Some Improvements on the Way

[regex]

More frequent updates please; just tell us what the actual hell is going on in a short forum post rather than the dumb memeing we have to put up with to keep up in the Discord. You guys CAN do better and you just have.

Also, I agree, we should absolutely get more frequent actual software updates. I'm in waiting mode on this game, you're losing my interest, much as I believe in your ability to produce the game and the promise of the end product, you're not delivering. You guys CAN do better.

Edited April 25 by regex

[TickleMyMary]

Be honest and just come out with it... This isn't an EA in any sense of the phrase.

Fast iteration, quick and regular updates, hotfixes and (the most kerbal of all) not being afraid to fail... I don't see much more than "Look at the shiney, shiney" and the usual suspects of "Soon", "We can't wait to show you" and "We don't have an exact date yet"

Nice... Real damned nice.

[Urus28]

Thanks for the update !

I have no idea what a PQS decal is, but it's good to see some improvements ! =D

I hope we will have the 0.2.2 patch soon. =)

[Pthigrivi]

Thanks, Nate and all! Dang those thunderheads!

[Flush Foot]

3 minutes ago, Urus28 said:

Thanks for the update !

I have no idea what a PQS decal is, but it's good to see some improvements ! =D

I hope we will have the 0.2.2 patch soon. =)

PQS (and planetary surface graphics more broadly) were covered in a prior Dev Update / Diary, if you want to take a look:

 

[Scarecrow71]

I'm going to call out a specific post in this thread to @Nate Simpson:

2 minutes ago, TickleMyMary said:

Be honest and just come out with it... This isn't an EA in any sense of the phrase.

Fast iteration, quick and regular updates, hotfixes and (the most kerbal of all) not being afraid to fail... I don't see much more than "Look at the shiney, shiney" and the usual suspects of "Soon", "We can't wait to show you" and "We don't have an exact date yet"

Nice... Real damned nice.

I could not possibly agree more here.  We were promised an update cadence of 6-7 weeks, and it's already been more than 3 months since the last one.  We were promised communication updates every 2 weeks, then every month, then once a month, and then ended with "When Mike finally gets the internal calendar straightened".  And when you finally do communicate what is going on, all we get is "We have an update coming.  Can't tell you when, but look at the clouds!".

I'm not going to apologize for my stance on this.  The gameplay loop is infinitely more valuable to be working on than graphics at this point.  The clouds and PQS improvements are nice - especially if they finally give some semblance of performance updates to those of us with mid-range equipment that you guys stated the game should run on with ~30 FPS.  But for all that is good in this world, please prioritize fixing the gameplay loop.  Colonies is great, interstellar is nice, resources will be wonderful.  But none of that works if we still have the issues we've been complaining about since day 1.  Period.  Colonies don't work if the dV calculator is broken.  Interstellar won't work if trajectory lines disappear.  Resources won't work if all of our buildings and ships fall through terrain when we time warp to get to a full load.

Thank you for the update.  Please keep these coming with better frequency.  But please don't just tell us "We're working on this" and then try to distract us with shiny pictures.

[Flush Foot]

4 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

try to distract us with shiny pictures

But... But... It's soooo shiny!

[Kianykin]

Any improvements to make docking aless buggy experience?

[Flush Foot]

  

3 minutes ago, Kianykin said:

Any improvements to make docking aless buggy experience?

They haven't explicitly NOT improved docking, at least not yet...

2 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

We identified a series of issues that we believed were negatively impacting moment-to-moment gameplay and the first-time user experience, and we dug deep into those bug clusters to make meaningful improvements. Some of those issues include: 

• Parachutes don’t deploy reliably (doubly true when fairings are in the mix) 
• Fairings don’t protect their contents from heating 
• Trajectory lines in the map view sometimes disappear (often related to erroneous designation of craft as “landed” when in flight) 
• Landed vehicles fall through terrain during time warp 
• Maneuver nodes refuse to allow the player to plan beyond the calculated Delta-V allowance, which in many cases is an incorrect value

Edited April 25 by Flush Foot

[Easyidle123]

Those clouds are absolutely amazing! 

Thanks for going into more detail about what specifically is being worked on in regards to colonies, its definitely appreciated and I hope the wider community feels the same

Edited April 25 by Easyidle123

[Scarecrow71]

2 minutes ago, Flush Foot said:

They haven't explicitly NOT improved docking, at least not yet...

I wonder if the docking issues are related to either/both of:

• Incorrect landed state causing trajectory lines to disappear
• Vehicles falling through terrain during time warp

[Presto200]

9 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Colonies don't work if the dV calculator is broken.  Interstellar won't work if trajectory lines disappear.  Resources won't work if all of our buildings and ships fall through terrain when we time warp to get to a full load.

