Mohopeful

[adsii1970]

Hey, folks - I hate to have to put on my moderator hat, but kinda have to for just a moment. Long before I was a moderator, I, too was a regular forum player back when KSP (the original) was in 0.22. And believe me, there were tons of bugs, a lot like we are experiencing now in KSP2. Some of the bugs were downright funny and others were infuriating, often crashing the game to the desktop and corrupting the saved game file. Ah, yeah, those were the days.

KSP2 is no different. We all knew there would be bugs with KSP2 being in EA. And while you are free to disagree with one another, personally attacking one another is never the right thing to do. Also, being rude is also never a good thing. And while we are on the topic of those forum guidelines, those are still applicable on ANY and all parts of the forum. So, when any member of the moderation team does make a decision to merge threads or hide posts, the decision was not made in haste or without great thought. But we have an obligation to follow the rules of moderation we've been given. And as Forum Guideline 3.3 states:

Quote

Do not openly discuss action (or inaction) taken by the moderators (bans, warnings etc.). If you have concerns about a moderator action, see 3.4 below.

3.4 Contesting moderation action

All of the moderators are active community members who try to set a good example and apply the guidelines as appropriately as possible, but they are only human and can make mistakes from time to time. If you disagree with something they have done, please contact them or a senior moderator privately, and the issue will be re-examined.

So, with that, we have had to remove a few more posts from this thread.

Please continue to keep the discussion on the topic of the OP; do not toss out personal attacks, and please do not publicly discuss moderation actions taken by the moderation team.

Edited May 20, 2023 by adsii1970
Thread locked message was removed and replaced.

[Nicrose]

6 hours ago, Just Jim said:

I am a writer, not an engineer.  I am qualified to fix writing and localization bugs, but that's about it.

Not trying to be rude or anything but I don’t think anyone is claiming that people who don’t know how to make games should be working on the game… I think the main gripe is why do we have grid fins if there are so many other things we are missing? If it’s models that are needed then modelers should be focusing on what’s needed. If it’s bugs, programmers should be working on it. If there aren’t enough programmers to complete the goals, maybe hiring more would be appropriate? Or maybe not making a brand new game in the background? Idk, it feels a lot like they rushed this game out and now it is what it is. Very sad honestly. But yeah, I don’t think anyone expects mods or writers to be coding the game as that doesn’t make much sense and would create an even worse product. 

[Alexoff]

Look guys, I found another KSP2 video that will make you laugh!

And even funnier comments under this video on the forum!

Remember those glory days (mid February 2023) when we thought KSP2 would be better than KSP1 from 2023 and not like KSP1 from 2012?

Edited May 20, 2023 by Alexoff

[Nicrose]

13 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

For one thing, people keep demanding "transparency." 

I can’t quite tell if the quotes are for sarcasm and if so, is that towards the people supporting the game wishing for more actual transparency or because you feel the transparency is adequate but the supporters of the game don’t? 

[Vanamonde]

I was answering a specific question. Someone asked why the updates were about certain issues, and I was explaining that it's because that's what they have been working on. That is transparency. Whether the thing they are working on is what the poster wants them to be working on is a separate issue. 

[Alexoff]

Just now, Vanamonde said:

Someone asked why the updates were about certain issues, and I was explaining that it's because that's what they have been working on. That is transparency.

It's just that before there was much more transparency, and even before the patch we were told what bugs would be fixed.

 

[mattihase]

4 minutes ago, Nicrose said:

I think the main gripe is why do we have grid fins if there are so many other things we are missing? If it’s models that are needed then modelers should be focusing on what’s needed. If it’s bugs, programmers should be working on it. If there aren’t enough programmers to complete the goals, maybe hiring more would be appropriate?

One thing that I think is important to consideris that for each thing in a game, that's something that multiple people have to work on. It's a pipeline. If programmers are working on fixing bugs, they can't work on implementing features that they have all the assets for, and so on, and considering everyone programming the game isn't gonna be a perfect generalist, some people are gonna be working graphics, some UI, some gameplay, some engine, some tools, etc. there's a lot of potential bottlenecks between the art for something being done and it being done. And given the whole "we want everything in the game to be multiplayer ready and mod ready before it's in", it's already a long pipeline.

As for hiring more programmers, to quote an old saying "what one programmer can do in a month, two can do in two months". Onboarding programmers onto a project saps up time. They absolutely should have had more people onboarded onto this ages ago but onboarding people now would just slow the "cadence" of updates even more.

