KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[PakledHostage]

I started playing KSP1 in 2011. It was free then. It didn't have Kerbol or a moon or Minmus or any other planets. (As I recall, even Minmus was a development tool that was left in accidentally for one release and then it stuck.) Some time later, they started selling licenses for $6. I bought 3 of them because I thought the game was worth more than 6 bucks. I bought KSP2 today. I'm underwhelmed, but I didn't buy it for me. I bought it for my kids. They will enjoy it, I can play it with them, and maybe over the years it will be improved as my kids abilities to undertake its challenges grow along with it. Who knows? I thought it was worth the risk.

Edited February 25, 2023 by PakledHostage

[whatsEJstandfor]

9 minutes ago, fragtzack said:

The dev teams needs to focus on basics and not the long term goals of interstellar, colonies, multiple systems, etc. 

 

 

tbh I think that's literally one of the goals of EA; to validate what works and what doesn't in the base game before committing to building colonies/interstellar/etc on top of it.

[whatsEJstandfor]

1 hour ago, DwightLee said:

Ok coming back from Mun landing and there is something we need.

There need to be an easy way to see how full an attached tank is. 

It may just be my own misunderstanding but it would help if in the parts manager when you have a tank selected you could see how much fuel is currently in it. That way it would be easier to know when we can drop that tank.

 

Thanks in advance 

 

 

I think this is what you're looking for: click the little blue arrow next to the staging button. It will show fuel and dV remaining in each stage and tank.

Edited February 25, 2023 by whatsEJstandfor

[Vegatoxi]

Game which require RTX card to play (but still cant hold 60 FPS on even TOP-end cards) dont have DLSS/FSR and ray tracing.

[snow830917]

I am a Chinese player, English is not very good, most of the content below is google translation, If this leads to difficulties in understanding, please forgive me

1. optimization, this can be slowly improved, but most of the bad comments on steam is also because of this reason, it does affect the game experience, in the same configuration of the PC, played KSP1 with some mod, whether in picture quality or frame number are far stronger than KSP2.

2.UI, some good traditions of KSP1 have been abandoned, the current version of KSP2 on the key values of the display is very fuzzy and difficult to find, I think in the launch of the rocket, such as  deltaV, TWR and other key information should be prominently displayed on the screen, In KSP1, these should be the most concerned information

3.maneuver node, when planning node, can not check the AP and PE values at the same time, And the most serious problem is that the node cannot be finely manipulated, rigorous orbit planning has been one of the biggest fun  when I play KSP.

4. Language localization, for example, "BEAM", when translated into Chinese, becomes something like "light, laser", but the actual meaning should be closer to "girder", there are many bad words like this--It may be the same as when you read my article translated by Google (laughter), I appreciate the production team for the localization of the game, but hope the translation team can be more serious.

I know the game is in the EA stage, thanks to the production team, after all I have played KSP1 for thousands of hours, I hope KSP2 will be a masterpiece.

[wasml]

A report from the shallow end of the computer spec pool.

My Potato specs:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz   3.41 GHz
nVidia GeForce GTX 745 4GB

Was really pleased I was able to run this at all. Getting about 2 FPS on the launch pad/runway and ~10 FPS when only the craft and stars are visible. Makes rovers and planes pretty much unusable at the moment. Launched a ~30 part Mun mission and launch was painfully slow but was able to time warp which helped. Did not notice a whole lot of difference between low and high graphics settings may have something to do with #3 below?

Some bugs spotted:
1) Settings menu:
Hovering the mouse over buttons and moving away will clear the ones that are not really on

https://imgur.com/zrOSzf4

2) Launch a craft and land.
In map view recover the craft.
Map view has craft still out after recovery.
To remove: Get out of the tracking station and return and the craft is gone

https://imgur.com/zrOSzf4

Note no craft in the transfer Station but there is a craft east of the KSC

3) I set some graphics options then reset to default then set all graphics to low, changed to 1440 and windowed applied and returned to the game - was still full screen. Quit and relaunched - still full screen. Messed around with windowed/full screen and on about the 7th or 8th try got it to windowed mode.