Respectfully, The post did talk about them working on each of these problems:

2 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

We identified a series of issues that we believed were negatively impacting moment-to-moment gameplay and the first-time user experience, and we dug deep into those bug clusters to make meaningful improvements. Some of those issues include: 

• Parachutes don’t deploy reliably (doubly true when fairings are in the mix) 
• Fairings don’t protect their contents from heating 
• Trajectory lines in the map view sometimes disappear (often related to erroneous designation of craft as “landed” when in flight) 
• Landed vehicles fall through terrain during time warp 
• Maneuver nodes refuse to allow the player to plan beyond the calculated Delta-V allowance, which in many cases is an incorrect value 

 

And even more he talked about fixing one of the main annoyances that come with the problem. While this doesn't necessarily fix the Delta-V calculator, It shows that they are committed to fixing the issue and making sure that the game stays fun while they work on it:

2 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

We’ve submitted changes to address a number of these issues – in the case of the last one, we’ll just be letting you plan beyond your current dV allowance while we continue to improve our Delta-V accuracy over the longer term (there’s a very challenging set of problems to solve in the pursuit of accurate Delta-V projections for every possible vehicle that a player can make, so this is something we’ll likely be refining for quite a while).  

 

I don't mean to disregard your concerns but I think if we are asking for more quality communication we should keep a positive attitude when they deliver, especially when it's specifically acknowledging what we have been saying for a while. I'm not saying anyone HAS TO be happy with where we are but I think a positive outlook is always better especially if one main complaint was asking for them to talk about what they are working on before it's here.

[Scarecrow71]

@Presto200

I am aware of what Nate's post stated.  My making mention of the problems was used to highlight that I feel this is what they should focus on, not telling us about clouds or PQS.  Are those things nice?  Yes they are.  But until the gameplay loop is fixed, they don't mean anything.

[ChrisShourai]

@Nate Simpson, thank you for this Dev Blog. THESE are the sort of blogs we expect more frequently from the dev team. They do not have to be long, they just need to be to the point and cover the main things RE development (bugs, progress, something interesting or not). If you can pound out more short posts like this (with or without screenshots of anything) we would be infinitely happier. Just post frequently, it does not have to be huge. Post every two weeks (that's only twice a month, or 24 times a year, just a post) with something compact and to the point, I'm guessing you'll turn around the vibe on these forums right quick.

[Icegrx]

This was a nice communication. Especially highlighting the bugs that are getting dev attention. 
PQS optimization is also awesome to hear about!

The shiny stuff is indeed shiny! The clouds look amazing, I’d like to know more about their impact to performance though.

I’m not too keen on not giving a time frame, that hurts. I get why you can’t drop a specific date, but giving us an estimate would be nice. 

We need more of this type of communication. You have shown exactly what kinds of information we have been asking for and communicated it nicely here, please don’t go radio silent again and keep these rolling please!
 

 

[Starwaster]

1 hour ago, Screeno said:

I don't know why temperature is not skin/internal and only a global temperature per part.  There's a lot more interesting gameplay to be had when it's like that. It was by default in ksp1, so why not now. 

The concept of skin temperature actually originated in Deadly Reentry with the advent of KSP 1.0 when I was trying to decide if the mod was still needed. It's a lot harder to heat things up to 'deadly' levels when parts have a unitary thermal mass to overcome and no concept of how hot things actually are on the surface. So the new DR got skin temperature which  they eventually incorporated into the stock game. Not sure why they decided to reinvent the wheel but it's going to be rough balancing thermals in a way that makes reentry challenging without making things too hot during launches and supersonic/hypersonic flight. Being able to factor in surface temp vs overall part temp helps with that.

I do see references though in the PhysicsSettings.json file to skin conductivity. Maybe they're just leftovers from KSP 1.

[nyae]

1 hour ago, Scarecrow71 said:

 Interstellar won't work if trajectory lines disappear.  Resources won't work if all of our buildings and ships fall through terrain when we time warp to get to a full load.

Thank you for the update.  Please keep these coming with better frequency.  But please don't just tell us "We're working on this" and then try to distract us with shiny pictures.

Tbh, they adressed this in the devlog, I'm not sure if you are talking about this just as an example, or more like "hey guys, this thing (that we fixed, sort of?) is broken! fix it"...

 

But yeah I do agree, there is a massive PR issue on this game, like, game development is hell, but if you go to reddit, half of the people don't even think that there is any progress on this game.

They just don't understand how game development works, and that promising / showing in development work is just a bad idea, but at this point, it's better to just tell things as they are, weekly...

[Jaypeg]

4 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

Hello! It’s been a while! 

I know that many of you have been wondering about the status of KSP2, so I thought I’d give you an update on how things are going. 

We have an incremental update on the way! The v0.2.2.0 update will address a number of common user experience issues, some of which have been causing frustration for quite a while. In many cases, a thing that was reported as a single bug (Delta-V calculations being incorrect, or trajectory lines being broken) were actually half a dozen or more closely related bugs. 

