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Calvinball? More like Spherical Hydrogen Tank-Ball!


Nate Simpson

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15 minutes ago, Nicrose said:

I think having to learn and understand different real world topics that have entire careers built off them is a bit much for a game about flying rockets (which is arguable hard enough for some).

I hope you're joking. 

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3 hours ago, LoSBoL said:

Full agreement, LEGO please, fix a bit of wobleness but let unstable builds be unstable builds. And than when your rockets woble it's the kraken whispering in your ear 'learn to become a better engineer'

Also agree. The wobble provides iterative feedback to the player on their designs. You don’t get as much feedback if your design is better or worse if it just fails (snaps apart) suddenly unless your flight every attempt is very similar. 

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2 hours ago, Nicrose said:

While the at may be true, it’s impossible to say for sure that that exact but is the reason people aren’t playing. For me, I haven’t played in weeks due to the lack of content and other various bugs, however this specific bug is actually not the reason. Additionally I think many players, if not a hefty majority, will be opening the game after major patches when bugs like this are fixed rather than paying $50 to completely abandon the game for one specific bug

Because of this bug, it is almost impossible to create anything large and complex in the game. Is it possible to follow to Eva and back? Is it possible to do a grand tour of all the planets? I highly doubt it. The players were left with the opportunity only for small crafts, greatly reducing the functionality. But I agree that this is far from the only reason. There are many reasons to quit the game, but few to stay in it and enjoy it.

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3 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

I hope you're joking. 

I meant things like magnetic fields, radiation, and thermodynamics are a bit advanced for most humans so it doesn't seem like a great thing to make a game made for humans <3

Edited by Nicrose
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If all the joint wobble is removed entirely then I expect to see random part and engine failure implemented, something has to provide an engineering challenge and if I need to build in redundancy, so be it. Autostrut is way too much, it pretty much trivialized KSP1 for the experienced player. OTOH, stitching tanks together with struts like in 0.19 KSP1 is stupid too, we can and should have better than that. There's a middle ground that provides an engineering challenge without requiring suspension of disbelief.

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6 minutes ago, regex said:

If all the joint wobble is removed entirely then I expect to see random part and engine failure implemented, something has to provide an engineering challenge and if I need to build in redundancy, so be it. Autostrut is way too much, it pretty much trivialized KSP1 for the experienced player. OTOH, stitching tanks together with struts like in 0.19 KSP1 is stupid too, we can and should have better than that. There's a middle ground that provides an engineering challenge without requiring suspension of disbelief.

Given the excellent advances is sound design in 2.x I'd like more sound design focused on immanent structural failures that would reflect real sounds of metal strain and flexing that one would hear if aboard the rocket under stress and near failure.

This wouldn't necessarily be more realistic for uncrewed craft, but would add better immersion and feedback to the player than wobble.  

In other words, if the claim is that wobble "provides feedback" for bad designs, sounds of stress and immanent failure would be much better and inline with the "better sound" design goal overall.

Some slight wobble just prior to  failure is likely realistic in some situations, but once it wobbles, failure should be 99% unavoidable 

I wonder if SpaceX had acoustic sensors on the recent Starship test?  That could have provided some great samples for the sound design team to work with for this type of thing

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Seriously I can’t stress enough for you guys to look into texture baking. The verts are one of the reasons the game is taking in fps. Us Star Trek ship models do have to take that into account if we are gonna use them in games and we let normal details do the visual work. 

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I'll add my strong disapproval of wobbly rockets to the chorus. A *slight* amount of wobble may be unobnoctious, but if it bends a rocket like a banana or prevents construction of large vessels then it'd be preferable to remove entirely. Aero and structural failures are fine, but find a better way.

I can fly a wobbly rocket to orbit, but it's not what I'd call fun. The bug that stopped me playing this patch was after a frustrating time nursing such a rocket to orbit through several flights it just despawned on acheiving an above atmo perigee.

 

As an unrelated suggestion - it'd be nice if struts and tubes had toggleable internal attachment points.

 

Edited by RCgothic
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1 hour ago, Nicrose said:

I meant things like magnetic fields, radiation, and thermodynamics are a bit advanced for most humans so it doesn't seem like a great thing to make a game made for humans <3

Those subjects people unconsciously deal with day to day. So why not point it out in the form of a video game?

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5 hours ago, Nicrose said:

I respectfully disagree and believe that would make the game really daunting for new players and tedious for experienced players. 

Can you explain why or how? I've simply suggested that the data we've collected gets saved and can be used as a resource in the future, it puts no onus on the player to do anything. This is like saying wikipedia is bad for the internet cause it has advanced topics in it. If that makes you uncomfortable then just don't read it.

