KSP2 is not ready For Science!

[Vl3d]

The foundation game still needs one or two more bug fixing passes / updates, otherwise by adding all the new parts and systems we'll just end up with bugs having bugs and the community reacting negatively similarly to the EA launch.

I really appreciate the hard work, QOL improvements, bug fixes and optimizations that have gone into KSP2 EA since launch. The game has gone a long way towards becoming polished. But as of 0.1.5 the basic game with the foundational mechanics and sandbox gameplay is not there yet.

I don't want to mention all the issues that players still encounter while trying to do a relatively complex mission from start to finish, but basic things that should work - like wheels, landing gear, docking, saving/loading, UI, stock vessels, cameras, staging, reentry heating (which combined with changing the joint system will surely cause new problems), buoyancy and liquid physics - are still missing, incomplete or buggy.

I realize that December was announced as the month in which For Science! gets added to the game - but I don't see how that upgrade will be successful in a few short weeks without first fixing the existing bugs and issues that prevent players from having fun or even completing missions in the base game.

Please prioritize bug fixing before adding new content - don't amplify the existing problems by stacking on new systems on top of a problematic base game.

Edited October 27, 2023 by Vl3d

[Periple]

I think it'll be fine!  

I tooled around a bit (did a mission to Duna), and while there were bugs, they were irritations rather than blockers. It's less flaky and buggy now than KSP1 was when I started to seriously get into it. If KSP2 had a progression mode as it is, I would play it and enjoy it. What's stopping me now isn't the bugs and rough edges, it's that sandbox isn't that appealing to me and I need a feeling of progression to keep me going.

[Vl3d]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

I think it'll be fine!  

I tooled around a bit (did a mission to Duna), and while there were bugs, they were irritations rather than blockers. It's less flaky and buggy now than KSP1 was when I started to seriously get into it. If KSP2 had a progression mode as it is, I would play it and enjoy it. What's stopping me now isn't the bugs and rough edges, it's that sandbox isn't that appealing to me and I need a feeling of progression to keep me going.

Remember that I wrote a post some weeks ago saying that KSP2 0.1.4 was a perfectly playable game. But that does not mean it has reached the level of polish required for adding major new systems and features. All the bugs of the base game will amplify the bugs of the For Science! update and the experience and player feedback will be terrible.

I can't even drive a rover 1000 meters without it flipping over. I can't reliably land or dock without worrying about catastrophic failure. How am I supposed to engineer a sample return mission from Duna?

The game needs 1 or 2 more bug fixing / optimization updates before any new major features are added. I just hope the team is focusing on this until December.

Edited October 27, 2023 by Vl3d

[Periple]

20 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

I can't even drive a rover 1000 meters without it flipping over. I can't reliably land or dock without worrying about catastrophic failure. How am I supposed to engineer a sample return mission from Duna?

I don't know, I just did one and it went pretty smoothly?

[Vl3d]

1 minute ago, Periple said:

I don't know, I just did one and it went pretty smoothly?

Try the bigger wheels.

[Periple]

Just now, Vl3d said:

Try the bigger wheels.

Nah, I'll wait until they've fixed them!

[Bej Kerman]

6 minutes ago, Periple said:

8 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

10 minutes ago, Periple said:

31 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

I can't even drive a rover 1000 meters without it flipping over. I can't reliably land or dock without worrying about catastrophic failure. How am I supposed to engineer a sample return mission from Duna?

I don't know, I just did one and it went pretty smoothly?

Try the bigger wheels.

Nah, I'll wait until they've fixed them!

Not helping your case 

[WelshSteW]

 

I get what you're saying, and it's a valid point. But!  The For Science! update probably isn't just going to be adding science bits, it'll almost certainly contain bug fixes as well, and we might even get another bug fix patch before For Science! comes out (although it's unlikely, I think devs have said it's 1.5.0, then For Science!).

So the bugs you talk about could be fixed in the For Science! update.

 

[Vl3d]

14 minutes ago, WelshSteW said:

So the bugs you talk about could be fixed in the For Science! update.

I have nothing against hopeful thinking, but let's talk hard facts: there are still a lot of bugs in the base game and the new systems and parts will bring their own bugs. What KSP2 needs now more than anything is polish to it's current feature set.

[Kerbart]

47 minutes ago, Periple said:

I don't know, I just did one and it went pretty smoothly?

The coordinate reset jitter that occurs every 1000m depends on mass. A light rover will be tossed in the air, a heavy rover will change its direction a couple degrees,

 

when you venture around the KSC grounds it’s not a big deal but it’s an issue with a lightweight rover on Minmus.

