Disappointed with Squad's development paradigm

[Derfel]

I give up, I really do. I started playing this game around 7 months ago and at first I found it far too difficult. I plugged on ahead and watched tutorials on YouTube and finally got a ship to Mun and back. Since then this is pretty much the only game I play religiously and I've racked up just over 600 hours on it. I haven't even visited every body in the system yet, I've just been having fun.

Every update has broken this game further, every update has released more bugs than have fixed. I can't have fun with this game any more, if I use more than 20 mods it crashes due to memory. If I use x64 it crashes regardless and most of the mods are disabled. Every mod I have makes the game more enjoyable to play, yet they're all let down by a base game that is terrible.

You can't build large ships due to the engine and you can't have more than 70/80 flights due to the memory usage. I un-installed the game in October due to the crashes and my frustration. I re-installed in yesterday as I thought maybe 0.90 had made it more stable. It didn't crash after 10 minutes so I installed my mods again and suddenly it was crashing again, I removed all the mods and it was still crashing, I re-installed it and it was crashing. Things weren't launching due to some bug, there was more lag, there's no new content. bugs in the VAB haven't been fixed, bugs that have been around for a year haven't been fixed.

And you know what? I'm not even annoyed at Squad for not fixing anything. I'm annoyed because they gave me a game that I looked forward to playing, they gave me a game that I spent triple the time playing over any other game, they gave me a game that let me do exactly what I've wanted to do; to build spaceships and start a mining company. They built up my hopes, then crapped all over them.

This could have been a great game, but it's too late.

And yes, I'm mad.

Edited January 8, 2015 by Specialist290
Nothing to see here...

[Specialist290]

Moving this to its own thread, since it doesn't exactly fit the "Thanks KSP Team" thread's topic and really deserves its own thread for discussion.

Edited January 8, 2015 by Specialist290

[r4pt0r]

Moving this to its own thread, since it doesn't exactly fit the "Thanks KSP Team" thread's topic and really deserves its own thread for discussion.

lol

anywho, play with less mods. the stock game is great

[KrazyKrl]

Lots of the issues you are having are a limitation of the engine that KSP is built off of, Unity version 4.

Squad can't really support x64 addressing, due to Unity itself being buggy in x64 builds. x64 support on Linux platforms is fine for some reason though.

KSP is essentially written as a mod for the Unity engine, and inherits any deficiencies that are in the engine itself. Some problems can be worked around, but programming a game is a very complex process. And you did sign on for early-access. Problems are to be expected.

Everyone is waiting for the Unity 5 engine, it should bring some much-needed stability and performance enhancements (hopefully.)

[Pthigrivi]

Im not sure squad can be held responsible for how the game performs with 20 mods installed. I play stock and there's been a crash here or there but its really not too bad, about par with other mainstream games Ive played by big companies and KSP isnt even out of beta.

I know some mods are easy to get hooked on. Have you tried paring things back to the essentials?

[Whirligig Girl]

Never ever ever ever use 64 bit. Ever. It's not good. At all. Don't use it. (Unless linux) To prevent memory crashes, use Active Texture Management. Also, just wait. Once Unity 5 comes out, 64 bit will be stable and you can have many more mods.

The game doesn't crash for me if you're not using mods. And you'll almost always find you progress saved in an autosave if it does crash.

Many of these complaints are just crazy. Why would you need 80 ships at a time? Do you really need to build rockets bigger than what they have? Even so, just search Whackjob and find all the stuff he's done. But what do you even mean about "Because of the engines"?

And as someone who by now has practically watched KSP grow up, the game has gotten more stable with every release. 0.90 was the most content-rich update since 0.18, which was a game changer.

That's not to say there aren't some problems with the way some of the features have been implemented, but just remember one thing. It's still in development. It may have reached Beta, but that means they're still squishing bugs as they pop up, like you do in a beta/alpha program.

Edited January 8, 2015 by GregroxMun

[Pthigrivi]

Just for the record most of my saves have had more than 80 flights going at a time*. It happens when you're building a real interplanetary infrastructure and not just stand-alone missions.

