Bring Back the Barn!

[Red Iron Crown]

26 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

Barn was always Kerbal, but long live the barn as we move from it onto more historical and realistic space center facility looks.

For amusement, have a look at the facilities Goddard used for the early rocket experiments, nothing unrealistic about using a barn.

[razark]

Goddard wasn't launching crewed vessels.

The barn works if we can start out with small sounding rockets like Goddard, but by the time something on the level of Mercury or Vostok is involved, the barn should be long gone.

[Vince_K]

why not before space center level 1?

[Wjolcz]

2 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

For amusement, have a look at the facilities Goddard used for the early rocket experiments, nothing unrealistic about using a barn.

Nothing wrong about a barn that looks good. What we were shown was complete trash. It's still pretty apparent that top tier KSC has much better quality to it than its previous levels and seems to be much more efficient when it comes to textures and models (the stairs).

#bringbac9back #stopbutitssokerbalmeme

Edited April 19, 2017 by Veeltch

[Starslinger999]

#bringbackthebarn

[Frybert]

The barn was a joke.

[Vanamonde]

I liked it. 

[Urses]

If you all complain so around i been realy courious with wich one eastereggs will @sarbian will come up next year...

Funny Kabooms 

Urses 

[Pthigrivi]

Hey yall, been gone a while. Who's doing this kind of modeling for them after the big exodus last year? The new work for Making History looks pretty tight.

[klesh]

2 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Who's doing this kind of modeling for them after the big exodus last year? The new work for Making History looks pretty tight.

 RoverDude.

[Jarin]

3 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Hey yall, been gone a while. Who's doing this kind of modeling for them after the big exodus last year? The new work for Making History looks pretty tight.

I'd gotten the impression that @RoverDude was one of their primary modelers these days.

[Pthigrivi]

Im just curious, how many people are against the concept of a converted farmland airfield for T1 and how many are just bothered by the WIP state of the released images? 

[Wjolcz]

8 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Im just curious, how many people are against the concept of a converted farmland airfield for T1 and how many are just bothered by the WIP state of the released images? 

Not against the concept. Just bothered by the quality. Compared to what @bac9 had planned (the link should be in my description) for tier 1 and tier 2 buildings it's still pretty poorly modelled elements of the KSC. Some of the models aren't even from tier 2, like the T2 tracking station which is nothing but T3 tracking station with scaffolding as if the person responsible for it went either "I don't have time for this" or "this looks good enough and saves me some time".

And don't even tell me you believe the barn looked bad because it was WIP. How should we treat the current T1 and T2 KSC then? Also WIP? Because compared to T3 it looks very much unfinished and WIP.

[passinglurker]

32 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Im just curious, how many people are against the concept of a converted farmland airfield for T1 and how many are just bothered by the WIP state of the released images? 

WIP suggests there is something to salvage but as @bac9 pointed out even from the pictures we saw the models and textures looked flawed on a very deep level there was nothing there to improve only purge and start over.

And besides we know how squad treats placeholders if that had been allowed to fly they wouldn't have ever fixed it and we still would be stuck with the barf barn till this very day

There is nothing wrong with idea of starting from a well made, cleaned up, and refurbished wooden shelter that may have once housed livestock, farm equipment, etc, but there is everything wrong with inconsistent art asset quality made by a team under a rushed greedy deadline to ship something to port onto ps4 for a quick buck.

Edited April 24, 2017 by passinglurker

[steve_v]

30 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Im just curious, how many people are against the concept of a converted farmland airfield for T1 and how many are just bothered by the WIP state of the released images? 

I'm not really a big fan of the "redneck" aesthetic personally, but that wasn't the main problem with what we saw of the "barn".
Seriously, it looked like it was thrown together over a few beers, by a couple of amateur modellers, in about 20 minutes. Not only was it bad overall, as in "if you show this to the internet you'll get torn to pieces" bad, it was about 5 different inconsistent kinds of bad...

I have no real objection to a barn for tier-1, but if it's going to be a thing, let's not show it off until it looks at least halfway presentable, no?

[razark]

33 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Im just curious, how many people are against the concept of a converted farmland airfield for T1 and how many are just bothered by the WIP state of the released images? 

I'm opposed not to the WIP state of it so much as the fact that it digs way too deep into the "Lol!  Kerbals build everything out of trash!" craptastic aesthetic.

 

However, I'm opposed to the concept, as well.  A converted farm/industrial area would be perfect for a tech tree that starts out with small sounding rockets.  The tech tree we have, however, starts with Mercury/Vostok level spacecraft.  Rework the tech tree, and I'm fine with a (reasonable) barn.  (Even a slightly run-down looking place would be fine.  But building it out of trash?  Bleh.)

[steve_v]

1 minute ago, razark said:

it digs way too deep into the "Lol!  Kerbals build everything out of trash!" craptastic aesthetic.

That it does. I am tempted to say "if that's the art style SQUAD wants, it's their game", but when you put it so eloquently... It is rather "craptastic" isn't it.
I've never been a fan of the LOL!Kerbals thing in general, but I find I can ignore it to a certain extent.