[Stoup]

I have to agree with you here, honestly. It's felt very nice getting closer and closer to a point where the game was more enjoyable than frustrating, and if we got two more updates that fixed as many super irritating, long-standing issues as 1.4 and 1.5 have I'd definitely say we'd be ready to throw another mess of additional bugs into the mix. As it stands, I wager it's gonna feel like a bit of a smorgasbord of old and new problems

[Kerbart]

My biggest fear is the impression that IG that they don’t think the bugs are a big deal. According to their messaging the game was great fun to play from day 1. They’re not pouring a lot of resources into bug fixing (there’s no way to explain the snail pace otherwise). The community backlash on the amount of bugs in the game seemed to surprise them.

So, now that game status had advanced from “completely unplayable” to “playable but frustrating” my fear is that bug fixing will get even less priority. I can already hear the creative director crow “We fixed orbital decay and rocket wobble. The game is now bug free!” and the dozens of sheer annoyances will be there for years to come, just part of the KSP2 lore.

Will the colliders on the KSC ever be fixed, for instance? It seems that the 3D artists have already moved on to other projects like grid fins.

[LoSBoL]

For me it's not the bugs, but the unfinished base game QOL wise, it's great that they've concentrated on bugfixing and performance optimisations these 8 months getting the game running for many people. But I thought the intentions were to get feedback of every Milestone before continuing to the next Milestone.

Yet we have unfinished IVA's, no transfer window planner, we are unable to create a manoeuvre node in an orbit after the current one, have only one cargo bay in which we may determine how far it opens, no TWR readings in the VAB besides Kerbin's and the list of unfinished things go on and on.

I can imagine to pressure to take the next step and make more people happy by expanding gameplay, but it leaves quite some gaps that leaves question marks in when (or even if) the gaps are filled.

[Stoup]

Oh yeah, that's actually a big one in my mind that I can't believe I'd forgotten to mention before. There's been no word at all, as far as I know, these past months about the status of any kind of IVA system being worked on!

[WelshSteW]

 

So, I tried making a rover. It was.......fun?

 

It started like this -

Spoiler

 

 

And then I tipped it, and it looked like this -

Spoiler

 

The back wheels were being dragged along as if they were still attached, even though they clearly aren't  

 

(no idea if those pictures will work. fingers crossed! )

 

[Kerbart]

Tipping your rover is not required. I had a rover that was all messed up merely from the transition of VAB to runway.

[WelshSteW]

 

Also, it would be nice to have a throttle of some kind for rovers, rather than having to hold the 'W' key down. Unless there's already something that does that?

 

[Wheehaw Kerman]

1 hour ago, WelshSteW said:

 

I get what you're saying, and it's a valid point. But!  The For Science! update probably isn't just going to be adding science bits, it'll almost certainly contain bug fixes as well, and we might even get another bug fix patch before For Science! comes out (although it's unlikely, I think devs have said it's 1.5.0, then For Science!).

So the bugs you talk about could be fixed in the For Science! update.

 

This.  Not a programmer, but the fact that For Science! is going to come with significant performance improvements etc. tends to indicate it may come with regular and foundational bugfixes as well as science and science parts.

[Vl3d]

12 minutes ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

it may come with regular and foundational bugfixes

If the devs had such bug fixes implemented, they would have released them in the current patch and announced that their respective user bug reports are resolved. Fact: they are not.

Edited October 27, 2023 by Vl3d

[PDCWolf]

15 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

If the devs had such bug fixes implemented, they would have released them in the current patch and announced that their respective user bug reports are resolved. Fact: they are not.

They probably have a bag of bugs that wasn't ready for 0.1.5 but in the 2 extra months will be ready for 0.2.0. Now, how important or crucial or foundational those bugfixes may be obviously I can't say, but it'd definitely be very rare for a big update do not include bugfixes in it as well.

28 minutes ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

This.  Not a programmer, but the fact that For Science! is going to come with significant performance improvements etc. tends to indicate it may come with regular and foundational bugfixes as well as science and science parts.

Remember that before Blackrack, 90% of performance gains came from them hiding, deleting, culling and downgrading stuff on screen, which is not fixing the performance of the game so much as it is a stopgap to make it playable whilst they hopefully actually fix stuff.

