KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[Chilkoot]

On the topic of science...  has there been any indication of when the Science Mode patch will land?  Seems like PD has been uncommonly mum lately, or perhaps I've just missed an announcement.

[moeggz]

36 minutes ago, Chilkoot said:

On the topic of science...  has there been any indication of when the Science Mode patch will land?  Seems like PD has been uncommonly mum lately, or perhaps I've just missed an announcement.

Science is still months away per the last dev update.

[Dakota]

 

[regex]

Good god Twitter is such garbage now...

Edited August 3, 2023 by regex

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

2 hours ago, Dakota said:

 

Who is getting fired this time?

jk

[Astr0Guy5]

8 hours ago, Dakota said:

 

Could it be that wonderful "The Making of KSP2's Music" video we were promised in the last feature video? Who's with me?

EDIT:  From the picture, I guess it looks like a video about heating--which is still cool!--but probably means no music production behind the scenes.  We should get that this summer though, right?

Edited August 4, 2023 by Astr0Guy5

[Xtra]

Honestly... How can anyone be Hyped about this game anymore when basic functions aren't working.  I don't give a damn about new engines, other planet visuals, Heat dynamics or science missions.  I want to be able to build a ship that doesn't just fall apart on the launchpad like it's been put together with masking tape and spit.  I'm not building highly complex rockets... but when I put it on the pad, even the Struts are not keeping the ship together; Fuel tanks are falling out of the center of a stack and the whole thing explodes after spending an hour to get everything right.   Now do real rockets have these issues... YES, but I don't want to play in REAL Mode until they get their Crap working properly.  This game has been out for 6 months and was in development for years before that and we can't get a basic rocket to hold together and that's with placing Struts everywhere just to make sure but they aren't sticking.

I'm angry as can be with this BS.  Blame went to the Pandemic... You all are Computer Techies... Zoom Meetings have been out for Years... working from home has been going on for Years before the pandemic...  I'm currently playing several EA games that have no where near the basic problems/issues this game has.  They even added Bug reporting within their games that capture the data needed for review.  And before anyone gives the line that this is EA and I should expect issues... I know and understand the meaning of EA and what it brings... But I keep hearing about adding new and more without the fixes for things like the Kracken or the fact that parts don't stay connected as they should.  The UI is Horrible when you compare it to KSP 1, The VAB UI is junk compared to KSP 1,  The parts manager is a terrible.  In the VAB while working on the lower half of your rocket and you click the screen or right click... next thing you know you're back at the top of the rocket away from where you were working and focused.  The ability to remove symetry parts isn't there, so if you use it to install and find you need to remove one... You start all over.  Fuel lines if they don't correctly go on, the flow goes the wrong way.  Adding multiple struts doesn't always work and if you delete one, the part still shows up.  This thing is a total mess... Thank goodness we still have KSP 1 to enjoy even in it's basic form unmodded it's far better than what they've done with KSP2 so far.

For those of you who seem to have a somewhat playable game where you can actually build and launch ships that go to Jool or any other planet for that matter... I'd love to have that version... But that doesn't seem to be the case.  I got the latest version and keep it updated and my computer was especially built to handle the latest MS Flight Sim with Live weather and Air Traffic, complete with all the external control systems - so it's not a TRASH 80 (TSR-80) or an Atari...   

To the Dev's stop dinking around with the New and Next greatest... Fix what's Broken and get a Playable game that works beyond your stock rockets because after 36hrs of Trying to make it work and hours of designing my ships only to have them explode on the pad before the Launch button is ever pressed is not a playable game.

 

[Socraticat]

19 hours ago, Xtra said:

Honestly... How can anyone be Hyped about this game anymore when basic functions aren't working.

Yeah so... I guess you're not on the hype train...

Or wait, is this the hate train?

Edited August 6, 2023 by Socraticat

[didkodidko]

Reminding Devs that one month for between patches for such a buggy-woogie product is criminal in the minds of the Kebals and no candy will stop us pushing!

I have the audacity to push you because you charged me for tech demo.

[Nicrose]

So I know there was vacation and everything but did communication just totally stop? I was under the impression that there would still be update posts or some kind of communication but I sort of feel like that’s been forgotten about and now this is the new status quo. Are there plans to return to weekly updates or is this our fate? 

[MechBFP]

This week

[The Aziz]

Did you miss that huge discord widget right here on this forums where every single news about news is posted?

[moeggz]

8 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Did you miss that huge discord widget right here on this forums where every single news about news is posted?

I’ve never seen this on the mobile site. Is it just on the desktop site? 

[Spicat]

From now on every two weeks we get those status updates. Which were essentially what we had with the weekly post. Post from Nate will also return, we will have some news this week (in addition to the KERB), so wait and see this Friday.

13 minutes ago, moeggz said:

I’ve never seen this on the mobile site. Is it just on the desktop site? 

Apparently, if you’re on discord it corresponds to the #dev_trackers channel.

[Nicrose]

25 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Did you miss that huge discord widget right here on this forums where every single news about news is posted?

I haven’t seen that but as another commenter mentioned it’s probably because I check on my phone. 

[regex]

16 minutes ago, moeggz said:

I’ve never seen this on the mobile site. Is it just on the desktop site? 

The Discord box is at the bottom of the home page on mobile, a result of reactive stacking. It is not included on the nested subpages, which is probably an oversight.

[OJT]

Moved stuff from Hype Train thread to Grand Discussion due to it fitting here more

And a kindly request to the users to keep things civil

[VlonaldKerman]

According to steamdb, KSP 1 daily max player count hovered around 5k since 2021 until the KSP 2 release when it spiked to 10k in the weeks preceding early access, before falling quickly to roughly 2.5k where it sits today.