 

There's a lot of things going on here that (at least going off what I can gleam from what they've said in public) explain why a lot of things, to put it politely, aren't getting resolved fast.

[Scarecrow71]

28 minutes ago, mattihase said:

One thing that I think is important to consideris that for each thing in a game, that's something that multiple people have to work on. It's a pipeline. If programmers are working on fixing bugs, they can't work on implementing features that they have all the assets for, and so on, and considering everyone programming the game isn't gonna be a perfect generalist, some people are gonna be working graphics, some UI, some gameplay, some engine, some tools, etc. there's a lot of potential bottlenecks between the art for something being done and it being done. And given the whole "we want everything in the game to be multiplayer ready and mod ready before it's in", it's already a long pipeline.

For starters, they shouldn't be working to add assets and features until the game-breaking bugs are fixed.  By putting in new assets while not communicating the bugs they are working on they are effectively saying that the bug reports don't matter and what the players are seeing isn't important.

Secondly, this should be an all-hands thing to squash bugs.  I'm a developer by trade, but when something breaks in our systems our whole team, regardless of skillset, is required to put effort into fixing it.  Everyone is responsible for how well the game performs, and the TEAM should be working to fix it, not just one or two people.

Edited May 20, 2023 by Scarecrow71

[mattihase]

Just now, Scarecrow71 said:

For starters, they shouldn't be working to afd assets and features until the game-breaking bugs are fixed.  By putting in new assets while not communicating the bugs they are working on they are effectively saying that the bug reports don't matter and what the players are seeing isn't important.

Secondly, this should be an all-hands thing to squash bugs.  I'm a developer by trade, but when something breaks in our systems our whole team, regardless of skillset, is required to put effort into fixing it.  Everyone is responsible for how well the game performs, and the TEAM should be working to fix it, not just one or two people.

That would be possible if every single person working on a game was a generalist, in practice at a game studio there's many different roles and skillsets people will have joined up with. There's gonna be people on the team who joined to make art assets, graphics, models, textures, music, sfx, etc. who aren't programmers and/or don't know c# or c++ and sending them in to the bowels of Unity isn't gonna solve any bugs, it's just gonna waste either their time doing nothing or the programmers' times telling them what to do. It's a much better use of their time to work on the next batch of stuff that needs to be worked on.

One of the artists modelling and rigging grid fins to show them off isn't slowing down what the programmers is doing. "Perhaps" it's a little dishonest-by-omission to point at that and say "hey, look what we're adding to the game", but aside from that it's probably the ideal thing for them to do in the circumstances.

[Superfluous J]

9 hours ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

Impatient would be when it was said an announcement comes this week, and those people would complain Monday at 8 in the morning.It's definitely not being impatient when we were close to the end of the week, and it was radio silence.

I disagree.

Nate was almost late with the announcement.

We have a term for almost being late. It's called "on time."

[Scarecrow71]

Just now, mattihase said:

That would be possible if every single person working on a game was a generalist, in practice at a game studio there's many different roles and skillsets people will have joined up with. There's gonna be people on the team who joined to make art assets, graphics, models, textures, music, sfx, etc. who aren't programmers and/or don't know c# or c++ and sending them in to the bowels of Unity isn't gonna solve any bugs, it's just gonna waste either their time doing nothing or the programmers' times telling them what to do. It's a much better use of their time to work on the next batch of stuff that needs to be worked on.

Not sure i articulated properly, but I wasn't hired at my job to do data anaylsis...yet when stuff blows up I'm required to learn stuff I don't know to help out where needed.  This should be no different.  Its a TEAM effort.  Hiding behind "That isn't my job or skillset" is a cop out and horrible excuse for why things aren't progressing.

[Sylvi Fisthaug]

1 minute ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Not sure i articulated properly, but I wasn't hired at my job to do data anaylsis...yet when stuff blows up I'm required to learn stuff I don't know to help out where needed.  This should be no different.  Its a TEAM effort.  Hiding behind "That isn't my job or skillset" is a cop out and horrible excuse for why things aren't progressing.

I would certainly hate teaching people to code when stuff crashed, instead of fixing things and letting other people mind their own business and progress other important parts of game dev.

[mattihase]

3 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Hiding behind "That isn't my job or skillset" is a cop out and horrible excuse for why things aren't progressing.

