Where is Nate?

[KerikBalm]

18 hours ago, K^2 said:

The question comes down to how you update the orbit. KSP1 ran this for ships under player control in Cartesian coordinates. Fast and dirty, and also results in an absurd amount of error. It looks like KSP2 team was doing something very similar. And in Cartesian, just integrating the main body's gravity goes awful immediately.

KSP1 didn't have the problem with decaying orbits (or at least rarely did), and I'm not talking about when vessels are placed on rails. What changed between the two of them?

On 5/20/2024 at 12:35 PM, K^2 said:

This is the point where we should chat about the warp, though. Maximum warp of KSP is 10⁵. Alpha Centauri is 4.3ly from Earth. The interstellar distances are reportedly "realistic," which in the most generous interpretation means 0.4 Kerbin light-years at realistic c of 3x10⁸m/s. So most generously, we're looking at something like 10¹⁴m. A 1g torch ship would traverse this in ~73 real world days. At 10⁵ warp that's about 1 minute. Which is fine, but only if you really can torch the whole way, your frame rate holds, and there's nothing at significantly higher distances. In other words, 10⁵ must be supported in KSP2 as an absolute minimum, and needs to be rock solid. Ideally, you want to be able to push it to 10⁶ while maintaining a 1:1 simulation.

I think this was all going in the wrong direction. Reduce the scope of interstellar. Instead of looking at Sol to Alpha Centauri, look at going from Alpha Centauria A-B to Proxima Centauri - 13'000 AU. 

Also, I was really hoping for interstellar to be more realistic than 1g torchships. I was hoping to be able to do months long burns with accelerations in the milli-Gs.

I recently modded in a star at 4'000 KU in KSP1, infinite fuel cheated, and headed for an intercept at about 60 km/sec, would take about 100 in game years

https://imgur.com/BVX4n2k

Then I built a MPD powered craft in Children of a dead earth with (probably OPd) nuclear reactors and 120k m/s of dV, but acceleration in the milliG's, with burns requiring months, I figured that's the sort of tech level that interstellar should become viable in KSP2.

Nuclear electric, mllliG propulsion, to companion stars mere thousands of AU away.

Its a smaller scope, but it seems that KSP2 was lead by artists who let the scope go way beyond what they were capable of

 

 

[K^2]

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

KSP1 didn't have the problem with decaying orbits (or at least rarely did), and I'm not talking about when vessels are placed on rails. What changed between the two of them?

KSP1 ships go on rails if you're warping even if you focus on them. That's why people use warp to freeze physics, rotation, and fix other problems. It's equivalent to switching to KSC and warping from there.

If you do stay focused on a ship on 1x time, you do still get drift. You just have to have a lot of patience to notice anything significant, since you are in local coordinates and the time step is a fraction of a second. Whether that's a net decay or net boost, I never had the patience to find out.

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Its a smaller scope, but it seems that KSP2 was lead by artists who let the scope go way beyond what they were capable of

Yeah, I think they ran with what's possible, and not with their team specifically can do. But the game director is almost always a creative, and they always push for more. That's normal and what every game development process will go through. It's the game's engineering director's job to say no, and then you start having discussions about what the limitations are, whether they can be exceeded by hiring more people or circumvented with a different design, and you arrive at something functional. That didn't happen for KSP2, and it sounds like the problem was on the engineering leadership side, unfortunately.

So game led by artists wasn't the problem. All indication is that the engineering didn't apply the brakes where needed or supply a solution. And while orbit decay specifically is a deceptive sort of problem, where I can see someone underestimating it initially, there were way too many examples that land the same way for me to excuse it. Technical leadership dropped the ball, and maybe Nate et al. should have recognized that sooner. Engineering director was eventually replaced, but I have no idea what sort of impact that had. The replacement would have been stuck with an absolute mess to untangle, and that obviously would take time.

[Izny]

nate is counting the moneys he secured for himself the past years, and is looking into nice places for retirement. 

 

Edited May 24 by Izny

[DeadJohn]

I don't get the focus on Nate. He was the creative/public face but so much of what went wrong with KSP2 was on the technical side.

KSP2 had 2 directors: 1 creative, Nate, and 1 engineering, Paul Furio. AFAIK Paul was let go ~2 years ago to save money and no one new was hired to fill the role. Who's been managing big technical decisions since then? "No one" would explain why KSP2 has so many issues. That's an issue higher than the KSP2 names I know about.

