will certainly be new. I hope.

The main problem of KSP2 is that it is practically no different from 2013 KSP1 in terms of gameplay. Of the new, only a wrapper that requires a lot of computer resources. The new gameplay element - colonies - is definitely not coming this year, and Nate has already told us that they won't be as impressive as they were in the 2019 trailer. I don’t understand at all why KSP2 was (poorly) created twice from scratch, in 6 years it was possible to disassemble the KSP1 code line by line, improve the existing one and make improved game. Does anyone care what Portal 2 is based on Portal 1? If KSP2 turned out to be KSP1 with a big modpack integrated inside, there would be less dissapointment.

[PDCWolf]

It is important to know they didn't promise a "new codebase" or physics system, or aero, and other core stuff. I've failed to find any source for this and have taken it as the community (and mine) wishful thinking.

Performance and codebase related issues should be concerning, because unless there's very few and specific stuffs massively wrong, and provided those can be fixed, KSP2 just doesn't have the performance overhead to implement bigger features, let alone modding. A good example of this is the terrain system: there's a very small chance that changing from PQS+ to CBT (which shouldn't work as they described it) will magically fix performance. Another good example is the janky orbits: provided CBT magically frees a lot of performance budget, how much of that new performance budget and how much work has to go into fixing what seems to be some nasty floating point and thread race issues causing the jank orbits?

Once those 2 are fixed, the performance budget left for all of the other planned systems doesn't look so good. If the game requires a 3080 now, how low do you think they can take it? The common man (as per the steam survey) has a 1650 and 16 gigs of ram, do you really think they can free up enough performance and then not use it up again for a normal gaming computer to be able to run the game?

[VlonaldKerman]

7 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

I've failed to find any source for this and have taken it as the community (and mine) wishful thinking

Yeah- that’s one of the reasons I created this thread. If anyone has links to statements, that would be appreciated. Either they said something to this effect, or the community generally assumed there would be a new code base given the things they promised to achieve.

It’s also been a common point raised by people who defend the state of the game that they scrapped the initial vision of the game in 2020 when T2 took over, and that the initial vision did not include revamped core systems and was a reskin like you described, and that the game is in an early state because they decided to start over with a more ambitious, ground-up development that fundamentally altered game mechanics and systems. However, this doesn’t seem to be true, which casts doubt on the idea that development was restarted. If dev wasn’t restarted, then that means that the game was in an unbelievably early state when they claimed to be < a year away from release.

[Yakuzi]

I agree with most of the OP, especially the main point. I was also primarily looking forward to a KSP2 with a performant and relatively robust codebase. A game engine that could run interstellar motherships bearing landers and satellites, while managing the logistics of a host of colonies and space stations on and around multiple planets and moons in different star systems through high-fidelity physics simulations... of 16 players in multiplayer. This has effectively been what Take2 and its subsidiaries have been communicating over the years. The state the game was released in after over half a decade of development does not... to put it mildly... give me much hope to ever see that vision realised.

 

5 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

- We don't know what the new science system is going to be, but I suspect it will be fine, so not much worry there.

I disagree here. Based on what the company has been hinting at KSP2 will have a similar science experience as KSP1, which wasn't good at all.

 

3 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

It’s also been a common point raised by people who defend the state of the game that they scrapped the initial vision of the game in 2020 when T2 took over, and that the initial vision did not include revamped core systems and was a reskin like you described, and that the game is in an early state because they decided to start over with a more ambitious, ground-up development that fundamentally altered game mechanics and systems. However, this doesn’t seem to be true, which casts doubt on the idea that development was restarted. If dev wasn’t restarted, then that means that the game was in an unbelievably early state when they claimed to be < a year away from release.

Are there any sources that support the claim that KSP2 development was restarted? The only source I could find, that June 2021 interview  , hints at quite the opposite. When asked about KSP2's development since its reveal in 2019 (prior to the poaching of Star Theory devs by Take2), Nate Simpson mentioned they made about 2 years of progress. He didn't mention anything about regress, discontinuation or a restart. Here's the relevant part of the dialogue:

Spoiler

Ozzie - "It's been almost two years since KSP2 was first revealed. How has the game's development progressed and how much of it was affected by the pandemic?"

