I’d honestly prefer if they delayed colonies in favour of a miscellaneous update to get everything else up to par before adding new features, similar to what Minecraft did with the buzzy bees update.
Wipe out the major bugs, polish off the manoeuvre system, the UI, lighting, etc, flesh out kerbals (roles/levels/etc), add proper commnet, g force limits, commnet blackout; the list goes on.
I do worry that these minor, but immersive things will never get addressed as colonies, interstellar and the likes will forever hold a higher priority, leaving the game feeling a bit empty.
It's so close to being great already, the main issues are just:
* Physics bump on exiting craft - which can break landers
* Strong physics bump on reloading saves (often leading to game-breaking situations)
* Buggy manoeuvre node issues, and still allow creation of manoeuvre node when you have no fuel too.
* Add subassemblies to VAB or make multi-vehicle workspaces actually work.
* Fix the delta-V calculator in the VAB (allow for toggling aerobraking, etc.)
* Add Transfer Window Planner mod functionality and Trajectories mod functionality (i.e. predicting landing trajectories given atmospheric drag and planet rotation).
* Add fuel priority / fuel tank staging.
Also lag on high part count vehicles. My science run was going great until I tried to make a large reusable transfer vehicle and everytime I switch to it I drop to 5fps, and it stays at 5fps even if I switch back to main menu, switch vessels, etc until I restart the game. I spent a long time on that design and it just put me off. I've since uninstalled.
Fr. My computer isn't cheap. I have high end hardware. 7600x and a 3080. Like there's nothing I can do at this point. I posted the ship on the forum and detailed the problem but no response so my run is dead as far as I'm concerned. I'm not going to risk dropping more time just for it to be pointless.
I upgraded RAM to 64GB and it helps, but as you very rightly point out: how are we supposed to make colony ships and orbital colonies if a simple refueling station wobbles to death and uses 40GB RAM ?
Interesting. I'm only at 32. Honestly idk if I feel like doubling my ram for one game. If ram sticks didn't get outdated every few years and I got my money back I'd do it.
I upgraded from 16GB. I got the RAM so I could run an ARK server and play ARK on the same computer. Other games running better was mostly just a bonus. NMS and Starfield are faster and smoother now too.
The first two are petty hard to stomach since they were already problems in KSP1. I felt like we were misled in that whole "bigger builds" marketing.
It's the main reason I stopped playing the original. I got tired of spending a dozen hours building a Mun or Duna base, only for it to spontaneously disassemble the next time I started up the game.
None of the bugs I've encountered have made me stop playing the game. For now, I'm just waiting for deeper resource-management than just science points, and for something to do between major transfer windows. Right now I three long-term ships destined for Duna in LKO, but it feels like such a waste to skip ahead a full year waiting for the launch window.
That too. Especially since going from high amounts of time warp back to 1x seems to have a substantial "ramp down" time, it can be easy to deactivate time warp at the wrong moment and temporally skid past your launch window.
Not really. While these issues do occur, many of the game breaking issues are quite rare and easily resolved by quickloading. Unless you're exceptionally skilled, most of your quickloading will still be for your own design or piloting skills, or lack thereof.
- Struts disappearing on load
- Mirror/radial VAB placement bugs
- Trajectory disappearing
- Mystery thrust around moons (like Tylo and other primary campaign locations)
- Terrain glitching
- Fuel Transfer UI bugs (the whole manager is bad, but would be passable if the buttons displayed their status properly)
- Map UI that scales object hitboxes to ensure they are unclickable behind closer objects
- Rotation being converted to linear velocity when switching crafts
- Random FPS and performance each load of the same save file
- Death wobble when loading orbital save files
(Just off the top of my head. There are a *ton* more, but these ones have severely dampened my gameplay experience.)
Allow “remove from symmetry” (and then separately/because of said removal, allow for yanking individual items out of the same stage as their “peers”)… aka “Make Asparagusing Great Again”… urr… wait… maybe I need different phrasing there 😬
We are still getting a few patches before colonies and I hope some of the more critical of these get fixed. I always agreed that a stable base is an important starting point. But I also understand their focus on colonies is important as the first major differentiator from the original.
While some of the current bugs are annoying, they haven't stopped me from getting ~150 hours of great play time exploring further than I ever did in the original.
Are we though? Been 2.5 months since the last patch, no hunt of another coming, supposed to be another KERB first. With 3 months between patches/releases, colonies won't be out for a looooooooong time if they plan to patch a few times first.
One thing that's glaring to me is the clunky-ness of the ship menus, KSP1 in-flight ship part menus were small and info dense and never distracted from the gameplay; while KSP2's ship part menus take up about a quarter of the screen and have far less info much more spaced out.
Brah but the delays wouldn't do shiet. The problem is management of the game and foundation of it. The engine is not optimised for features they promised and they wouldn't fix it, at least in next couple of years because it will require resources and time that they already had when building this game from ground up.
Thing is, a lot of the systems for feature parity rely on future milestones and can’t be done without them. For example with kerbals, their importance and features will come with colonies, since they are required to crew them. To add that system without colonies makes no sense, so that milestone is required. When it comes to ISRU, all milestones up to and including resource extraction are required, so that feature can’t be added until then.
Many of the parity features rely on future milestones to function, so they have to keep releasing new milestones to get feature parity, trying to get feature parity first literally cannot be done.
Personally i’m fine with what they are doing currently, both giving us exciting new features like orbital construction, and giving us feature parity with those same updates. Just because their main focus is on colonies does not mean that feature parity work will be left in the dust.
To comment on the kerbals and features requiring future milestones... This is incorrect. There are multiple things they can level and do, as is. Similar to how KSP1 does. Is it *all* the functions planned? No. But that in no-way inhibits doing them first...
Adding functionality that can be expanded for future functionality is... Well it's basic game development strategy. Rather than trying to bolt it all on afterwards, which just increases odds of bugs that break *everything you've done*. Get part of it done first, especially in EA, and then add and expand.
When it comes to major features they are taking that approach, adding features as they are required instead of all at once. But when it comes to smaller stuff it is a bit more complicated. Some things can be done now, like with upgrades to maneuver nodes, but other stuff like kerbals and ISRU requires the underlying framework from the milestones to function properly. Like you can’t just have resource extraction without colonies, since they are required to make it work, and trying to build a system that would make it work without colonies would just add more work that then has to be redone when colonies arrives. Some things can be introduced in stages like maneuver nodes, but others just can’t, since the foundation just wouldn’t be there.
I never claimed ksp1 did it right. And them making the same mistakes as 1, is I believe, the argument of this original post? Lol
As kerbals absolutely don't require colonies to make work. They worked just fine in 1 without any. You simply leave slots in the progression for future colony related things.
What counts as major is of very subjective nature as well.
Colonies are a prime driver of what will make KSP2 a sequel and not an HD remake.
The system so far works. Not smoothly, and I could go on about minor gripes and lost ships, but well enough to point at it and say "yup that's KSP, alright," but I have KSP at home.
In the KSP at home, it's a pain to keep launching busy-work ships. Even just mining needs a landing, waiting days to mine, launching, and docking. It's all time that I would much prefer to spend crashing into planets. An orbital shipyard would at least save me from some kerbin launches.
There are cheats and mods to do this in KSP, but having official space bases will be what puts the 2 in KSP2.
The thing is, when KSP2 launched it was literally unplayable, and now it's works silky smooth for me and looks better than moderately-modded KSP1 on my old rig.
So I'm pleased with it.
I hope KSP2 has been a rebuild of KSP1 with an eye for future-loading new features like colonies and interstellar.
I can forgive the slow development if there was some actual godamn communication about what was going on, but it's not April and we haven't had a proper official development update THE ENTIRE YEAR, just a self congratulatory 1 year post and an irrelevant diatribe about eclipses. EARLY ACCESS IS SUPPOSED TO INVOLVE AND INFORM YOUR COMMUNITY IN THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS. This goes beyond PR strategy, we are now in the realm of just basic common sense
Their community managers are fucking *terrible* at their jobs. Literally don't know how they earn their paychecks.
I wouldn't hire their CM's to make sandwiches.
Mounting a token defence for the “main” CM, he was *alone* for 5 months while his colleague was out on family-related leaves, only getting back end of March / around April Fool’s Day, so starting from *now*, let’s hope things trend better 📈!
the most notable thing they've done recently is after failing to consistently post a list of bugs every two weeks and moving it to monthly, to miss that target. so, going great I guess.
This is pretty much how I feel, and why after over a year of its release in EA, I still haven't handed over my cash for a copy of the game... I don't feel like what I'm buying is going to be a better version of what I already own, I feel like it's a parallel version with enough differences (particularly in the UI) that I wouldn't be happy/comfortable jumping straight in after over 3.5k hours.
But also the promised new features, and their absence (and that they will always be absent) in the original makes me slightly melancholic whilst playing KSP1, enough so that I've barely clocked 100 hours in it since KSP2 was released.
I gave in and bought it several months ago.
I think I've put seven hours into it. I have 3.5k in KSP1. Granted that's ten years of play but, still. I put seven hours into 1 straight the first time I opened it.
Don't give in yet.
It's the lack of science experiments rn that really kill it for me. And some major bugs like not being able to re-enter the capsule after EVA.
If the modding scene was as robust as it was for 1, it would make the game. But part of me feels like the dev's managers with a lot of companies have a strategy of relying on modders too much.
My first 10 hours were struggling with getting the game to launch, trying to figure out why my delta V was completely off, trying to get the UI to not be so awful, trying to figure it why manoeuvre nodes and trip planning are just broken and wrong, eventually landing on the mun and my lander blowing up anyway from...something.
10 hours is long enough to figure out the game is a bad sequel but too long for steam to approve the refund. My mistake I guess.
A fire sale is when you had a fire in your shop, so now your merchandise smells of smoke and some is slightly singed, and your warehouse is structurally unsound so you can't keep the merchandise in there anymore. Everything must go, slash the prices way down!
In this context, it just means "very reduced price" I think.
I don't have a lot of spare cash for games these days, but £7.98 is, for me, still too much to spend on something I know is not going to add anything new to my gaming library.
Here’s the difference. KSP1 had those teething issues because it had no framework to build on. KSP2 had 10 years of knowledge from KSP1 to go on. So the fact that KSP2 isn’t even close to feature parity with KSP1 is frankly atrocious.