The recent Shadowzone video and related thread talks about it. ST/IG/PD/T2 churned through a lot of staff. A team of underpaid unguided developers will create subpar software. Not Nate's fault. Unless Nate's job was to oversee all IG operations and he somehow took home bonus money by understaffing or underpaying others.

Rhetorical questions: Who did Nate Simpson and Paul Furio answer to? That's the first suspect I would look at when trying to place KSP2 blame. Did IG have 1 boss, or did Nate and Paul jointly report to someone at PD across the country, or something else?

Edit: Giving someone I mentioned by name the courtesy of seeing this. I didn't even know he was on the forum but just spotted a post elsewhere. @WatchClarkBand

Edited May 24 by DeadJohn

[Infinite Aerospace]

1 hour ago, DeadJohn said:

I don't get the focus on Nate. He was the creative/public face but so much of what went wrong with KSP2 was on the technical side.

KSP2 had 2 directors: 1 creative, Nate, and 1 engineering, Paul Furio. AFAIK Paul was let go ~2 years ago to save money and no one new was hired to fill the role. Who's been managing big technical decisions since then? "No one" would explain why KSP2 has so many issues. That's an issue higher than the KSP2 names I know about.

The recent Shadowzone video and related thread talks about it. ST/IG/PD/T2 churned through a lot of staff. A team of underpaid unguided developers will create subpar software. Not Nate's fault. Unless Nate's job was to oversee all IG operations and he somehow took home bonus money by understaffing or underpaying others.

Rhetorical questions: Who did Nate Simpson and Paul Furio answer to? That's the first suspect I would look at when trying to place KSP2 blame. Did IG have 1 boss, or did Nate and Paul jointly report to someone at PD across the country, or something else?

Edit: Giving someone I mentioned by name the courtesy of seeing this. I didn't even know he was on the forum but just spotted a post elsewhere. @WatchClarkBand

Nate is a scape-goat as far as the community goes. It's unfair but that's the nature of the beast, I honestly think despite some of the questionable decisions made over the years he had good intentions and a vision that the game *could* become something really, truly special.

[WatchClarkBand]

When I was hired, my title was Senior Manager of Engineering. There was the Creative Director (Nate) , the Art Director (Ness) , the Design Director (Shana), and two roles were hired for Director of QA (I forget this guy's name)and Director of PM (Grant, although before him the other Nate was the head of Production with a Senior Manager title, IIRC).  My title was updated to Technical Director about four months before we launched EA.

All the Directors reported to Jeremy Ables, who was the Studio Manager. I asked Jeremy several times who his manager was, and he said he was always uncertain, which was... curious. Who did his annual reviews? Locally, Michael Cook was in charge of the KSP franchise, and there was some other nebulous org structure inside Private Division that I never quite sorted out before it got to Take2 in NYC. 

So that's the org, more or less.

[Izny]

by choosing to stay silent, contractual or not, he is betraying the everyone. hes counting his money.

[DeadJohn]

1 hour ago, Izny said:

by choosing to stay silent, contractual or not, he is betraying the everyone. hes counting his money.

I've worked in IT long enough to expect only a 50/50 chance for any big software project to truly succeed. It sucks that things turned out the way they apparently did, but don't take it personally.

Nate didn't work for the last 5 years conspiring against you. He'd be counting a lot more money if KSP2 was successful.

Nate works for a company. He owes them a minimal level of loyalty (within reasonable legal and ethical limits). He has obligations to himself and his family. Us customers and potential customers are far down the list. If I was Nate I wouldn't be falling on my sword, either.

[Skorj]

3 hours ago, DeadJohn said:

I've worked in IT long enough to expect only a 50/50 chance for any big software project to truly succeed. It sucks that things turned out the way they apparently did, but don't take it personally.

Nate didn't work for the last 5 years conspiring against you. He'd be counting a lot more money if KSP2 was successful.

Nate works for a company. He owes them a minimal level of loyalty (within reasonable legal and ethical limits). He has obligations to himself and his family. Us customers and potential customers are far down the list. If I was Nate I wouldn't be falling on my sword, either.

Sure, Nate wasn't twirling his mustache while tying Val down to the railroad tracks, but good intentions don't matter in engineering.  You either built something that stayed up, or you built something that broke.  KSP2 broke.  Being stuck with the KSP1 code base does excuse some of the failings of the dev team, but only some.

As far as one's priorities as a dev (whether engineer or artist): integrity is always a valid choice.  Sure, keeping your integrity will mean you change jobs more often, but at the end of your career you'll have your integrity.  Otherwise, you end up a corpo: perhaps you'll have more money, but you'll be a soulless husk where a man once stood.