Nate - "Well that's a good question. Well obviously there's about two years of progress since last time we talked about the game.

[snip]

Nate - "And obviously were in the final stretch. We're releasing and we're releasing next year."

 

[RocketRockington]

I don't think there's any hard data out there of the sort you're looking for.  PDCWolf has already pointed out that they haven't really promised specifics, besides (afaicr) allusions to improved  physics or overall 'meeting a high quality bar'.  I think you know all that stuff so I won't rake over those coals.

What I can say is to just apply some logic here.  We already have info from Gotmachine's and others looks at the current code base, which is where a lot of your info comes from.  PDCWolf talks about 'where will they find the perf budget for new features'.  Another question would be 'where will they find dev budget to rework old features'.  When would time be found to rework aero, for example, when the game is already so far behind where anyone reasonable would expect it to be, when it needs content to actually generate sales and pay for development, etc.

I think the worst offense of all though is the lack of mod support.  Having a modding interface present would force them to be more transparent about the state of the games functionality, and let modders maybe make up for some of the lack of content while they work on providing better under-the-hood features to the mod team.  Mod support often forces a game to be cleaner and more functional, because modders will always find the grime you were trying to hide under the carpet.

[VlonaldKerman]

59 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

didn't mention anything about regress, discontinuation or a restart. Here's the relevant part of the dialogue:

 

Wow. We need a thread which compiles all of the statements like this that were made, in my opinion. This is pretty egregious. I’ve often read people saying, “when did they say X.” Statements like this are important because they are relevant to the future of the game: he knew, at the time, that this wasn’t true. That speaks directly to trust in the dev team and the game’s future prospects.

[Spicat]

8 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

- The reworked terrain system has not yet been implemented. For now, we are stuck with almost the same thing that we had in KSP 1, with some revamped textures and new heightmaps.

That's a huge understatement of what they did, it's not because it's the same algorithm that we have the same thing as ksp 1. (The new terrain algorithm will probably just be for optimisation)

Ksp 2 terrain is a way better than ksp 1 terrain, those realistic mountains are my favorite to capture:

That was just to nuance the argument a bit, I mainly agree with you with the rest, a lot of work (or implementation) still needs to be made to explain KSP2 existence.

[TLTay]

We get the features we get, and if too many people voice displeasure on this thread it might see the padlock...

[RocketRockington]

Threads get padlocked not because of displeasure - but because threads that discuss KSP2s flaws invariably draw in people who want to complain about the complainers, post sarcasm, and people who fight back, etc,  which gives the mods the excuse to padlock.  My suggestion to everyone who's interested in the topic - just don't engage with anyone who's being awful or sarcastic.  If you don't engage, it's not a fight, the mods can clear out the negative posts and the topic can continue.

[AtomicTech]

17 hours ago, Alexoff said:

that would not be in KSP1 mods

{snip}
It'll definitely be some time before we see any of these "reworked" core systems.

Edited May 16, 2023 by Gargamel
Portions redacted by moderator

[Scarecrow71]

13 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

I think the worst offense of all though is the lack of mod support.  Having a modding interface present would force them to be more transparent about the state of the games functionality, and let modders maybe make up for some of the lack of content while they work on providing better under-the-hood features to the mod team.  Mod support often forces a game to be cleaner and more functional, because modders will always find the grime you were trying to hide under the carpet.

When you look at what the modders have already done with the lack of support, it really makes you wonder what they could accomplish with said support.  Or what the game devs could do with the code if they leaned on the modders for help or to even bounce ideas off of.  Some of the mods are nothing short of unbelievable when you consider they had almost nothing to go on for coding.