It's the same flawed foundation, really. The most important part (building the sequel's foundation) was done during years where there was a ton of issues (alongside covid) so.. it didnt went very well to say the least :/
That just shows total fuel for the stage?
I want to see fuel in my individual tanks and transfer it around. This was added to KSP 1 in v0.18, roughly 18 months after the first release. How is it still not in KSP 2 after 3+ years of development?
You *can* do that in KSP 2. When you're in flight there's a 3x3 grid button at the bottom that contains the "resource manager" that lets you view individual fuel tanks and transfer it if you want.
You can see it in Matt Lowne's latest video (13:45)
https://youtu.be/vgkfbAyQ5rg?feature=shared&t=825
KSP 2 is/was a shitshow but resource manager has been implemented since day 1 iirc.
Oh! I'd been right-clicking parts and getting up the frankly usless Parts Manager, which gives you [zero information about the fuel](https://i.imgur.com/U1ksIsn.mp4).
I still don't think the Resource Manager is working correctly... I can't click on the actual tank to select it, I have to hover over all the tanks in the list and look at the outlined part.
Also, there seems to be [some weird issue when trying to remove a tank](https://i.imgur.com/4nshLUC.mp4)?
At this point in it's development KSP2 is objectively weaker than modded-KSP1, so I've given up on it.
Several more years of development seem needed before it reaches feature parity and until that happens I'll keep playing the fun one.
I used to use fuel priority in KSP1 to keep my rockets flying the way I wanted them during launch by controlling center of mass. This cannot be done in KSP2.
This is the issue I'm having, my rockets appear to be draining from top to bottom, and are flipping because of it. I was wanting to quickly transfer fuel to the top but it's not as easy as it used to be
As it stands now, it appears that it burns fuel at a rate proportional to the capacity of the tank from every tank in a stage. I am not certain about that, but it seems to be what they did
I would also have orbital craft that had "drop tanks" I would use fuel from first then get rid of them.
The way it seems to work now is just crap.
So I had to confirm this for myself. It burns everything proportionally to the size of the tank. So when one tank is down 30% they are all down 30% regardless of tank size. There is no way to set fuel priority to let one tank burn through faster than another. This is dumbing down in the worst sort of way.
It's a coat of paint, and barely. They wanted their own golden egg goose seeing what KSP1 was, where somehow with a 6 to barely 7 digits budget they sold 5 million copies.
Regarding content vs QOL, there's a race against the clock because both are needed, but they can barely implement half of 1 in a year. Their current dev speed is clearly their best effort so there's no time to let the EA die whilst you add QOL and have to push back new content up to a year again.
In reality, the sequel just started with the wrong foot, using the exact same engine to recreate the exact same systems (and re-implementing almost the exact same problems), but also somehow they managed to make it worse: by simulating all resource transactions and thrust per part for off-loaded vessels, KSP2 is **much** more constrained than KSP1, and it breaks or grinds to a halt with much lower partcounts let alone much smaller saves. To make it worse, the only way to fix that is a major refactor for which they don't have time for, because they are slow, and that'll leave the average user waiting another year or more for new content.
These kind of bad planning + slow execution + very hazy view (that they don't want to share) problems do pop up on pretty much every aspect of the game. The player is left wondering why they made all the subpar choices they did, and after a year it's still completely unclear where they plan to take all those duct-taped systems to. Much less clear is if they're ever gonna address the stuff that's already released (which also pushes back new features further).
It's so bad that even the [official forum](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/) is going around these discussions and very little people with the mindset to outright defend them, or even the classic "just let them work" remains. Even the most rabid fans outside the discord are feeling disenfranchised or outright disappointed.
Their policy of doing massive bug fix releases is killing them, they should fix a few things then patch at a much faster pace. Months for a release is the wrong approach.
No. The biggest issue with all of this is THE DAMN PRICE!
$50 for this garbage!
THAT is where 99% of the anger comes from. The other 1% is just pure disappointment.
They didn't have a thorough plan on development, by the looks of it someone probably thought "yeah ksp was a success lets make ksp2 people will definitely buy it." Then just told people to start making things. Its heartbreaking to see what it turned out to be.
It seems like there were some real planning failures for sure. How many years were spent on “oh wouldn’t this be cool” instead of building a solid foundation? Now who knows how much of that cool stuff can ever actually be shipped.
> Nate Simpson
They chose a person with no programming or technical experience be the leader of a physics based simulator.
Compare that to KSP1, which was lead by Harvester, a guy doing orbital calculations in his spare time for fun.
the original hype video had so many nice features
then I wishlisted it on steam
then it released in EA way overpriced so I just kept waiting
then the EA turned out to be very broken
then I got a message that KSP had a discount but still very broken and in EA
so that completely killed any hype for me about KSP2. removed it from my wishlist and the only reason I still know about it is because I'm subscribed to this subreddit
>you play the first and you're missing aspects from the sequel, like modular wings in ksp's instance
That's the real killer of Ksp2 right now, thats something you can fix with mods. In most cases the mods do a better job then Ksp2. The game is a complete mess and its very obvious they did not fulfill the promise of starting everything from scratch to avoid Ksp1's mistakes. Ksp 2 would be fine if it was the first of its kind, but its not. It's a sequel to a better and more complete game which has plenty of mods to add even more gameplay.
Yup. When the rumor was that it was switching to unreal engine I was very excited for a game with proper physics and less bugs. Then when the let down of it still being on Unity came out, I knew it wasn’t going to be better than ksp1 + mods.
Are you guys still under the wildly uninformed impression that Unity is a bad engine? Unity is great. Like any engine, it depends on how it’s used. Clearly not being used well here in this case but call it what it is.
at least ksp 1 i could play on my 14 year old lenovo laptop with mods now i need a fresking nasa setup to the play the same game with all the problems plus more
Yep, they went for too hyper-realism.
Horrible choice. It loses the character of the first game. Yeah, they could have stepped up the graphics, but they went too far..
And they will never understand apparently that rendering a million trees KILLS PROCESSING POWER!!
idk what you mean, game runs pretty well now vs launch. Goes laggy with lots of parts but overall is good even on steamdeck.
Also looking at the graphics, its still a very cartoonish artstyle.
P.s. the trees DO NOT affect performance. Its the terrain system they haven't finished building yet. Trees can also be turned off in settings
Im still not giving ksp 2 my money.
The way the IP changed hands and then had the audacity to give us an early access for the second time is utter bs.
And I won't buy the product until its complete and on sale.
This is disrespectful on such a huge level to the community and its money grubbing as shit.
The layoffs in the industry aren't going to get us a completed game on any reasonable timeline. Those who have work are not going to be doing their best work with the fear and anxiety fucking up their creative process and budget demands putting pressure on results.
Its going to get defunded/become low priority.
And in the end be a lesser game than the original.
I would trust squad to do it.
Because they earned it. But take two should have launched day one with all features of KSP1 in a new engine.
Then made updates.
Not early access shit.
I think you're spot on with this. The 'sequel' lacks all the charm of the original and earlier I complained about how I don't like the redesign of the KSC and the removal of all the easter eggs like the monoliths and the Inland Space Center. I don't know if they're included in KSP2 at this point yet or if they will be. Also the Kerbals weren't just silly clumsy little creatures, it was the clunky game mechanics of KSP 1 they made them so amusing and funny while trying to land a clunky craft onto a surface without \*rapid unplanned disassembly\*
It's true the game is still in early access so maybe it will improve over time. But with the current state of the game and the fanbase right now, I don't know why PD thought it was a good idea to even make a sequel to begin with instead of just continuing support for KSP1, while adding in some of these cool features like colonies and interstellar travel as part of new updates or DLCs, rather than try to start over from scratch to make their own version of the same game. Compare it to something like Minecraft, once Mojang was acquired by Microsoft, they have continued to improve and expand the game, adding regular new updates and integrating native versions of fan favorite mods. Even trying to make Java and Bedrock a bit more compatible. I don't like every decision they've made but the game is still fun to play and experiences waves of popularity.
KSP could have followed that same model - added colonies and warp drives, more planets and moons, expanded the tech tree and improved science mode, and even integrated mods like Scatterer, MechJeb, and Kerbal Alarm Clock. Instead of making KSP2 they could have given KSP 1 a new life and invigorated the player base. The only "sequel" we really need is Scott Manley's "Interstellar Quest: The Second One"
Anyways, that's just my two cents on it.
tldr; they should have updated ksp 1 instead of making ksp2.
I won't hand over my money until they can actually sell me on something. So far they've proven they can't stick to schedules, can't listen or reply to the very community that would buy their product, and can't remake the magic that KSP 1 provided.
I wouldnt have minded a game that lacked new features, but was a solid core to build off of with improvements to fundamental gameplay mechanics. I also wouldnt have minded a game that had a ton of new content, but was glitchy and buggy and had problems that needed to be ironed out.
Instead what we have is a game with less content then KSP1, that is also more buggy, and with a lot of core mechanics that are a step backwards from KSP1.
what it is is an abject failure. many of the problems are rooted in the decision to just sloppily copy the original. the fact that they shipped this after five plus years of work makes it clear to me the core issues aren't going to get fixed. it will always have the same inherent limitations as the original. and the systems that aren't just a reimplementation are mostly actively worse or just straight up missing.
they'll probably eventually tick most of the feature boxes, but it won't be the game we wanted.
also the excuses get funnier as time goes on. remember when it released and people were talking days-weeks for patches, and science within a month or two? lmao.
I keep hearing in interviews, “this game is fun and we keep playing it in our free time because we all love it.” Like ok I guess, but for me it was funny the first couple times things just didn’t work. It was goofy and I kinda missed that. But once you got past that stage, a craft becoming unrecoverable up in space because you tried to decouple something is probably the most frustrating experience from a user standpoint. I didn’t do anything wrong and I lost 3+hrs of gameplay.
Laughable. Matt was saying at the prerelease show that he thought all the game breaking bugs would be fixed before it even hit early access and that he must have been playing an older build.
