Will "For Science" (Hopefully and Finally) Include Flight Controller Support?

[Buzz313th]

Yeah..

The fact that KSP2 has no support for Flight Controls (Joysticks and Gamepads) actually says quite a bit about the effort put forth into atmospheric flight modeling.

Can IG please make an attempt, any attempt to support, Stick, Throttle and Rudders please..   At the least, give us the ability to assign multiple analog axis and mappable buttons.

 

Thanks

Edited December 4, 2023 by Buzz313th

[Skorj]

This sounds like an easy win (not that they'd want to add anything last minute, of course).  Flight controls aren't just useful for atmospheric flight, they're really handy for docking too, any sort of fine maneuvering really.   And it's just control mapping, so about an isolated a change as you can have in real software.

[The Aziz]

Given the general state of input settings, any controllers are way down the priority list. There's no time to deal with it now.

[Buzz313th]

2 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Given the general state of input settings, any controllers are way down the priority list. There's no time to deal with it now.

That's what I'm afraid of..  And not surprising.

 

[Skorj]

I assume they aren't changing anything in the next 2 weeks. But then a whole new patch cycle starts. 

I've said this about several EA games: make your players happy with the state of input and menus, as a priority.  It's great bang-for-the-buck for removing "friction," improving accessibility, and generally making a game more pleasant to play, because it's very quick to fix compared to anything to do with the internals of a game.  It also requires little understanding of the overall codebase, and many improvements can be done piecemeal, which makes it great for ramp-up projects for new hires, small work to do between big projects, and so on (or for small indie teams, buy this stuff from the store).

Adding/improving  controller support, best practices for keybindings, menu usability, color pickers for anyplace color is used in the UI, these are all small projects which can be done in isolation from other changes, and produce player-visible results right away.

[Periple]

Assuming it’s not yet in, what would you have deprioritized and kicked to later releases? Wobbly rockets? Bugfixes? Contracts? Buoyancy?

It’s always a question of trade-offs — what do you do now, what later.

And in case you’re wondering, I also would really love controller support!

 

[LoSBoL]

It's been a while though...

 

[Buzz313th]

12 hours ago, Periple said:

Assuming it’s not yet in, what would you have deprioritized and kicked to later releases? Wobbly rockets? Bugfixes? Contracts? Buoyancy?

It’s always a question of trade-offs — what do you do now, what later.

And in case you’re wondering, I also would really love controller support!

 

Kerbal Hairdos.

10 hours ago, LoSBoL said:

It's been a while though...

 

The key phrase here is....  

"but was disabled due to stability issues. It'll be re-enabled once those get ironed out."

Stability issues with Controllers, or just stability issues with the game as a whole?

Edited December 5, 2023 by Buzz313th

[cocoscacao]

Well... In the original game, I assume it's the same in the sequel, we're taking the role of KSC director. Basically, a player is a kerbal as well. It would be nice to have a profile creation screen. I want to kerbalize myself. 

[Buzz313th]

17 hours ago, The Aziz said:

 There's no time to deal with it now.

Just re-read some of these replies and I laughed at this part of your quote as it occurred to me that.....

It's been almost 10 months since EA release and 9 months since the reply from the forum mod regarding the joystick support.

I always try to teach my two kids that procrastination and laziness will just lead to self compromise when time runs out.  

 

Cheers

4 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

Well... In the original game, I assume it's the same in the sequel, we're taking the role of KSC director. Basically, a player is a kerbal as well. It would be nice to have a profile creation screen. I want to kerbalize myself. 

Great idea!

Lets move that to the top of the list.   On that note, who needs game controller support when I can pretend to be a Kerbal..

Cheers

[Periple]

10 hours ago, Buzz313th said:

It's been almost 10 months since EA release and 9 months since the reply from the forum mod regarding the joystick support.

Same thing with heating and science. Most of us expected the former within a month or two and the latter by summer. Progress has been slower than expected across the board. They just must have figured that there were more important things to address.

(As to kerbal hairdos, the people making those aren’t the ones who would be doing controller support. Engineering is clearly the bottleneck here, not art.)

[Meecrob]

16 hours ago, Periple said:

(As to kerbal hairdos, the people making those aren’t the ones who would be doing controller support. Engineering is clearly the bottleneck here, not art.)

Just because something is completed does not mean it is the appropriate time to release it. If everyone wants one thing, and you give them something else entirely, you have to expect disappointment. You can't just be like "oh, it was a different department that dropped the ball" The whole point of a game being developed by a proper team is that everything is planned out and not haphazard. This isn't a couple guys coding a game in their college dorm in their spare time for fun.

Imagine if you bought a car that has a defect in the steering system, and the car company is like "hey, we don't have the steering fixed yet, but check it out, we got you some new skins for your media player in the dash! Pretty neat, huh?"

[Buzz313th]

7 hours ago, Meecrob said:

Just because something is completed does not mean it is the appropriate time to release it. If everyone wants one thing, and you give them something else entirely, you have to expect disappointment. You can't just be like "oh, it was a different department that dropped the ball" The whole point of a game being developed by a proper team is that everything is planned out and not haphazard. This isn't a couple guys coding a game in their college dorm in their spare time for fun.

Imagine if you bought a car that has a defect in the steering system, and the car company is like "hey, we don't have the steering fixed yet, but check it out, we got you some new skins for your media player in the dash! Pretty neat, huh?"

Good point.  

Management F-ed up.  Why is art so far ahead of engineering?  It's almost like Art is just doing busy work at this point?  Why haven't the assets that are funding the Art team been moved over to fund a larger, better paid and experienced Code squad?