12 hours ago, Spicat said:

That's a huge understatement of what they did, it's not because it's the same algorithm that we have the same thing as ksp 1. (The new terrain algorithm will probably just be for optimisation)

Ksp 2 terrain is a way better than ksp 1 terrain, those realistic mountains are my favorite to capture:

I have to disagree here.  While I do think that things look great from orbit or during fly-by, I have seen nothing to this point that made me think that the graphics or terrain were awesome.  Most disappointing were the rings on Dres; I specifically went to Dres to see the rings, and all I got was a few flat, grey lines spinning around the planet.  I know the argument here would be something about performance, but what I saw was a real letdown. 

13 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

Wow. We need a thread which compiles all of the statements like this that were made, in my opinion. This is pretty egregious. I’ve often read people saying, “when did they say X.” Statements like this are important because they are relevant to the future of the game: he knew, at the time, that this wasn’t true. That speaks directly to trust in the dev team and the game’s future prospects.

I don’t think I could agree with this statement any more than I do.  Everyone - and I point a finger at myself first - makes one comment or another about what they have read or heard or think they've seen somewhere.  It would really help to get this compiled in one place so we have a data dictionary or a timeline of what was said and when and by whom.

Edited May 16, 2023 by Scarecrow71

[AtomicTech]

1 minute ago, Scarecrow71 said:

When you look at what the modders have already done with the lack of support, it really makes you wonder what they could accomplish with said support.  Or what the game devs could do with the code if they leaned on the modders for help or to even bounce ideas off of.  Some of the mods are nothing short of unbelievable when you consider they had almost nothing to go on for coding.

Definitely! I was able to do some really cool things because all of those who modded before me shared their experience and dedicated countless hours working on understanding KSP's code and how to change it.

I am definitely in favor of more modding support but I will urge some caution on relying on modders. The reason? Because all of us here are hobbyists and could disappear off the face of the forums one day and never return or could decide that they want to scrap a project without another thought (I know I'm guilty of this ). There are some of us here who are reliable pillars but sometimes Life (TM) happens and we can't engage with KSP in the same way we used to.

[RocketRockington]

1 minute ago, AtomicTech said:

I am definitely in favor of more modding support but I will urge some caution on relying on modders

I didn't mean to imply that with my post, just that modding support could be a better forcing function for a strong foundation. 

Ultimately KSP2 is in a no-win situation now because of thier past delays and decisions.  They can't build back a user base without more features.  They can't work on features exclusively because the game is so buggy.  They can't only smash bugs because they're bugfixing ontop of a shaky foundation, patching a building that's made of the same cooked spaghetti that the rockets are.

And they can't just take the time to do all of those properly because T2 was sick of giving them extensions and less and less of the fan base is willing to believe their excuses.  I feel bad for the Squad devs and the recent hires who joined up into this mess in just the last year or so, and have to deal with this, but unfortunately Star Theory/Intercept wasted the chance to build a good solid game, and now the best we can hope for is they make the spaghetti work somehow.

[AtomicTech]

16 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

I didn't mean to imply that with my post, just that modding support could be a better forcing function for a strong foundation. 

Gotcha; thank you for the clarification

17 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

I feel bad for the Squad devs and the recent hires who joined up into this mess in just the last year or so, and have to deal with this, but unfortunately Star Theory/Intercept wasted the chance to build a good solid game, and now the best we can hope for is they make the spaghetti work somehow.

Ain't that how we first got to orbit in early KSP

17 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

Ultimately[,] KSP2 is in a no-win situation now because of [their] past delays and decisions.

I'm hoping it isn't; I've got faith in Nate & Co. (even if it runs a bit thin at times) but I hope that we'll be able to look back on all of this as some sort of comedicially bad first chapter in KSP 2's history 

[RocketRockington]

34 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:

I'm hoping it isn't; I've got faith in Nate & Co. (even if it runs a bit thin at times) but I hope that we'll be able to look back on all of this as some sort of comedicially bad first chapter in KSP 2's history 

Unfortunately I have 0 faith in Nate.  I've worked with people like him - they profess enthusiasm for everything, they get over+promoted based on their hype rather than their competence, they oversell everything they work on hard to upper management and let other people try to deliver on their baseless promises.  If you channel them right, they can get you more money for your project, help build buzz.  But what you never do is put them in charge, they're toxic for building good product, they focus on the appearance of the thing vs the reality. 