5 hours ago, Nicrose said:

I personally don’t have a problem with getting science points over actual information unless the information was just that, information, similar to the last game where they told you the temp and that was it :) I think having to learn and understand different real world topics that have entire careers built off them is a bit much for a game about flying rockets (which is arguable hard enough for some).

I never suggested that the system I brought up would replace points, on the contrary I said they should exist together, see:

17 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

 And that doesn't mean it cant also be used for things like a tech tree but included as well so that it remains a useful mechanic beyond when the tree is finished.

Also, I'm not suggesting adding new mechanics, radiation will likely be in the game around 1.0. Wouldnt it be better to see the radiation belts cause you sent a probe to check for them that also mapped them than to unknowingly pass through them and have negative effects happen without being able to see ahead of time that they would? Wouldn't it be better to be able to scan a planet for where its resource deposits are concentrated than to simply land in a place an hope the resource you are looking for exists there?

5 hours ago, Nicrose said:

For instance, I know nothing about magnetic fields other than positive and negative

It's actually north and south :P

5 hours ago, Nicrose said:

 and very little about thermodynamics and even less about radiation and the different kinds and I think making a mission where you have to pay attention to all of those in addition to everything we already need to is a bit extreme and should probably be saved for an “extreme difficulty” option if it’s implemented otherwise I’d vote against it :) 

Where did thermodynamics get mentioned? Also, you don't need to know much about radiation other than a lot of it is hazardous and requires shielding, which is an issue we are likely going to be dealing with already as shielding plates to block radiation from certain engines have been shown pre-launch strongly hinting this is one of the mechanics that will be released later on.

 

In short, I'm just asking do be able to discover and readily access data about mechanics that will already be in the game regardless if there's an ability to reference it implemented like I'm suggesting

1 hour ago, Nicrose said:

I meant things like magnetic fields, radiation, and thermodynamics are a bit advanced for most humans so it doesn't seem like a great thing to make a game made for humans <3

The ones in bold really aren't that complicated.. rocket science/engineering is way more complex :/

again, thermodynamics was never mentioned in the post i made that you are referring to

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On 6/18/2023 at 12:39 PM, Alexoff said:

On the other hand, the presence of this feature in the game greatly upset the players and significantly reduced their number.

What leads you to believe that the one caused the other? I'm sure some have quit over it but is there any indication that it was significant? As opposed to - say - the game not having progression, or bugs that made interplanetary travel difficult, or anything else upsetting the players these days?

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3 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

What leads you to believe that the one caused the other? I'm sure some have quit over it but is there any indication that it was significant? As opposed to - say - the game not having progression, or bugs that made interplanetary travel difficult, or anything else upsetting the players these days?

Yeah, the lack of goals and limited selection of parts has me not playing currently. There's just not much to do yet.

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If only it was beautiful and running well... It's really something missing from KSP1 and KSP2. Incentive to explore, land, visit, drive, settle. Incentive to take screenshots, to share them, to find the best location to build your colony, at the top of a beautiful and details cliff, to benefit / be challenged by the terrain topology. To build specific Rover being able to handle the rough terrain and scatters with proper physics.

Etc, etc, etc. Even with as much bugs and limited part selection, if it was really beautiful and running fairly well (say, 2-300% better, like 45 FPS with a 150 parts craft on a 1000$ recent desktop PC), I would definitely, deeeeefinitely play it. It's the main thing lacking for me, the main thing I was waiting for. Scenery. Terrain. Graphics. I'm not keen of playing an already vastly outdated game and I don't think it will improve enough, by a huge margin.

Actually I perfectly remember almost not installing KSP1 at all when I saw the pics, back in 2013, like, soooooo outdated.

BUT : it was one of its kind. Indie. Very early in dev. KSP2 is none of this and has no excuse. I don't understand.

Edited by Dakitess
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2 hours ago, TLTay said:

Why even release a patch at all if it doesn't solve any major problems? Might as well delay it again if none of the big ones can be solved.

In case of a nuclear war, it's better to have as many copies of the most recent build of the game :)

It'll gives us the taste how much it is improved... Plus, it's not just bugfixes that are added.

Edited by cocoscacao
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13 hours ago, darthgently said:

Given the excellent advances is sound design in 2.x I'd like more sound design focused on immanent structural failures that would reflect real sounds of metal strain and flexing that one would hear if aboard the rocket under stress and near failure.

While this change would tell you your rocket is having issues somewhere, it does not tell you where it is happening in your rocket easily. I’d definitely be down for this as a compliment (its a cool idea), but it does not seem suited as a replacement. Assuming wobble is a sane amount, a system to where a rocket snaps if it  “overwobbles” in both frequency and magnitude sounds good, however Id still like wobbling as an indicator of “You messed up”.

