KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[pandaman]

4 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

@pandaman then why was the mod dark multiplayer elevated to feature and mechjeb wasnt? Both camps were equally vocal/loud and yet here we are. I want desperately to say more but ive said all i can over the years. 
 

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Simple...  Design decisions based on what those making the game feel is right, for 'whatever' reasons they may have.  (Or maybe they just wanted to annoy you )

NOT because some people shout about  particular features louder than others.  Yes many requested it, and I'm sure they considered it, along with many other ideas.  But that's how it goes.

Personally I'd find a MechJeb equivalent of more interest to me than multiplayer too. 

Edited March 2, 2023 by pandaman

[MarcAbaddon]

I hope they fix the forums soon. It's the place where they direct people to making bug reports and the forum being broken too, won't help with the bad first impression some people have. On the good side, seems there was a maneuver node controller mod released that looks like it solves one of my biggest gripes with the game. TBH not sure how I feel about - it's great to have, but it should really have been there out of the box.

[Periple]

17 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

Timewarp. Parts counts, mod compatibility ALL make multiplayer more complicated. Please go through all the threads discussing how its far more complicated. But as my final pair of examples: your pc can handle a max part count of say 200 parts in physics range at once. Mine can comfortably handle say 1000 before it starts to even hint at strain. I can safely get say 60fps at my station that has with my current ship say 1250 parts. You get 60fps at a max of 200. You need fuel, i have it. Does my monstrosity make you go from frames per second to minutes per frame? Or how about time warp? Does my need to warp from LKO to an eeloo encounter and then to eeloo screw you up? Im warping YEARS into the future from your perspective. Are we no longer in the same temporal frame of reference? Did my multi year time war catastrophically screw you? This is but the tip of the complications. Ive said all this over and over and over year after year in thread after thread. Multiplayer is more complicated than adding mechjeb as mp has more things to consider. You dont see that? 

I apologize if I wasn't clear: I was referring to game/gameplay design, not technical complexities. Clearly multiplayer is more complicated technically than autopilot, although most of these complexities are known problems with known solutions so therefore relatively manageable – you just need to budget for them and find people with the right skillsets. There's not a whole lot of "unknown unknowns" there. 

From a game design point of view it's different though. Consider Civilization. One of the core activities is war. Now suppose somebody wanted to introduce Algorithm the Great, "Al" for short, an AI assistant for your war-leading needs. So instead of fighting the wars yourself, you'd give Al objectives like "defend this city," or "take that province." The gameplay would change drastically! It could still be a fun game, but you'd have to make everything other than war that much more engaging,  you'd have to make sure using Al to help fight your wars provided a different set of still-interesting challenges, and you'd have to make everything fun and working for players who still wanted to play it the old way. That's really complicated! And by the time you'd worked through the complexities, you might discover that it's affected the design in every other area, from the way the map looks, to resource management, to the tech tree, to diplomacy, to... everything!

MechJeb is like that with KSP – it fundamentally changes a core gameplay activity. Everything around it would have to be rebalanced or re-thought so it's still fun and exciting, and it would still have to be fun and exciting for people who don't want to use it for whatever reason. It would be a really different game!

Multiplayer on the other hand is really straightforward and easy to understand from a game/gameplay design point of view. The core gameplay activities are still exactly the same: you're building craft, flying them, exploring the cosmos with them, and eventually using them to build colonies and such, except that now you're doing it together with a few friends. Sure, there are some unique twists to KSP like the divergent timelines, but those have lots of potential solutions from the very simple to the very complex. (I bet it's going to be something very simple — like you can see every other player's game state as it is now in their timeline, regardless of where you are in the timeline, but if you want to interact, you need to sync up.) 

I'm not pooh-poohing the technical challenges by the way, they will definitely have to have designed the game for multiplayer from the start or they'll be painting themselves into all kinds of corners. But, once again, all that is "known unknowns," it's not like they're making the first multiplayer game ever. You just need to get the right people on board from the start and make sure that all the important decisions are checked that they won't screw up MP. MP itself isn't an unknown.