That's one reason I've been mentioning Nate's history of failed projects - if you go back and read his posts about PA and Human resources(which bombed and failed to launch, respectively), you'll see the exact same kind of language that got the KSP community on-side with him during the early days.  I think at this point T2 must know this - but they're concerned that ousting Nate would rock the boat too much.  Which is why it seems he's more in charge of writing marketting copy and coming up with community challenges and playing the game as an extremely overpaid QA tester.

Edited May 16, 2023 by RocketRockington

[Dakitess]

It's good to see people being able to debate politely about the state of KSP2. It helps other readers to see that critics are constructive and not some random rants. Because yes, KSP2 is so far a real failure about so many subjects and this topic discusses a bunch of them.

I agree with what have been said : I don't see how incoming optimization would help with the crazy performance gap we're facing. I've often used a quick comparison to find out that we are somewhere 10 to 15 times worst than it should be / it has been advertised, to run 1000 parts craft at decent (let's say 20 FPS) framerate. It's... Gigantic, enormous. 50-200% framerate gain are already something really hard to achieve, I don't see how they could accomplish such a thing while keeping the game as it exists right now. And this performance topic is very centric as it will condition most of what can be added / improved / enhanced.

I see more and more people saying that they're not happy with how the game is looking so far. Or actually, I don't find much people saying otherwise anymore. At the beginning, it was clearly IMPOSSIBLE to say that the game was not looking 2020+ as it should. It's debatable, I guess, but I maintain that it really must be looking decently modern and technically up to date, I don't understand how / why people are okay, saying that "C'mon it's KSP who care about graphics". I do. It's like, core-feature for a game like this. It means everything. It's an incentive to visit, to move, to build rovers and plane to find a place and settle cause you find the sweet GPS coordination and to share it with others, to make forums lives, etc etc etc. I very (very (very)) honestly find myself asking if *this* screenshot is KSP1 or KSP2, I mean it ! How is it even possible ? Anyway, now theses people are less prone to engage aggressively when other are saying that they find the game lacking visual attractiveness. I consider it to be very very lacking on this point, and nowhere close to what it should have been.

So it's running bad, while looking bad, and it's not going to be easy to fix it properly. We might end up with a 1.0 KSP2 in about 18 months, I'd say, including some okay new features, and with performance improvement allowing for 30 FPS with 1000$ rigs and 200 parts craft. Okay. But then... What is the point of KSP2 at all ? It's what KSP1 is able to do, using mods, for years. I've been waiting KSP2 since 2015 : I already had something like 2500 hours and faced the situation where this Indie Game could be so much more beautiful, performant, featureful, bug-less, etc. I'm probably not the only one, for sure ! KSP1 is my favourite game, period. Still, it was already possible to feel a dead-end, the need for a 2nd opus that would be held by professionals, enjoying new techs, new core-dev, new engine, new everything, from scratch.

It's lightyear from what we have so far, and what we'll have at the end, i'm afraid. And I would be pleased to be proven wrong, of course. But that's a missed opportunity to me, and a terrible one.

Edited May 16, 2023 by Dakitess

[Klapaucius]

1 hour ago, Dakitess said:

It's good to see people being able to debate politely about the state of KSP2. It helps other readers to see that critics are constructive and not some random rants. Because yes, KSP2 is so far a real failure about so many subjects and this topic discusses a bunch of them.

I agree 100%. Count me as one of those forum members who have grown very weary of sniping, snarky comments, petty arguments and immature language. To be honest, the negativity may drive me away from the game before the bugs do.  If I am going to read criticisms of the game, they need to be reasoned. I need to learn something, or at least feel I am being spoken to in a rational and adult manner.