4) In Windowed mode: Selected game I wanted to load and went to type some notes in NotePad and was unable to re-enter game.
Frozen loading the game I had selected. Had to kill with Task Manager

5) After booting the game up P.A.I.G.E goes through the entire intro to the VAB every time I boot the game and enter the VAB – only the first time I enter.

6) In the VAB
Have two assemblies.
Click "Launch Assembly" and select the non selected assembly.
Click "Selection Tool" - does not return to selection mode.
Click "Rotate/Translate" tool and then the "Selection Tool" and you are now in selection mode
Note: Same with "Assembly Anchor" and "Select Tool"

7) In the VAB click "Assembly Anchor" then select a part for the part catalog - part is invisible

8) Procedural wing menu popped up under the part manager menu.

9) TWR not always updating when I switch Launch assemblies.

11) Building a fairing and the “+” to add a section disappeared on second section, finished fairing and re-edited “+” was back. Note I had made a fairing previously and had not seen this bug.

12) When extending the fairing the fairing only extends about 1/10th as far as the cursor is moved making it a bit awkward to build long fairings.

13) When executing a maneuver node the bar below the burn time starts at the right and heads to the left as the burn progresses. at some point the pointer starts heading back to the right and the bar starts filling with red/brown from left to right (I have plenty of Dv for the maneuver)- I may not under stand what is being conveyed.

QOL thoughts:
a) Double click on save game to launch without clicking “Load”.
b) Trim settings for aircraft
c) Allow creating maneuver nodes while paused
d) In the VAB add a way to check TWR/Dv on bodies other than Kerbin and at different pressures. Bonus points if the pressure can be set per stage (ex: sea level for stage 1, 30Km for stage 2, vac for stage 3) with total Dv shown at the bottom
    
Other thoughts:
    a) In the VAB - I would prefer the menus to be smaller to give me more design room
    b) Love the scenery and what I've seen of Kerbin and the Mun.
    c) Really like the new VAB with assemblies and such
    d) Sounds and plumes are great
    e) I like the the new UI

To Nate and team – thanks for all the work you've done on this! I'm looking forward to see where you take this.
    

 

 

 

[Starhawk]

Overlapping threads merged.

[Tweeker]

While this is funny to watch, I'd be quite disappointed if I'd paid $50 for this sort of experience. 

 

[Vicis]

6 hours ago, Multivac said:

I don't like all the people on here getting high and mighty with comments like "don't pay if you don't want to" and such. You aren't heroically sticking up for some small indie game creator who is having difficulty bringing a revolutionary new idea to reality, you're sticking up for a big corporation that is engaging in practices that, in my opinion, are pretty obviously unfair.

If you want your players to act as your QA testers, that should be reflected in the price.

If your game costs $50, it should be a pretty good, playable game. As soon as someone pays $50 they should have access to something that's at least a playable and enjoyable experience, regardless of future planned features or road maps or whatever.

If you just want QA testers, you should ideally be paying them, not the other way around.

And there is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with expressing negative opinions about a product that is a major, over-priced letdown many years in the making, neither on third-party sites nor right here on this forum.

This is exactly it.

People are jumping through hoops just to defend a massive corporation that would sooner bleed them and sell their organs on the black market than go out of its way to help them. This game was listed on Steam entirely to offload the cost and risk of funding development to you, the consumer. You can also do some free QA testing on the side while you're at it.

[jos1151]

The game is great, better than i expected, i did end up finding out that undocking two craft from each other will cause them to plummet into the ground, and you'll get the "vessel destroyed" popup message. Tried reloading them game, disabling fuel crossfeed, nothing works. Also, i wish terrain closer to the ground was more detailed, and theres some werid aliasing issues when a cloud is behind your spacecraft. Apart from that. great game. Janky as all hell, but fun.

[kerbiloid]

The absence of pre-release in-game videos looks quite self-explainable.

[jos1151]

Some quick other quick notes about the visuals, none of these are all that important, just my opinion.

1. Planets with an atmosphere are really bright.

The game currently has a set exposure, which causes places with an atmosphere like Kerbin and Eve to be obscenely bright near the surface. I like the high exposure, it makes space look more "spacey" but i feel like there should be a way of the exposure automatically turning down as you get closer to the surface.

