Secret feature is completely underwhelming.

[Alguien]

Honestly, it is a semi-nice feature, but is not that nice enough to put it in super-ohmygawdwhatcoulditbe-secret level, for all the pre-0.24 talk about not showing 0.24 due to fear of "overhype" and dissapointment, your guys REALLY REALLY REALLY deserve this thread, specially since the last time your guys hyped a secret feature was landing gear suspension, i mean, what is wrong with you hyping small features like that or this?

Stuff looks off too, concrete burning? and the runway destruction models look specially bad, like easy "just make a model covering thr runway" bad, probably because thats what it is

But i guess your guys really love that "KERBAL EXPLOSION SIMULATOR" part of the fanbase has attached to everything

Also i am calling 20000000 pics of KSP recreation of 9/11

In before deleted/edited by mods

[lincourtl]

It stems from the continued reinforcement of the perception that Kerbals are idiots who deserve to blow up by provided even more gratifying means to do so. A minor annoyance? Nothing to worry about? Maybe, but I completely agree with bac9's paragraph on why portraying them as stupid is bad for the game and this feature is just going to lead to more of that sort of thing.

Also, I'm kind of worried about how damage my Tiamat lifter will do to the pad with 17 RD-171s going off at the same time. >_>

Meh. I'm underwhelmed too, but it's not as big a deal to me, plus it could lead to people actually flying slightly more realistic ascent profiles, and maybe not raining down debris on the space center. I completely agree with bac9 about not treating Kerbals as clownish oafs, but I'm not sure this does that. It's sort of in the eye of player, you know?

I'll wait till I see the implementation before I decide if it's for me or not.

Edited September 27, 2014 by lincourtl

[dryer_lint]

very accurate hype graph

Look on the bright side. When that plane dives down, we'll all feel zero-g!

[Richy teh space man]

The secret feature is interesting and amusing.. but not really worth all the hype imo

[Franklin]

Meh. I'm underwhelmed too, but it's not as big a deal to me, plus it could lead to people actually flying slightly more realistic ascent profiles, and maybe not raining down debris on the space center.

I'll wait till I see the implementation before I decide if it's for me or not.

See, the irony there is if that was true, that they wanted to nudge people into more realistic (read: sane) builds and staging and flight patterns, you'd think they'd first give us an aerodynamic model that doesn't prefer insane pancake rockets that are most efficient flying straight up.

[Rowsdower]

It stems from the continued reinforcement of the perception that Kerbals are idiots who deserve to blow up by provided even more gratifying means to do so. A minor annoyance? Nothing to worry about? Maybe, but I completely agree with bac9's paragraph on why portraying them as stupid is bad for the game and this feature is just going to lead to more of that sort of thing.

Also, I'm kind of worried about how damage my Tiamat lifter will do to the pad with 17 RD-171s going off at the same time. >_>

On the other hand, though, it was also stressed that if you're good at what you do, you may never even encounter it. That's not quite the mark of a Kerbal being stupid. If players want to reenact a Michael Bay film at the KSC - and not everyone will - they can do so, but must remember that it comes with a price.

Maybe something with a bit more substance deserving of the hype. Anyway, It does open up some interesting possibilities.

It *is* something completely new, so that's worth it imo, but as Max stressed, it was still something just small and fun in the scheme of things. Although as you suggest, the possibilities have opened up, since it leads into the long project that the art guys have been working on for 0.26.

Not fixed aerodynamics, that's for sure."

That's something that may get another look post-scope complete.

that "small feature" looks an awful lot like "days if not weeks of work" considering how long it took devs to implement other models till now.

it's a smaller slice of a bigger pie.

Now everyone, please remember to be constructive and props to those are. I reckon some of you may be underwhelmed, but "it sucks because it sucks" isn't going to get anyone anywhere. Also, once again, remember to play nice in the thread. We already had one flare up taken care of. Let's not make more of it. Thanks.

[TYRT]

Finally our replica rocket artillerys gonna do something.

[Franklin]

I mean, in the video that we saw where this secret feature was announced he never used nose cones and built a soup-can shaped rocket. Then proceeded to tell us the build he just made is now a terrible idea (but the most economical, given our current aero model).

[Draft]

That's something that may get another look post-scope complete.

Far more of a disappointing statement than the whole secret update, that's for sure.

[cantab]

Towns need destructable buildings?

this feature is in any way liked to the towns?

what?

this makes exactly zero sense.

Well, towns and cities wouldn't strictly speaking need to be destructible, but it's an obvious way to make them have a gameplay impact. Drop a rocket on one and you're going to take a rep hit. The work I believe Squad have done on making those town buildings and making them destructible will then be what they've applied to the space centre in .25. Especially if they have some sort of generic system that was straightforward to extend to the space centre buildings.

PS: I'd like to see aero looked at after Unity 5. That's probably going to shake up the physics anyway after all.

