K.E.R.B. Report Update

[AtomicTech]

Comnet this isn't something that I want to see come to KSP 2 via mods. It's something integral to KSP and IRL spaceflight and such I think should not be excluded. If you don't want to do the whole relay thing, that's why we had that umbrella dish that could connect from anywhere but for those who do, we were happy with comnet.

[kdaviper]

Of course every thing they include of exclude at any point in time is a decision. Instead of implementing comment occlusion, they have decided that their time is better spent delivering other content and fixing the foundations of the game.  

I tend to agree with this decision. While I do see the value of adding additional challenge via occlusion, I am more interested in seeing:

-the challenges and gameplay opportunities afforded by colonies

-resource gathering and how that will tie into both science collection and colony function

-Much-needed improvements to UIX, including but not limited to maneuver creation, map view, PAM, resource Manager, and vehicle construction.

-optimizations to performance, especially considering terrain generation, vehicle physics, and fuel flow

-bug fixes that are frustrating to experienced players and game-breaking to newer players.

Let's not miss the forest for the trees.  The difficult part of this is we can only see a few trees around us while the rest is hidden behind nondisclosure.

2 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:

Comnet this isn't something that I want to see come to KSP 2 via mods. It's something integral to KSP and IRL spaceflight and such I think should not be excluded. If you don't want to do the whole relay thing, that's why we had that umbrella dish that could connect from anywhere but for those who do, we were happy with comnet.

While I agree that commnet provided an additional challenge, remember it did not Even come to KSP for quite some time after 1.0 and Even then could be disabled via toggle.

Especially considering how performance degrades as the number of vessels increases, I didn't know if it's a great decision to encourage sending a bunch of extra crafts into orbit at this point in time.

[Flush Foot]

11 minutes ago, kdaviper said:

I didn't know if it's a great decision to encourage sending a bunch of extra crafts into orbit at this point in time

As much as I also like the challenge of setting up reliable comms everywhere, I must regrettably concede this point; enough relays for good coverage would probably tank performance on even the beefiest rigs (at least at this point in the game's development).

[Fizzlebop Smith]

1 hour ago, AtomicTech said:

WHAT THE HECK!?

Nononononono

Source?

 

This was from the exchanges I followed on discord.

The developement team is a bit tight lipped regard feature we opine for. 

I dont  have the discord links to jump to the post and keyword search for occlusion resulted in quite a few hits

The gist was a bunch of people complaining about the lack of above features on discord.

There was silence mostly but the general theme was that these things are part of the base code and would be a monumental task to fix and will be reevaluated at a later date in time.. 

If there is time and if the community continue to express enough interest in it.

 

 

 

 

There are things that can be done to optimize performance.

Similarly to how they plan trade routes?

Occlusion is a very realistic part of space exploration and to claim a game is the successor to a game that was heavy on orbital mechanics to hand wave some stuff feels incredible disingenuous.

Splitting Physics to multiple Cores for instance would greatly improve cpu performance.

 

I do not want Juno+

I want a successor to KSP.

These things should have been brought to the community.

Do you want realistic relay systems?

Is it worth wracking our brand to try and figure out?

Instead the games core complexity has been reduced in favor of simplicity.

Edited March 25 by Fizzlebop Smith

[Spicat]

The question is not: Do you want comms or not?

The question is: Do you want them to prioritize comms over new features exclusive to ksp2? Like colonies or interstellar for instance?

They never said that commnet will not be in the game, they just said that this is not something they want to work on at the current time and that the current behavior is not a bug.

In my very own opinion I don’t want just a ksp1+, I want a new game that try new/different things. I’m not interested in the "make it on par with ksp1 first and then add features" (Besides QoL stuff). So it makes sense to me that commnet is not being prioritized. Even in ksp1 it wasn’t a priority (arguably was a new feature so I understand)

It’s all a question of priority, I’m sure devs want to add all the features they can. Just that some are more "interesting" or unique so it comes first.

Edited March 25 by Spicat

[Fizzlebop Smith]

The question is metric on percentage of community that feels which way and if they are being true their player base.

I completely agree that NOW,  there other things to prioritize over ComNet and occlusion.

However, I think it was an incredibly poor choice to begin the game without that kinda of feature. Whether my view is a minority one or not, i would love to know.
Due to the way the game was promoted I thought certain things would already be there... later to learn they may never be.

They new  KitHack [spelling edit] model club, the RC game looks so amazing and i am very excited to play this game. It is "by the makers of KSP1"[ <--- My bad Meant KSP1]

( Only to ME)
It is beginning to feel like they should have made a game instead titled "KSP Colonies" brought to you by the creators of KSP2
If the game is to really be KSP done right, KSP2.. the successor of -- what have you
it cant be Something completely New

So far the part that is the same is - Build rocket & launch

Some New things is fine in a Follow Up with the same title. There has to be a significant chunk that is not new. 
Again this is pretty much MY OPINION not a consensus or me speaking for the community.