2. The game looks blurry.

Far away objects appear blurry and aliased, even some nearby object have this problem. I'm not sure why this is, but the main thing i noticed when i first booted up the game was how crazy blurry everything is.

3. Terrain looks bad. Really bad.

I understand this is not a priority for devs at the moment, but i hope this is resolved later. In some places the terrain can look worse than KSP1, even without mods. Surfaces have sharp edges, or will look too flat, more bumpmapping could easily solve this, although it would probably reduce performance, maybe this could be implemented after the game is properly optimized, and could be available under a certain graphics setting or preset.

4. Terrain scattering is disappointing.

If you decide to build a plane or a lander, as most people do, you'll immediately notice that trees will just pop into existence as you get closer. I understand that things have to be this way for performance's sake, however the effect is very jarring, and tree will also have a very noticable color shift in between LOD's. This could be fixed by, adjusting the colors on the LOD's so that the shift is less apparent, Adding more LOD's that draw further away making the tress disappearing less noticeable, and adjusting the color of the terrain further away to more closely match the color of the trees, since the main reason the scattering effects seem so jarring is due to the contrast between the trees and the ground making  where the trees and and the ground starts very noticable.

5. Planet textures are in a rough state.

I love the way the planets look in this game, they look crazy good and they managed to make every single planet in the game look like a work of art.

...As long as you're looking at them from 600km away. Any closer and you'll notice how low res the textures are close up. This is especially noticeable in orbit, which happens to be where a lot of player will be spending their time. This is why i think this is a big issue. The LOD system they implemented for rendering planet textures does not seem to hold up. Near the terminator of the planets, where light fades into darkness, many of the craters you'll see looks increasingly low res. And when your orbiting over light, the textures look blurry, and you cant make out any detail. This could be fixed by having a second, high res texture for the planets that renders between 500-100km altitude, and then an even higher res one for 100-50km, and so on. I believe this is what they are already doing, but it doesn't seem to look very good. For orbiting in direct sunlight, i understand that there isn't much that can be one, and with straight down sunlight most features of the mun will be washed out due to a lack of shadows.  Again, i understand that the main reason for the low res textures is performance, which is why i desperately hope that things like this will be added in a "visual update" after optimisation.

6. The surface is flat as hell.

In the original game this was also the case, and mods like Parallax 2.0 simply brute forced the problem with a billion scatters. however i believe that KSP2 would benefit from a more elegant solution; Procedural mesh generation. I believe that by using Perlin, Worley or any other type of mathematical noise, you could use that to generate a mesh, similar to the terrain generation used in Minecraft, that is layered into the surface. of the planets. This is essentially how they created the planets in KSP1, however i thing doing it at a smaller scale for the surface, and layering these meshes on top of each other as you get closer will create very good looking terrain. Blah blah blah optimisation performance, add this once they 7090ti Super releases.

7. Clouds.

Clouds.  They look bad, idk maybe take the new eve redux mod and shove it into KSP2. They both run on unity right? Ahh who cares about the framrate most of the stuff ive suggested would tank performance.

 

Closing remarks:

I play ksp for the visuals. I hope the moderators read this and then ban me from the fourm. Ive been writing this for 2 houts now and i dont know what else to say.

[Virtualgenius]

Do you think they will add the aircraft hangar back building in the VAB is janky and where are you supposed to park your aircraft I love the new layout of KSC but it would be better if it had an aircraft hangar

[Periple]

2 minutes ago, Virtualgenius said:

Do you think they will add the aircraft hangar back building in the VAB is janky and where are you supposed to park your aircraft I love the new layout of KSC but it would be better if it had an aircraft hangar

I don’t think so, they added the orientation button to the VAB so you can build horizontally or vertically there without having to switch. 

I like it a lot, it’s nice to be able to build a rover and a rocket in the same workspace and then click them together.

[RocketRockington]

7 hours ago, Multivac said:

I don't like all the people on here getting high and mighty with comments like "don't pay if you don't want to" and such. You aren't heroically sticking up for some small indie game creator who is having difficulty bringing a revolutionary new idea to reality, you're sticking up for a big corporation that is engaging in practices that, in my opinion, are pretty obviously unfair.