  

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23 hours ago, Lisias said:

Wobbly rockets happens when you abuse the structure. It's meant to be a failure, user's failure, a failure on designing a rocket that both do what it's intended to do as well respects some constraints.

This is a game, and building crafts under constraints is part of the challenges imposed by the game.

If the wobble is to be gone, it needs to be replaced by something else, as plain R.U.D.
 

It removes challenges. Juno is another kind of game, it promotes visuals over constraints. If we would be talking about kid's toys, Juno is like a Modelling Dough, while KSP is like LEGO: two completely different kinds of toys, to be used in completely different ways.

KSP2 needs to decide the way it want to go - LEGO or Modelling Dough. It will fail if it tries to be both.

 

I agree with Nate, besides rockets generally don't just snaps: they plain explodes or just collapses:

Snapping is one of the possible "punishments" by not respecting some constraints. If snapping is to be gone, it should be replaced by something else - as plain collapsing. What's just a convoluted way to "snap" after all. :) 

Oh, you don't like playing under constraints? Not a problem: here, take this nice cheat and play as you like! ;) 

I choose to play KSP over Simple Rockets (1 in the past and now 2, aka Juno) and Orbiter exactly because I like to build things under constraints - I always liked more playing LEGO than Modelling Dough. Stock parts doesn't cut it? Finding an add'on that does what I want is also part of the fun, as well as coping with the new constraints such add'on brings to my gaming.

If KSP2 is going the Modelling Dough way, I will just not play it - sticking with KSP1. I already have Juno for playing this style, and it's available now and it runs on my current machines. ;) (I wonder what would happen if someone writes an add'on for Juno adding little critters like Kerbals to it - bonus points if they are Kerbals indeed! :sticktongue:)

 

My personal opinion about this is that they should had gone No Man's Sky style: just shut up and do the work with occasional releases.

It's nice to have such kind of feedback from them, I'm enjoying reading most of them, but they are also exposing themselves to unfunded and uneducated criticism, and this can be both abrasive to the game's reputation as well also exhausting to the game developers.

They start to listen to people around here, and KSP will be reduced to a stand-up guyly [mongrel] and better funded copycat of Juno.

You think that because I don't want rockets to wobble in an unrealistic manner and just break in half due to their being zero rigidity in the joint system that I want to cheat...

 

Gotcha! :blink:

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1 hour ago, TLTay said:

Why even release a patch at all if it doesn't solve any major problems? Might as well delay it again if none of the big ones can be solved.

It solves at least some major problems. Also this is not an exhaustive list of fixes and features, only a discussion of what has been previously posted as the top ten bugs.

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39 minutes ago, Strawberry said:

While this change would tell you your rocket is having issues somewhere, it does not tell you where it is happening in your rocket easily. I’d definitely be down for this as a compliment (its a cool idea), but it does not seem suited as a replacement. Assuming wobble is a sane amount, a system to where a rocket snaps if it  “overwobbles” in both frequency and magnitude sounds good, however Id still like wobbling as an indicator of “You messed up”.

  

Add to this my previous suggestion of compressive and tensile strength view of craft in editor where one could spot joint issues in the editor.  This would combine joint strength with lever arm and typical aero forces to color code the margins of all the joints. Maybe available in flight also?

Edited by darthgently
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3 hours ago, Dakitess said:

If only it was beautiful and running well... It's really something missing from KSP1 and KSP2. Incentive to explore, land, visit, drive, settle. Incentive to take screenshots, to share them, to find the best location to build your colony, at the top of a beautiful and details cliff, to benefit / be challenged by the terrain topology. To build specific Rover being able to handle the rough terrain and scatters with proper physics.

Etc, etc, etc. Even with as much bugs and limited part selection, if it was really beautiful and running fairly well (say, 2-300% better, like 45 FPS with a 150 parts craft on a 1000$ recent desktop PC), I would definitely, deeeeefinitely play it. It's the main thing lacking for me, the main thing I was waiting for. Scenery. Terrain. Graphics. I'm not keen of playing an already vastly outdated game and I don't think it will improve enough, by a huge margin.

Actually I perfectly remember almost not installing KSP1 at all when I saw the pics, back in 2013, like, soooooo outdated.

BUT : it was one of its kind. Indie. Very early in dev. KSP2 is none of this and has no excuse. I don't understand.

Incentive?  Because it’s there!

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What is there ?... Flat out stretched texture without physical scattering ? No micro-topology ? Rough lightning that highlight any contour when the sun goes down, and turning any surface in a silver-ish weird reflexion ? Total absence of scenery, actually, let's be fair. Sure, planets, moons, blabla, won't be *very* different from what we have in substance. Dead rocky bodies, uh ?

