I have come to meet you, Kerblings

[Yoha]

Nine days ago, I used to only be another earthling, crawling on the surface this planet populated by Kerbal-like beings but for the bada55 skin color. However, when the steam powered cars brought the recruiters seeking for new guineap heroes to experiment with a steroid (or something of the kind), I immediately enrolled. Now, I have been to Mün en Minmus and set up communication satellites, and I have yet to visit another traveler of the sky.

</rp>

For who may be interested, here are some technical details of my hardware configuration:

• GA-MA770T-UD3P
  
• Phenom II X2 550 (two cores at 3.1GHz)
  
• 2GB of RAM
  
• Radeon HD 4350 (a kind of old video card with 512MB of dedicated DDR2 RAM)
  

You could say that this set up is quite outdated (especially the video card) and it would be a fair assessment. However, I have been to most game I want to play (Half Life 2, Portal 1 and 2, Counter Strike Source, Mirror's Edge), with some tweaking of the settings. As a matter of fact, my troubles were more akin to be linked to running them on a GNU/Linux system (Debian) than to performance issues. Then, despite my repeated and airy efforts to have Mirror's Edge running, I finally accepted to install an inferior Operating System (Windows Seven) alongside my true setup. This parenthesis explains that I am arguably a power user an that KSP is not the first game I have to deal with on my config.

This is why I do know that, in this instance, most of the issues I have met must be due to incompatibility and performance limitations. Nonetheless, I shall a few of the ones I encountered (notice that this is not a bug report, but if developers or other players are interested, I would be glad to discuss or investigate them).

• the game won't run soundly on Linux: the native version will run, but the renderer will become pitch black after loading some sounds right when the log file display that the game requested a resizing (for any configuration, LC_ALL=C won't help);
  
• the Windows version ran through Wine will work (yay! just got it to) or have the renderer freeze depending on the configuration;
  
• I experience regular bugs where the game becomes unplayable and need to be restarted entirely: switched to nothing, Kerbin texture glitching causing ship to completely explode even at low speed (after having manually deployed all chutes), high speed explosions virtually freezing the game (I don't have an indicator but probably around 0.05 FPS), quickload unusable before restart (in these situation going back to Space Center will display a blue circular figure (center of Kerbin I guess) instead and clicking on a building will either fail or get me to another blocked situation);
  
• unstable orbits (almost circular orbits will have their periapsis and apoapsis moving randomly, orbital period in Engineer Redux won't have stable least significant digits either);
  
• an asteroid I approached started warping around (usually going along its orbit, and at some point teleporting back to where it used to be);
  
• a very specific bug at the KSC: the light green area wobbles over the dark green area when I move the camera
  
• duplication bug.
  

From what I understand, the launch problem is due to compatiblity issues from my video card and the unstable or warping stuff may be due to unsufficient float precision in the internal registers of my video card (depending how KSP internally works). Because the game is usually able to gracefully exit, I don't have much crash report or error logs to post. It turns out that some memory dumps have appeared in the KSP folder in the last few days, but I do not to which bug they are related (I have to restart fairly often and do not track their date and time).

Well, that was for the negative stuff. I had quite a lot of bugs but I know that the game is still in the development process. Moreover, the fact that I am still playing despite all this really shows how much interesting this game can be. I even think I will be starting another Career mode with a Life Support mod in addition to RemoteTech.

I will be posting a few suggestion once I have checked which one were already submitted but here is a quicklist not to forget:

• more modular building in VAB/SPH
  
• timestamped screenshots
  
• chosing the crew on launchpad/runway (I know Crew Manifest does this, but it is convoluted)
  
• cancel launch without having to get back to VAB/SPH or "clean" afterwards
  
• getting rid of all debris in Tracking Station
  
• reducing the disparities between the two kinds of time warp
  
• save selected target (I have seen it be proposed somewhere)
  
• commercial contracts (not just "get to the Mün and plant a flag")
  
• correctly handling event passing (mouse wheel impacting both zoom and scrolling, click will sometime both act on the chosen button and select a part behind)
  
• a way to remember positions (not flags)
  

All in all, this game is great, and I look forward for its future development.

Edited April 12, 2014 by Yoha

[Specialist290]

Welcome to the forums!

Glad to hear that you're enjoying the game, despite the issues you've been having with it. It really is a testament to how enrapturing and alluring the basic concept is that so many people are willing to put up with it despite the slightly-more-than-occasional bug. Rest assured that Squad is hard at work trying to make it even better, though

I'm sure you'll be happy to know that at least one of your suggestions (commercial contracts) is already slated to make an appearance in the next update, according to the information the developers have revealed thus far.

[Yoha]

Welcome to the forums!

Thanks!

Glad to hear that you're enjoying the game, despite the issues you've been having with it. It really is a testament to how enrapturing and alluring the basic concept is that so many people are willing to put up with it despite the slightly-more-than-occasional bug. Rest assured that Squad is hard at work trying to make it even better, though

I have come to accept that I hate the games I play. I do not hate them because they are particularly bad games, but any game as quirks, and by playing it, I am exposed to them. So, if I hate a game, it must be pretty good. I would no bother with a bad games. On the other hand, I have also being playing intentionally-unplayable games such as Dwarf Fortress so I may be biased. Any way, I am very glad to see such a good community and numerous resources for the game still under development!

I'm sure you'll be happy to know that at least one of your suggestions (commercial contracts) is already slated to make an appearance in the next update, according to the information the developers have revealed thus far.

You may be referring to this thread. The missions they are imagining seems more like research projects. I was thinking of something more along the lines of:

• permanently connect two points on Kerbin by radio communications
  
• have a satellite constantly above this area
  
• send so many kerbals to there and have them survive (assuming Life support), or bring a "drilling unit" and have it powered (not necessarily operable by the player)
  
• keep a constant connection with our extra-kerbalial (?) settlement
  

The original thread seems quite old now, though.

Edited April 12, 2014 by Yoha
realized the contract-related thread was no more active

[Specialist290]

Actually I'm referring to this news announcement by Harvester himself, which is in fact much more recent

[Xaelath]

Welcome to the forums!