I wish there were some polls. A few more AMA's with the dev's
I really wanna know the direction they are taking & the direction the majority *feel* the game should be taking

Done Cluttering KERB report with my angst, I speak from a place of love (for the KSP title itself) 

 

Edited March 25 by Fizzlebop Smith

[Flush Foot]

Just now, Fizzlebop Smith said:

KitBash RC cars looks so amazing and i am very excited to play this game. It is "by the makers of KSP2"

KSP or KSP2? (I thought it was HarvesteR or something?)

[herbal space program]

2 hours ago, kdaviper said:

-Much-needed improvements to UIX, including but not limited to maneuver creation, map view, PAM, resource Manager, and vehicle construction.

-optimizations to performance, especially considering terrain generation, vehicle physics, and fuel flow

-bug fixes that are frustrating to experienced players and game-breaking to newer players.

I must agree that fixing these things is way more important right now than having them  fully implement the Comnet feature the way it worked in KSP1.  In fact, I think that trying to implement it now,  while there are still all these play hindrances due to bugs, would just degrade the experience further rather than enhance it. I've spent a good number of hours recently simultaneously working on three things in the game that are relevant to the above bug issues. One is my Eve 10 lander, which has three large orbitally docked modules, consisting of a big nuclear orbital  tug with the crew re-entry vessel, the lander proper, and an intermediate sky crane stage to facilitate my Eve atmospheric entry.  The second is a swarm of 5 remote probes, each of which is targeting a different body in the Jool system, all arriving in more or less the same timeframe, and the third is my Mohole mission, which I am gradually spiraling inwards towards Moho with a series of carefully timed gravity assists and DSMs. Trying to manage all these missions concurrently has raised a number of issues for me that seem like they should be quite high on the Fix or Implement Better Right Now list. For me, in order of priority, those would be:

1)  What gives with the comically self-censoring pop-up windows when you want to see the info about when a given craft will reach a specific AP/PE? The default, information-less designator, e.g. "Jool PE",  is always right in front of the critical information telling you when you will arrive at that spot when you click on it.  D'ooh! And I mean, how hard can that possibly be to fix? All you need to do is change the default arrangement of those windows in the display, or enable the user to bring the desired window to the front by clicking on it.  It's absolutely maddening if you've got 5 different flights making maneuvers in the same time frame!

2) About half the time, when I'm on an escape trajectory within some SOI, especially when I have just put myself on one, I have to play this ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with the pop-up window for maneuver nodes, because every time I click on the orbit to open the window and try to push the "Make maneuver plan" button, the window  disappears before I can click on it. If you were actually trying to design a bug to drive players crazy, I'm not sure you could do better than that.

3) On the same subject, the display of patched conics and the placement of maneuver nodes is just not sufficient for anybody who is trying to plan things out into the future.  I need to be able to place nodes in my next SOI, and I need to see where I'm going further into the future! Playing Jool Pinball with 5 simultaneous craft in-system is hard enough even if that all works well, and this system makes it well-nigh impossible.

4) When the part count gets really high, even if most of those parts are stuff like batteries, the frame rate still gets so low that  play becomes next to impossible. Docking up my Eve lander module to the other two was just an excruciating process because the frame rate was so low. It seemed there was a significant improvement to this in the two last updates, but it appears they still have a long way to go.

Anyway, for my part I'd really, really prefer that they fix stuff like this before they start trying to implement any new features.  You can't  keep making the building taller if the foundation still needs major work!

Edited March 25 by herbal space program

[Scarecrow71]

57 minutes ago, Spicat said:

The question is: Do you want them to prioritize comms over new features exclusive to ksp2? Like colonies or interstellar for instance?

I think the question should be "How much of the gameplay loop do you want fixed before they start work on additional features".  Which then leads into the next question, which is "What exactly defines the core gameplay loop".  Some people would argue that the core gameplay loop should include anything that was stock in KSP1, which includes commnet.

I get that a lot of people, myself included, don't simply want a hack of KSP1 with better graphics and a label slapped on saying "KSP2!  New and Improved!  Get it now while the getting is good!"  But what we do want is, at a minimum, the same stock features KSP1 includes, with the additional features of colonies, resources, and interstellar.

[Spicat]

17 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I think the question should be "How much of the gameplay loop do you want fixed before they start work on additional features".  Which then leads into the next question, which is "What exactly defines the core gameplay loop".  Some people would argue that the core gameplay loop should include anything that was stock in KSP1, which includes commnet.

I get that a lot of people, myself included, don't simply want a hack of KSP1 with better graphics and a label slapped on saying "KSP2!  New and Improved!  Get it now while the getting is good!"  But what we do want is, at a minimum, the same stock features KSP1 includes, with the additional features of colonies, resources, and interstellar.

