Parts and Circumstance

[Bosun]

20 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

you can at least see some of the ropes we’re hauling on every day

As a professional tallship sailor - 'Lines.'   "You can at least see some of the lines we're hauling on every day.  Lines are ropes that have a purpose, much like the tasks you work on, that also have a purpose.  A rope is a task that you store in the back of the office, to break out when you need some random piece of code for some awkward task, at which point the moment you use that code, it goes from a rope, to a line because you've given it purpose.  

If you need any other advice on old sailing ships, their actual mechanics or rigging, let me know.

As someone who often has a cynical attitude towards development, especially once it stretches beyond 5 years, I really appreciate your more candid discussions like this.  I've seen a lot of games, mods and other programs reach year 5 and fizzle out as the enthusiasm, resources and overall drive run out of the teams.  You're pushing through though, and proving my cynacism wrong. 

As the ole' shanty goes - Keep haulin, keep haulin...
 

Edited May 27, 2023 by Bosun

[Mitokandria]

Am a hobbyist programmer and aspiring systems engineer. Being that this is an engineering game I think the community (or at least me) would love to hear more of the nitty gritty from dev logs. Not just the "what" and "when" but also the "why" and "how". Let us in on some of that juicy, crunchy, and sometimes dirty dev process and not just the squeaky clean PR fluff.

This post is is a wonderful place to start! I know I already posted once but just wanted to say thank you again!

Edited May 27, 2023 by Mitokandria

[Bej Kerman]

12 minutes ago, Mitokandria said:

not just the squeaky clean PR fluff

They've always been talking about the "sometimes dirty dev process". This post is the opposite of "squeaky clean".

Edited May 27, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[WasatchWind]

I appreciate the transparency. I think that as long as you continue to caveat that not all announcements are final, it should be fine. I am hopeful that as we have this update, and then the science update, we'll slowly start seeing the playerbase grow again.  : )

[ILikeIke]

Nate & team, I really appreciate the candor here. Learning about your team's priorities, and its approach to setting priorities, makes it so much easier to play through the issues that inevitably come with releasing a game into Early Access. KSP 1 changed my life, and I'm confident that both it and KSP 2 will do the same for many more players to come.

I wish you the best of luck in squashing these bugs, and many others.

[Klapaucius]

7 hours ago, schlosrat said:

Looks like you'll get your wish! The Cornet was the first one he mentioned, and the Tuba was the third! 

Gosh, I missed cornet even though it was in front of my nose. Still hoping for a piccolo trumpet and Sousaphone!

[TheOrbitalMechanic]

Honestly, I've been pretty pessimistic so far regarding the state of the game and future development, but this is incredibly reassuring to hear. Although I (like many others) am still unhappy with the state of the initial launch, I am now also cautiously optimistic for the future, and I truly hope you guys keep up the good work and can make this game into something great.

[Vanamonde]

Please avoid getting personal. Some comments removed. 

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

8 hours ago, Alexoff said:

As I wrote earlier, the cyberpunk strategy works. You can promise to do something incredible, a really functioning world and so on, then release the game without all this, but with a bunch of bugs. Then the developers openly apologize and fix bugs for a year and add a new jacket and some new weapons. And voila - everyone is happy! Well, and that the gameplay of the game has not come close to what was promised earlier, almost no one cares. But the developers speak fluently and openly, thats important!

I can assume that he is looking forward to the game, roadmap implementation and patches. We already understood that Nate can express himself beautifully, that's why he was hired.

I thought it was just me noticing this modern recipe

for a game changing game that in the end is just passable. 
I hope it won’t be the case here, this is meant to be a usable but complex simulator for the most part.

[Pthigrivi]

Im really hopeful for this next update. I've got some Mac issues that might be mac issues that I can solve on my end, but it makes it so I don't feel like my feedback on bugs is useful so.. kinda just waiting for things to smooth out in a way that I can start a deep save and really set up and explore properly.  At least that way I could be more engaged and active on gameplay feedback. 

Edited May 27, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[pipe]

It's incredible how powerful mood swings this community has. In "A Taste of Science" people were somewhat still positive and hopeful but in "Mohopeful" everyone acted like all hope is lost, the game's dead and the entire world came crashing down on the dev team. And I hope you didn't look at what was going on in the KSP subreddit under Mohopeful's comment section. This forum was light sauce stuff compared to that. And now everyone's happy again. Like a teenager with BPD.

