Some Improvements on the Way

[Jaypeg]

2 hours ago, The Space Peacock said:

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!

Me too, runs fine-ish for everything but ram

[NexusHelium]

4 hours ago, Flush Foot said:

But... But... It's soooo shiny

I like the shinies. They’re fun  

[Icegrx]

1 hour ago, NexusHelium said:

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

B. Those clouds are AWESOME

They do look even more impressive, 

but Blackrack is famous for his KSP1 mod Volumetric Clouds.

[PASSthe40]

I'm really happy to see this communication but it didn't really scratch any itches for me. Nate, I almost want to hear more about how you plan to communicate moving forward than hearing about the next patch. The next patch to me should be coming soon and itll address whatever your team focused on which is a positive step forward. 

How do we improve communication. How can we help give feedback to your direction while you progress. It feels like we are at risk of building to requirements that may be disconnected from the stakeholders needs. Better communication, earlier and more meaningful can help us avoid that. I really like KSP2, I'd like to see it mature to a state that keeps this community strong.

[Superfluous J]

Great update. Looking forward to more.

Also good to hear some sticky bugs are getting fixed, I'm sure they were a pain to figure out and address.

Those clouds are amazing, can't wait to fly through them!

[AtomicTech]

8 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

Glad to hear from y'all

I am quite weirdly excited about the realistic hydrogen plumes! 

[Jaypeg]

53 minutes ago, Icegrx said:

They do look even more impressive, 

but Blackrack is famous for his KSP1 mod Volumetric Clouds.

hope they add godrays! They'll look great w/ the clouds

[turnerjack698]

Look's great, hiring BlackRack and Nertea show that despite taking a while, you all know exactly what you're doing. I know there's some serious doomer posting in r kerbalspaceprogram, but you guys are doing great work, if you get colonies out by summer with an improved science mode , this game will pull a No Man's Sky. I really think a kerbol system scaler would be a good improvement to add. 1.0 is vanilla, 2.7 is hard, 5.3 is nightmare. It adds incredible replay value and forces players to look more closely at some of the harder mechanics. IE: Gravity assists, orbital construction. Keep up the good work ya'll!

[DaveLChgo]

Agree with leaving the manuver node calc unlocked / available even without enough fuel for it.   Cause If im short delta v I can try to make up the difference using monoprop.  But without even being able to know??  Hurts the game.

[Alex76]

A difficult case. The developers are doing anything, but not what this game is. This is just nonsense and clowning! What clouds? Why are they needed in a space simulator at all? This game is an obvious fraud. And it’s unlikely to ever be finished!

[MechBFP]

9 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.

That is great to hear and glad that stuff is not being put on the back burner.

[Jaypeg]

35 minutes ago, Alex76 said:

A difficult case. The developers are doing anything, but not what this game is. This is just nonsense and clowning! What clouds? Why are they needed in a space simulator at all? This game is an obvious fraud. And it’s unlikely to ever be finished!

lol

[Alrecenk]

I've been waiting to play the For Science update until parachutes are fixed. Clouds and colonies stuff is cool or whatever, but none of that matters if I can't rely on the parts of my ship to function, or the navigation UI to be there, or the camera to stay attached to my craft. I'm happy to see an update, but I think it's worth remembering that most players aren't here. The frequency of these posts doesn't matter to them. They only play the game. Often very briefly in the case of KSP2.

[Jaypeg]

3 minutes ago, Alrecenk said:

I've been waiting to play the For Science update until parachutes are fixed. Clouds and colonies stuff is cool or whatever, but none of that matters if I can't rely on the parts of my ship to function, or the navigation UI to be there, or the camera to stay attached to my craft. I'm happy to see an update, but I think it's worth remembering that most players aren't here. The frequency of these posts doesn't matter to them. They only play the game. Often very briefly in the case of KSP2.

Yeah. It should come sooner than later. Ksp 2 is currently around ~700 players down from 5000 at 0.2's launch

[DancZer]

These exhausts vfx is mutch better! Looking forward to see it in action!