Telling someone to learn C# from scratch and start fighting bugs isn't like handing someone a bucket of water and telling them to fight a fire. You don't want a huge influx of bad/amatuer/copypasted from stack exchange code injected into the project en masse by people who, nothing wrong with it, just aren't programmers. That is not going to help, it's gonna slow down the actual coders as they onboard them and it's probably going to introduce a whole host more bugs from newbie coding errors than it's actually gonna solve.

[Davidian1024]

I cannot disagree with the "let the modders fix it" mentality more.  One of the main reasons I want a new KSP is that I want a version of the game that does not need to be modified.

My mother gave me a copy of Cosmos by Carl Sagan when I was young.  My interest in space is no doubt because of her.  I would absolutely love to share the game with her.  Despite being extremely put off by video games in general, she's actually expressed interest.

Unfortunately, modifying KSP1 is not a straightforward process.  She simply does not have the patience for it.  Nor is she terribly comfortable with the idea of having software modifications that were created by random people on the internet installed on her computer.  (Nothing against the modders at all, I've enjoyed many a KSP1 mod over the years.)

And it's not just her, there are alot of people I've attempted to share the game with over the years.  But vanilla KSP1 is just kinda ugly out of the box.  That coupled with the steep learning curve of orbital mechanics, and inevitably they lose patience.

I think this point is critical.  I don't think anyone is arguing that stock KSP1 is good enough.  This is a massive problem.  If we want KSP to remain an extremely niche game, that only us KSP nerds play, then KSP2 should be scrapped, and we should just play modded KSP1 for the rest of our lives.

If we want KSP to become appealing to a broader audience, and I wholeheartedly do, then we need a KSP2 that does not need to be modified.

Let them cook!

[Sylvi Fisthaug]

Just now, mattihase said:

You don't want a huge influx of bad/amatuer/copypasted

*chatGPT enters the chat* 

A lot of random AI-generated code sounds like a nightmare. Looks clean, is wrong.

[mattihase]

Hell, even when it comes to firefighting, recruiting civillians off the street and sending them in with buckets is probably just gonna get a lot of bucket carriers

1 minute ago, mattihase said:

Telling someone to learn C# from scratch and start fighting bugs isn't like handing someone a bucket of water and telling them to fight a fire.

in need of rescue from fire too...

Just now, Sylvi Fisthaug said:

*chatGPT enters the chat*

Oh god I hadn't even considered the possibility. That's a trash fire I sure hope isn't happening.

[Alexoff]

1 minute ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Not sure i articulated properly, but I wasn't hired at my job to do data anaylsis...yet when stuff blows up I'm required to learn stuff I don't know to help out where needed.  This should be no different.  Its a TEAM effort.  Hiding behind "That isn't my job or skillset" is a cop out and horrible excuse for why things aren't progressing.

If there had been a properly organized development team, then in six years it would have been possible to make a game of acceptable quality with colonies and other things. Now to interrogate the performers, it seems to me, is wrong. If someone wrote a lot of texts with errors, then he is to blame. If the programmers were poorly organized and poorly trained, they constantly left the company and newcomers came to take their place, then management or specifically the one who wrote the buggy part of the code should be responsible for their work.

But the management does not communicate with us, as the transparency is rather limited. By the way, no one has ever apologized to us, so it is not clear why forgive the mistakes of those who do not need our forgiveness.

[Superfluous J]

Having worked in computers professionally for mumble dozen years (thankfully not as a programmer, but talking to them pretty much daily), when you're doing something that nobody's done before and there's a problem... sometimes you have no idea how to fix it.

Sometimes, NO ONE knows how to fix it.

It can take between 1 second and infinite time to fix a bug. It doesn't matter how critical, game breaking, or "so obvious" the bug is. If you've worked on a bug for some time and still have no idea how to fix it, it becomes less and less productive to sit there banging your head on the keyboard instead of putting it on the back burner and moving on to something else.

Now, actual critical bugs (hint: deteriorating orbits, incorrect trajectory predictions, and lack of Science Mode aren't critical bugs. Not being able to launch the game or the game crashing when you click a button that's needed to play, those are critical bugs) NEED to be fixed right away and it's worth spending any amount of time fixing them because the game LITERALLY won't work if they're not fixed.

Any other bug is NOT critical and SHOULD be shelved if it can't get fixed, if for no other reason than it's wasting time that can be used on other bugs.

And frequently, giving the bug time to cook in your subconscious is sometimes the best way to fix it.

[mattihase]

True. I've found most of the bugs that take seconds to fix also took months to fix. It's best to use that intervening time for at least something handy.