Well that’s pretty much what I said, it will come at the cost of new features being delayed. And I don’t think people would like the wait and being the fact that the main arguments of ksp2 existence would be even further away.

In my own opinion, I definitely think that some features are definitely needed asap, mostly QoL stuff (bring my maneuver editor into ksp2) but some other can easily be left behind in favor of new features (like commnet or kerbal specialization). But that doesn’t mean we will never seen commnet back into the game (even if it’s different from ksp1).

[BigBA]

Just waiting for the next major bug fixes. There are still several super annoying bugs that takes aways lots of fun.

[Flush Foot]

3 hours ago, Spicat said:

some features are definitely needed asap

Probably not so high on the list, but how about either ‘more capable’ sample-arms or some kind of warning / clearer indication of when the arm is mounted “illegally”?

[herbal space program]

33 minutes ago, Flush Foot said:

Probably not so high on the list, but how about either ‘more capable’ sample-arms or some kind of warning / clearer indication of when the arm is mounted “illegally”?

Yeah, I had those on all my general-purpose robotic probes and they all turned out to be "blocked" as well,  even though there was no obvious reason why they should have been. Lots of lucrative science out the window! As I detailed above however, other issues were more problematic for me than that.

Edited March 25 by herbal space program

[Spicat]

1 hour ago, Flush Foot said:

Probably not so high on the list, but how about either ‘more capable’ sample-arms or some kind of warning / clearer indication of when the arm is mounted “illegally”?

oh that's definitely pretty annoying, there is a bug report you can upvote:

 

[Flush Foot]

54 minutes ago, Spicat said:

there is a bug report you can upvote

Did that a long time ago …

Probably around the time I commented on it, if not earlier.

[magnemoe]

17 hours ago, Flush Foot said:

As much as I also like the challenge of setting up reliable comms everywhere, I must regrettably concede this point; enough relays for good coverage would probably tank performance on even the beefiest rigs (at least at this point in the game's development).

I agree, I fly lots of missions at once and the 5 eve landers is an serious impact on performance so Jool 2 was canceled, manned Tylo landings, SSTO to Laythe, exploring the ocean of Laythe and the well at Vall.  

While in KSP 1


80+ probe cores dropped in an free return trajectory around the Mun. 
It lagged a bit in map view looking at it but not else. 

Result was that they did one extra orbit encountered the Mun again, 4 was kicked out off Kerbin SOI as they came before the Mun, one crashed into the Mun and the rest got their Pe lowered so they impacted Kerbin. 

Now the game does not need to do anything about stuff in orbit, just calculate its position then needed. 
perhaps have an list of objects who require attention because SOI change or impact, this list could include maneuver nodes and you just need an front end for an alarm clock   

With communication blocking you would need to calculate the position for more as you could imagine you are in low orbit around Eve, com to Kerbin is blocked but you have an relay around Duna who you use. 

Edited March 26 by magnemoe

[Coyotitos]

13 hours ago, BigBA said:

Just waiting for the next major bug fixes. There are still several super annoying bugs that takes aways lots of fun.

That.

KSP2 is on the verge of uninstall in my game library, rejoigning Star Citizen in the "not there yet" category.
Sorry for the comparaison, but when I bought KSP1 I was able to fly simple crafts to the mun and back without game breaking bug.
Not there yet with KSP2 - Chute failing to deploy, I am thinking about you

[Haux49]

Maybe do like Star Citizen with their backlog available to the public with releases and status?

[PDCWolf]

On 3/25/2024 at 12:27 PM, kdaviper said:

Of course every thing they include of exclude at any point in time is a decision. Instead of implementing comment occlusion, they have decided that their time is better spent delivering other content and fixing the foundations of the game. 

Even if you deleted every bug right now, KSP2 is still another Unity engine game that's gonna have similar joint limitations (they were gonna be much worse if we didn't complain), performance and even a tighter part limit than its predecessors. Even the colonies sneak peeks are plagued by magic 1part assemblies to kill part count as much as possible because the game is designed from the ground up to simulate almost everything for every part everywhere, meaning big saves are already doomed and in its current state, the game's performance dies after a couple missions.

They can optimize a bit, but without some very different savegame serialization and off-load simulation approach, the writing is in stone.

22 hours ago, Spicat said:

Well that’s pretty much what I said, it will come at the cost of new features being delayed. And I don’t think people would like the wait and being the fact that the main arguments of ksp2 existence would be even further away.

In my own opinion, I definitely think that some features are definitely needed asap, mostly QoL stuff (bring my maneuver editor into ksp2) but some other can easily be left behind in favor of new features (like commnet or kerbal specialization). But that doesn’t mean we will never seen commnet back into the game (even if it’s different from ksp1).