*granted 15 or more were flags.

[vexx32]

I find that complaint to be somewhat arbitrary, to be honest; I've had saves with hundreds of flights going without any real issues. Mostly because I couldn't be bothered deorbiting them, but even so.

[klgraham1013]

I average around 40 mods with few problems. Are you using a lot of part packs? You can't blame the developer for a modified version of the game crashing due to memory usage. What you can blame Squad for is not implementing key features that you feel are essential, yet are not planned for stock. (That we know of.) Having to resort to mods for certain basic functionality can get irritating.

edit Quick aside, speaking of 64 bit, why does the launcher default to 64 bit? Anyone else getting that?

[vexx32]

Not actually sure on that score, myself, as I've not got a copy with a working Launcher to test out. (I use the Steam version, so the Launcher is essentially non-functional.)

[mattinoz]

Never ever ever ever use 64 bit. Ever. It's not good. At all. Don't use it. (Unless linux) To prevent memory crashes, use Active Texture Management. Also, just wait. Once Unity 5 comes out, 64 bit will be stable and you can have many more mods.

If this is the case shouldn't Squad just person up and say no 64Bit for now.

We tried it's not working, we can't fix it and save everyone some grief we are going to stop offering this version.

[vexx32]

They did. They were well aware that it wouldn't work, and they said so. Then a bunch of users got it into their heads that they knew better, and made a cobbled together x64 version that had its own problems (it used the standalone x64 Unity player, but the KSP assemblies were still only x32, so it had its own slew of issues). Thus, the devs concluded it best to just let people muck around with x64 if they wanted to, and gave them a slightly more stable way to use it.

It's included for those who want to use it, but don't expect an extreme amount of attention to be paid to bugs it presently causes, because for the most part Squad would have a hell of a time trying to fix them; it's better to just work on things that can be fixed instead, and wait until Unity fix the issues on their side.

[prophet_01]

64 bit works or doesn't work. It's rly random at times (refering to glitches, freezes and crashes) and also the mod compatibility is very individual. It worked for me a couple of months ago but some of the mods I'm using now aren't working that good with 64 bit, so I'm back to 32 bit. OpenGL works pretty decently and active texture manager may also help the case.

Ksp isn't THAT buggy imo. Sure, it has it's limitations, but it has gotten a lot better over time and the vanilla game works pretty good. Have you played dayz or space engineers? Those are early access titles that were/are rly buggy. Those 2 weren't even fully playable with the released vanilla content at times.

Ksp is far ahead of those regarding the quality of updates released. And since we just hit beta, bugfixing is now a lot higher on the list anyway.

Btw, mods aren't rly a good point to start arguing about performance. They often have theire own compatibility issues with each other and it's sometimes rly hard to find the origin of a problem. It may not even be the mod's developers fault, maybe they are simply outdated or not yet working properly. It's often possible to get highly moded versions to work pretty stable. Just search on the faq of the mods or google a little. It's tedious, but we are talking about the moding of a work in progress game. What do you expect?

Edited January 8, 2015 by prophet_01

[Guest]

Bugs are inevitable, thing is, fixing them must be first priority. Sometimes, they cannot be fixed right away, so some time can be spent on adding new features.

Problem is, that game development took wrong direction lately.

We do not need another economic simulator, there is hundreds of them.

What we need is more SPACE!

There is very few, probably two semi-realistic space games in existence, so there a lot of space to be filled.

What is space? It's exploration, science, engineering, planning, piloting, and of course, astounding views.

We need everything of it ramped to a new level, not another goat farm simulator.

[Superfluous J]

I wish every game I play sucked so bad as to elicit 600 hours of play from me.

[BudgetHedgehog]

You forget that more places to go is meaningless without interesting stuff to do there. And IIRC, the development schedule has been more of a 'build the framework for the game so we expand on content later' kind of thing. Now that everything that the dev want in KSP is there, if only in minimal form (e.g. ground scatter), they can now start expanding content using what's already there as the starting blocks. Just as nicer explosions made for nicer destructible buildings which made way for upgradable ones, what seems like barely any new content now paves the way for more and better stuff later.