-- And finally there's the dull boring bottom line. How many new players would stock MechJeb bring on board? How many new players would MP bring on board? I think the former number is close to zero but the latter number is potentially millions!

[cocoscacao]

I think they've mentioned automating boring tasks (like bringing provisions to colonies). I guess we will see something like MechJeb or better, then. I'm curious how building colonies will work...

[Periple]

1 minute ago, cocoscacao said:

I think they've mentioned automating boring tasks (like bringing provisions to colonies). I guess we will see something like MechJeb or better, then. I'm curious how building colonies will work...

I think they've indicated that supply route automation will be "abstracted out" -- that is, once you've got it set up, the supplies will just magically be subtracted from the source and added to the destination whenever the route is supposed to be run. So they might not be simulating the actual flights.

[Alexoff]

19 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Can you do a comparison with KSP 0.7.3?

Do I only have a choice between very early versions of KSP1 and KSP2? Is that the only way to compare games? Apparently the development of KSP2 will be a journey of 10 years, while KSP2 repeats the path of B4B, which lost the competition miserably to the old L4D2, which is played by 20 times more players.

19 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I run on similar enough hardware and get quite a bit more frames than this sheet would indicate.

We are all waiting for your results!

[Bej Kerman]

3 hours ago, Alexoff said:

23 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Can you do a comparison with KSP 0.7.3?

Do I only have a choice between very early versions of KSP1 and KSP2?

It only makes sense.

3 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Apparently the development of KSP2 will be a journey of 10 years

Eh?

[Alexoff]

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

It only makes sense.

Why? I have the latest version of KSP1 in my games folder, why do I have to do such a deep downgrade to appreciate KSP2?

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Eh?

Are you familiar with this gaming meme? There is such a game, Anthem, there was a road map. But where is it now?

[Bej Kerman]

12 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

It only makes sense.

Why? I have the latest version of KSP1 in my games folder, why do I have to do such a deep downgrade to appreciate KSP2?

It's not even a release title.

13 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Eh?

Are you familiar with this gaming meme? There is such a game, Anthem, there was a road map. But where is it now?

Irrelevant

[Vl3d]

9 hours ago, Periple said:

Clearly multiplayer is more complicated technically than autopilot

IMO multiplayer cannot work well without autopilot. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to control your ship with autopilot.

[Bej Kerman]

I'm not sure why the SAS has to go from Up to Locked when speed approaches 0. More often than not this destroys whatever balance you had going on while landing.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Kept things very simple.  Tried to do stuff that would be successful and fun.

• Small part count craft. 
• Efficient gravity turns. 
• Docking and undocking. 
• Landing where I wanted to.

Found a lot of bugs... but actually enjoyed most of the gameplay.

[Periple]

5 hours ago, Vl3d said:

IMO multiplayer cannot work well without autopilot. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to control your ship with autopilot.

I don’t understand, can you elaborate?

[Vl3d]

6 hours ago, Periple said:

I don’t understand, can you elaborate?

You would need recorded actions / events for multiplayer missions in space placed on a common timeline - is the basis for implementing the delivery routes system.

The events / actions recording system (which is also used by the delivery routes system) would allow to have a centralized timeline for massive multiplayer. This would allow time warping at will (because everything is either on-rails or manually controlled - which would trigger updates to the recordings placed on the timeline). Server could optimize sending you only the relevant localized recordings using an events / actions LOD system. Players would see all pre-recorded actions of other players in space as they play / warp. This combined with the hybrid multiplayer bubbles (big ones close to celestial bodies and small ones around space stations or for rendezvous) would be a general workable solution for KSP2 multiplayer.

[Periple]

That’s very complicated! I don’t think they have the team or the time for something like that. There’s no indication that they even have a server team.

