neat way to "explain" the restart mission function

[spatula]

Just a small idea that I thought was quaint enough to share...

I always think of the "restart from launch" functions in-game to be explained away as a "simulator" or maybe a Kerbal scientist having a dream while sleeping on the job. Would be kind neat, if there's ever a quick way to throw in simple cut scenes (or even comic-frame stills) that could replace the loading screens... would be cool if after a horrific crash, I click restart and it shows some kind of comical clip of Bill waking up right before the "real launch".

I dunno if that's even possible, and even so, would probably be a last-minute polish kinda thing, but meh, throwing that in there.

[Dunbaratu]

Just a small idea that I thought was quaint enough to share...

I always think of the "restart from launch" functions in-game to be explained away as a "simulator" or maybe a Kerbal scientist having a dream while sleeping on the job. Would be kind neat, if there's ever a quick way to throw in simple cut scenes (or even comic-frame stills) that could replace the loading screens... would be cool if after a horrific crash, I click restart and it shows some kind of comical clip of Bill waking up right before the "real launch".

I dunno if that's even possible, and even so, would probably be a last-minute polish kinda thing, but meh, throwing that in there.

I've thought that the simulator aspect "mostly" works as en explanation except for one problem: You get to decide later on AFTER you know if the mission is working well whether or not it's a simulation or real. For it to be a simulation you'd have to decide BEFORE you launch, "This launch isn't going to be real", and if you decided it was real, then you don't get to restart the mission - you have to accept failures at that point.

I've often thought that a good simulator mode would be to let you launch the craft, but in a temporary universe where the other craft don't exist and once you stop it, your craft stops existing too. So your craft is the only one in existence in its own separate persistence file in its own seperate copy of the universe (or maybe the persistence file is never saved to disk at all for it). I sometimes sort of do this now, but it involves having to go in behind the scenes and copy craft design files over between campaign directories. It would be really cool if that was the standard way the game worked - that all campaigns have a temporary "simulator" universe tacked on the side of them (or maybe they all share the same one since it has no persistence anyway) that you can use if you like. Then there'd be two different launch buttons - the "Real" launch button and the "Simulation" launch button. Only when you used the simulation button would "reverting" be an option.

[spatula]

yeah i like that way of handling it actually... though please let's not get crazy and remove quicksave or anything, hahaha

[Dunbaratu]

I have found that whenever I'm using the revert flight option my motivation is usually not "I don't want to live with the failure and the death" but rather "I don't want to sit here for another 5 minutes before I can relaunch. I see what I did wrong and I want to go fix it and try again now, not 5 minutes from now." Waiting for the crash first, when you've made it up to say 40,000 meters, can take a while. Even at 4x physics warp. So I think the primary reason for revert flight might not be "avoid death" but "the damn game won't let me switch vessels in atmosphere so I have to wait it out."

[RSwordsman]

I would heartily support separating launch options into "Launch" and "Load to Simulator." We could have a few graphical cues that the simulation world isn't real (trees and engine exhausts as obvious 2D sprites, meaningless scrolling numbers in low-res fonts in the corners of the screen, nothing too horrible) and if anything bad happens, no harm, no foul. Free restart. If you launch for real, however, your chips are in. Quicksave would still be there, but you don't get a free revert.

[Force21]

I would be sooo happy if the devs removed quicksave... If I mess up a flight, I shouldn't feel like, "oh yeah ill just try the maneuver again a bit differently", I should think, "well darn I gotta start from the beginning". I've never quicksaved a ship before and I never will.

[Dunbaratu]

I would be sooo happy if the devs removed quicksave... If I mess up a flight, I shouldn't feel like, "oh yeah ill just try the maneuver again a bit differently", I should think, "well darn I gotta start from the beginning". I've never quicksaved a ship before and I never will.

I'd only feel that way if the game had none of the bugs that can cause disasters that aren't your fault. As it is, the quicksave is a nice feature to escape from the disaster of undoing all your work because of a game-killing bug that requires you to kill the pogram entirely from the task manager.

Just, in general, any sort of game with permadeath becomes massively unfair when it's possible for deaths to be caused by software bugs. Only when the game is as solid and finished as possible should the ability to revert go away.