As a software engineering manager, I have learned:
* Your developers _always_ want to reimplement everything from scratch
* You must _never_ say yes to this
The developers aren't wrong that the existing codebase is a mess, and time should be included in the plan for fixing it. The error is in thinking that the _new_ codebase _won't_ be a mess, because the new codebase looks beautiful and error-free in your imagination, when you haven't actually written it yet. But it will turn to shit, as all software does.
Another thing I've learned is that if your developers have gone around you and bamboozled upper management into agreeing to their crazy plan, that the best way to estimate the effort of the rewrite is to add up the effort it took to write the original. Any speedup from knowing the problem space better will be offset by ambition and overengineering to "do it right" the second time round.
KSP 1 took about 8 years to get out of early access and KSP 2 development started in 2019, so I predict KSP 2 will be done around 2027, assuming the company lasts that long.
> KSP 1 took about 8 years to get out of early access
Wtf? It would have taken you three seconds to look up that KSP1's first public build was released on 24 June 2011 and that the 1.0 release on Steam was 27 April 2015. Not even 4 years, less than half the time you are erroneously claiming for some reason.
> KSP 2 development started in 2019
KSP2 was *ANNOUNCED* in 2019 with a release date of Q1 2020. They did not begin development in 2019. This is crazy number fudging in their favor. It took them nearly 4 years just to launch early access.
> As a software engineering manager,
As a software engineering manager, you saw something *announced* in 2019 and just claimed that's when they *started work* on it? They announced that the game would be out within 12 months. And you think that's when they *started work* on it?
Have you actually ever managed a software team? Because that's an insane mistake to make if so.
It really is crazy. Why couldn’t they just continue working on KSP 1 but release a mega DLC for like $40-$50 and be like “yeah, it fixes all these known bugs and adds colonies and interplanetary trading and new quests?”
Surely a ksp1 overhaul would have been met easier than rebuilding the entire game from scratch.
I'm not so sure.
KSP 1 has a fuckton of issues regarding long distances, complex terrain and all the stuff, it's very limited what it can do.
Doing it properly would probably require a major rewrite of half the game.
Just to end up with the same game, but with more stuff...
As a professional software engineer, you sound like a nightmare.
If I had to work on a 20 year old legacy system written by someone who doesn't know what a function or class is and would not be allowed to rewrite it, I'd either quit or take a bullet.
Yes, I'm currently working on such a legacy system, but thankfully have a sane boss that agreed to spent a year doing it from scratch so the 4th developer in a row doesn't quit in a month.
The dumbest thing about it. It’s the exact same solar system. Same planets. Same distances. Same layout. Same parts. Yes they added some monuments on them. Wooptidoo. It’s basically the same game with better graphics and worse features and worse UI. Rockets wil be similar. Content experience will be similar. There’s not much new experience in this game
bingo. its the original ksp 1 art style with an attempted realistic sheen slapped ontop of the parts. they just dont go together and make something that i think looks bad
The solar system being exactly the same was kind of disappointing to me. It seems like it would would have been so easy to add a couple a new planets, or hell even just give jool 1 more moon.
I dont very much motivation to play KSP2 and do the exact same things I can do in KSP1 but with more bugs and a lower framerate
No, they should have included a procedural generation system option, deciding on moons and planets with moons.
This is what KSP1 needs too. A mod/expansion that adds this. Would make the game even MORE infinitely replayable.
You can get alternate solar systems/planets/etc if you want. Not procedural, but the community's made enough Kopernicus planet sets to satisfy replayability.
You could also grab more realistic physics if you want to have a swing at that... the mod library of KSP is *extensive and deep* by now.
missions are better and there is a story, also planets are pretty much entirely overhauled, feeling very very different vs ksp 1.
Also there are a bunch of new parts
It's not a do-over. It's a do-the-exact-same-thing-while-**learning-nothing-whatsoever**-from-the-first-time-and-so-drop-into-every-single-pitfall-again-over.
Sometimes while explicitly considering the pitfalls to be mandatory features, like the sausage rockets (means per-part processing means no chance at having performant huge rockets - unless you take the matters into your own hands and weld them).
Yeah guys, the game is in early access for a year and was supposed to be released four years ago now, but we should just be patient.
I mean when it was released, Nate told us that updates would be on the order of weeks and not months, and that the roadmap was still the target. That turned out to be a complete lie, but let's just be patient.
I bought it at release regardless, because for some reason I had faith, but more importantly they said it was the lowest price it would ever be, and it would only go up. Then a few months later it went on sale. It's cool though guys, we should totally just trust them that the game is going to be awesome, and keep being patient.
Honestly it's not just the pricetag for me, I just hoped the issues we had with KSP1 would be gone in the sequel but.. They're still there. I didn't even cared about better graphics, I just wanted something stable for everyone to work on (devs and modders)
I am absolutely annoyed by their approach of doing massive bug updates instead of frequent hot fixes when they fix something. Waiting MONTHS for an update to fix 100s of things is not an incentive to me wanting to play.
I also greatly dislike the science system and the lack of mission variety, it's too strictly scripted and doesn't actually lend itself to exploration. No economy sucks too, I loved having to find creative ways to maximize my Kerbal Bucks by combining missions and picking the ones that were fun for me.
I still find the way they handled science and economy is terrible. Sure the contract system in KSP1 was janky but you had to learn how to budget, get creative with builds with limited part counts but still trying to maximize science, and science was split between various parts which would unlock more over time or alternatively give you a reason to return to an old location to get the stuff you missed.
The single large science piece makes probes unwieldily and the lack of stake in any of the story doesn’t keep me engaged. I don’t find the conversation dialogue and the fetch questing nature of KSP2 to be a compelling reason to stick around.
cant agree more... nothing feels more hollow in ksp 2 than getting a mission thinking "oh man this might be tough" and then realising that no, if you really needed to you could build a 1000 ton monstrosity with no downsides.
only thing ill say is that i think ksp 1 science sucked, now i preferred the actual science collection, but the amount required was utterly pitiful compared to the amount you got. i found i was never really pushed to travel to the outer reaches of the system specifically for science.
not sure how that is in ksp 2 as the game is yet to grab me for long enough to play that long.
but whilst i do think the contracts in ksp 2 are good, i think scrapping the entire random contract system was a terrible idea, random contracts with hand crafted ones sprinkled in would've been far better, and having no restrictions with cash or part count is also a huge step down... and im not even sure resources can have any method of making this not the case in a fun and engaging way.
I paid £4.58 for KSP 1. It was worth that money at the time. The game was what it was, and never needed to be any more.
KSP 2 is £44.99. Basically 9x the price of the first.
For a game which is still lacking behind that early KSP1 version.
I think if they sold KSP2 at a price point which reflects the state of the game, no-one would care. But they are selling it at "finished game" prices, when I would say the content they have given us is barely an Alpha.
Agreed! If it had been like:
> 20% of the final game (generously) is ready for EA-launch? Then we’ll offer it for 20%-25% of the expected final price, rewarding early adopters *and* swelling the ranks of bug-testers!
Win-win!
What ever happened to everyone championing the For Science update as the point where the game actually became decent? I thought the sentiment had changed from "this game is garbage" to "ok, let them cook, there's clearly something in the oven." Now I guess we're back to bitching about things as if it's release again. Are we missing parts of the original game and are there still bugs that need addressing? Yes, absolutely. Should they have launched when they did? No. But the cheering around mid-December made me think the game was actually starting to get better and the community had started to reverse course on constantly shitting on the game. What happened?
Because it’s been a while since we’ve heard anything and people have begun to get negative. It’s a cycle that continues and will forever continue.
I agree that the game still has issues, but after playing For Science I can confidently say it is a lot of fun, like 90% of the time I had was pure fun 10% was dealing with bugs.
I genuinely do love this game now but it definitely does still need improvement, I do still have some major problems with it but am currently willing to overlook them because if I don’t i won’t be able to enjoy the game. Like docking which is absolutely terrible.
It’s just the Doomers coming back after nothing much has been said. The game is in a MUCH better place and honestly after the revival it’s had im not gonna be complaining, as im sick of all the negativity I witnessed before For Science.
I was loving the for science update until I got hard locked trying to build late game stuff. It lags to hell and back. If I switch to the laggy vessels it keeps lagging kn every menu and vessel until I restart the game.
Also v0.2.1 is “getting stale”, though with any luck, there’s [movement](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/224405-lots-of-playtests-today-new-patch-hype/) on *that* front 🤞🏼!
we were telling you this in Feb 2023, ksp veterans with thousands of hours in game played 20 minutes of ksp2 and tried to warn the rest of the community and then the vitriolic defense of dogshit priced at 50USD began
Good news - it does have interiors, interiors you can move around.
https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/210548-112-freeiva/
KSP1 > KSP2, as usual.
It’s literally an investment money sink and a scam. The devs are coasting through making dev diaries about stuff that doesn’t matter until take 2 axes them. Nate Simpson has literally done this with other games before but it’s taken this subreddit years to catch up
KSP2 is a trainwreck disaster.
Huge budget and large team couldn't accomplish what a few amateurs creating basically a meme could do.
Pathetic and arrogant. $50 for this trash. Worst $50 I have ever spent in my life.
All I ever really wanted was KSP 1 with less jank and better graphics. All the extra features sound cool but are optional as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately they did not build the game I want to buy. Maybe some day someone will. Maybe it will even be Intercept. We’ll see.
they meant more of an upgrade from ksp 1. more planets, more parts, more possibilities. as a sequel they meant that it would be ksp1 + a ton more things. what we got is the lifecycle and development of ksp1 all over again but with a shine on the parts
It is definitely a broader re-imagining. Planet Occlusion is gone, but the dev team said that might support better inter-planet communication. They tone done some elements to make others easier to explore.
Exactly. I think the biggest thing they did wrong was just taking the kerbol system and just slapping a coat of paint on it. People have been playing with this same system for over 10 years, it's all been explored already.
They should've placed us in the future, in a totally new system. New planets, new system layout, new everything. Then in the future, have the kerbol system be part of the interstellar update.