Also they said that there are 4 space centers with 4 launch pads each, which would cap the MP at 16. That’s already a lot! I’m pretty sure it’ll be simple small-scale co-op. 

[Vl3d]

1 minute ago, Periple said:

That’s very complicated! I don’t think they have the team or the time for something like that. There’s no indication that they even have a server team.

Also they said that there are 4 space centers with 4 launch pads each, which would cap the MP at 16. That’s already a lot! I’m pretty sure it’ll be simple small-scale co-op. 

I know. We'll see what they decide to do.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

7 hours ago, Periple said:

I don’t understand, can you elaborate?

You would have to have been here for a while. Context is that Vl3d actually wrote out a series of threads and posts outlining a comprehensive MP game based on the Kerbal universe.  They may still be accessible in the pre release archives. 

[Periple]

6 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

You would have to have been here for a while. Context is that Vl3d actually wrote out a series of threads and posts outlining a comprehensive MP game based on the Kerbal universe.  They may still be accessible in the pre release archives. 

Oh OK, thanks. It sounds like it could be a cool game but I don’t think KSP2 is it!

[DunaManiac]

On 2/27/2023 at 3:49 PM, Bej Kerman said:

KSP 2's failings are inevitably going to be ironed out, unlike KSP 1's as it seems Squad gives up on adding features.

You seem to be pretty sure about that, but me, less so. What was limiting KSP1 was the fact that it's codebase was created 10 years ago by a couple guys who weren't even software developers. No amount of shine can really fix that. KSP2 seems to have a similarly bad foundation. I would suspect that many of KSP2's problems are simply unfixable because of the way that it was designed. Rockets may become less noodly, for example, but you can't completely get rid of that because of how KSP2 was designed. KSP2 still has problems with things clipping through fairings, just like KSP1, or problems with aerodynamics. Stuff like corrupting saves may be less easy to fix, and I don't think that KSP1 ever did that (if you don't count the console versions). It may be possible that down the road it'll get better, but wasn't that what KSP2 was supposed to avoid in the first place?

Edited March 4, 2023 by DunaManiac

[Vl3d]

2 minutes ago, DunaManiac said:

KSP2 still has problems with things clipping through fairings, just like KSP1, or problems with aerodynamics.

While I don't agree with your full statement, it does feel like some objects and algorithms of an older version of KSP1 have been implemented in KSP2. There are a lot of similarities in the bad behavior.

[The Aziz]

Nobody thought about another possible cause: there simply isn't a better way to develop some features and the only option is to work and improve what you have. Don't talk how mods fixed things because mods were a "solution" slapped on top and fixed in place with a flex tape.

So the final question, currently an open one, is to what point things can be fixed if they can't be replaced because there's no alternative?

[Manul]

3 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

if they can't be replaced because there's no alternative

No alternative to "sausage tree" physical model? No alternative to connect rigidbodies other than using the faulty UnityJoint and "fixing" it by just spamming more and more UnityJoints?

[The Aziz]

Do I look like Unity developer?

You have your workaround by editing the config file and making the joints 500 times stronger, but I bet it comes with its own downsides.

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, DunaManiac said:

You seem to be pretty sure about that

And then you proceed to assert in a very sure manner that A. you can't fix a game that's only three years old and B. that the game's foundations are shaky when they really aren't.

KSP 2's failings are inevitably going to be ironed out. Why you think, for example, that corrupt saves cannot be fixed whatsoever and must 100% be a deep-rooted problem is beyond me.

[Manul]

24 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

You have your workaround by editing the config file and making the joints 500 times stronger,

Making it 5 million times stronger doesn't help either. If it was this simple there would be no need in spamming hundreds of extra joints like autostruts or KerbalJointReinforcement do.

And there is an alternative to the tree structure we have in KSP: a grid structure. It's more rigid by it's nature than a tree where each parts  doesn't connect to anything except it's parent or child and each branch of a tree just wobbles freely.

Edited March 4, 2023 by Manul