[Mr. Peabody]

The very thought of having to look at those horrible looking buildings appalls me. I can't believe they were ever even in KSP.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, The Dunatian said:

The very thought of having to look at those horrible looking buildings appalls me. I can't believe they were ever even in KSP.

Don't worry then, because they never were. Squad offered them as a sneak-peak of something they were working on and everyone got really, really upset and so squad ditched T1 from the game entirely. I happen to think both were over-reactions, but hey, thats me. Im an architect so I do a lot of this kind of modeling. Everyone has their own way of doing things, but generally any design process is going to be iterative. You're never just rendering things with final details and textures and lighting from the outset. You start with big lumpy massing blocks and whittle away and refine things over and over before you get to a final design. I often use place-holder textures until I know what the final pallet is going to be. A lot of this work even goes to clients so they can get a conceptual sense of where the design language is going, but that depends on them having a certain kind of understanding that not every gutter and mullion is going to be represented precisely until we get through some broad strokes. Folks here aren't nearly so understanding, apparently. It was a communication failure, but it does bum me out that the level of vitriol board members leveled at it is has basically stalled all work on buildings since.

The current early tiers are fine but pretty bland to my taste. Im not saying these things should look like they're from mad max but its okay for them to be fun. 

Edited April 24, 2017 by Pthigrivi

[Wjolcz]

@Pthigrivi how is inconsistency fun? How do you even connect these two things?

I really like how people just go fanboy mode and call everything that looks inconsistent and has nothing to do with gameplay "fun". As if, when every past argument for was shot down, this was the last remaining argument to keep this game's look crappy and "kerbal". And I guess we could just say people shouldn't care about the looks since they build rockets and go into space. I guess SQUAD could just make KSC out Minecraft blocks and simply import the models and textures. That would be fun, right?

[Pthigrivi]

10 hours ago, Veeltch said:

@Pthigrivi how is inconsistency fun? How do you even connect these two things?

Well don't ask me that haha, some of my favorite buildings do stuff like this:

Its not a question of inconsistency, its a question of story and progression. I guess that's why I wanted to parse out the image we were given, poor rendering that it was, and the general concept of starting with an abandoned airfield. Silly controversy aside, its an interesting design problem because you want to let players project their own stories into the game. Some people are going to imagine they're recreating early NASA programs, some will imagine they're like Burt Rutan pioneering aircraft and commercial spaceflight, others will have their own totally unique conception of what they're doing. It needs to be flexible enough to allow for that without stripping it of all personality and character. I feel like the latter is sort of where we are at the moment, blank warehouses with really no sense of life or story. It doesn't have to have low-res textures, it doesn't even need to be a barn, but it should give some idea to players that they're starting out small and scrappy, building up through more space-age industrial buildings and finally arriving at the glitzy bac-9 final tier when they've really made it. 

Edited April 25, 2017 by Pthigrivi

[Daddy Cecil]

Remember, this is Kerbal Space Program. We have mods for everything. I wouldn't see it too far fetched to have someone make models for Kerbal Konstructs for an industrial or agriculture area for T1. Just my two funds.

[cfds]

20 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Squad offered them as a sneak-peak of something they were working on and everyone got really, really upset and so squad ditched T1 from the game entirely.

I am still not sold on the point that it was work in progress and believe that this was what we would have gotten if the protest was not as loud as it was. Of course it would have been "just temporary" and "would have been replaced after release" but we know how that would have ended. We were very lucky that this child was strangled in the crib...

[Red Iron Crown]

11 hours ago, Veeltch said:

I really like how people just go fanboy mode and call everything that looks inconsistent and has nothing to do with gameplay "fun". As if, when every past argument for was shot down, this was the last remaining argument to keep this game's look crappy and "kerbal". And I guess we could just say people shouldn't care about the looks since they build rockets and go into space. I guess SQUAD could just make KSC out Minecraft blocks and simply import the models and textures. That would be fun, right?

I really like how you've gone full strawman here, with a nice dose of ad hominem on the side. People can like things you don't, that doesn't warrant accusing them of being fanboys or arguing ad absurdium.

[Pthigrivi]

Don't worry Im not hurt. Veeltch isn't alone in being on the hard-realism aesthetic side of things. Having a fun sense of design doesn't necessarily mean things have to look slapped together with hotglue, but there is something compelling about giving a sense of history. I personally quite like the idea of farmland repurposed as an airfield repurposed as an early rocketry testing site. Abandoned army base feels to military and a precise, purpose-built rocket factory feels too antiseptic and anticlimactic. If you start off looking like you've already got all the money in the world there's no sense of drama or growth or reward as you can afford bigger and better things. 

1 hour ago, cfds said:

 We were very lucky that this child was strangled in the crib...

I mean I guess, but are we happy that we've scared squad off from doing anything creative with the buildings ever since? Having 4 tiers also has legit gameplay implications, smoothing out step-ups and reducing progression chokepoints.