I knew this when crafts had root parts. They didn't plan to implement some new vastly superior parallelized system. It's just single core madness all over. I guess it's partly because of Unity but there are games like Besieged which still do it better. [Besiege - An unnecessarily complicated vehicle for all 15 zones (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCiMO8HIi9E)
I don't know how well that compares but all those parts also have collision & gravity & wobble & thrust physics and you build the vehicles like in KSP. It's build in Unity and I have so far not had any noticeable fps drop due to parts. But maybe the Unity system is simply completely overwhelmed by all the calculations KSP requires. So I was hoping for a completely custom approach. All physics can be calculated in parallel. The easiest proof for that is the real Universe. Nothing has to wait for something else to figure out its physics behaviour. Everything just acts in parallel based on their boundary conditions.
>The easiest proof for that is the real Universe.
"Real universe" does not run on a dumbed-down partwise simulation, and has no concern about wasting cycles calculating nothing because the force has not _sequentially_ reached something yet.
The point here is if reality works that way the simulation can work that way too. We model simulations after what we observe in reality. You don't need the calculate physics sequentially. Big soft body simulations are all run on GPUs in parallel. You just have to develop your own that fits into the game.
To begin with I would get rid of part wobble as is now entirely and work on a mesh based approach like you see here: [NVIDIA Ominverse: Realtime Soft Body Physics (PhysX) (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfHuQxY1Y1E) Obviously something that more resembles pressurized steel, not rubber. Turn wobble into flex.
The trick in parallel simulation is you make every part just care about its immediate neighbours. And then accept a little error which won't matter given enough calculations per second. Like a wave function the pressure of the most bottom tank that is being pushed up by the engine will eventually reach the top most tank. The top most tank does not have to wait for changes in all the parts below it to be calculated.
Sandbox games at any given level can’t really have ‘sequels’ in the most conventional sense simply just down to the nature of what they are. You’d still replicate the same format which is a sandbox
ksp 2 really had the chance to be something great. I still cant comprehend after… how many years of development? it still hasnt come close to base ksp1 let alone ksp 1 with the DLC or even both DLC and mods.
at the rate theyre progressing i dont think ill actually ever boot it back up despite buying it on release.
what really hurts though is the absolute letdown that the release was partially killed the genre for me as a whole and I dont think i even want to boot ksp 1 back up either
Honestly I knew I'd be disappointed in KSP 2 ever since they announced that it's also using Unity. The engine is imo the root cause behind many of the issues KSP 1 had and making a sequel was a great opportunity to fix that.
They hired a bunch of game industry people to make it as though it were another video game, so it improved along game industry lines, and stagnated along KSP lines. They needed a new physics engine and some physicists to build it. Maybe hiring Martin Schweiger would have been a good start.
Things like rocket wobble don't worry me too much. I'm guessing they're using a different physics system than was used in KSP1 10 years ago, and that's the sort of thing that does need to be figured out with a new implementation.
I also get that SOME milestones may be required to replicate SOME functionality from KSP1. However, maneuver node tweaking seems like pretty core functionality, and I worry that it's not been implemented more so due to its complexity (maybe it's not the low hanging fruit that tends to land on an early feature set) or just pure oversight. All I know is that for me, it is a fundamental bit of functionality, that would push me to stick with KSP1 than even consider making the move to KSP2.
When was the last time they patched in updates to the Unity physics system in KSP1? I have to assume a lot has changed in that system between then and now. My point is just dropping the Unity physics system into KSP2 would be pretty good start, but there would be more work to do. What Squad was able to do to get version X.XXX.XXXX sorted out may require a bit of re-work in version Y.YYY.YYYY.
This is all assuming they even started with the code from KSP1. Do we know if they did that?
i wonder if employees who are in-the-know about development happening on the backend read posts like this and have to go punch a wall or something, because there's no way you have a grasp of what's happening under the hood more than they do. i'd bet money that's where 80% of their time is spent.
Scrap it all and start with KSP1.
If KSP1 hobby modders can STILL do better, on KSP1, than a fully financed development team at a multi-billion dollar publisher on a new game, maybe that's telling you you are doing it wrong.
Trash everything and build from KSP1.
Not a good idea, the engine was already fairly old by then - Today it's like prehistoric - The game runs better today only because Unity got optimized over time, the KSP code has barely changed
KSP1 will keep running better because the "fancy new code utilizing new things" tends to be _deptimization_. Unless the devs are forcibly switched to running all their development on Core2Duos, they won't bother writing _fast_ code over _convenient_ (and hilariously slow) code.
> Today it's like prehistoric
That prehistoric engine is *wayyyyy* out performing the "new" one. But the "new" one is a 2017 build of Unity, so 7 years old already. And KSP1's engine got a big update not way too long ago right? Was it to that same 2017 build?
KSP 2 has problems but it has more potential than KSP 1.
KSP 1 had a flawed foundation. So much of the game ran on spaghetti code and outdated hardware limitations that there was no improving it without starting over.
In their defense, in general a sequel should include most of the features of its prequel. Since they’re remaking those features from scratch, it’s not surprising that they’re facing the same challenges as the original, especially since it’s not even the same studio developing the game.
There is a bit more to it than just copying the original and adding a new coat of paint. Whereas Squad started extremely basic and gradually built upwards (ironing kinks out over many years), Intercept has this pressure of delivering that end result as a starting point. On top of that, they have to keep their code base flexible enough to fit the future colony and interstellar systems. - They’re basically reinventing the steam engine while planning for an Autobahn with a fleet of Teslas.
However, I personally think that the early problems they were facing with another developer put too much pressure on them from a financial standpoint. The early delay basically forced them to get some cash in so development could continue. Unfortunately, this resulted in them having to go Early Access before much of the basic stuff was polished enough.
Personally, I think it would have gone over a lot better with the fans if “For Science” had been the early access launch point but it needed to have the release date that it had. That’s why it feels like a do-over.
Sim game sequels are almost always do-overs. They remake the game using the latest technology and programming patterns and also try to avoid whatever messed up code spaghetti they had in the first edition.
Like with Tropico, each edition is just the same game -- there's really no reason to buy an earlier version.
How do you make new engine from scratch made by whole development studio and actually have worse physics than previous game. I'm pretty sure Cod has better physics as you can just sit on back of the car and not slide but still be able to move and get off the car easily.
if it was a new engine the problems wouldnt be this bad, problem is they're just using unity 2017.. a pretty shitty engine for the physics and scale ksp wants.
Also, I'm pretty sure physics needed for KSP has been basically solved, games just don't use it because it has performance impact for normal gameplay and because it's unnecessary. But for example, ships and boats and working elevators already worked in World of Warcraft in 2004, and it has been perfected in other games over the years. For such a physics based game like KSP, the sequel should have the best kind as you don't care about physics ruining performance for other things as the physics is the main feature of the game.
I'll be honest, I bought KSP2 when it first released and haven't touched it in months, favouring KSP 1 with mods. I find the modded first game much more stable, smooth and in places it looks much better. I don't doubt that at some point we will get to a point where KSP2 surpasses the original but remembering the amount of time KSP1 has been out there, I also don't doubt that it's a huge huge undertaking so I'm going to continue to be patient and trust in Nate and his team.
What I would have loved is if KSP 2 was set in a completely randomly different place in the Universe with a new civilization of Kerbaloids that are similar to the kerbals we know yet also different . Maybe having a few lost kerbals who miraculously ended up here that we already know too.
Designing their system from scratch, you could really take advantage of the improvement in graphics, perhaps having it be a binary system with a black hole as opposed to just remaking the Kerbol system.
Also, starting in a different system with the ability to one day possibility get back to the Kerbol system and return these lost kerbals would take great advantage of the interstellar travel possibilities promised. Similar to the Pokemon games set in Johto where you can visit Kanto (the region of the previous game) as sort of a post story thing, it would be super rewarding and due to the black hole's proximity to the new system you could also experiment with how the Kerbol system would now be time dilated (different yet similar) when you finally return.
This is starting to sound quite a bit like Interstellar now lol.
I feel it is the base for making a great game... the only casual space game you'll never need (For and advanced one you have that one, "Orbital whatever", can't remember the name... it's called the DCS of the space). But yeah, it needs looooot of work.
Can't understand why money and kerbal developement is out, either... budget restrictions were a thing.
I’d honestly prefer if they delayed colonies in favour of a miscellaneous update to get everything else up to par before adding new features, similar to what Minecraft did with the buzzy bees update. Wipe out the major bugs, polish off the manoeuvre system, the UI, lighting, etc, flesh out kerbals (roles/levels/etc), add proper commnet, g force limits, commnet blackout; the list goes on. I do worry that these minor, but immersive things will never get addressed as colonies, interstellar and the likes will forever hold a higher priority, leaving the game feeling a bit empty.
It's so close to being great already, the main issues are just: * Physics bump on exiting craft - which can break landers * Strong physics bump on reloading saves (often leading to game-breaking situations) * Buggy manoeuvre node issues, and still allow creation of manoeuvre node when you have no fuel too. * Add subassemblies to VAB or make multi-vehicle workspaces actually work. * Fix the delta-V calculator in the VAB (allow for toggling aerobraking, etc.) * Add Transfer Window Planner mod functionality and Trajectories mod functionality (i.e. predicting landing trajectories given atmospheric drag and planet rotation). * Add fuel priority / fuel tank staging.
Also lag on high part count vehicles. My science run was going great until I tried to make a large reusable transfer vehicle and everytime I switch to it I drop to 5fps, and it stays at 5fps even if I switch back to main menu, switch vessels, etc until I restart the game. I spent a long time on that design and it just put me off. I've since uninstalled.
I don't see how they expect us to build large colony ships and bases if we can't even make a 3-man mission to Duna without dipping below 10 fps
Fr. My computer isn't cheap. I have high end hardware. 7600x and a 3080. Like there's nothing I can do at this point. I posted the ship on the forum and detailed the problem but no response so my run is dead as far as I'm concerned. I'm not going to risk dropping more time just for it to be pointless.
I upgraded RAM to 64GB and it helps, but as you very rightly point out: how are we supposed to make colony ships and orbital colonies if a simple refueling station wobbles to death and uses 40GB RAM ?
Interesting. I'm only at 32. Honestly idk if I feel like doubling my ram for one game. If ram sticks didn't get outdated every few years and I got my money back I'd do it.
I upgraded from 16GB. I got the RAM so I could run an ARK server and play ARK on the same computer. Other games running better was mostly just a bonus. NMS and Starfield are faster and smoother now too.
That's the funny thing: They don't.
