What direction do you want KSP to take.

[Tom K.]

Personally I would like this game as realistic as possible but I know that I'm not the only person playing this game and thus I know that it's better for it to stay cartoony as it is now. I'm more than happy with the amount of realism mods we have now.

[Javster]

I'm not sure I'd agree, having been a developer of stuff myself. If you release everything to too large an audience immediately, before it's tested, then you get the same exact errors being reported again and again and again, clogging up the issue tracking list. The big problems that everyone runs into get reported by everyone. Instead you first release to a small population, discover the big problems that are so common everyone hits them, fix those problems, and then for round two you release to a larger population to find the slightly less common bugs, then for round three a much larger population, and so on.

Even open source projects stored on public sites like github, that theoretically have every little change released to everyone in the public at once, still tend to flag the code as "developers only for now" and then promote it to "beta for testers" and only after a while do they promote it to "ready for the public now". You can access the newest code at any time but are warned in a big way that a lot of it doesn't work yet and unless you're trying to become part of the development process by making bug reports and participating in the QA of it, you should still stay away. (That if you're just trying to use it as an external end-user, it's not ready for that yet.)

If you look at the "Minecraft snapshot" system, it seems to work fairly well. Release to a small amount of people, who actually want to test a buggy version.

- - - Updated - - -

( SQUAD has said they don't want to do procedural content.

But then they said there wouldn't be a multiplayer...

EDIT: wait, posts get combined? AWESOME!

[rkman]

Before, people were talking of Procedural Generation based on "seed", which implied different universe based on "parameter"

Not if the seed/parameter is the same for all players, and there is no reason why it could not be the same for all players.

The game Elite was repetitive as hell

Maybe but that has nothing to do with the content being procedural.

and didn't have much of a physics engines

Again that that has nothing to do with the content being procedural, and Elite does have the most important physics that any space sim can have: gravity/orbits.

this wouldn't work in KSP? Remember how Minecraft looks very familar every time you load up a new world.

Procedural does not mean it is inevitable that you get to load up a new world, whenever.

[Rizendell]

64 bit & bug fixes. a default utility for calculating delta v, and transfer windows. a default enhanced nav ball. a default kerbal attachment system.

Bug examples

point precision error fixes in the map, so things don't wobble around (you said you fixed it, but you didn't). fix jool, so you can actually land on it and leave again. fix sas so it doesn't cause orbit wobble (you said you fixed it, but it still happens when crafts are long). fix kerbals so they don't get stuck when they fall out of a command seat.

[cantab]

Surely Jool even having a surface to land on is the bug. But unless Unity adds support for supercritical fluids, I don't see it being fixed.

[Dunbaratu]

Oh, you want some code?

Thanks for giving an example that helps my case. Now will you just let it rest for once and stop derailing the thread?

What I'd like to see is some variance in solar system generation so it's not identical every time, to aid in replay value of the game. The best way to do it is to use procedural generation *that starts from a seed that can be selected from something outside the algorithm's control, like the system clock, thus making the result effectively as random as a computer is capable of and not pre-determined*. And furthermore I'd like people to stop trying to derail that suggestion by disingenuously *pretending* they don't know exactly what that means just so they can have a pointless argument over nothing.

SQUAD's idea that it's a bad thing for different players to end up with different solar systems is simply not something I agree with. This is primarily a single-player game and having the exact same solar system every time means eventually you've explored everywhere and done everything already. And having an algorithm with the capacity for random seeds does not have to imply that it's mandatory for every player to play with such a random seed start. You can have the game default to using the same universal seeds for all players, and make picking a different seed from the default be an option. That leaves it up to the player whether they want to share the same experience as everyone else or not.

Furthermore you don't need to randomize absolutely everything to get some variety. You can bias the algorithm to make it more likely to end up with gas giants farther out, small solid planets further in, and make it unlikely to get two planets at the same orbit, and so on.

Edited April 15, 2014 by Steven Mading

[neamerjell]

Realism vs. Simple game play: Why not make a setting with a slider that goes from easy simple mechanics to "any more real, and you'd need NASA's permission to run it"? Okay, maybe not that real, but you get the idea. So simple could be like what the stock game is now with possibly Mechjeb integrated into it, and no engine overheating. The next level up could add additional aerodynamic effects, temperature effects like engine overheating and reentry effects, and maybe remove some of the Mechjeb functionality, like ascent guidance. The next level could be hard core, adding things like weather (when it gets implemented) so you have to compensate for wind, air pressure and temperature, meteorite impacts (randomly generated), etc.

[Dunbaratu]

Realism vs. Simple game play: Why not make a setting with a slider that goes from easy simple mechanics to "any more real, and you'd need NASA's permission to run it"?

I dislike the idea of making it be a slider. Individual checkboxes per feature? sure. A slider? no. This is because in every game I've ever played with a difficulty slider that turns options on and off it's always been the case that the options I want on don't fit with how the game makers designed the slider settings. For example, in Fallout New Vegas, I wanted a mode that was as hardcore for ME as possible, but not hardcore for the dumb NPC followers who kept choosing to kill themselves through no fault of my own because the AI made them dumb as rocks. "I'm an NPC. The game doesn't allow me to take anti-venom doses. Oh look its a few stinging insects in the distance that we're trying to skirt around. I'm going to run directly toward that nest of giant stinging insects all by myself even though I was told to stay put. Oh look, I died from venom, how did that happen? Now all the quests involving me have failed because I'm dead." So in that game I'd have liked to cherry pick which realism options I wanted (basically everything except dead NPC's stay dead - which kills plot lines when the AI runs at poison insects, or walks off a cliff). But the slider didn't have that as an option. Once I added the need to deal with hunger, thirst, and rest, for myself, I was also activating the perma-death for NPCs which I didn't want.

Difficulty sliders almost always end up making options into 'package deals' in which I don't care for how things have been packaged together.