I hope...

[marcushouse]

It is a fantastic game. Mods do slow it all down if you are using a lot. I try to keep close to stock and just use a few of the essentials (MechJeb, Docking etc).

Fingers crossed more essential stock stuff will come. Things such as in build docking tools would be great. Don't give up on the game though. As soon as things get locked down more, mods will become more stable. It is hard to develop reliable mods with the groundwork shifts from under you. But that is the nature of early access. I've had more enjoyment out of KSP than almost any other game... and it is only in Beta now.

Missions need a lot of work and more balancing. Reward should be more closely related to difficulty. I got offered 600k to test a sub orbital part for some reason once. That was strange. Testing parts should reward little but perhaps allow benefits of unlocking the part in advance perhaps (maybe even after multiple test types in different situations). As mentioned elsewhere, testing a part is a useless exercise if you've already unlocked it. But all these things are to do with balancing and finalising stuff.

Take a break for a few months. Come back... You will still love it

[ghpstage]

Bugs are inevitable, thing is, fixing them must be first priority. Sometimes, they cannot be fixed right away, so some time can be spent on adding new features.

Problem is, that game development took wrong direction lately.

We do not need another economic simulator, there is hundreds of them.

What we need is more SPACE!

There is very few, probably two semi-realistic space games in existence, so there a lot of space to be filled.

What is space? It's exploration, science, engineering, planning, piloting, and of course, astounding views.

We need everything of it ramped to a new level, not another goat farm simulator.

Engineering, scientific development, and project planning are all so intertwined with budget constraints, that not adding an economic aspect would prevent them reaching their full potential.

There are a lot of things that require a rehaul, many bugs that require fixing, and stuff that we all hope will be added, but with an aerodynamics update in the works and everything that happened in the last patch I like the direction the devs are going!

[DBT85]

It really isn't too late. It's not even a finished game yet, though at times its easy to feel like it.

Maybe try the DX11 trick to lower your memory usage. Mine dropped from using 2.6GB after launching a ship and going back to the KSC to 1.6GB, running about 22 mods. A few minor visual glitches are easy enough to look past and you get AA which the OpenGL trick doesn't for me.

Regarding bugs, that's what comes now we're in Beta. Alpha gets the basic game functionality in which is what they've done. It's mostly complete even if several areas need overhaul. In Beta those bugs can be squashed, modules re written to be more efficient or just better, and then we make progress towards 1.0.

I'm really excited for the next year or so for KSP. Potentially moving to Unity 5 with decent x64 performance, Squad honing the game to be where they want, modders doing more and more incredible stuff, us being able to play with more of the stuff because we have less memory issues.

[Superfluous J]

Have you ever heard someone say that you get to see how the sausage is made? That's what we've got here. Squad is making sausage, and letting us watch. A lot of people can't handle what they see but those of us who know the end result will be delicious, lovely sausage don't mind what's going on.

[klgraham1013]

You forget that more places to go is meaningless without interesting stuff to do there. And IIRC, the development schedule has been more of a 'build the framework for the game so we expand on content later' kind of thing. Now that everything that the dev want in KSP is there, if only in minimal form (e.g. ground scatter), they can now start expanding content using what's already there as the starting blocks. Just as nicer explosions made for nicer destructible buildings which made way for upgradable ones, what seems like barely any new content now paves the way for more and better stuff later.

I hope...

I'm dying for some natural landmarks. A waterfall on Eve, anyone?

[Renegrade]

While I disagree with the tone of the original post, I do agree with one thing: We seem to be building up long-standing bugs that take forever to go away. Specifically, it takes longer for a given bug to be squashed than for new ones to be introduced. That's not heading in the right direction...

As a specific example, Claw's series of fixes for the most obnoxious bugs are growing in number....

I find that complaint to be somewhat arbitrary, to be honest; I've had saves with hundreds of flights going without any real issues. Mostly because I couldn't be bothered deorbiting them, but even so.

Yeah, flights don't take that much memory at all. The only reason why I ever trim flights is to reduce the number of lines on the map view (and often trimming just involves renaming something unwanted to 'debris').