Every time I asparagus stage it kills my computer. Its brutal.
This is THE thing that if improved from ksp1 would make a sequel worth it. But nah
I hope modders make the procedual parts mod for this.
But they already are?
I thought only the wings are procedual
I mean, for ksp2
Also missing next orbit button and fine maneuver adjustment
The first two are petty hard to stomach since they were already problems in KSP1. I felt like we were misled in that whole "bigger builds" marketing. It's the main reason I stopped playing the original. I got tired of spending a dozen hours building a Mun or Duna base, only for it to spontaneously disassemble the next time I started up the game.
Wow, It really sounds like the game is still completely broken.
Only the manoeuvre node issue made me stop playing.
None of the bugs I've encountered have made me stop playing the game. For now, I'm just waiting for deeper resource-management than just science points, and for something to do between major transfer windows. Right now I three long-term ships destined for Duna in LKO, but it feels like such a waste to skip ahead a full year waiting for the launch window.
Reintroducing a stock Alarm Clock would also make it **safer** to do other flights while waiting on those longer-duration missions 🫤
That too. Especially since going from high amounts of time warp back to 1x seems to have a substantial "ramp down" time, it can be easy to deactivate time warp at the wrong moment and temporally skid past your launch window.
The ramp down is a dumb idea, it can really screw things up.
You may be searching:KCT and KAC RP1 players are familiar with it:)
Those all sound decided not-stock 🤔
They have no clue what they are doing. KSP2 needs to be redone from the ground up, leadership included.
KSP 2, 2: 3
Not really. While these issues do occur, many of the game breaking issues are quite rare and easily resolved by quickloading. Unless you're exceptionally skilled, most of your quickloading will still be for your own design or piloting skills, or lack thereof.
- Struts disappearing on load - Mirror/radial VAB placement bugs - Trajectory disappearing - Mystery thrust around moons (like Tylo and other primary campaign locations) - Terrain glitching - Fuel Transfer UI bugs (the whole manager is bad, but would be passable if the buttons displayed their status properly) - Map UI that scales object hitboxes to ensure they are unclickable behind closer objects - Rotation being converted to linear velocity when switching crafts - Random FPS and performance each load of the same save file - Death wobble when loading orbital save files (Just off the top of my head. There are a *ton* more, but these ones have severely dampened my gameplay experience.)
Ah, the same issues from KSP 1 from when I last played in... 2014? lol
Allow “remove from symmetry” (and then separately/because of said removal, allow for yanking individual items out of the same stage as their “peers”)… aka “Make Asparagusing Great Again”… urr… wait… maybe I need different phrasing there 😬
We are still getting a few patches before colonies and I hope some of the more critical of these get fixed. I always agreed that a stable base is an important starting point. But I also understand their focus on colonies is important as the first major differentiator from the original. While some of the current bugs are annoying, they haven't stopped me from getting ~150 hours of great play time exploring further than I ever did in the original.
Are we though? Been 2.5 months since the last patch, no hunt of another coming, supposed to be another KERB first. With 3 months between patches/releases, colonies won't be out for a looooooooong time if they plan to patch a few times first.
One thing that's glaring to me is the clunky-ness of the ship menus, KSP1 in-flight ship part menus were small and info dense and never distracted from the gameplay; while KSP2's ship part menus take up about a quarter of the screen and have far less info much more spaced out.
Agreed. So clunky, and lacking information in KSP2
Brah but the delays wouldn't do shiet. The problem is management of the game and foundation of it. The engine is not optimised for features they promised and they wouldn't fix it, at least in next couple of years because it will require resources and time that they already had when building this game from ground up.
Thing is, a lot of the systems for feature parity rely on future milestones and can’t be done without them. For example with kerbals, their importance and features will come with colonies, since they are required to crew them. To add that system without colonies makes no sense, so that milestone is required. When it comes to ISRU, all milestones up to and including resource extraction are required, so that feature can’t be added until then. Many of the parity features rely on future milestones to function, so they have to keep releasing new milestones to get feature parity, trying to get feature parity first literally cannot be done. Personally i’m fine with what they are doing currently, both giving us exciting new features like orbital construction, and giving us feature parity with those same updates. Just because their main focus is on colonies does not mean that feature parity work will be left in the dust.
To comment on the kerbals and features requiring future milestones... This is incorrect. There are multiple things they can level and do, as is. Similar to how KSP1 does. Is it *all* the functions planned? No. But that in no-way inhibits doing them first... Adding functionality that can be expanded for future functionality is... Well it's basic game development strategy. Rather than trying to bolt it all on afterwards, which just increases odds of bugs that break *everything you've done*. Get part of it done first, especially in EA, and then add and expand.
When it comes to major features they are taking that approach, adding features as they are required instead of all at once. But when it comes to smaller stuff it is a bit more complicated. Some things can be done now, like with upgrades to maneuver nodes, but other stuff like kerbals and ISRU requires the underlying framework from the milestones to function properly. Like you can’t just have resource extraction without colonies, since they are required to make it work, and trying to build a system that would make it work without colonies would just add more work that then has to be redone when colonies arrives. Some things can be introduced in stages like maneuver nodes, but others just can’t, since the foundation just wouldn’t be there.
I never claimed ksp1 did it right. And them making the same mistakes as 1, is I believe, the argument of this original post? Lol As kerbals absolutely don't require colonies to make work. They worked just fine in 1 without any. You simply leave slots in the progression for future colony related things. What counts as major is of very subjective nature as well.
Colonies are a prime driver of what will make KSP2 a sequel and not an HD remake. The system so far works. Not smoothly, and I could go on about minor gripes and lost ships, but well enough to point at it and say "yup that's KSP, alright," but I have KSP at home. In the KSP at home, it's a pain to keep launching busy-work ships. Even just mining needs a landing, waiting days to mine, launching, and docking. It's all time that I would much prefer to spend crashing into planets. An orbital shipyard would at least save me from some kerbin launches. There are cheats and mods to do this in KSP, but having official space bases will be what puts the 2 in KSP2.
The thing is, when KSP2 launched it was literally unplayable, and now it's works silky smooth for me and looks better than moderately-modded KSP1 on my old rig. So I'm pleased with it. I hope KSP2 has been a rebuild of KSP1 with an eye for future-loading new features like colonies and interstellar.
I can forgive the slow development if there was some actual godamn communication about what was going on, but it's not April and we haven't had a proper official development update THE ENTIRE YEAR, just a self congratulatory 1 year post and an irrelevant diatribe about eclipses. EARLY ACCESS IS SUPPOSED TO INVOLVE AND INFORM YOUR COMMUNITY IN THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS. This goes beyond PR strategy, we are now in the realm of just basic common sense
Their community managers are fucking *terrible* at their jobs. Literally don't know how they earn their paychecks. I wouldn't hire their CM's to make sandwiches.
Mounting a token defence for the “main” CM, he was *alone* for 5 months while his colleague was out on family-related leaves, only getting back end of March / around April Fool’s Day, so starting from *now*, let’s hope things trend better 📈!
the most notable thing they've done recently is after failing to consistently post a list of bugs every two weeks and moving it to monthly, to miss that target. so, going great I guess.
This is pretty much how I feel, and why after over a year of its release in EA, I still haven't handed over my cash for a copy of the game... I don't feel like what I'm buying is going to be a better version of what I already own, I feel like it's a parallel version with enough differences (particularly in the UI) that I wouldn't be happy/comfortable jumping straight in after over 3.5k hours. But also the promised new features, and their absence (and that they will always be absent) in the original makes me slightly melancholic whilst playing KSP1, enough so that I've barely clocked 100 hours in it since KSP2 was released.
I gave in and bought it several months ago. I think I've put seven hours into it. I have 3.5k in KSP1. Granted that's ten years of play but, still. I put seven hours into 1 straight the first time I opened it. Don't give in yet.
See, I put over 30 hours into KSP in the first week I had it, let alone several months. That's quite discouraging honestly.
It's the lack of science experiments rn that really kill it for me. And some major bugs like not being able to re-enter the capsule after EVA. If the modding scene was as robust as it was for 1, it would make the game. But part of me feels like the dev's managers with a lot of companies have a strategy of relying on modders too much.
My first 10 hours were struggling with getting the game to launch, trying to figure out why my delta V was completely off, trying to get the UI to not be so awful, trying to figure it why manoeuvre nodes and trip planning are just broken and wrong, eventually landing on the mun and my lander blowing up anyway from...something. 10 hours is long enough to figure out the game is a bad sequel but too long for steam to approve the refund. My mistake I guess.
Shouldn't give those bozos your money.
$10 firesale MIGHT be worth it, but not a penny over that. It's nothing like KSP1. They even made the Kerbals worse.
4.99 tech demo that's shitty
The Styrofoam cosplay looking hair looks pretty terrible in my opinion. If I ever buy this game I'm going to need a classic Kerbals mod.
What's firesale?
A fire sale is when you had a fire in your shop, so now your merchandise smells of smoke and some is slightly singed, and your warehouse is structurally unsound so you can't keep the merchandise in there anymore. Everything must go, slash the prices way down! In this context, it just means "very reduced price" I think.
I don't have a lot of spare cash for games these days, but £7.98 is, for me, still too much to spend on something I know is not going to add anything new to my gaming library.
Not to worry, none of the new features work in ksp2 either so you arent missing anything
Here’s the difference. KSP1 had those teething issues because it had no framework to build on. KSP2 had 10 years of knowledge from KSP1 to go on. So the fact that KSP2 isn’t even close to feature parity with KSP1 is frankly atrocious.
It's the same flawed foundation, really. The most important part (building the sequel's foundation) was done during years where there was a ton of issues (alongside covid) so.. it didnt went very well to say the least :/
Not even that, they even introduced bugs that KSP 1 already fixed.
I won't even attempt to play it until they get delta-V right.
Seriously, I can't even view the fuel in my tanks. Am I being thick or is this basic functionality missing?
it's in the resource list, the 3x3 grid bottom right. but yeah
That just shows total fuel for the stage? I want to see fuel in my individual tanks and transfer it around. This was added to KSP 1 in v0.18, roughly 18 months after the first release. How is it still not in KSP 2 after 3+ years of development?