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a SOLID AND STABLE "For Science" release.

Cheers

Edited December 7, 2023 by Buzz313th

[Superfluous J]

35 minutes ago, Buzz313th said:

Why haven't the assets that are funding the Art team been moved over to fund a larger, better paid and experienced Code squad?

Probably due to the fact you can't just add new programmers to a team with a complex problem and expect them to fix it faster, any more than you can add pregnant women to a family and expect a baby any faster.

But unlike the women and the babies, at least you can expect them to not slow progress down like training new hires invariably does.

[Skorj]

40 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

Probably due to the fact you can't just add new programmers to a team with a complex problem and expect them to fix it faster, any more than you can add pregnant women to a family and expect a baby any faster.

But unlike the women and the babies, at least you can expect them to not slow progress down like training new hires invariably does.

Come on now, every software development manager I've ever worked for knew with unbreakable faith that 9 women could have a baby in 1 month!

But to your point, that's why I think control mapping is a great project: it's a safe and easy change for new hires and junior programmers to do, people who we wouldn't want trying to fix the remaining game-braking bugs (and no doubt breaking 6 other things in the attempt) until they know the codebase better.  Or even as something somewhat relaxing to do to recover from crunch, as the case may be.

[Periple]

1 hour ago, Buzz313th said:

Management F-ed up.  Why is art so far ahead of engineering?  It's almost like Art is just doing busy work at this point?  Why haven't the assets that are funding the Art team been moved over to fund a larger, better paid and experienced Code squad?

One of the really depressing things about the game industry is how volatile it is. Lots of studios do just that, they hire and fire continuously as bottlenecks move. The beancounters think it’s smart: “Art’s done, fire the artists, engineering is a bottleneck, hire some programmers.”

This also means there’s little loyalty to a studio, if you’re gonna be made redundant in a year or two anyway, why would you be?

Consequently, people stick with a job for about two years on average. That’s not enough to learn the ins and outs of how to do things properly in context. In most studios most people are in some stage of trying to figure out what their job even is. The results are all around us.

There are exceptions. Nintendo for example holds onto its people as much as it can. Four out of the five people in the core team for the original Mario game worked on the latest one. Shockingly, Nintendo keeps making one hit after another at astounding quality.

“Moving resources to maximize efficiency” is what gets us delayed bugfests to start with. If you want to do things well, you need to think long term, and that is very difficult in this industry.

 

[The Aziz]

2 hours ago, Buzz313th said:

Why is art so far ahead of engineering?

Because it's faster and easier.

As a team you get the prompt to build A thing. You manage the concept, including both art and functionality. Then you can start working on The thing based on the above. What comes first, the model or the code? Exactly.

57 minutes ago, Periple said:

Shockingly, Nintendo keeps making one hit after another at astounding quality.

*Cough*pokemon*cough*

What?

58 minutes ago, Periple said:

Moving resources to maximize efficiency” is what gets us delayed bugfests to start with

No, it's the preplanned (by a publisher) deadlines that have no real relation to development reality. You can't just plan a release date 6 months in advance and expect it to go smoothly all the way to day 0.

[Periple]

8 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

No, it's the preplanned (by a publisher) deadlines that have no real relation to development reality. You can't just plan a release date 6 months in advance and expect it to go smoothly all the way to day 0.

Nobody does.

[Periple]

20 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

*Cough*pokemon*cough*

It's the highest-grossing media franchise ever. Current estimate it that it's brought in $92 billion. You picked a weird example!

Edited December 7, 2023 by Periple

[The Aziz]

24 minutes ago, Periple said:

It's the highest-grossing media franchise ever. Current estimate it that it's brought in $92 billion. You picked a weird example!

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pokemon-scarlet/

The astounding quality.

[Meecrob]

I have to admit, I have missed the point of how Pokemon relates to KSP?  Like no offense, I don't care about Pokemon. I want a game that lets me play "space."  I can bring up more examples than are necessary of franchises that made more money than KSP. I'm not on those message boards though, I'm here, talking about KSP...?

[Meecrob]

3 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

Probably due to the fact you can't just add new programmers to a team with a complex problem and expect them to fix it faster, any more than you can add pregnant women to a family and expect a baby any faster.

But unlike the women and the babies, at least you can expect them to not slow progress down like training new hires invariably does.

Nobody is asking for that. Put your strawman back in the barn. You assume because I want the game to not suck that I want it to be ruined? Don't assume my strategy is to hire a bunch of noobs and try to get them up to speed. Way to assume things. Seriously. I've had a job before, I get the concept of drowning in incompetence. Thanks for assuming that I'm not smart enough to get it.

What I am asking for is for the existing devs to get on track. I never suggested they should hire a bunch of green noobs to help out. Like where did you get this idea from?

[Periple]

4 hours ago, The Aziz said:

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pokemon-scarlet/

The astounding quality.

It's developed by Game Freak, not Nintendo EPD. Nintendo just published it (together with the Pokemon company). I'm sure you'll find more examples of mediocre games they've published, I was talking about their first-party titles.

I expect Nintendo has whiffed on a few of those too, but not many of them. They are usually consistently high quality, technically, critically, and commercially.

 

[Superfluous J]

4 hours ago, Meecrob said:

Nobody is asking for that

The person I quoted did.

[Buzz313th]

Aren't there "Ringers" in the software code business that have a reputation of being able to get things done?  Wouldn't an ace engineering lead straighten this mess out?  Or, if hired months ago, been able to make a bigger difference now?