[RealKerbal3x]

This was a good update to read. I've kinda been lurking here on the forums for the past month or so, and similarly, I've been focusing my attention on other games (mostly KSP1, with a sprinkling of Elite Dangerous that I picked up in a steam sale) while waiting for KSP2 to progress. Given everything said here, I remain cautiously optimistic that this game can be what I've always hoped it would be.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, things can only get better. Don't stop and falter.

[Mitokandria]

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

They've always been talking about the "sometimes dirty dev process". This post is the opposite of "squeaky clean".

I may have miscommunicated. This post is the "sometimes diry dev process" that I like and would like to see more in this fashion. I like numbers and formulas. When I say "dirty" I mean the thought processes and ideas that sometimes end up being left on the cutting room floor due to being out of scope or doesn't fit into the game.

I suppose an example of this might be sharing some of the possible sources of the bugs they are working on or the methods they are trying out to work through a particularly tricky "accidental feature".

[Alexoff]

2 hours ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

I hope it won’t be the case here, this is meant to be a usable but complex simulator for the most part.

This is likely to be the case, since it doesn’t take much to make KSP fans happy. It is polite and courteous enough to say that the developers are trying to fix bugs and add a few new parts. The task of developers, first of all, is to make the audience happy, and if the audience doesn’t need much, then developers don’t need to do much. Nothing happened in the game itself, what bugs will be fixed? We don’t know if the fourth patch will be released before the fall, whether the game will be brought to a playable state, when features from KSP1 return and when science comes out - no one knows, but most fans are already happy. The community has never bought into beautiful words, right?

[cocoscacao]

16 hours ago, Periple said:

For the people calling for Nate's head on a plate

Maybe they're just hungry... Cannibalism... yeah I went there

52 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

We don’t know if the fourth patch will be released before the fall

At this point, I'm convinced that even if patch 4 date was set in stone, you would complain about uncertainty of v1 release date... tired... 

[Alexoff]

12 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

At this point, I'm convinced that even if patch 4 date was set in stone, you would complain about uncertainty of v1 release date... tired... 

Of course, it's not about the release dates, we've been listening to them for quite some time. If you mentally eliminate all the bugs from KSP2, it will still be too far from the game that we expected. If you weren't expecting (boring) KSP1 remaster instead of a sequel.

[whatsEJstandfor]

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

Of course, it's not about the release dates, we've been listening to them for quite some time. If you mentally eliminate all the bugs from KSP2, it will still be too far from the game that we expected. If you weren't expecting (boring) KSP1 remaster instead of a sequel.

I don't know how to say this without it sounding like a personal attack, so I apologize to the mods in advance; let me know if this is out of line. But, since the version of the game that would satisfy you currently doesn't exist and almost certainly won't exist for at least the next several months, why keep making the same post every few hours but with different wording? Do you have any other points to make?

[schlosrat]

7 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

Gosh, I missed cornet even though it was in front of my nose. Still hoping for a piccolo trumpet and Sousaphone!

These engines look so interesting and fun! I can’t wait to take them for a spin and see how they do. They’re visually very appealing and functionally very interesting! Hopefully they’ve got a non extended operating mode that will work for landers.

If for some reason the dev’s don’t include a piccolo, then there’s always hope the modding community may step in. There’s a lot of interesting parts development going on right now in the KSP2 modding community, including developing easier ways to mod the stock parts and especially concerning development of entirely new engines.

 

[Scarecrow71]

23 hours ago, Dakota said:

I'll answer this one: yes. We really enjoyed the last ones and we want to keep doing them. We're looking at a new more approachable format for some of our comms, and the AMAs would most likely appear that way compared to just doing them on Discord again.
 

No timeline, but we have a list of team members ready-to-go - so expect one sooner rather than later.

What platform would they be on?  Something that we wouldn't have to purchase, I hope?  Teams, or Webex, perhaps?

I really dig listening to the conversation, and I just took it upon myself to record them, so I'm invested in attending.  I am curious, though, if you are using something other than Discord, will you guys be able to show yourselves, or images or other video during them?

Finally on this topic, have you thought about inviting one or two community members (one of us) to have us give on-the-spot analysis of what we see, or what we would like to see, or what we think?  I know it would be difficult to guarantee nothing ugly happens, but I'm just curious.  And I would, of course, be happy to do it and show gameplay as it relates.  

Edited May 28, 2023 by Scarecrow71

[Redneck]

On 5/26/2023 at 4:45 PM, Nate Simpson said:

Good afternoon, Kerbonauts.