"At the cost of new features being delayed" has zero weight as an argument when the team doesn't have what it takes to compromise with a date, and feature drops aren't fast by a single measure. If colonies and resource extraction have the same depth as science, then they might as well ignore those and work on fixing the game and bringing it up to decency and letting modders do the work IG can't.

I'ts been 3+ months since science. I should already as a customer be in the loop with a date to expect Colonies, and knowing what it's gonna be like. From all the EAs I've been in, KSP2 is the slowest, less transparent, and most unfulfilling project I've followed, bar Valheim taking literal years to add a single biome.

Edited March 26 by PDCWolf

[Scarecrow71]

27 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

I'ts been 3+ months since science. I should already as a customer be in the loop with a date to expect Colonies, and knowing what it's gonna be like. From all the EAs I've been in, KSP2 is the slowest, less transparent, and most unfulfilling project I've followed, bar Valheim taking literal years to add a single biome.

Let's not forget that it's been more than a year since initial launch, and we still have bugs present today that were present at launch.

[AtomicTech]

2 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Let's not forget that it's been more than a year since initial launch, and we still have bugs present today that were present at launch.

True, true.

Though I commend the Dev team for trying their hardest

A number of the most egregious ones have been severely attenuated or removed all together.

If I'm just being annoying, I can say that KSP1 has the same issue 

[steveman0]

I continue to hope that the silence and apparent slow progress is due to them recognizing these limitations and being hard at work at substantial infrstructural redesign of some of the core systems to accommodate the performance needs. 

I see potential for batching parts for combined simulation, offloading background sim to other threads, and surely other opportunities to address performance needs while working around some existing bugs by essentially writing the systems responsible for the bugs in the first place.

I would have hoped that this kind of work would be precisely the kind of fundamental effort they would publically highlight to show why it is difficult, takes time, and is resulting in otherwise slow progress in areas that are of immediate attention for players.

[PDCWolf]

7 hours ago, steveman0 said:

I continue to hope that the silence and apparent slow progress is due to them recognizing these limitations and being hard at work at substantial infrstructural redesign of some of the core systems to accommodate the performance needs. 

I see potential for batching parts for combined simulation, offloading background sim to other threads, and surely other opportunities to address performance needs while working around some existing bugs by essentially writing the systems responsible for the bugs in the first place.

I would have hoped that this kind of work would be precisely the kind of fundamental effort they would publically highlight to show why it is difficult, takes time, and is resulting in otherwise slow progress in areas that are of immediate attention for players.

I think they've been very good  at showing literally all they can do. Slow progress is because they are slow, little info is because features are shallow and simple, and what they say is exactly what we get (next to nothing), so there's zero reason to hold hope for magic hidden development.

[Mitokandria]

From going through posts on here it seems there are two different schools of thought on sequels:

• A sequel should aim to recreate all/most of the previous game's primary mechanics in a new or updated engine utilising modern hardware, optimization techniques, and lessons learned to improve performance and stability. Then add/revise/remove features to meet story development, incorporate mechanics/tweaks from popular community mods, and to meet new player expectations.
• A sequel should aim to create a brand new game using it's predecessor as inspiration; incorporating features from the previous game that meet the vision of this new game and leaving out features that do not meet this vision. Adjust final vision to meet player expectations.

It seems most people, myself included, were lead to believe KSP 2 would follow the first school of thought. What we appear to be getting though is the second school of thought; a new game meant to bring in a wider player base while attempting to maintain the feel and essence of the original.

Neither school of thought is really "superior" as there are plenty of excellent examples of both in gaming, but I think not making it clear from the start which school of thought the devs subscribe to has caused a lot of discord, infighting, and mistrust among the playerbase. This has been exacerbated by a lack of communication, transparency, and, to some people, honesty during EA development.

 

I think KSP 2 will still end up being a good game, but perhaps not the game many fans of the original are looking for.

Edited March 29 by Mitokandria

[Fizzlebop Smith]

2 hours ago, Mitokandria said:

Neither school of thought is really "superior" as there are plenty of excellent examples of both in gaming, but I think not making it clear from the start which school of thought the devs subscribe to has caused a lot of discord, infighting, and mistrust among the playerbase. This has been exacerbated by a lack of communication, transparency, and, to some people, honesty during EA development.

 

I think KSP 2 will still end up being a good game, but perhaps not the game many fans of the original are looking for.

This... the entirety of your comment is so insightful and resoundingly true. 

I believe if there would have been a very clear definitive model of what the end vision maybe the infighting would have been greatly reduced. 

When a suggested feature/ correction deviates .. your could be told "that's  ot part of the plan" instead vitriol for the aspect you loved so much.

 

Very well said and makes me wish there were am award mechanic here.