Edited May 25 by Skorj

[aeroeng14]

6 hours ago, Izny said:

hes counting his money.

Frankly, not as much as you think. Compared to the average salary in the US perhaps, I could say the same thing myself with a master's degree and 10 years experience. However, "money" is not MONEY (big fat stacks of cash you can swan dive into). Even as a mid career engineer I make enough to put towards retirement and medical but I'm not taking vacations every year for example and I live in a low cost of living area of the US.

[razark]

Gotta love the fact the community wants to hear what Nate has to say, while pointing out that everything he says is a lie and cannot be trusted.

[Uuky]

8 hours ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

Nate is a scape-goat as far as the community goes. 

Better be a scape-goat than a sacrificial lamb.  

 

Edited May 25 by Uuky
forgot a character

[Fizzlebop Smith]

15 minutes ago, Uuky said:

Better be a scape-goat than a sacrificial lamb.  

 

I'm about ready for some kebab or gyro.

[K^2]

3 hours ago, Skorj said:

Sure, Nate wasn't twirling his mustache while tying Val down to the railroad tracks, but good intentions don't matter in engineering.

But again, his job wasn't engineering. His job was getting everyone on board for a unified vision of what KSP2 should be, which, goal clearly achieved. The fact that it was a vision not achievable with tech/resources on board is not his fault. It's literally not in Creative Director's job description. You have the art director who is supposed to make sure the assets can meet creative's requirements, or push the brakes. You have the technical/engineering director who's supposed to do the same from the tech side. Then you have production that's supposed to get everyone organized, get them in the same room, and make sure the abilities and vision of the studio are all aligned, and finally up to the publisher to approve that vision and the bill for it.

If the vision is clearly presented, everyone understand that vision, and then the project fails because resources for that vision aren't there, Creative Director's the last person on the list of guilty parties among the above-mentioned. Other people on the team are the ones that should be raising a red flag on that, resulting in change of course ordered from above. I'd also argue that art's in the clear, simply because of where things landed. So we're looking at production, engineering director, and the publisher. And we know the publisher's done a lot of shady stuff in this process, so it does make them the prime suspect, and next on my list is technical leadership (or lack thereof for the most of the duration, which is also mostly on publisher...)

Edited May 25 by K^2

[Izny]

3 hours ago, aeroeng14 said:

Frankly, not as much as you think. Compared to the average salary in the US perhaps, I could say the same thing myself with a master's degree and 10 years experience. However, "money" is not MONEY (big fat stacks of cash you can swan dive into). Even as a mid career engineer I make enough to put towards retirement and medical but I'm not taking vacations every year for example and I live in a low cost of living area of the US.

7 years of 300k a year (taken from the shadowguy video)...     that's retirement money bro. 

[DeadJohn]

3 hours ago, Izny said:

7 years of 300k a year (taken from the shadowguy video)...     that's retirement money bro. 

That allows good saving towards retirement but it's not the pot of gold you may be thinking of.

Thought exercise. $300k income. $100k to taxes. $100k to living expenses. That leaves $700k retirement money after 7 years. Maybe more maybe less depending on many things but it's not our business to debate Nate's home finances.

$700k savings is great but grossly insufficient to retire early and maintain the same standard of living.

[FreeThinker]

Meanwhile at Nate office:

[MechBFP]

6 hours ago, K^2 said:

Other people on the team are the ones that should be raising a red flag on that, resulting in change of course ordered from above.

Feels like the team suffered from groupthink to a degree. Probably not for many malicious reasons but just because they were all so green that nobody had the experience to even know when/how to pushback until it was far too late to make a difference. 

[attosecond]

5 hours ago, Izny said:

that's retirement money bro. 

No.... have a couple of kids, then try sending them to college. See how much you have left for retirement. 

[Izny]

6 hours ago, attosecond said:

No.... have a couple of kids, then try sending them to college. See how much you have left for retirement. 

funny how people who don't even make a 6th of that manage to do that though. 

 

he's counting his money, and securing himself a cushy job with increased pay. 

Edited May 25 by Izny

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, Izny said:

funny how people who don't even make a 6th of that manage to do that though. 

Ahhh student debt. It's a miracle.

[DeadJohn]

2 hours ago, Izny said:

funny how people who don't even make a 6th of that manage to do that though. 

 

he's counting his money, and securing himself a cushy job with increased pay. 