We identified a series of issues that we believed were negatively impacting moment-to-moment gameplay and the first-time user experience, and we dug deep into those bug clusters to make meaningful improvements. Some of those issues include: 

• Parachutes don’t deploy reliably (doubly true when fairings are in the mix) 
• Fairings don’t protect their contents from heating 
• Trajectory lines in the map view sometimes disappear (often related to erroneous designation of craft as “landed” when in flight) 
• Landed vehicles fall through terrain during time warp 
• Maneuver nodes refuse to allow the player to plan beyond the calculated Delta-V allowance, which in many cases is an incorrect value 

We’ve submitted changes to address a number of these issues – in the case of the last one, we’ll just be letting you plan beyond your current dV allowance while we continue to improve our Delta-V accuracy over the longer term (there’s a very challenging set of problems to solve in the pursuit of accurate Delta-V projections for every possible vehicle that a player can make, so this is something we’ll likely be refining for quite a while).  

For this update, we’ve also prioritized a new kind of issue: in some cases, the first-time user experience is undermined by a failure of the UI to clearly communicate how to progress between phases of gameplay – put simply, we sometimes put new players in a position where they don’t know what they’re supposed to do next. We’ve received a huge quantity of very helpful user feedback in this area since the For Science! Update. For example, since most of us are seasoned KSP veterans, it never occurred to us that we hadn’t fully communicated that “revert to VAB” is a very different thing from “return to VAB.” We received a rash of bug reports from people who were confused about having lost progress after completing their missions and reverting to VAB. Yikes! Similarly, the lack of a clear call to action when a vehicle can be recovered frequently left new players staring at a landed vehicle and not knowing there were more steps to follow. We’ve made some UI changes to address issues like this, and we think the flow has improved as a result. 

Another usability issue that even catches me out on occasion -- trying to do illegal actions (for example, parachute deployment) while in time warp states other than 1x. In fact, we believe quite a few bug reports we’ve gotten about actions being broken have actually been the result of people attempting to do things under time warp that weren’t allowed. This is an area of ongoing work for us – not only do we need to do a better job of communicating to the player when they’re warping, but we also need to make clear what actions are and are not allowed under both physics and on-rails time warp. We’ve made some small UI changes to increase the player’s awareness of their time warp state, and we’re looking forward to seeing if those changes feel good to you. I know we talk a lot about the value of Early Access, but this is a great example of how your reporting helps us target our efforts. 

We still haven’t nailed down the exact date for this update, but we’ll notify you here once we’re on final approach. 

Most of our team continues to be pointed squarely at the Colonies update. We’re making a lot of progress this month on colony founding, the colony assembly experience, and colony gameplay mechanics. There are lots of interesting problems to solve here – some are super obvious (colony parts exist at a wide range of scales, and the Base Assembly Editor – the colony version of a VAB - needs to feel equally good when you’re connecting a small truss or a giant hab module). Other issues – for example, how vehicles interact with colonies on both the systems and physics levels – come with a lot of edge cases that need to be satisfied. We remain very excited about the ways colony gameplay will move KSP2 into completely new territory, and we’re definitely eager to see what our legendarily creative players do with these new systems. 

In parallel with our colony work, we’re continuing to find significant opportunities to improve performance and stability. We just made a change to PQS decals that got us huge memory usage improvements – mostly VRAM (this one is still being tested, so it won’t go into the v0.2.2.0 update – but I was just so excited about the improvement that I had to share): 

And of course, while all this work is going on, Ghassen Lahmar (aka Blackrack) continues to make big strides with clouds. Here’s a peek at some of the improvements he’s working on today (yep, that’s multiple layers)!

And because the VFX team can’t ever stop making things better, they’ve begun an overhaul of exhaust plumes to bring them more in line with reality (which thankfully is also quite beautiful):

Thanks as always for sticking with us as we work through each challenge – we couldn’t be more grateful to have your support as we move toward the Colonies era! 
 

Nate

CLOUDS FIXED

[The Space Peacock]

Fantastic updnate! Those visual improvements look terrific, but im especially excited about the optimization of the PQS shaders. Memory usage has always been a bottleneck for me, playing on a below-spec device. Cant wait to see how this affects that!

 

Also nice to hear about more bug fixes on the horizon ofcourse. Keep it up team!

[DibzNr]

Those clouds and plumes look soooooo good, you guys are absolutely cookin! Looking forward to the next updates

[jebycheek]

We already knew blackrack's achievement. show us some more colony related stuff.

Edited April 25 by jebycheek

[RayneCloud]

Thank. You. 

[Little 908]

When can we expect to see these multi layer clouds?

[mindseyemodels]

PLEASE tell me there are more VFX fixes and improvements for reentry soon

[NexusHelium]

57 minutes ago, jebycheek said:

We already knew blackrack's achievement. show us some more colony related stuff.

But did we? Cause those clouds
A. We haven’t seen and

B. Those clouds are AWESOME