If you want your players to act as your QA testers, that should be reflected in the price.

If your game costs $50, it should be a pretty good, playable game. As soon as someone pays $50 they should have access to something that's at least a playable and enjoyable experience, regardless of future planned features or road maps or whatever.

If you just want QA testers, you should ideally be paying them, not the other way around.

And there is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with expressing negative opinions about a product that is a major, over-priced letdown many years in the making, neither on third-party sites nor right here on this forum.

Yeah the Steam EA guidelines literally say this stuff too, its not like this is some crazy expectation that we fans are inventing.  EA is meant to be an incomplete game, not an unplayable one,  and not a stub that is only dependent on future features to be worth the price.  Rules 2 and  6 here especially - Steam Early Access Guidelines

 

[esorth]

Next craft I'm attempting is trying to get an aircraft-style, runway-takeoff craft to orbit (not quite an SSTO since it's extensively using drop boosters).  Something I've never dealt with much before since I've never had the patience to try to successfully land on a runway in KSP1 (which is silly because I have a pilot's license in real life), and I usually played KSP1 in career mode where not landing aircraft would be a big money waste.

Haven't quite achieved orbit yet.  Closest I've gotten, I got out of the atmosphere with (I think) enough dV to circularize, but I missed for too long during my burn that my craft was wildly spinning despite having SAS on and using Swivel engines.  I think the same issue as my previous orbiting craft that something in the SAS or engine gimbaling is having issues.

Another observation I've made is that the point where you place a maneuver node now seems to represent the start of a burn rather than the center of a burn.  Makes sense with all the dev talks about reworking maneuvers to be able to handle much longer burns, but it still throws off my ability to use maneuver nodes to try to plan things like when to start circularizing burns.  Can't get it circular if you start with the node at the initial Ap/Pe.  Something I'm going to have to get used to, I guess.  Maybe it would be best to play with repositioning the node until the resulting Ap/Pe even out, but that's near impossible with the current inability to see resulting Ap/Pe altitudes while editing a maneuver node.

[Jarin]

12 hours ago, regex said:

Yeah but even after they had funding we didn't get a damn delta-V calculator until seven years had passed. For an actual early access release this thing is pretty chock full of features, especially compared to the previous game. No wonder we have bugs.

This is what I keep reminding myself. So much of what I'm used to in KSP1 isn't base game. I'm used to mods smoothing down the rough edges and filling in ugly gaps all over the place.

[Azimech]

My emotion: it's like a relationship that fails but you try to salvage it. So you have patience while the both of you go to do other things. And then when  you try again ... it fails again.

I didn't like the direction KSP was going after version 1.3 and Take Two and I certainly don't like KSP2. I guess my gaming days are over. I'm almost 46, too old for this kind of crap.

[uglyduckling81]

They don't need play testers to tell them the game isn't ready to be played.

It's in an awful state that shouldn't be seeing the light of day yet.

It probably needs another year or two of development to get it anywhere near ready for a beta release.

What they have provided looks like a tech demo or advanced proof of concept.

[Proply]

Have played 1000's of hours of KSP1, and wanted to share my experience of trying to get to the Mun for the first time in KSP2. Seems like there is a lot of thread spam at the moment so just gonna put it here.

First attempt was an apollo-style Mun mission, except I overbuilt the rocket and didn't have to drop the second stage until in low Mun orbit. However, after decoupling the lander the SAS did the opposite of what it should (increased spin instead of decrease), resulting in an uncontrollable tumble. Attempts to fix this manually with SAS off were unsuccessful as pressing W or A to pitch when in the chase camera results in the camera moving round by 90 degrees, making control impossible (nowhere in the controls do I see why W/A would control the camera...). I did eventually manage to dock to the transfer stage after time warping to cancel the spin, but now the ships explode every time I try to undock (or at least that is what the pop-up says, in the space tracker the ship is still there but the docking ports are now disabled). Oh well, is early access, so I will try again...

Next attempt I docked in LKO, then transferred to Mun. However, the KSC then made an unwelcome appearance in space and I ended up colliding with it and destroying the ship. Space-KSC persisted through save/load, so I gave up and tried again...