Fortunately, this entire thread so far has been constructively critical.  I have found it all very interesting; this is exactly the kind of critique I want to read.  In addition, the developers are much more likely to read threads like this and take the feedback on board.

May this thread continue in this manner.

Edited May 16, 2023 by Klapaucius
Clarity

[RocketRockington]

If there's one bright side to how bad things are - it's that the modding community for KSP1 is still going and isn't fractured. It was going to take a long time anyway even if KSP2 was good for my favorite stuff to move over to KSP2.   Now...well, I'm glad development of stuff like RP1 is going to continue without those devs or thier player base even having to consider a change. 

 A better situation than if KSP2 was better but not good and the mod community was teetering between the two - worse than if KSP2 was actually really good though of course.

[AtomicTech]

8 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

PA and Human resources

Where might I be able to find this?

18 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

it's that the modding community for KSP1 is still going and isn't fractured.

I disagree; I've seen a serious decrease in mod downloads and a number of really cool projects wrapped up.

1 hour ago, Klapaucius said:

May this thread continue in this manner.

It's a really refreshing change of pace

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

9 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:

I disagree; I've seen a serious decrease in mod downloads and a number of really cool projects wrapped up.

This may be due to the 50% decrease in KSP1 player count, after the launch of KSP2. Which maybe means people were prepared to drop KSP1 for good and when they saw what they got and how it was priced, just abandoned the KSP franchise. 

 

Pre Launch KSP1 had around 5-6,000 players daily, now it's 3000 and declining.

https://steamdb.info/app/220200/charts/

Edited May 16, 2023 by GGG-GoodGuyGreg

[AtomicTech]

Just now, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

Which maybe means people were prepared to drop KSP1 for good and when they saw what they got and how it was priced, just abandoned the KSP franchise. 

Well hopefully we'll see all those members of the community come back whenever KSP 2 if/when gets to a playable state.

[RocketRockington]

21 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:

Where might I be able to find this?

Example here.  You can read more of what he posted on reddit under that account.  Unfortunately I don't know if the hypey stuff posted to the Kickstarter still exists anywhere.  This is him hyping the PA team after he barely joined Uber Entertainment and had almost no basis for this.

[Yakuzi]

6 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:

Where might I be able to find this?

Nate Simpson replying to concerns/criticism on the Human Resources kickstarter (since the earlier released Planetary Annihilation was still underdeveloped and had major issues, link to thread ):

Spoiler

Howdy ataraxic,  This is Nate, the art director for Human Resources. Hi.  I just wanted to address your comment, since it sounds like you think HR is a cool idea, but you're concerned that we won't be able to deliver on the promise of the pitch. I am stoked that you liked our idea, first off. I was genuinely worried that folks would think HR was too nuts, so it's a relief to discover that the idea has traction.  I've written this in a couple of other places, but I want to reiterate that Uber is for the first time choosing to grow to accommodate two equal-sized projects simultaneously. I am one of several people who were hired explicitly to build this new project. PA is remaining fully-staffed, and that staff is committed to continuing to deliver on the promises made in that Kickstarter.  The nice thing is that with a multi-project structure, the company will be better able to support all of our offerings, regardless of their short-term economic viability. With two games on a staggered schedule, we can afford to bring every game to a good level of polish. That's a whole lot harder to do when you've got one team working on one project. If that project hits a rough spot, you've got to scramble to figure out how to keep the lights on.  There are other benefits to the two-project structure -- namely, that because Human Resources is being built on the PA engine, any improvements we make may also improve the PA experience. We just have more brains working on the problem, and that's good for both projects.  I hope that all made sense. Personally, I think Human Resources is going to be a great game, and it's existence will help ensure that PA gets the full gestation that it deserves. A vote for Human Resources is a vote for a better PA.  We'd love to have your support. Because monsters and robots.  Thanks,  Nate

 

Nate Simpson replying to the fallout when Human Resources got cancelled (link to thread):

Spoiler

I get why you feel this way. I think we had a little less control over the timing than many suppose. But regardless, PA will continue to receive upgrades, and I hope very much that it meets your expectations at some point.