This past week has been a learning experience. My last post here received a lot of comments, many of which expressed doubt, frustration, and in some cases even anger about either the seeming lack of progress on KSP2 or the perception that I am concealing some dark reality about the state of the game. Our team has been reading your comments and asking one another if there’s some way we can do better.

In the past, every item in these forum posts has had to cross a threshold of certainty - I don’t want to announce some new feature or target date, only to experience a trust-eroding failure to follow through. I feel this burden especially keenly because in the past I have personally announced dates that turned out to be incorrect. For that reason, I have avoided talking about features in progress, bugs under investigation, or internal delivery deadlines. With a game this complex, nothing is ever assured until it has been thoroughly tested by QA. When you combine this "stay quiet until you’re absolutely sure" ethos with a more dispersed update cadence, what you get is long periods of silence.

Now, of course I haven’t gone literally silent. I still post here every week. Before each post goes out, I meet with the production and community teams to review the past week’s progress, and a great many exciting developments are discussed. They often take the form of "we’ve made great progress on x category of super annoying bug" or "this feature looks good but we haven’t had time to fully validate it yet." By my standard of "don’t talk about it until it’s truly done," neither of those scenarios yields anything that’s safe to post about. What is safe, then? Well, for the most part, content updates (new art, new parts, new graphics improvements) come along in nice, neat little parcels that are not only visually pleasing, but also unlikely to generate an unmet expectation. They’re fun and they’re safe, and artists are always creating new content. So you see lots of that.

But the other thing you see lots of is some variation on "improved stability and performance." That’s my catch-all term for that very meaningful category of progress that, because of my reluctance to write bad checks, can’t yet be talked about in detail. When I hold back on such items, I comfort myself that the less I reveal now, the more surprising the patch notes will be when we finally release them.

Still, I’m questioning my choice to withhold information about systems in progress. Yes, there’s always the chance that when we talk about a feature in development, that we’re also creating an expectation that the feature will be present in the next update. Similarly daunting is the possibility that we’ll announce that we’re working on something that the community perceives as "easy" (an especially common situation when we’re working on a feature that is already functional in the original KSP), and then take such a long time delivering that feature that people may decide we don’t know what we’re doing. In such cases, we then need to take the time to explain in technical detail why the implementation of such and such a feature is non-trivial in KSP2. Increased transparency carries costs, and those costs always have to be balanced against other feature-facing work we could be doing.

So what I’m going to try to do right now is to extend some trust to you. I’m going to talk about a few things that are not yet complete so that you can at least see some of the ropes we’re hauling on every day - some of which may prove to be long. This list is not exhaustive (there are dozens of people working on dozens of items simultaneously, and there are some features that we really do want to be surprises), but it will hopefully give you some visibility into the breadth of issues we’re tackling. Please do not assume that if a bug didn’t get mentioned in this list that it is unknown to us or not being worked on — this is a top-ten list.

Our bug prioritization is broadly guided by the following logic:

• Category A: any bug that causes loss of a vehicle in flight (physics issues, trajectory instability, decoupling instability, loss of camera focus, unexpected part breakage/RUD)
• Category B: any bug that affects the fidelity or continuity of a saved game (rigidbody degradation, save file inflation, loss of vehicle or Kerbal during instantiation or focus switching)
• Category C: any bug that negatively affects the expected performance of a vehicle (drag occlusion, staging issues, thrust asymmetry, joint wobbliness, landing leg bounciness)
• Category D: any VAB bug that prevents the player from creating the vehicle they want to make (symmetry bugs, fairing/wing editor bugs, strut instability, inconsistent root part behavior)

While there are many bugs that live outside these four categories (and in some cases, such bugs end up getting sorted out during normal feature development), the four categories above are the biggest fun killers. Until a player can envision a vehicle, create it without being impeded by VAB issues, fly it with a reasonable expectation that physical forces will be consistently applied, and save their progress at any point without worrying about the fidelity of that save, the KSP2 experience will be compromised. Obviously, now that we are layering in progression mechanics (Science gathering and transmission, missions, and R&D tech tree) in preparation for downstream Roadmap updates, the importance of addressing these issues only increases.