But there is beautiful dead rocky bodies and... Ugly,  lazy scenery without any wow-factor at all and being way out-dated compared to what exist now in video games ? Yeah yeah yeah again "KSP2 is not Star Citizen budget wise" I get it, okay, yes, wouw, cool. Yeah, so, 30% of StarCitizen Scenery would be fine ? Or whatever other game that dare including some actual scenery and terrain physic ?

Or I should just be happy to stick with the 10 yo terrain from KSP1 with some glitters and shiny surfaces, since this is what most will say, whatever the graphics, it's KSP !

Ha... We won't go anywhere with this ambition, it's just my take, while scenery could actually really really really set KSP2 apart from KSP1 and benefit a LOT for every gameplay.

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On 6/16/2023 at 2:00 PM, Nate Simpson said:

A Word About Wobbly Rockets

 

Our team shares the community view that overly-wobbly rockets are a major issue in KSP2 (it is number 10 on our top-ten issues list). We have introduced a number of mitigations to address aspects of that issue (altering inertia tensor values to decrease joint issues that emerge when high-mass and low-mass parts are connected, introducing various bespoke multi-joint augmentations to areas of known over-flexibility), but we still see this as an area where major improvement is needed. For the record, this is our official view on what a successful implementation would look like, and against which we continue to measure the effectiveness of ongoing mitigation work:

  • For inline parts that are connected serially, in most applications there should be little to no flexing. This is especially true when neighboring inline parts are the same core size
  • For radially-attached boosters or cantilevered subassemblies with single-point radial connections, some flexibility is expected. There are some applications for which manually-applied struts should be required
  • Wings should not require struts to stay rigid
  • Docking two vessels in orbit should result in a strong, non-wobbly connection that doesn’t fold on itself as soon as the player tries to move the resulting vehicle
  • Wobbly rockets are sometimes fun and funny. A big part of what originally got many of us hooked on the original KSP was the silliness and emergent problem solving that came from playing World of Goo with rocket parts. Broadly, we see this as part of the Kerbal DNA, and want to preserve it in some form. Whether that means limiting wobbliness to certain types or sizes of parts, or relegating certain behaviors to player settings, is the subject of ongoing internal discussion. We of course are following community conversations with keen interest, and this is an area where Early Access participants can have a significant impact on the 1.0 version of KSP2
  • Joint physics impact CPU performance, and as we progress through the Colony and Interstellar roadmap milestones the part counts will increase dramatically. Any solutions we arrive at for the above requirements must accommodate this reality
  • We would like to move away from autostrut, or any other band-aid solution that involves hidden settings that automatically apply additional joints to make a vehicle more rigid. Whatever solution we arrive at, we’d like it to be predictable and transparent to all users. If over the course of Early Access we find that some form of autostrut is still necessary to allow the creation of ambitious vehicles, we’ll revisit this requirement

As a person who has dive-bombed more than one physics meeting with an exasperated "can’t we just make the joints stiffer" comment, let me assure you that in true KSP fashion, this is not a problem with a simple remedy. We’ve got very capable people on the case, and we will arrive at a good solution.

I just... Don't know what to say...

While I agree that wobbly rockets are funny, they outstay their welcome within the first hour of gameplay and become more discouraging as time goes on. I know there is the argument of 'add more struts', but I really want to be mindful of the part count on vessels. Especially when they get more and more complex, like say, making the Space Shuttle, interstellar vessels, colonies, etc.

Granted, I started doing more advanced builds when KSP2 released, like my Saturn V-Centaur I made for the JUICE challenge. I also understand not everyone is going to try advanced building like what I took on, or what creators like Matt Lowne, EJ_SA, or ShadowZone have been doing for years. However, I think wobbly rockets do need to be reconsidered. As should the inclusion of autostrut in KSP2. But that's just me.

On the plus side, wobbly rockets are somewhat accurate. Look at SLS's onboards during the launch of Artemis 1. But the wobble was in the first couple of seconds of launch, and then the vehicle is stable for the rest of flight. If there is wobble, but it doesn't impact vehicle performance and is only for cinematic effect, then I'm okay with it.

Edited by NovaRaptorTV
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18 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Wouldnt it be better to see the radiation belts cause you sent a probe to check for them that also mapped them than to unknowingly pass through them and have negative effects happen without being able to see ahead of time that they would?

Personally, no it wouldn’t. 

18 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

It's actually north and south :P

Point proven :p

18 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Where did thermodynamics get mentioned

I greatly apologize for confusing, I derived it from reading temperatures in KSP1 and thermodynamics are the only thing I can think of for a temperature reading to be useful ❤️

18 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Can you explain why or how?

I cannot, that post was a lot to read and quite frankly I have expended all the energy I have for this topic. I put my two cents in for the devs to see other players perspectives, not to debate online with another player. To each their own is where I chalk this up to

Edited by Nicrose
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