I'm seeing this comment enough on these postmortem threads that I'm going to copy-paste my way-too-long explanation of the timing from the kickstarter comments. Apologies in advance, but I hope it sheds a little light on the timing:

"Cancel the current project, finish PA, come back to HR later."

The way game teams work, different people come into play at different points in the pipeline. It starts with a small team doing design and concept art, and then as prototyping gets underway, engineers begin to roll on. Then content starts to get made, which means artists and animators and scripters and more engineers. And once the bulk of that stuff is done, there are loose ends to tie up, bugs to hunt, random UI tweaks to do, visual effects to polish. There's marketing art, trailers, music and sound effects. In the case of PA, there are also lots of rewards to complete (the art book, custom commanders, etc).

But if you look at the way the actual hours add up, it resembles a boa constrictor with a wild boar inside it -- narrow at the ends, fat in the middle. And all those surplus people at the ends need to either do something else or go find another job. This is why medium-sized studios often develop two or more projects at a time. If you do it right, you can sort of rotate your crops so that the land is always growing something.

PA is at a point where there is still lots of engineering to do, and there are a bunch of engineers dedicated to making that game as awesome as possible. No engineers are working on HR right now. Part of the reason we are doing the Kickstarter is so that we can afford a few engineers to get us to alpha.

We did, however, get help from several PA artists to make the HR trailer. This is a good thing, because the bulk of the art for PA is complete (not all of it, but the bulk of it). I am the only new full-time hire for Human Resources at the moment.

Human Resources is its own project, separate from PA, and as such is expected to pull its own weight financially. Ideally, it will eventually bring in enough revenue that it can make the company more stable and more able to lavish the sort of polish on PA that we want, even if financial winds start blowing in an unfavorable direction.

The existence of HR, while it may seem impertinent or poorly timed to some observers, is actually a thing that A) is necessitated by the distribution of occupations within the company and B) good for PA in the long run, both as a financial buffer and as an incubator for further development of the PA engine.

I know this answer was long, but I hope it gives you some insight into why we can't just stop a thing that we've already dumped a bunch of time and money into, teach a bunch of artists how to fix bugs, push them onto PA, send me off to go find another job somewhere, fund the entire company for a year with a single project, and then have me quit whatever other job I got to come back to Uber and try to resurrect a project that has completely lost its momentum.

Human Resources lives or dies by what is happening right now. PA will continue to improve and thrive, and our communication with the community will continue to improve (as you've seen with Jeremy Ables). Clearly, there are major perception issues right now -- after all, here we are in a thread that's supposed to be about Human Resources, and we're talking about a different project.

Is Uber's past performance a legitimate topic of discussion? Of course it is. Do we have room to improve? Absolutely. Do I personally think we are a company that is committed to quality and able to deliver on ambitious goals? I absolutely believe it, or I wouldn't have taken this job.

This is the only place that an idea like Human Resources could have thrived, and these are the only people that I know of who have the right combination of expertise, passion, and technology to get the job done. If we get to make this game, it will melt faces.

If you need to wait for a while before your faith in Uber is restored, I get it. PA gets better every day, as the recent spate of major updates has shown. I hope we win back every person who feels we've let them down. But we don't have the luxury of putting Human Resources back on the shelf until everybody agrees we've atoned enough.

We go to war with the army we have, for better or for worse. It's up to you to decide if you want to be a part of this particular fight."

Nate's rhetoric seems quite similar to what he's been using to describe the pre-release and current state of development of KSP2. As such I don't think anyone would be over-cautious to take anything he says with a proverbial grain of salt.

[Alexoff]

Nate has a lot of experience talking about the difficulties in work and faith in a brighter future. It seems to me that he needed to go into politics, in politics usually no one remembers what was said a week ago, not to mention years.