Now Blackrack came in and pretty much fixed the clouds which were a huge performance issue, and actually one of the like 10 proper performance fixes we've seen and probably the only one with a measurable, night and day impact as well. This is my way of saying I think we'll be back to meager "we made something worse so the game runs a bit better" type fixes.

[MechBFP]

The game is never going to be perfect, and it desperately needs this content, so it will be what it will be.  Better to release it now than trying to be perfectionists  

If I had to guess I would say that it will need a few patches post science update to get to a decent state for that content, which is going to be disappointing but *shrug*. 
 

I don’t think they are going to fix wheel issues, terrain issues, etc, until they switch to the new terrain system. So those issues will just have to be dealt with for quite some time. 

[VlonaldKerman]

2 hours ago, Kerbart said:

My biggest fear is the impression that IG that they don’t think the bugs are a big deal. According to their messaging the game was great fun to play from day 1. They’re not pouring a lot of resources into bug fixing (there’s no way to explain the snail pace otherwise). The community backlash on the amount of bugs in the game seemed to surprise them.

So, now that game status had advanced from “completely unplayable” to “playable but frustrating” my fear is that bug fixing will get even less priority. I can already hear the creative director crow “We fixed orbital decay and rocket wobble. The game is now bug free!” and the dozens of sheer annoyances will be there for years to come, just part of the KSP2 lore.

Will the colliders on the KSC ever be fixed, for instance? It seems that the 3D artists have already moved on to other projects like grid fins.

I think the critical error was releasing the game before it was ready for even an early access release.

For one, they did not need the community to find bugs, so I think they actually gained relatively little.

I also suspect that the general impression that bugfixes are moving slowly is due to the fact that there are SO MANY BUGS that when 80 bugs get fixed, it doesn’t seem like it to the player. This is a function of the game still being so early in development- earlier than a lot of other EA titles. The bugs are also back-end and fundamental. I suspect that their pace of fixing bugs is actually quite good, there’s just a lot of bug fixing to do and we normally don’t pay $50 for a game that’s at this stage, so it seems unusual when it really isn’t.

 

Ill argue FOR the release of For Science… I doubt, counter to the various hints at internal builds we’ve gotten, that many of the major game systems have actually been hooked up together yet. When they do get hooked up, there is bound to be a whole new host of bugs to work out and there may be things that are broken now that will only become obvious when science etc is integrated. So they should try to integrate as many things as possible as soon as they are built, and then start the laborious task of sorting through the tangled web of bugs. But I’m not a game dev, so take this with a mound of salt.

[chefsbrian]

5 hours ago, Vl3d said:

Please prioritize bug fixing before adding new content - don't amplify the existing problems by stacking on new systems on top of a problematic base game.

Kinda feel like things are do or die - Not for the project team, but for the community. They really need a content and feature win to moderate community dissatisfaction with the EA release, just as much as they need stability and bugfixes to deal with the community sentiment on that front. In their position, I'd be desperate for a content update too - While our specific community and its disappointments do matter, the casual observer opinion waiting to buy the game matters too, and "Its been a year since Early Access and it hasn't gotten a single roadmap update" is a bad look, the kind that causes a lotta people to just remove the game from wishlists with a "I'll check it out later then" sentiment that often ends with the game being forgotten.

Perhaps releasing science isn't the 'Best' idea with the bug state of the game, but its probably the most realistic idea, and heads off a lot of other budding problems. Sometimes its not even a matter of 'Good enough' so much as it is a matter of 'Survivable' in early access development.

[KUAR]

My views are that it's got to happen soon as people are "played out" in Sandbox right now. There's no point waiting for things to be perfect before adding features, just stable enough that you're not trying to build a house on shifting sand.

[PDCWolf]

2 minutes ago, VlonaldKerman said:

For one, they did not need the community to find bugs

Conversely, the most controversial and big stuff has been found by the community, mostly Anth as well. Like the game being released accidentally with DRM on, or bloating the registry to the point of not opening anymore, or having a very gross coordinate reset system, and so on. I'm still afraid of what Anth might find that now he can't tell us about, and now with Blackrack they pretty much confirm they've been hacking stuff together with little knowledge.

5 minutes ago, chefsbrian said:

Perhaps releasing science isn't the 'Best' idea with the bug state of the game, but its probably the most realistic idea, and heads off a lot of other budding problems. Sometimes its not even a matter of 'Good enough' so much as it is a matter of 'Survivable' in early access development.

This. We all understand an Early Access is not a perfect game (even if KSP2 abused that concept with sheer unplayability), and really the content starvation is magnitudes bigger than the bugfix starvation.