Do what, work 7 years at $50k and retire? You seem to be changing the goalposts now begrudging Nate future employment. Earlier you were talking like he had so much money he never needed to work again.

I'm genuinely curious about how old you are and your work history. It seems like you don't have much financial experience.

[K^2]

8 hours ago, MechBFP said:

Feels like the team suffered from groupthink to a degree. Probably not for many malicious reasons but just because they were all so green that nobody had the experience to even know when/how to pushback until it was far too late to make a difference. 

There were several very experienced people on the project, but that might have been even worse. The senior people might be used to their counterparts from other departments telling them when they're over-reaching, and the junior people might not know to speak up, creating a perfect storm for confidently heading in the wrong direction. Dev teams tend to be pretty flexible in terms of the hierarchy - there isn't usually a strict chain of command to follow (though, there is one outlined, and it's usually used to resolve conflicts). But the composition of the team is still very important. If you're lacking "high ranking" developers in any given area, even if the juniors are capable of doing the work, it's going to bite you in the rear.

But on the net, it's not something invisible. Everyone knew the project's off schedule. The internal view was clearly, "We're not getting enough resources, and the goal posts are constantly shifted," which is at least partially fair. But to a publisher that looks like a team that's giving a constant thumbs up and under-delivering. The correct reaction from a publisher is looking into the causes, down to the point of sending their due diligence team in. Because PD usually works with external studios, they have people specifically employed to look into other team's culture, work practices, etc, which evaluates developers prior to signing them up. And if your internal studio starts showing signs of distress, these are the people who will tell you precisely what's going wrong. Instead, PD's reaction was to just keep saying, "Hurry it up," and then putting a hard deadline for EA? That's not going to make the situation better. All it does is moves another goal post from the team's perspective.

Bottom line, we can argue at length on what the studio could have done to self-correct and to send clearer communication up the chain to the publisher to resolve the situation, and whether that was even possible. But there is no argument that identifying and responding to problems like this is part of the publisher's job. It's literally what they are there for - managing resources and targets for the team. And the publisher that only adjust the latter without even checking on the former does not know how to do their job.

And this is why I'm fully on Intercept's side, including individuals often blamed for it, like Nate. Mistakes were clearly made, but mistakes always happen in any development, and in a healthy developer-publisher relationship, these would have been corrected years ago.

And FWIW, I don't think it's malicious from T2/PD's perspective either. They shot themselves in the foot and lost a bunch of their own money. A lot of people here will say, "And ours!" and that's true, but T2 wanted KSP2 to be successful as much as the rest of us. The only predatory move was how EA was marketed, and I don't think that was intentionally malicious. I don't know if anybody here ever worked with brand/marketing people in games, but they are their own universe. I know a bunch of people just picture an office building full of boring bean-counters, and they have a few of these, but marketing is about hype, about going viral, about making things popular. They are extremely excitable, and often terminally online bunch. (Also often older than the target demographic, leading to a touch of the "How do you do, fellow kids," but that's a separate topic.) So if you send them an email saying, "Hey we are releasing an Early Access for this game, can you make a trailer?" you'll get exactly what we got. I don't think anybody wanted to hide how rough EA is to defraud somebody. Analytics wanted to see how many units EA can sell to make projections for the 1.0, marketing just wanted to do the best they can as always, and somebody in charged pushed the red "launch" button without ever considering the consequences. It was still predatory and damaging, but I don't think anybody involved went in with that intention. People at T2 who should have thought about it just didn't care. And that last bit is probably the summary for the entire story.

[Izny]

12 hours ago, DeadJohn said:

Do what, work 7 years at $50k and retire? You seem to be changing the goalposts now begrudging Nate future employment. Earlier you were talking like he had so much money he never needed to work again.

I'm genuinely curious about how old you are and your work history. It seems like you don't have much financial experience.

merely adjusting the future to include kids scenario. if no kids for college: retirement.  if kids for college: cushy job with T2. 

you moved the goalpost, i followed accordingly.

why you would defend this guy is beyond me. 
 

also: 41yo. homeowner (ship actually). retired. 

Edited May 26 by Izny

[DeadJohn]

1 hour ago, Izny said:

merely adjusting the future to include kids scenario. if no kids for college: retirement.  if kids for college: cushy job with T2. 

you moved the goalpost, i followed accordingly.

why you would defend this guy is beyond me. 
 

also: 41yo. homeowner (ship actually). retired. 

You are arguing with someone else even though you quoted me. I never mentioned kids or college.