Therefore, here are a few of the biggest issues we’re wrangling with right now:

1. Vehicles in stable coasting orbits sometimes experience orbit instability/decay - Status: possible fix in progress
2. Trajectories change when vehicles cross SOI boundaries - Status: fix in progress (see below)
3. Certain inline parts cause aerodynamic drag numbers to spike - Status: under investigation
4. Returning to craft from VAB causes craft to go underground (possibly related to Kerbals and landed vehicles dropping through terrain while being approached) - Status: possible fix being tested
5. Decoupling events result in various issues including loss of control, incorrect controllability of decoupled subassemblies, loss of camera focus, and other issues - Status: may have many causes, but some fixes in progress (see below)
6. Save files get bigger over time (TravelLog experiencing "landed" status spam) - Status: fix being tested
7. Opening part manager causes major frame lag - Status: experiments ongoing
8. Major post-liftoff frame rate lag immediately above launchpad (associated with engine exhaust lighting) - Status: fix being tested
9. Root parts placed below decouplers cause issues with stage separation - Status: under investigation
10. Vehicle joints unusually wobbly, some part connections unusually weak - Status: under investigation

We’re tracking down some strange vehicle behaviors associated with spurious autostrut errors. As we’ve discussed here before, some radially-attached parts are reinforced by additional invisible autostruts to improve their stability. It turns out that these autostruts don’t always break cleanly during decoupling events, and may be the cause of some of our more frustrating decoupling issues (including those where detached vehicle elements appear to still affect one another’s behavior). We’re still investigating this one, but we have high hopes that its correction will result in a reduction of mission-killing errors.

Finally, we have zeroed in on the cause of some of the trajectory errors we’ve been seeing - especially the situation in which a trajectory changes spontaneously when crossing an SOI boundary. This one is deep in the code and its correction may end up fixing a few other downstream issues. This is a complicated problem, however, and we may not solve it in time for the June update. We should know more about this one soon.

I’ve provided the list above as a stopgap. We have been discussing internally how best to improve bug status visibility so that you have a better idea of what we’re working on. We’re looking at a lot of options right now, and I’ll update you when we’ve settled on something. We recognize the need for this transparency and we’ll come to a solution soon.

ANYWAY... we have some nice content news! Update v0.1.3.0 will be the first KSP2 update to contain not only bug fixes, but a few new parts. Right now, we can confirm the arrival of the following:

• A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E
• Clamp-O-Tron shielded docking port
• Clamp-O-Tron Inline Docking Port
• MK2 Clamp-O-Tron Docking Port
• Cornet Methalox Engine (new small extensible-nozzle orbital engine)
• Trumpet Methalox Engine (new medium extensible-nozzle orbital engine)
• Tuba Methalox Engine (new large extensible-nozzle orbital engine)
• S3-28800 Large Inline Methalox tank (longer version of large methalox tanks)

Here’s some video of those new engines in action. The Tuba has individually-swiveling mini-nozzles that might be one of part designer Chris Adderley’s coolest ideas yet (final parts built by Pablo Ollervides, Jonathan Cooper, and Alexander Martin):

We are still testing the new grid fins. Because these parts require some special part module support, engineering work is ongoing. Due to the complexity of this work, we don’t believe grid fins will make it into the v0.1.3.0 update.

Last week’s challenge produced a few spiffy designs. Check out this rocket, with which user Well braved the Kraken and managed to deposit a lander at the bottom of the Mohole:

Gotta respect the ingenuity of using antennae for landing legs:

Thanks to those who participated!

Next up, at the suggestion of @RyanHamer42 on Twitter, we’re building space stations! Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

• Primary goal: build a station by docking at least two Wayfarer habitat modules together in orbit above Kerbin
• Secondary goal: add a deployable solar panel truss and a fuel depot tank to your station
• Jeb-level goal: dock a transfer tug to your station and place the station in orbit above another planet
• Val-level goal: send a lander to your station that can be reused for down-and-up flights to the surface of the planet below

Thanks for the suggestion, Ryan! Good luck, everyone!

@Nate SimpsonTHATS how you do a update! No PR bs just straight to the point communication. Thats all we ask. Im still a lil liquided about releasing the game in this condition and at a $50 pricetag BUT at least now we know the what and why is being worked on along with the results even if not conclusive. This is all we ask. Thank you for this 

Edited May 28, 2023 by Redneck

[Dakitess]

11 hours ago, pipe said:

It's incredible how powerful mood swings this community has. In "A Taste of Science" people were somewhat still positive and hopeful but in "Mohopeful" everyone acted like all hope is lost, the game's dead and the entire world came crashing down on the dev team. And I hope you didn't look at what was going on in the KSP subreddit under Mohopeful's comment section. This forum was light sauce stuff compared to that. And now everyone's happy again. Like a teenager with BPD.