[Alexoff]

8 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

And frequently, giving the bug time to cook in your subconscious is sometimes the best way to fix it.

It seems that the developers have adopted this strategy for a long time! And not only with bugs.

[TwoCalories]

19 hours ago, Alexoff said:

And it seems very strange to me to show quite simple separate part for rockets three months after the release of "a game without new features". In the fall of 2020, I became suspicious when we were shown the creation of kerbals, although the game was then at the stage of "polishing". Why not show:
- a short video with the collection of science
- a short video with the construction of the space center as we move forward in our career
- a short video with a small colony on Minmus
- a short video with the colony editor
- a short video with the editor of huge spaceships being built right in orbit
- a short clip with a craft descending from orbit in a plasma cloud
- a short video with multiplayer (which Nate and his friends actively played in 2019), not a screenshot
- a short video with the extraction of resources (solid hydrogen from Jool for example)
- a short video with a Kerbal walking on unknown planet under unknown star
- a short video with fully functioning buildings of the space center
It just seems that the developers are exclusively engaged in the core of the game, a remaster of early versions of KSP1. To find out that some new features even in work, we have to take the word of the developers. They seem not going to show us something worthwhile.

Someone might have already said this, but...

The devs are waiting for a better time to release these new features since they are very key parts of KSP2. Once they iron out the last bugs, they'll release a feature episode or something that tells us everything we need to know about that feature, rather than a little snippet of gameplay. Nate Simpson even said at some point that they had a whole suite of ships that didn't include parts that weren't revealed.

I think for now, we can kind of enjoy the little things about KSP2, like the launch countdown, and Dres' rings.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, Nicrose said:

trying to be rude or anything but I don’t think anyone is claiming that people who don’t know how to make games should be working on the game… I think the main gripe is why do we have grid fins if there are so many other things we are missing?

Point... Missed.

 

 

 

Jim tried to explain it. 

Think about a car.  Someone builds engines.  Someone builds windshields.  Someone builds tires. 

You don't take the guy who knows glass off the windshield line just because the lady who builds tires keeps putting out triangles.  You either get a better tire maker or teach her why the circular shape was chosen back in the stone age. 

So even if the car won't be ready for a while due to engine and tire issues - if you tell the window guy to go home without pay, by the time the tires and engine are resolved you won't have a windshield... And still won't have a car that works. 

Edit - that said, I don't disagree that Nate's post was crafted in a way to almost guarantee annoying people. 

They really need to talk to a Crisis Communication consultant.  Comm strategy since release has been really poorly done. 

[Nicrose]

9 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Point... Missed.

 

 

 

Jim tried to explain it. 

Think about a car.  Someone builds engines.  Someone builds windshields.  Someone builds tires. 

You don't take the guy who knows glass off the windshield line just because the lady who builds tires keeps putting out triangles.  You either get a better tire maker or teach her why the circular shape was chosen back in the stone age. 

So even if the car won't be ready for a while due to engine and tire issues - if you tell the window guy to go home without pay, by the time the tires and engine are resolved you won't have a windshield... And still won't have a car that works. 

Edit - that said, I don't disagree that Nate's post was crafted in a way to almost guarantee annoying people. 

They really need to talk to a Crisis Communication consultant.  Comm strategy since release has been really poorly done. 

Convenient misquote… however I respectfully disagree with the overall point so it wasn’t missed. Again, no one proposed a “tire worker” to be building engines. But we expect them to not be making “new cars” when there are existing cars waiting. Hope that makes sense. Seems like a difference in scope.

[MechBFP]

1 minute ago, Nicrose said:

But we expect them to not be making “new cars” when there are existing cars waiting. Hope that makes sense.

No, it doesn’t. Imagine shutting down an entire car factory because 1 car is held up by some issue.  Lol. 

[Nicrose]

1 hour ago, Vanamonde said:

was answering a specific question. Someone asked why the updates were about certain issues, and I was explaining that it's because that's what they have been working on. That is transparency. Whether the thing they are working on is what the poster wants them to be working on is a separate issue. 

Yeah, I think this is all the info I needed to say goodbye. If all they’re working on is grid fins and a single bug then my worst fears are confirmed. Thank you for your effort here on the forums and I hope everyone enjoys the game ❤️

Just now, MechBFP said:

No, it doesn’t. Imagine shutting down an entire car factory because 1 car is held up by some issue.  Lol. 

That’s a minimization if I’ve ever seen one lol that’s like saying I’m the only person experiencing a horrible gaming experience