T2 interactive layoffs

[Ker Ball One]

I'd be very weary of the first stage of grief here.  Denial that this is a real rug pull.  When something like this happens, and the other side goes silent like this... it's comforting to think, they are just busy reworking the problem and will come back with a solution (like it's just a break while they regroup).
Their silence speaks volumes.

As for improvements over KSP1 that we did get.  Sure, but that also clouds judgement.  When comparing it to stock KSP1, it's easy to be impressed.  When compared to a fully modded KSP1, the improvements are not so impressive.

1 hour ago, gluckez said:

but I lost hope in Take 2, and I'm never buying anything from them again because I simply don't trust that they'll actually give me what I paid for.

I go a step forward, and am suspicious of ANY game studio that deals in an "Early Access" model.  They don't get my money unless I am part of an exclusive beta group that has direct feedback into the dev process.  And honestly, a way to get a refund if they just decide to take years to make progress.  They might as well asked for crowdsource development, which would have been more honest. 

[danfarnsy]

21 minutes ago, Ker Ball One said:

I go a step forward, and am suspicious of ANY game studio that deals in an "Early Access" model.  They don't get my money unless I am part of an exclusive beta group that has direct feedback into the dev process.  And honestly, a way to get a refund if they just decide to take years to make progress.  They might as well asked for crowdsource development, which would have been more honest. 

I've had plenty of purchases bigger and more disappointing than this. There's a new fancy burgers-and-shakes place that opened near here, and buying food for the whole family cost more than KSP 2 while being a big letdown. I'm still willing to try new places, just not willing to go to that particular place again. EA can still pay off. It just didn't this time.

Honestly, I miss what this community used to be a lot more than I miss the features KSP 2 will never have.

[Ker Ball One]

That's fair.  It's not that expensive for a full space sim game. 

6 minutes ago, danfarnsy said:

Honestly, I miss what this community used to be a lot more than I miss the features KSP 2 will never have.

I wonder if the mere existence of KSP2 has distracted the modding community from KSP1. 

[Ker Ball One]

I just had the craziest fever dream about the intercept games graphics design team that does the marketing videos, in the last weeks of employment, creating something special...

A spoof on the final scene of Star Wars: Rogue One.  Kerbals, after witnessing the Kraken destroy their space station (named the intercept), are carrying a data disc to a rebel escape pod.  Explosions in the background they relay hand off the disc to other kerbals.  Desperately trying to get the data to safety.

They finally get the data into the hands of a princess Leia looking Kerbal.  "Hope".  Fade to Black.

Alongside this promotional video, is the entire Source Code for KSP2 along with a Mod Creation development kit.

[VlonaldKerman]

2 hours ago, Ker Ball One said:

That's fair.  It's not that expensive for a full space sim game. 

I wonder if the mere existence of KSP2 has distracted the modding community from KSP1. 

When KSP 2 released, it caused the combined playercounts of KSP 1 and KSP 2 to drop significantly. That is to say, the game was in such a sad state, that some players who were playing KSP 1 lost enthusiasm and stopped playing.

This is a well documented effect in other brands. In general, what is bad for one branch of an IP is bad for all the others as well, even if the mechanism is subconscious in the consumer.

2 minutes ago, Ker Ball One said:

I just had the craziest fever dream about the intercept games graphics design team that does the marketing videos, in the last weeks of employment, creating something special...

A spoof on the final scene of Star Wars: Rogue One.  Kerbals, after witnessing the Kraken destroy their space station (named the intercept), are carrying a data disc to a rebel escape pod.  Explosions in the background they relay hand off the disc to other kerbals.  Desperately trying to get the data to safety.

They finally get the data into the hands of a princess Leia looking Kerbal.  "Hope".  Fade to Black.

Alongside this promotional video, is the entire Source Code for KSP2 along with a Mod Creation development kit.

Woah. This is a great idea.

[herbal space program]

1 hour ago, VlonaldKerman said:

Alongside this promotional video, is the entire Source Code for KSP2 along with a Mod Creation development kit.

TBH, I'm not sure most of the nitty gritty source code would represent much of an improvement. I think if indeed the game is dead, it died because they failed after multiple attempts to upgrade the physics engine enough to make all these grandiose future plans about colonies, etc. feasible. What may still have a lot of value however is all the nice art and terrain maps they created while the more technical side of the team was struggling with the nuts and bolts. I'd bet there's a whole lot of that which never saw the light of day because other elements were holding up its release.

[Ker Ball One]

26 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

attempts to upgrade the physics engine enough to make all these grandiose future plans about colonies, etc. feasible

So how did KSP 1 mods like MKS manage to do reasonably well?

Maybe it was shortcuts like removing certain elements from the game's physics engine, and putting placeholders that just managed inputs and outputs.    Similar to the idea of handling high park counts, by fusing entire sub-assemblies together into single parts with the included modules.  Many sub assemblies can be created that don't necessarily need internal interactions.

That's where I think the source code could be of value.  Not to replicate their roadmap exactly as they would have done it. But rather to create the same features within a framework that bypasses the limitations.

 

Does KSP2 even have a creation kit for mod developers yet? 

Edited May 8 by Ker Ball One

[Bej Kerman]

20 minutes ago, Ker Ball One said:

So how did KSP 1 mods like MKS manage to do reasonably well?

They did "reasonably well" because people weren't expecting super polished experiences to come from mods and tempered their expectations accordingly.

[Superfluous J]

6 hours ago, danfarnsy said:

Honestly, I miss what this community used to be a lot more than I miss the features KSP 2 will never have.

1 billion times yes.