[skrit manfrat]

I agree with derfel, and here is why.

KSP's development has been severely cut back in the past year or so.

resources, scrapped

weather, scrapped

career mode, simplified

i could honestly go on and on, but my point is, these features have either been pushed back repeatedly because there is already a mod out there that does these jobs, or they get straight cancelled.

so essentially, squad is skipping out on features because they have such a strong modding community

unfortunately, they do not have a strong game to run all these mods, most of which are frankly required, such as deadly reentry, remotetech, FAR.

so now we are left with a half completed vanilla game that has no purpose.

or a modded game that has purpose, but is unplayable.

"oh it's just an alpha, calm yourself"

this was the excuse i heard over and over again once we started this slide into the mohole after 0.18.

well now we are in beta, "feature complete" but without many of the features that were planned, and features i feel the game desperately needs to give the gameplay some definition.

and it's so full of bugs that have been around for multiple versions it's not even funny

"oh it's just a beta, it's not supposed to be polished, bugs are to be expected"

okay, you say that now, but once they hit full release, full of bugs, and i bring these concerns up again, the response will be

"oh it's just an indie dev"

or my personal favorite

"you already got your moneys worth out of it, stop complaining"

these are the excuses of the weak.

the fact is this game has lost direction, it had the opportunity to become great, but now it is a giant lego simulator.

difficulty is slowly being removed, and replaced with a horrible science grind that makes no contextual sense (inspect runway unlock decouplers) and having things like moho's temperature removed, magic boulder removed etc

so now, this game is dull and a grindfest unless you have mods.

but you can't have mods

"b-b-but dont blame squad, it's not their fault! it's unity's fault!"

that doesn't fly. not after 4 years.

there are plenty of examples of games out there, that run on unity, have waaay more assets, and don't have anywhere near the issues KSP has. The reasons behind this are not my expertise, so i won't go into them, but for example, loading EVERYTHING on startup is not required. a [insert adjective here] dev would streamline the loading, keeping only the assets you need loaded at any one time.

TL;DR yes, derfel is allowed to get mad at squEAd, it's kinda their fault these mods are all required, and game needs serious streamlining.

as it stands he will be told to "uninstall your mods they're causing problems"

and if he does, he will be sitting in a bare room twiddling his thumbs because everything in vanilla has been done to death and squad wont add any necessary features because "there's already a mod for it"

see the problem?

[Derfel]

the stock game is great

Either I'm getting too old or I'm expecting too much from games these days, but the stock game is not fun. It's very limited in parts and there's no real reward for playing the game, there's no real reason to actually launch anything. I played the stock game for about 3 hours before I started looking for mods. To each their own, but playing just the stock game is like hitting a ping pong ball against a wall for 10 hours in my opinion.

Lots of the issues you are having are a limitation of the engine that KSP is built off of, Unity version 4.

Squad can't really support x64 addressing, due to Unity itself being buggy in x64 builds. x64 support on Linux platforms is fine for some reason though.

KSP is essentially written as a mod for the Unity engine, and inherits any deficiencies that are in the engine itself. Some problems can be worked around, but programming a game is a very complex process. And you did sign on for early-access. Problems are to be expected.

Everyone is waiting for the Unity 5 engine, it should bring some much-needed stability and performance enhancements (hopefully.)

The game was first released in 2011, it shouldn't take a developer just over 4 years to fix a game with so many ground breaking bugs, especially if said developer is selling the game for over £22.99 on Steam and has got over 10,000 reviews on Steam. Squad are merely cashing in on the game now, I highly doubt there will ever be a full release and it will be in a constant "beta" phase seeing as the alpha took 4 years.

Im not sure squad can be held responsible for how the game performs with 20 mods installed. I play stock and there's been a crash here or there but its really not too bad, about par with other mainstream games Ive played by big companies and KSP isnt even out of beta.

I know some mods are easy to get hooked on. Have you tried paring things back to the essentials?