Edited September 27, 2014 by cantab

[Duke23]

Wow, I was almost sure that wasn't going to be the feature. Pretty cool! I do wish they had incorporated damage levels or building health instead of hit it hard enough and it goes poof, but I've gotta give them credit for the destruction animations. I assume that will come at a later date anyway. And who knows, an intrepid modder could probably dig into whatever they used to trigger it and tweak all that. Either way it's a nice step to... Why does my brain immediately jump to destructible moons and planets?!

I did enjoy how Max revealed it, in any case. I totally thought he was going to say "If you don't like the admin building you can just disable it in settings." lol

[Franklin]

If there isn't an annotation in the .25 changelog that states "• Dropped stages can now be safely recovered with parachutes, mitigating KSC damage and recovering partial funds" I may become somewhat annoyed.

[SuperWeegee4000]

How could anyone call this underwhelming?? It's insane.

[cantab]

As others have said, just pitchover a little shortly after takeoff. Unless your launchers are extremely on the margins 5 degrees isn't going to make much difference.

[Duke23]

As for dropping stages on the launchpad I don't think I've ever done that even when going straight up, just because of the slight rotation of the planet. But I could be wrong, I don't exactly spend most of my launch looking at the ground.

[LaydeeDem]

How could anyone call this underwhelming?? It's insane.

You explode KSC, the end

[Sky_walker]

Far more of a disappointing statement than the whole secret update, that's for sure.

Yep. But seeing in what direction this game drifts: explosions, devs building flat rockets, people arguing that incorrect Isp calculation is actually a feature - somehow I'm not surprised.

[katateochi]

*snip

That said, personally I wish Squad worked on other things first or prioritized different things; the minor feature is underwhelming to me as well, but ultimately I like it too

That's pretty much my feeling about it. I'd rather see improvements to existing features than new features like this. But I'm also not going to complain either (unless it has an adverse impact on performance).

If this is a precursor to terrain deformation then I can totally see the point!

So...If I mess up landing a heavy aircraft am I going to have to spend money re-paving the runway? I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.

Is this all buildings? as in the ones at the island runway and the "secret" 2nd KSC too?

[Guest]

It *is* something completely new, so that's worth it imo, but as Max stressed, it was still something just small and fun in the scheme of things.

Barring the future features it's just disappointing that so much time (destruction meshes and such, plus the new building still looks terrible; no one took bac9's advice about the textures) went into something I will likely never encounter instead of, say, another planet or something.

[metalmouth7]

How could anyone call this underwhelming?? It's insane.

How so? I'm almost certain you'd either have to be trying to have this happen, or attempted to fly a spaceplane.

[juanml82]

This comment makes me wonder how many development days were put into making models of destroyed buildings, particle effects unique to them, etc....

I intend no offense, but this comment made me remember Game of Thrones book fans complaining about the author's supposedly slow writing and Neil Gaiman answer to that: "Squad is not your ....."

I am so, so disappointed! I really think Squad took a wrong turn here. How juvenile. And to think I just wasted the last hour to discover this? And on another note, Maxmaps, (nothing personal) but your Spanish accent is really hard to follow, I had the volume pretty much cranked but, only understood about half of what you were saying, (it's when you talk fast). Here again, "nothing personal". I can only hope that with the release of .25, that this blunder will be overshadowed by some intelligent and educational game play.

How dare Squad hire people without American accents!

As for the secret feature, I think I only crashed into a building once and I don't consider myself a good player. It does open possibilities like using Infernal Robotics to create a MLRS to level the place and... use IR to create an MLRS. I think that's it. Even by playing bad, none often crashes into the buildings (or so I guess)

As for destructible cities in 0.26, it would add immersion to the game (if that's indeed the feature), but how are they going to deal with the texture/memory limitation?

[Maxmaps]

I believe we've said this before, but the way we're developing stuff now we're looking at putting all of the planned game's features in the game while we're still in alpha stage, to then begin on adding only really small things while we focus on finishing everything that has been left hanging. This is our take at Early Access games, which is a very new model of production so we don't really have any generalized standard to look into. We're deeply thankful to everyone who is willing to follow us in this adventure.

[metalmouth7]

I intend no offense, but this comment made me remember Game of Thrones book fans complaining about the author's supposedly slow writing and Neil Gaiman answer to that: "Squad is not your ....."

That may be the case, but it's somewhat concerning that Squad put all that time into creating all those assets, when they could have been working on "non-scope" aspects such as the absolutely broken aerodynamics model, or perhaps dealing with KSP's absolutely monstrous memory requirements.

[Alguien]

Yep. But seeing in what direction this game drifts: explosions, devs building flat rockets, people arguing that incorrect Isp calculation is actually a feature - somehow I'm not surprised.

Is funny because reworked aerodynamics is something i actually see be worth hype as much as Squad pushed for building destruction

Well, more sad than funny honestly, with Rows comment is clear Squad takes priority over the game having explosions than actually fixing broken stuff

Not to mention for a space game, Squad hasn't added anything pass Kerbin SoI in ages, even asteroid only cross Kerbin Soi!

[Camacha]

The only downside I see with this is that landing on the terrain around KSC with aircraft was already a little easier than landing on the strip and the possibility of ruining the latter does not really help that.