[Rudolf Meier]

12 hours ago, herbal space program said:

I think a fair number of those "realists" didn't actually play the game enough to recognize any of the significant improvements over KSP1...

Well... that's true. But: What they should have done and haven't, is something you can see without playing the game. And this is create a solid new foundation. A stable and reliable foundation. But what they did is create some fancy graphics, a poor performing system and they brought back problems of KSP1 (wobbly rockets for example). And that's where my frustration comes from. But I know, that in such projects you often have customers who only see what they can see... and that's what's on the screen. For every new Windows version almost everyone is talking about the start menu, the icons and how good the browser is. But that's not important. The most important thing is how stable it is. How performant it runs and what driver architecture it offers. Sure, only 1 out of 10'000 speaks about it. But that's what matters! ... a shiny new car is not usable if the wheels fall off when you go into a turn of more than 5° ... and here we have just this: The foundation seems not to work (after 5 years or more). And that's something you cannot fix anymore. Try to swap out the foundation of a house after you moved in.

[Overheal]

Still on life support?

Positive vibes...

[herbal space program]

17 hours ago, Rudolf Meier said:

Try to swap out the foundation of a house after you moved in.

I don't dispute what the fundamental problem with the game is, and I have myself invoked the house metaphor when talking about it here, but I don't think it really quite translates  to that extent.  That is, I would expect that they wouldn't really need to rewrite so much of what is on top of that bad foundation in order to fix it, they might just need to bring in somebody who works at a lower level of coding than most of the programmers  involved in projects like this, and moreover has the skills required to ferret out various  sources of wasted clock cycles in that low-level view.

[Rutabaga22]

I don't know where to post this, but this whole layoff thing has been really disappointing for me. I bought the game on launch day and it was in a pretty sad state and the forums were so bad that I stopped regularly using them, but I was hopeful and the updates that came improving it made me even more excited about the game this was becoming. Then For Science! release it was the most fun I've had playing ksp in a while. Then this layoff thing happened. A jarring act of corporate greed that burnt anyone who bought this game. I didn't really expect this; they were fully speed ahead with development and had posted updates days earlier, then all comms cease. Nothing but corpo jargon and then silence. I don't think I'll buy an early access game for a while and I'm definitely not buying anything from Private Division ever again. Even if this blows over and turns out to be nothing, I don't think I'm going to trust much that comes out about it news-wise.

[DaveLChgo]

On 5/8/2024 at 1:56 AM, Rudolf Meier said:

 Try to swap out the foundation of a house after you moved in.

Replacing the foundation of a house after its been built....  thats a good one.    However, we need a better metaphor because replacing the foundation after the house has been built is done all the time, now-a-days.

 

[Ker Ball One]

44 minutes ago, DaveLChgo said:

Replacing the foundation of a house after its been built....  thats a good one.    However, we need a better metaphor because replacing the foundation after the house has been built is done all the time, now-a-days.

 

That's so Kerbal!

[gluckez]

7 hours ago, Rutabaga22 said:

I don't know where to post this, but this whole layoff thing has been really disappointing for me. I bought the game on launch day and it was in a pretty sad state and the forums were so bad that I stopped regularly using them, but I was hopeful and the updates that came improving it made me even more excited about the game this was becoming. Then For Science! release it was the most fun I've had playing ksp in a while. Then this layoff thing happened. A jarring act of corporate greed that burnt anyone who bought this game. I didn't really expect this; they were fully speed ahead with development and had posted updates days earlier, then all comms cease. Nothing but corpo jargon and then silence. I don't think I'll buy an early access game for a while and I'm definitely not buying anything from Private Division ever again. Even if this blows over and turns out to be nothing, I don't think I'm going to trust much that comes out about it news-wise.

trust me my friend, you're not alone in this

[NexusHelium]

11 hours ago, DaveLChgo said:

Replacing the foundation of a house after its been built....  thats a good one.    However, we need a better metaphor because replacing the foundation after the house has been built is done all the time, now-a-days.

We don't need a better metaphor because that's exactly what IG is going to do  

[mattihase]

11 hours ago, DaveLChgo said:

Replacing the foundation of a house after its been built....  thats a good one.    However, we need a better metaphor because replacing the foundation after the house has been built is done all the time, now-a-days.

Chicago did that with their whole city once. It's kinda eerie staring down an access tunnel and seeing about 100 yards of empty space between chicago and the ground.

[Ariel Kerman]

I still think that despite the actual state of KSP2 as a product, there is still o solid base to work from, hidden in his base code.
I know i know... is really easy and logical to claim the base of KSP2 is terrible, but that is from a gameplay and performance perspective only:
the code could^TM very probably contain instruccions for Unity to do very interesting things, like 1) geometry cache, or 2) normal-to-geometry generation mesh (#2 is very unlikely but still possible), wich would allow things in gameplay like for eg, allow a 400 parts vessel to be reduced at 2 parts only during timewarping (one part for the engine, the other for the rest of the vessel), and thats just the top of the iceberg, "Juno: New origins" already use this trick. IMHO if KSP2 is dead, the only future of this community will depend on us getting a look inside the KSP2's code. Gather signatures or pay to obtain the IP could be the only way...

[mattihase]

I don't think rendering all the parts is the current bottleneck, it's simulating them all that raises a difficulty.

[Ariel Kerman]

2 hours ago, mattihase said:

I don't think rendering all the parts is the current bottleneck, it's simulating them all that raises a difficulty.

Exactly, is not about render the parts, but by allowing the engine not have to, you can simulate them in background, reducing the amount of calculations needed for the whole ship, specially thoose related with physics during flight and timewarping