Are you planning to overhaul the reentry vfx to in line with reality? We got spectacular footage from SpaceX (I have seen you made notes there on X ) 

[Jaypeg]

2 minutes ago, DancZer said:

These exhausts vfx is mutch better! Looking forward to see it in action!

Are you planning to overhaul the reentry vfx to in line with reality? We got spectacular footage from SpaceX (I have seen you made notes there on X ) 

its a little better with 0.2.1 but Im most waiting for when they make it change colors based on planet

[Rusted Iron]

The exhaust plumes don't make sense to me.

Why does that outer layer curve towards the rocket, while the inner layer curves away?

shouldn't they both curve away? what force is acting on the outer layer to push it back toward the rocket?

If it's not actually accelerating inward, but appears that way due to the rocket's acceleration away from the exhaust then it should be acceleration-dependent and not like that all the time.

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

It’s a shame it’s an incremental patch after all this time.

I see more people worried about the content and lack of updates related to things to do in the game vs the  people worried about graphics and performance .

The good part is at least now we now know what to expect which imo is not a lot, but a bit better communication than before.

Colonies sounds like it’s not coming soon, which is expected but to me it still reads like it’s an earlier stage than I expected with some here claiming they saw hints in the game code and that colonies was almost done since last year, but of course this hasn’t been confirmed by you but it’s a funny rumor to spread around nevertheless.

Edited April 26 by GGG-GoodGuyGreg

[stephensmat]

We knew it would be incremental. We know there'll be another between this and Colonies.

"Soon" is a relative term, especially around here. The steps don't have to be big, they just have to be in the right direction.

[Gflight]

14 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

– 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

Why have this restriction in the first place? Just leave it off! There are many cases it still would be useful to have. Planning follow-up missions for example. Should never have been implemented in the first case!

[Robin Patenall]

1 hour ago, Gflight said:

Why have this restriction in the first place? Just leave it off! There are many cases it still would be useful to have. Planning follow-up missions for example. Should never have been implemented in the first case!

In KSP 1 where manoeuvres were modelled as a single impulse, it sort of made sense to allow them to have any deltaV the player wanted, but with the KSP2 model where the manoeuvre is correctly modelled over time there's going to be issues if you exceed your real deltaV. With the new planning model the predicted acceleration of the vessel needs to change over the manoeuvre as the mass of the vessel decreases / the TWR increases and if you can exceed your vessel's deltaV then you'd either:

• have to special case what happens when you run out of fuel (i.e. how much does the acceleration change over time when you're burning non-existent propellant)
• run into the point when you have so much negative mass of propellant that your vessel has zero mass and infinite acceleration

Neither of these cases make for good manoeuvre predictions.

But I do understand that some sort of planning mode where you can model future missions to determine the amount of dV needed before designing the vessel would be useful.

[Meecrob]

16 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

snip

This is the exact type of review we have all been wanting. Next time could you post it in the year we asked for it? I am 100% serious. To an outside observer, this game is a couple steps away from abandonware. I am not suggesting the game is going to be cancelled, I am saying the effort being put out to communicate is barely above "we aren't working on the game, so why bother?"

 

15 hours ago, HammerTyme said:

One thing I REALLY wish we had in this game was joystick support…

There is, unofficially. You have to bind it yourself, but axes work, no problem. I dunno why the devs don't mention it.

[rebel-1]

I wonder how many years it will take for the game to reach the level of playability of the first part? I hope in three years the second part will be fully playable?

[cocoscacao]

Nice plumes, nice clouds. I don't care about memory usage, I have a strong gaming rig, mwahahahaha

17 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

Base Assembly Editor

Sneakpeek it soon please.

[Alpha_star]

What hyped me the most are the NTR plume changes. I always wanted blue/purple-ish exhausts from nuclear rockets and I have to say I'm seeing my dream come alive at last.

P.S. Please! Fix flat-bottom clouds before adding multiple layers. I always have a strange feeling that flying just beneath the current clouds is like faying with sheets of paper floating above. If this problem doesn't get addressed then it would probably get worse once we have multiple cloud layers.

Edited April 26 by Alpha_star