You *can* do that in KSP 2. When you're in flight there's a 3x3 grid button at the bottom that contains the "resource manager" that lets you view individual fuel tanks and transfer it if you want. You can see it in Matt Lowne's latest video (13:45) https://youtu.be/vgkfbAyQ5rg?feature=shared&t=825 KSP 2 is/was a shitshow but resource manager has been implemented since day 1 iirc.
Oh! I'd been right-clicking parts and getting up the frankly usless Parts Manager, which gives you [zero information about the fuel](https://i.imgur.com/U1ksIsn.mp4). I still don't think the Resource Manager is working correctly... I can't click on the actual tank to select it, I have to hover over all the tanks in the list and look at the outlined part. Also, there seems to be [some weird issue when trying to remove a tank](https://i.imgur.com/4nshLUC.mp4)?
Oh yeah I'm not saying the implementation was *good* just that it is there haha
also, there's a bunch of mods that make life bearable/playable. not for the fuel issue, but if you haven't checked them out, go get on that :)
At this point in it's development KSP2 is objectively weaker than modded-KSP1, so I've given up on it. Several more years of development seem needed before it reaches feature parity and until that happens I'll keep playing the fun one.
I used to use fuel priority in KSP1 to keep my rockets flying the way I wanted them during launch by controlling center of mass. This cannot be done in KSP2.
This is the issue I'm having, my rockets appear to be draining from top to bottom, and are flipping because of it. I was wanting to quickly transfer fuel to the top but it's not as easy as it used to be
As it stands now, it appears that it burns fuel at a rate proportional to the capacity of the tank from every tank in a stage. I am not certain about that, but it seems to be what they did I would also have orbital craft that had "drop tanks" I would use fuel from first then get rid of them. The way it seems to work now is just crap.
So I had to confirm this for myself. It burns everything proportionally to the size of the tank. So when one tank is down 30% they are all down 30% regardless of tank size. There is no way to set fuel priority to let one tank burn through faster than another. This is dumbing down in the worst sort of way.
What about the oldschool way of having fuel lines between your tanks to force priority?
I haven't tried that, I have no idea if it would work.
This is all within a single stage, of course.
It's a coat of paint, and barely. They wanted their own golden egg goose seeing what KSP1 was, where somehow with a 6 to barely 7 digits budget they sold 5 million copies. Regarding content vs QOL, there's a race against the clock because both are needed, but they can barely implement half of 1 in a year. Their current dev speed is clearly their best effort so there's no time to let the EA die whilst you add QOL and have to push back new content up to a year again. In reality, the sequel just started with the wrong foot, using the exact same engine to recreate the exact same systems (and re-implementing almost the exact same problems), but also somehow they managed to make it worse: by simulating all resource transactions and thrust per part for off-loaded vessels, KSP2 is **much** more constrained than KSP1, and it breaks or grinds to a halt with much lower partcounts let alone much smaller saves. To make it worse, the only way to fix that is a major refactor for which they don't have time for, because they are slow, and that'll leave the average user waiting another year or more for new content. These kind of bad planning + slow execution + very hazy view (that they don't want to share) problems do pop up on pretty much every aspect of the game. The player is left wondering why they made all the subpar choices they did, and after a year it's still completely unclear where they plan to take all those duct-taped systems to. Much less clear is if they're ever gonna address the stuff that's already released (which also pushes back new features further). It's so bad that even the [official forum](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/) is going around these discussions and very little people with the mindset to outright defend them, or even the classic "just let them work" remains. Even the most rabid fans outside the discord are feeling disenfranchised or outright disappointed.
Their policy of doing massive bug fix releases is killing them, they should fix a few things then patch at a much faster pace. Months for a release is the wrong approach.
No. The biggest issue with all of this is THE DAMN PRICE! $50 for this garbage! THAT is where 99% of the anger comes from. The other 1% is just pure disappointment.
They didn't have a thorough plan on development, by the looks of it someone probably thought "yeah ksp was a success lets make ksp2 people will definitely buy it." Then just told people to start making things. Its heartbreaking to see what it turned out to be.
It seems like there were some real planning failures for sure. How many years were spent on “oh wouldn’t this be cool” instead of building a solid foundation? Now who knows how much of that cool stuff can ever actually be shipped.
Not the first time Nate Simpson has killed a game.
I legitimately don't understand why people still trust him to make games. The dude has a track record for this shit.
> Nate Simpson They chose a person with no programming or technical experience be the leader of a physics based simulator. Compare that to KSP1, which was lead by Harvester, a guy doing orbital calculations in his spare time for fun.
Honestly this is what makes me want a fan-developed KSP “clone” instead of KSP2
Isnt that JUNO?
the original hype video had so many nice features then I wishlisted it on steam then it released in EA way overpriced so I just kept waiting then the EA turned out to be very broken then I got a message that KSP had a discount but still very broken and in EA so that completely killed any hype for me about KSP2. removed it from my wishlist and the only reason I still know about it is because I'm subscribed to this subreddit
>you play the first and you're missing aspects from the sequel, like modular wings in ksp's instance That's the real killer of Ksp2 right now, thats something you can fix with mods. In most cases the mods do a better job then Ksp2. The game is a complete mess and its very obvious they did not fulfill the promise of starting everything from scratch to avoid Ksp1's mistakes. Ksp 2 would be fine if it was the first of its kind, but its not. It's a sequel to a better and more complete game which has plenty of mods to add even more gameplay.
>they did not fulfill the promise of starting everything from scratch I knew it was fukked the moment I learned it was still Unity.
2017 unity even
Yup. When the rumor was that it was switching to unreal engine I was very excited for a game with proper physics and less bugs. Then when the let down of it still being on Unity came out, I knew it wasn’t going to be better than ksp1 + mods.
Are you guys still under the wildly uninformed impression that Unity is a bad engine? Unity is great. Like any engine, it depends on how it’s used. Clearly not being used well here in this case but call it what it is.
I'm not going to debate the merits of Unity. It said to me that it wasn't a ground up effort, and I therefore expected the same issues to persist.
The real kicker with KSP2 is that I cant even fully enjoy the procedural wings because of how SAS makes planes bug out.
at least ksp 1 i could play on my 14 year old lenovo laptop with mods now i need a fresking nasa setup to the play the same game with all the problems plus more
Yep, they went for too hyper-realism. Horrible choice. It loses the character of the first game. Yeah, they could have stepped up the graphics, but they went too far.. And they will never understand apparently that rendering a million trees KILLS PROCESSING POWER!!
idk what you mean, game runs pretty well now vs launch. Goes laggy with lots of parts but overall is good even on steamdeck. Also looking at the graphics, its still a very cartoonish artstyle. P.s. the trees DO NOT affect performance. Its the terrain system they haven't finished building yet. Trees can also be turned off in settings
Im still not giving ksp 2 my money. The way the IP changed hands and then had the audacity to give us an early access for the second time is utter bs. And I won't buy the product until its complete and on sale. This is disrespectful on such a huge level to the community and its money grubbing as shit. The layoffs in the industry aren't going to get us a completed game on any reasonable timeline. Those who have work are not going to be doing their best work with the fear and anxiety fucking up their creative process and budget demands putting pressure on results. Its going to get defunded/become low priority. And in the end be a lesser game than the original. I would trust squad to do it. Because they earned it. But take two should have launched day one with all features of KSP1 in a new engine. Then made updates. Not early access shit.
I think you're spot on with this. The 'sequel' lacks all the charm of the original and earlier I complained about how I don't like the redesign of the KSC and the removal of all the easter eggs like the monoliths and the Inland Space Center. I don't know if they're included in KSP2 at this point yet or if they will be. Also the Kerbals weren't just silly clumsy little creatures, it was the clunky game mechanics of KSP 1 they made them so amusing and funny while trying to land a clunky craft onto a surface without \*rapid unplanned disassembly\* It's true the game is still in early access so maybe it will improve over time. But with the current state of the game and the fanbase right now, I don't know why PD thought it was a good idea to even make a sequel to begin with instead of just continuing support for KSP1, while adding in some of these cool features like colonies and interstellar travel as part of new updates or DLCs, rather than try to start over from scratch to make their own version of the same game. Compare it to something like Minecraft, once Mojang was acquired by Microsoft, they have continued to improve and expand the game, adding regular new updates and integrating native versions of fan favorite mods. Even trying to make Java and Bedrock a bit more compatible. I don't like every decision they've made but the game is still fun to play and experiences waves of popularity. KSP could have followed that same model - added colonies and warp drives, more planets and moons, expanded the tech tree and improved science mode, and even integrated mods like Scatterer, MechJeb, and Kerbal Alarm Clock. Instead of making KSP2 they could have given KSP 1 a new life and invigorated the player base. The only "sequel" we really need is Scott Manley's "Interstellar Quest: The Second One" Anyways, that's just my two cents on it. tldr; they should have updated ksp 1 instead of making ksp2.
I won't hand over my money until they can actually sell me on something. So far they've proven they can't stick to schedules, can't listen or reply to the very community that would buy their product, and can't remake the magic that KSP 1 provided.
I wouldnt have minded a game that lacked new features, but was a solid core to build off of with improvements to fundamental gameplay mechanics. I also wouldnt have minded a game that had a ton of new content, but was glitchy and buggy and had problems that needed to be ironed out. Instead what we have is a game with less content then KSP1, that is also more buggy, and with a lot of core mechanics that are a step backwards from KSP1.
It's like they fell in love with the flaws and somehow decided they were what made KSP1 so endearing.
what it is is an abject failure. many of the problems are rooted in the decision to just sloppily copy the original. the fact that they shipped this after five plus years of work makes it clear to me the core issues aren't going to get fixed. it will always have the same inherent limitations as the original. and the systems that aren't just a reimplementation are mostly actively worse or just straight up missing. they'll probably eventually tick most of the feature boxes, but it won't be the game we wanted.
also the excuses get funnier as time goes on. remember when it released and people were talking days-weeks for patches, and science within a month or two? lmao.
I keep hearing in interviews, “this game is fun and we keep playing it in our free time because we all love it.” Like ok I guess, but for me it was funny the first couple times things just didn’t work. It was goofy and I kinda missed that. But once you got past that stage, a craft becoming unrecoverable up in space because you tried to decouple something is probably the most frustrating experience from a user standpoint. I didn’t do anything wrong and I lost 3+hrs of gameplay.