I would expect player count to go down over time, but KSP 1 seems to have had a big, loyal player base for 6+ years before it fell off a cliff at exactly the point when KSP 2 was released. Was half of the playerbase playing KSP 1 out of anticipation for the second game? Or did the catastrophe of KSP 2’s launch tank player enthusiasm for the whole IP, including the first game?

All of this as some of the best, most incredible KSP 1 mods are being released like Parallax 2, blackracks clouds, etc. There’s even a procedural star system generating mod (I think it’s called infinite exploration or something like that). There’s never been more to do in KSP, and the player count has gone down and been stable at an all-time low level for months now.

Any thoughts or explanations for this? I wouldn’t have guessed that KSP 1 was affected by the KSP 2 launch.

[RalphKerman]

I am not sure the numbers are correctly representing the player count.

Most experienced KSP 1 enthusiasts do not start the game from within the steam launcher I would bet. Making several different installations of the game with a variety of mods and starting the game directly from each different location without the steam client running (and therefore the ability to track player count if I am not mistaken) will be the preferred choice of launching the game for many players.

The loyal player base who invest so much time and energy into playing KSP 1 modded is certain to stick around for a while waiting for KSP 2 becoming more viable to play. At the start of KSP 2 I (and I guess many other players, too) switched to it, tried it, saw it was "in need of improvement" and let it sit on the side and switched back to modded KSP 1. And with the state of KSP 2 and the long road ahead that will be needed to make the game "good" I guess even more players looked into modding KSP 1 and as  stated above switched from launching it via Steam to separate installations thus "lowering" the player count through Steam.

So I would no rely on any player count derived from steamdb in order to judge how KSP 1 is doing. And, @VlonaldKerman is right, KSP 1 is in a wonderful state, the modding options are endless and will carry the game for a long while and still providing new challenges and fun.

[VlonaldKerman]

@RalphKerman I’m sure you’re correct about how players launch the game- but I don’t think that explains the precipitous drop in player count after the KSP 2 release. Alternate launching methods means that the player count is always underrepresented- unless players who launch the game from steam quit in larger numbers than those who launch other ways. I would expect that to happen slowly- not all in one watershed event in one random February.

In other words, why would 2.5k steam users all decide to drop the game in the same week? Other launching methods notwithstanding?

[The Aziz]

22 minutes ago, RalphKerman said:

KSP 1 is in a wonderful state

Let's rewind back to early days of 1.12 and later, where the community was straight up angry at tons of new bugs introduced with the update, with no visible signs of them being squashed in foreseeable future, because soon after that, Squad moved to cooperate with IG on KSP2. And the buggy mess remains the buggy mess to this day. And what we got instead? Broken mun arch.

The modding scene may be in wonderful state, though it's worth mentioning that all of that happened waaay too late, but the game itself really isn't. 

There's a good reason why the last time I opened it was in January.

Edited August 8, 2023 by The Aziz

[Turbo Ben]

10 minutes ago, RalphKerman said:

I am not sure the numbers are correctly representing the player count.

Agreed, steamdb won't be giving an accurate number, but it definately shows a trend.

For me personally, I had put KSP aside for a year or so in anticipation of KSP2. After the disasterous release, I've gone back to KSP1. That's the opposite of the trend steamdb shows, so I can't speak for what's happened.

[Lisias]

There's something else that we need to consider: Epic more or less at the same time did a huge giveaway for the KSP base game - essentially for free.

So, even by being true that Steam players are getting bored on KSP (and this is true), we don't know how many new KSP players are still playing it after getting it for free from Epic.

On the grand perspective, usually this doesn't matter so much because Steam still have about 70% of all the Market Share (or at least it had last time I heard about), but once we start to get into niche games like KSP, when a few hundreds players make a difference, then we can't be too much sure about the matter by only looking on Steam.

There's still a trend happening, and Steam is one of the tools we can use to proper infer it - but always with a grain of salt.

8 hours ago, Turbo Ben said:

That's the opposite of the trend steamdb shows, so I can't speak for what's happened.

There's also that tragicomical PD Launcher - I bet that a lot of KSP users choose to ditch Steam Launcher and started to fire up KSP directly just to get rid of that crap.

Edited August 8, 2023 by Lisias
tyops! Who would thought of that? :P

[PDCWolf]

2 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

Any thoughts or explanations for this? I wouldn’t have guessed that KSP 1 was affected by the KSP 2 launch.

Why would you think the release of the sequel would do nothing for the original? If anything it's way more curious that those people are just lost after the fiasco that was KSP2s release, since they're not playing the new one and didn't go back to the previous. There's also the free gift on Epic, which for some reason may have pulled people from steam (into a crappier system but w/e). Finally, since the launcher was added, there's a chance some people began using the .exe though I really don't think that's the case.

52 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Let's rewind back to early days of 1.12 and later

Before the biggest money in gaming (T2) managed to somehow publish a sequel that 10 years later manages to be even worse, the bar has been lowered. Thus, comparatively, KSP1 is better and is set to remain better for a long time. It works much more often and is more performant than the sequel, with a bigger and still somewhat active modding community.

Also funnily enough the same people that we should be angry at for leaving KSP1 broken, are almost the same ones developing the sequel with the same publisher behind them.

[VlonaldKerman]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

Why would you think the release of the sequel would do nothing for the original?

Well, I would expect KSP 2 to temporarily increase players in the old game, which it did. But there’s no obvious reason why it would cause player to leave on net.

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

anything it's way more curious that those people are just lost after the fiasco that was KSP2s release, since they're not playing the new one and didn't go back to the previous.

Yes, this is my point. Why now? The timing is too specific to be coincidental, but I don’t know what actually happened to the 2.5k daily players that either left, or stopped using steam when KSP 2 released, but had been playing the game regularly for years up until that point.