Final time, maneuver nodes just gave up. I could still make them, but the projected flight path was not shown. Eyeballed it and got all the way to the Mun only to discover that the entire fuel tank of my lander was drained during launch despite having a decoupler (with fuel transfer disabled according to the VAB) between the lander and the main rocket. Additionally, while undocking the lander did not destroy my craft, it did add several hundred m/s in delta V to it and it is now on the way into deep space. At this point I gave up in disgust.

I may try a direct ascent Mun mission later if I can work up the enthusiasm for it, but the number of bugs are just overwhelming, very much more frustrating than fun.

Edited February 25, 2023 by Proply

[GoldForest]

12 hours ago, DwightLee said:

I will have to watch for that, interesting if it does.

So, I've confirmed time does move while you're in the VAB.

Also, omg! We can copy entire crafts now?! 

[snkiz]

2 minutes ago, GoldForest said:

So, I've confirmed time does move while you're in the VAB.

Also, omg! We can copy entire crafts now?! 

I caught a shadow moving over my plane in the VAB. looked out the window and there was the sun, setting. Yup it sure does.

[GoldForest]

So, I just found out that you can add multiple struts to one strut "point" for lack of a better word. It's a little finnicky, but this is how you do it:

Place your strut.
Place the other side.
(Now, this is the tricky part.)
To select the point you want to have multiple struts attach to it, you need to alt+click on the OPPOSITE strut point. 

Example, a rocket with boosters. If you want the core strut to connect to multiple boosters, you alt+click the strut point on the booster, which will give you a strut connected to the core strut point. 

[tstein]

10 hours ago, Skorj said:

Glad you're enjoying it.  But please stop conflating "incomplete" and "low quality".  These are unrelated.  I certainly expected the game to be incomplete - it says so on the Steam store page.  They were very upfront about the included content.  That's not the issue here.  Quality is a different topic.  Bugs don't get fixed all at the end as part of "finishing".  Sure, that approach was common last century, I was there for it, but there's a reason everyone changed to iterative development.  It's understood now that "if there's not time to do it right, there won't be time to do it over".  But I'm belaboring the point, so I'll stop.

That!

 

and it is not an issue of raging. it is an issue that is our DUTY as consumers and EA clients to POINT everything that is wrong!  No one HARMS the game  more than people that  keep saying...  "shut up is EA"  people need to POINT the bugs. I speak as a  owner of a company that develops software,nothing is more useless than a test client that does not complain! We even tend to DROP those from our list of users to receive  early  new features. The useful EARLY user is the one that COMPLAINS of EVERYTHGIN WRONG

9 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Yeah. Let's not forget how barebones KSP 1 was (and still is). I'd honestly say there's a lot of bias around here in favour of KSP 1 despite it missing some very important things like persistent thrust, which let's face it, is required for a good handful of thrusters - I'd say I'm rather baffled Squad added ion engines for 0.18 and over the course of a decade never looked at fixing KSP 1's stinginess with timewarp and acceleration.

That would be valid if the persistent thrust was working in KSP2.

[brettpersson]

My MSI Laptop with a RTX-2060 and 32gb of ram is running it great.  I know it is early and it is rough to say the least but I love it.  I played for 10 hours today and it felt like it was 2 hours.  I had almost 2000 hours on KSP1 and enjoyed it, but this is something fun and interesting to play with.  Is $50 to expensive, not in my opinion, but I understand why it is for some.  If it's too much than I understand not buying it.  To me they were very upfront about how 'bad' it was going to be.  The made it very clear it is a resource hog.  Early Access is exactly that early.  It is basically Alpha or Beta.  This approach does two things 1. It gives them real world play and interactions across a vast amount of hardware. 2. It gives them extra funding to finish production right.  I am sure there are things they are polishing that will make it into the updates sooner than later.  For the time being I am going to enjoy what it is and love every minute of it.  I understand the frustration many of you have but hang in there and enjoy it for what it is and enjoy the adventure it will be as they rollout new fixes and features.  This is not another No Man Sky situation, it really isn't.  No Man Sky promised the world on a full release and delivered very little of it, KSP2 has promised little and called it what it is, Early Access.