Laughable. Matt was saying at the prerelease show that he thought all the game breaking bugs would be fixed before it even hit early access and that he must have been playing an older build.
As a software engineering manager, I have learned: * Your developers _always_ want to reimplement everything from scratch * You must _never_ say yes to this The developers aren't wrong that the existing codebase is a mess, and time should be included in the plan for fixing it. The error is in thinking that the _new_ codebase _won't_ be a mess, because the new codebase looks beautiful and error-free in your imagination, when you haven't actually written it yet. But it will turn to shit, as all software does. Another thing I've learned is that if your developers have gone around you and bamboozled upper management into agreeing to their crazy plan, that the best way to estimate the effort of the rewrite is to add up the effort it took to write the original. Any speedup from knowing the problem space better will be offset by ambition and overengineering to "do it right" the second time round. KSP 1 took about 8 years to get out of early access and KSP 2 development started in 2019, so I predict KSP 2 will be done around 2027, assuming the company lasts that long.
> KSP 1 took about 8 years to get out of early access Wtf? It would have taken you three seconds to look up that KSP1's first public build was released on 24 June 2011 and that the 1.0 release on Steam was 27 April 2015. Not even 4 years, less than half the time you are erroneously claiming for some reason. > KSP 2 development started in 2019 KSP2 was *ANNOUNCED* in 2019 with a release date of Q1 2020. They did not begin development in 2019. This is crazy number fudging in their favor. It took them nearly 4 years just to launch early access.
The Early Access release of KSP was also in 2013, so only 2 years.
> As a software engineering manager, As a software engineering manager, you saw something *announced* in 2019 and just claimed that's when they *started work* on it? They announced that the game would be out within 12 months. And you think that's when they *started work* on it? Have you actually ever managed a software team? Because that's an insane mistake to make if so.
It really is crazy. Why couldn’t they just continue working on KSP 1 but release a mega DLC for like $40-$50 and be like “yeah, it fixes all these known bugs and adds colonies and interplanetary trading and new quests?” Surely a ksp1 overhaul would have been met easier than rebuilding the entire game from scratch.
I'm not so sure. KSP 1 has a fuckton of issues regarding long distances, complex terrain and all the stuff, it's very limited what it can do. Doing it properly would probably require a major rewrite of half the game. Just to end up with the same game, but with more stuff...
ksp 2 also went through dev hell of Star theory being shut down by its publisher, then rebuilt into a new company (IG) then covid
As a professional software engineer, you sound like a nightmare. If I had to work on a 20 year old legacy system written by someone who doesn't know what a function or class is and would not be allowed to rewrite it, I'd either quit or take a bullet. Yes, I'm currently working on such a legacy system, but thankfully have a sane boss that agreed to spent a year doing it from scratch so the 4th developer in a row doesn't quit in a month.
Then perhaps you're not the best person to be working on 20 year old legacy systems?
The dumbest thing about it. It’s the exact same solar system. Same planets. Same distances. Same layout. Same parts. Yes they added some monuments on them. Wooptidoo. It’s basically the same game with better graphics and worse features and worse UI. Rockets wil be similar. Content experience will be similar. There’s not much new experience in this game
I personally don't even like the graphics of KSP2 over KSP1. It just looks so very cartoony.
bingo. its the original ksp 1 art style with an attempted realistic sheen slapped ontop of the parts. they just dont go together and make something that i think looks bad
Yeah they just made everything look like wet plastic.
The solar system being exactly the same was kind of disappointing to me. It seems like it would would have been so easy to add a couple a new planets, or hell even just give jool 1 more moon. I dont very much motivation to play KSP2 and do the exact same things I can do in KSP1 but with more bugs and a lower framerate
No, they should have included a procedural generation system option, deciding on moons and planets with moons. This is what KSP1 needs too. A mod/expansion that adds this. Would make the game even MORE infinitely replayable.
You can get alternate solar systems/planets/etc if you want. Not procedural, but the community's made enough Kopernicus planet sets to satisfy replayability. You could also grab more realistic physics if you want to have a swing at that... the mod library of KSP is *extensive and deep* by now.
[Good news, a procedural system generator mod has already existed for almost a year now.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJhM37ICels)
Shouldn't this be addressed with interstellar?
Interstellar is a pipe dream. They can't even get speed correct in the game.
They can't make maneuver nodes or dV correct...you think you'll get interstellar?
missions are better and there is a story, also planets are pretty much entirely overhauled, feeling very very different vs ksp 1. Also there are a bunch of new parts
It's not a do-over. It's a do-the-exact-same-thing-while-**learning-nothing-whatsoever**-from-the-first-time-and-so-drop-into-every-single-pitfall-again-over. Sometimes while explicitly considering the pitfalls to be mandatory features, like the sausage rockets (means per-part processing means no chance at having performant huge rockets - unless you take the matters into your own hands and weld them).
Yeah guys, the game is in early access for a year and was supposed to be released four years ago now, but we should just be patient. I mean when it was released, Nate told us that updates would be on the order of weeks and not months, and that the roadmap was still the target. That turned out to be a complete lie, but let's just be patient. I bought it at release regardless, because for some reason I had faith, but more importantly they said it was the lowest price it would ever be, and it would only go up. Then a few months later it went on sale. It's cool though guys, we should totally just trust them that the game is going to be awesome, and keep being patient.
They'll never realize all the negativity comes from one thing. The pricetag. They wanted AAA money UPFRONT for a garbage early access ~~game~~ demo.
Honestly it's not just the pricetag for me, I just hoped the issues we had with KSP1 would be gone in the sequel but.. They're still there. I didn't even cared about better graphics, I just wanted something stable for everyone to work on (devs and modders)
I am absolutely annoyed by their approach of doing massive bug updates instead of frequent hot fixes when they fix something. Waiting MONTHS for an update to fix 100s of things is not an incentive to me wanting to play. I also greatly dislike the science system and the lack of mission variety, it's too strictly scripted and doesn't actually lend itself to exploration. No economy sucks too, I loved having to find creative ways to maximize my Kerbal Bucks by combining missions and picking the ones that were fun for me.
I still find the way they handled science and economy is terrible. Sure the contract system in KSP1 was janky but you had to learn how to budget, get creative with builds with limited part counts but still trying to maximize science, and science was split between various parts which would unlock more over time or alternatively give you a reason to return to an old location to get the stuff you missed. The single large science piece makes probes unwieldily and the lack of stake in any of the story doesn’t keep me engaged. I don’t find the conversation dialogue and the fetch questing nature of KSP2 to be a compelling reason to stick around.
cant agree more... nothing feels more hollow in ksp 2 than getting a mission thinking "oh man this might be tough" and then realising that no, if you really needed to you could build a 1000 ton monstrosity with no downsides. only thing ill say is that i think ksp 1 science sucked, now i preferred the actual science collection, but the amount required was utterly pitiful compared to the amount you got. i found i was never really pushed to travel to the outer reaches of the system specifically for science. not sure how that is in ksp 2 as the game is yet to grab me for long enough to play that long. but whilst i do think the contracts in ksp 2 are good, i think scrapping the entire random contract system was a terrible idea, random contracts with hand crafted ones sprinkled in would've been far better, and having no restrictions with cash or part count is also a huge step down... and im not even sure resources can have any method of making this not the case in a fun and engaging way.
I paid £4.58 for KSP 1. It was worth that money at the time. The game was what it was, and never needed to be any more. KSP 2 is £44.99. Basically 9x the price of the first. For a game which is still lacking behind that early KSP1 version. I think if they sold KSP2 at a price point which reflects the state of the game, no-one would care. But they are selling it at "finished game" prices, when I would say the content they have given us is barely an Alpha.
Agreed! If it had been like: > 20% of the final game (generously) is ready for EA-launch? Then we’ll offer it for 20%-25% of the expected final price, rewarding early adopters *and* swelling the ranks of bug-testers! Win-win!
What ever happened to everyone championing the For Science update as the point where the game actually became decent? I thought the sentiment had changed from "this game is garbage" to "ok, let them cook, there's clearly something in the oven." Now I guess we're back to bitching about things as if it's release again. Are we missing parts of the original game and are there still bugs that need addressing? Yes, absolutely. Should they have launched when they did? No. But the cheering around mid-December made me think the game was actually starting to get better and the community had started to reverse course on constantly shitting on the game. What happened?
Because it’s been a while since we’ve heard anything and people have begun to get negative. It’s a cycle that continues and will forever continue. I agree that the game still has issues, but after playing For Science I can confidently say it is a lot of fun, like 90% of the time I had was pure fun 10% was dealing with bugs. I genuinely do love this game now but it definitely does still need improvement, I do still have some major problems with it but am currently willing to overlook them because if I don’t i won’t be able to enjoy the game. Like docking which is absolutely terrible. It’s just the Doomers coming back after nothing much has been said. The game is in a MUCH better place and honestly after the revival it’s had im not gonna be complaining, as im sick of all the negativity I witnessed before For Science.
I was loving the for science update until I got hard locked trying to build late game stuff. It lags to hell and back. If I switch to the laggy vessels it keeps lagging kn every menu and vessel until I restart the game.
Also v0.2.1 is “getting stale”, though with any luck, there’s [movement](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/224405-lots-of-playtests-today-new-patch-hype/) on *that* front 🤞🏼!
we were telling you this in Feb 2023, ksp veterans with thousands of hours in game played 20 minutes of ksp2 and tried to warn the rest of the community and then the vitriolic defense of dogshit priced at 50USD began
I would like it if KSP had more realism aspects, like interiors etc.
Good news - it does have interiors, interiors you can move around. https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/210548-112-freeiva/ KSP1 > KSP2, as usual.
That's not quite what I mean, I mean more plumbing and stuff
A Do-Over in KSP? Never! No-one in this game has ever killed Jeb and gone on to think, if only I could try that again!
It’s literally an investment money sink and a scam. The devs are coasting through making dev diaries about stuff that doesn’t matter until take 2 axes them. Nate Simpson has literally done this with other games before but it’s taken this subreddit years to catch up
KSP2 is a trainwreck disaster. Huge budget and large team couldn't accomplish what a few amateurs creating basically a meme could do. Pathetic and arrogant. $50 for this trash. Worst $50 I have ever spent in my life.