Well I've got to say that I don't really understand that. 2 theories come to mind :

- These are not the same persons, and people that were not complaining about the game so far, came to compliment the OP, to say that they are happy about the communication changes, the transparency, the news. Maybe they were supportive and optimistic but not to the point of ignoring the previous official threads.

- These are partially / a good proportion of the same people, and they are just genuinely happy to be able to say that they are happy from theses news. Like they've always wanted to but not being able, see previous point.

For the latter, well, I can understand but I find it quite strange : as said previously, there is really nothing here that is able to recover from the bad previous communication. This is better, clearly, but nothing magical that would deserve a complete shift of public opinion. To me, at least, obviously.

I'm quite thinking of a mix of both situation, quite some new people compared to the global complainers, as well as a bunch of eventual complainers that defintely "want" to express their support. I'm not one of them so far, unfortunately, and I'll really need a real kind of new "start" (nah, still not the Nate head, not even the dev team to be replaced...) to believe in a potentiel worthy future KSP2, be it in 3 years.

Regarding the AMA, we all know that questions are quite cherry picked : it's normal, it's fine, but I think it could be a good way to actually deliver specific answers that community want to hear about.

@whatsEJstandfor So, what do you recommend ? Keeping silent and now have a whole majority of positive feedback about the news, just because... Negative things have already been said ? True honest non-rethorical question. What would it means to the community, to the KSP2 Team ? Why should it be this way ? Obviously, regarding the state of the game, way more negative things has been said, and kept being repeated. Positive things were not much, it's not rethorical either, just some kind of facts that you're free to discuss about. Now, if more and more good things is brought to the game, to the communication, more and more people will speak about it, and it's cool, it's what we are all waitinfg for, isn'it ? 

But it does not mean that the game nor the communication is perfect or even good enough. Sure, unconstructive gratuitous rants are still not welcome, as well as troll or low-effort copy pasted complaints. But you might agree that theses are pretty, pretty rare. Though, complaints and critics still have their place. Here, I say that the OP is something better than before, and quite far from what I would expect for something really "game changing", that I think the game need some fresh start of any kind, to be discusses as well, etc. Can I ? Can we indeed repeat some things, insist on some other that had been said, to balance the very positive feedback on this thread and not being instantly flamed for that ? We're speaking about this "issue" way more than we should, I guess we all agree about that.

Edited May 28, 2023 by Dakitess

[Periple]

13 minutes ago, Dakitess said:

Keeping silent and now have a whole majority of positive feedback about the news, just because... Negative things have already been said ? True honest non-rethorical question.

Once you’ve made a complaint or criticism and have noted that it has reached the people you meant to reach, the best thing you can do is let it drop. Maybe return to it in a few months if it looks like it’s been forgotten, and even then you just might have to accept that however strongly you feel about it, it might not be a priority for them. Banging on the same drum will just make the people you want to reach put in ear plugs and annoy everybody else!

 

[cocoscacao]

8 hours ago, Alexoff said:

If you mentally eliminate all the bugs from KSP2, it will still be too far from the game that we expected

I fail to see how. They said it's gonna be just sandbox at the beginning of the EA, and we got that. Did you mean that for the full game? If so, do you also mean that roadmap won't be finished? 

Edited May 28, 2023 by cocoscacao

[TickleMyMary]

I'll believe it when I see it, talk is cheap until things actually start dropping... 

I could write the most fanciful menu imaginable but it means nothing until plates start hitting the tables and customer reaction is gauged... And, those customers ARE the business! A fact quite often missed in an online forum such as this.

 

[Alexoff]

8 hours ago, whatsEJstandfor said:

I don't know how to say this without it sounding like a personal attack, so I apologize to the mods in advance; let me know if this is out of line. But, since the version of the game that would satisfy you currently doesn't exist and almost certainly won't exist for at least the next several months, why keep making the same post every few hours but with different wording? Do you have any other points to make?

If I was given a dollar each time for telling me "if you don't like something, then get out," then I might not work. It's amazing that the same people write the same thing over and over again.

1 hour ago, cocoscacao said:

I fail to see how. They said it's gonna be just sandbox at the beginning of the EA, and we got that. Did you mean that for the full game? If so, do you also mean that roadmap won't be finished? 

Oh yes, early access, or rather early access of early access. Everyone should be happy, and the roadmap is apparently the end of early access.