A lot of the crashes and bugs I have experienced are with the stock game, every-time I crash more than 5 times in a small space of time I re-install the game and play without mods for a while, the game still crashes. A lot of the mods I use are just to stabilise the game, I'd understand needing 7 mods to stabilise a game if it was Fallout or Skyrim, but for a small indie game? That's the developer's fault.

Never ever ever ever use 64 bit. Ever. It's not good. At all. Don't use it. (Unless linux) To prevent memory crashes, use Active Texture Management. Also, just wait. Once Unity 5 comes out, 64 bit will be stable and you can have many more mods.

The game doesn't crash for me if you're not using mods. And you'll almost always find you progress saved in an autosave if it does crash.

Many of these complaints are just crazy. Why would you need 80 ships at a time? Do you really need to build rockets bigger than what they have? Even so, just search Whackjob and find all the stuff he's done. But what do you even mean about "Because of the engines"?

And as someone who by now has practically watched KSP grow up, the game has gotten more stable with every release. 0.90 was the most content-rich update since 0.18, which was a game changer.

That's not to say there aren't some problems with the way some of the features have been implemented, but just remember one thing. It's still in development. It may have reached Beta, but that means they're still squishing bugs as they pop up, like you do in a beta/alpha program.

Once Unity 5 comes out...we'll be cold and dead in our graves by the time Squad upgrades KSP to Unity 5, why spend money and time when they can release the game how it is and complete and bask in the praise of all the lemmings? It may still be in developmental, but when a game is this broken it shouldn't be sold; it shouldn't take over 4 years to fix many bugs. Just look at the bug page, if you can find it, a lot of major bugs were reported 2 years ago and haven't been touched.

-snip-

a few of the essentials (MechJeb, Docking etc)

Why do you even play this game if you use MechJeb and Docking? All that you can do in this game is build and launch ships.

Edited January 8, 2015 by KasperVld

[BudgetHedgehog]

Either I'm getting too old or I'm expecting too much from games these days, but the stock game is not fun. It's very limited in parts and there's no real reward for playing the game, there's no real reason to actually launch anything. I played the stock game for about 3 hours before I started looking for mods. To each their own, but playing just the stock game is like hitting a ping pong ball against a wall for 10 hours in my opinion.

KSP isn't a game, it's a toy. Play with it for a few hours, don't achieve much, still have fun. The only goals are what you set yourself and there's no big reward for doing them except the knowledge that you did them. If KSP had some sort of end game or final achievement, you might have a point. But it doesn't and doesn't pretend to either. It's a toy, plain and simple.

-snip-

I highly doubt there will ever be a full release and it will be in a constant "beta" phase seeing as the alpha took 4 years.

That's like.. your opinion, man. But seriously, just because you personally believe the game won't move beyond beta, doesn't mean it actually won't. Don't present your opinions as facts.

A lot of the crashes and bugs I have experienced are with the stock game

These should be forwarded onto the devs for review and fixing. Yeah, they haven't touched long standing bugs, but since it started, KSP has been about adding the framework for the full game. Balancing, adding content and fixing bugs should be done after alpha when most things that cause bugs are in and before release. 0.90 is the first beta release - give them a chance.

Also, yes, early access alpha. KSP is one of the most complete and stable EA alphas I've ever seen (along with Minecraft). I'm not brown nosing or anything here - no full released game has given me as many hours of play as KSP has. You yourself have played over 600 hours on it.

Why do you even play this game if you use MechJeb and Docking? All that you can do in this game is build and launch ships.

Maybe, just maybe.. he enjoys doing that, despite finding it difficult. The sights are pretty impressive, as well. And saying that's all you can do it a little disingenuous. You're building a rocket ship that, using realistic(ish) physics is capable of attaining orbit around a planet. Then, using actual orbital mechanics and stuff NASA had no clue about in the early 60s, you get ships within docking distance and join them together. This is actual rocket science - NASA basically had to shoot Buzz Aldrin into space and say 'mess around for a while, see what happens' to figure this stuff out. That knowledge has been put into a game (/toy) you can play on your laptop. How does that not blow your mind?

Edited January 8, 2015 by KasperVld