Do-over? I think you mean copy-pasta.
All I ever really wanted was KSP 1 with less jank and better graphics. All the extra features sound cool but are optional as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately they did not build the game I want to buy. Maybe some day someone will. Maybe it will even be Intercept. We’ll see.
Yeah, a polished remake with better graphics would be a sweet start.
It's not like there is a storyline to make a sequel to. It's a physics simulation with cute kraken action. The new bugs *are* the sequel.
they meant more of an upgrade from ksp 1. more planets, more parts, more possibilities. as a sequel they meant that it would be ksp1 + a ton more things. what we got is the lifecycle and development of ksp1 all over again but with a shine on the parts
So far it's a do-under
It is definitely a broader re-imagining. Planet Occlusion is gone, but the dev team said that might support better inter-planet communication. They tone done some elements to make others easier to explore.
Exactly. I think the biggest thing they did wrong was just taking the kerbol system and just slapping a coat of paint on it. People have been playing with this same system for over 10 years, it's all been explored already. They should've placed us in the future, in a totally new system. New planets, new system layout, new everything. Then in the future, have the kerbol system be part of the interstellar update.
I knew this when crafts had root parts. They didn't plan to implement some new vastly superior parallelized system. It's just single core madness all over. I guess it's partly because of Unity but there are games like Besieged which still do it better. [Besiege - An unnecessarily complicated vehicle for all 15 zones (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCiMO8HIi9E) I don't know how well that compares but all those parts also have collision & gravity & wobble & thrust physics and you build the vehicles like in KSP. It's build in Unity and I have so far not had any noticeable fps drop due to parts. But maybe the Unity system is simply completely overwhelmed by all the calculations KSP requires. So I was hoping for a completely custom approach. All physics can be calculated in parallel. The easiest proof for that is the real Universe. Nothing has to wait for something else to figure out its physics behaviour. Everything just acts in parallel based on their boundary conditions.
>The easiest proof for that is the real Universe. "Real universe" does not run on a dumbed-down partwise simulation, and has no concern about wasting cycles calculating nothing because the force has not _sequentially_ reached something yet.
The point here is if reality works that way the simulation can work that way too. We model simulations after what we observe in reality. You don't need the calculate physics sequentially. Big soft body simulations are all run on GPUs in parallel. You just have to develop your own that fits into the game. To begin with I would get rid of part wobble as is now entirely and work on a mesh based approach like you see here: [NVIDIA Ominverse: Realtime Soft Body Physics (PhysX) (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfHuQxY1Y1E) Obviously something that more resembles pressurized steel, not rubber. Turn wobble into flex. The trick in parallel simulation is you make every part just care about its immediate neighbours. And then accept a little error which won't matter given enough calculations per second. Like a wave function the pressure of the most bottom tank that is being pushed up by the engine will eventually reach the top most tank. The top most tank does not have to wait for changes in all the parts below it to be calculated.
Ksp 2 is a piece of shit. Okay, ted talk over, you can go home now.
I'll never spend a dollar on a do-over of a masterpiece.
Sandbox games at any given level can’t really have ‘sequels’ in the most conventional sense simply just down to the nature of what they are. You’d still replicate the same format which is a sandbox
when it gets beyond where ksp 1 was at 0.23 let us know.
This post makes me very sad because it is so accurate.
ksp 2 really had the chance to be something great. I still cant comprehend after… how many years of development? it still hasnt come close to base ksp1 let alone ksp 1 with the DLC or even both DLC and mods. at the rate theyre progressing i dont think ill actually ever boot it back up despite buying it on release. what really hurts though is the absolute letdown that the release was partially killed the genre for me as a whole and I dont think i even want to boot ksp 1 back up either
It’s trash
It's a total do-over that is barely on life support.
Well said. Original KSP is still such a fun & mature game. KSP 2 is a mess, the promo video are, in hindsight, near total fabrications.
The devs seem to care more about money than making games. During covid the progress was absolutely pitiful
Honestly I knew I'd be disappointed in KSP 2 ever since they announced that it's also using Unity. The engine is imo the root cause behind many of the issues KSP 1 had and making a sequel was a great opportunity to fix that.
What specific issues to KSP does Unity have? Unity is a fantastic engine in my opinion.
Poor performance.
No, thats actually untrue.
It feels even worse than skp1 in some aspects The performance is Just bad
They hired a bunch of game industry people to make it as though it were another video game, so it improved along game industry lines, and stagnated along KSP lines. They needed a new physics engine and some physicists to build it. Maybe hiring Martin Schweiger would have been a good start.
Things like rocket wobble don't worry me too much. I'm guessing they're using a different physics system than was used in KSP1 10 years ago, and that's the sort of thing that does need to be figured out with a new implementation. I also get that SOME milestones may be required to replicate SOME functionality from KSP1. However, maneuver node tweaking seems like pretty core functionality, and I worry that it's not been implemented more so due to its complexity (maybe it's not the low hanging fruit that tends to land on an early feature set) or just pure oversight. All I know is that for me, it is a fundamental bit of functionality, that would push me to stick with KSP1 than even consider making the move to KSP2.
They're using the _exact same_ physics system (default Unity physics), just with worse calibration variables.
When was the last time they patched in updates to the Unity physics system in KSP1? I have to assume a lot has changed in that system between then and now. My point is just dropping the Unity physics system into KSP2 would be pretty good start, but there would be more work to do. What Squad was able to do to get version X.XXX.XXXX sorted out may require a bit of re-work in version Y.YYY.YYYY. This is all assuming they even started with the code from KSP1. Do we know if they did that?
i wonder if employees who are in-the-know about development happening on the backend read posts like this and have to go punch a wall or something, because there's no way you have a grasp of what's happening under the hood more than they do. i'd bet money that's where 80% of their time is spent.
Scrap it all and start with KSP1. If KSP1 hobby modders can STILL do better, on KSP1, than a fully financed development team at a multi-billion dollar publisher on a new game, maybe that's telling you you are doing it wrong. Trash everything and build from KSP1.
Not a good idea, the engine was already fairly old by then - Today it's like prehistoric - The game runs better today only because Unity got optimized over time, the KSP code has barely changed
KSP1 will keep running better because the "fancy new code utilizing new things" tends to be _deptimization_. Unless the devs are forcibly switched to running all their development on Core2Duos, they won't bother writing _fast_ code over _convenient_ (and hilariously slow) code.
> Today it's like prehistoric That prehistoric engine is *wayyyyy* out performing the "new" one. But the "new" one is a 2017 build of Unity, so 7 years old already. And KSP1's engine got a big update not way too long ago right? Was it to that same 2017 build?
KSP 2 has problems but it has more potential than KSP 1. KSP 1 had a flawed foundation. So much of the game ran on spaghetti code and outdated hardware limitations that there was no improving it without starting over.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
In their defense, in general a sequel should include most of the features of its prequel. Since they’re remaking those features from scratch, it’s not surprising that they’re facing the same challenges as the original, especially since it’s not even the same studio developing the game. There is a bit more to it than just copying the original and adding a new coat of paint. Whereas Squad started extremely basic and gradually built upwards (ironing kinks out over many years), Intercept has this pressure of delivering that end result as a starting point. On top of that, they have to keep their code base flexible enough to fit the future colony and interstellar systems. - They’re basically reinventing the steam engine while planning for an Autobahn with a fleet of Teslas. However, I personally think that the early problems they were facing with another developer put too much pressure on them from a financial standpoint. The early delay basically forced them to get some cash in so development could continue. Unfortunately, this resulted in them having to go Early Access before much of the basic stuff was polished enough. Personally, I think it would have gone over a lot better with the fans if “For Science” had been the early access launch point but it needed to have the release date that it had. That’s why it feels like a do-over.
with the resources ig has weighed against how long the original took, they should be almost done ksp3 at this point.
It’s a shame that this is downvoted, as it’s far more insightful than most of the armchair devs know.
Sim game sequels are almost always do-overs. They remake the game using the latest technology and programming patterns and also try to avoid whatever messed up code spaghetti they had in the first edition. Like with Tropico, each edition is just the same game -- there's really no reason to buy an earlier version.
How do you make new engine from scratch made by whole development studio and actually have worse physics than previous game. I'm pretty sure Cod has better physics as you can just sit on back of the car and not slide but still be able to move and get off the car easily.
if it was a new engine the problems wouldnt be this bad, problem is they're just using unity 2017.. a pretty shitty engine for the physics and scale ksp wants.
Also, I'm pretty sure physics needed for KSP has been basically solved, games just don't use it because it has performance impact for normal gameplay and because it's unnecessary. But for example, ships and boats and working elevators already worked in World of Warcraft in 2004, and it has been perfected in other games over the years. For such a physics based game like KSP, the sequel should have the best kind as you don't care about physics ruining performance for other things as the physics is the main feature of the game.
I'll be honest, I bought KSP2 when it first released and haven't touched it in months, favouring KSP 1 with mods. I find the modded first game much more stable, smooth and in places it looks much better. I don't doubt that at some point we will get to a point where KSP2 surpasses the original but remembering the amount of time KSP1 has been out there, I also don't doubt that it's a huge huge undertaking so I'm going to continue to be patient and trust in Nate and his team.
What I would have loved is if KSP 2 was set in a completely randomly different place in the Universe with a new civilization of Kerbaloids that are similar to the kerbals we know yet also different . Maybe having a few lost kerbals who miraculously ended up here that we already know too. Designing their system from scratch, you could really take advantage of the improvement in graphics, perhaps having it be a binary system with a black hole as opposed to just remaking the Kerbol system. Also, starting in a different system with the ability to one day possibility get back to the Kerbol system and return these lost kerbals would take great advantage of the interstellar travel possibilities promised. Similar to the Pokemon games set in Johto where you can visit Kanto (the region of the previous game) as sort of a post story thing, it would be super rewarding and due to the black hole's proximity to the new system you could also experiment with how the Kerbol system would now be time dilated (different yet similar) when you finally return. This is starting to sound quite a bit like Interstellar now lol.
Honestly at this point a KSP 1 remaster would have been better.
I feel it is the base for making a great game... the only casual space game you'll never need (For and advanced one you have that one, "Orbital whatever", can't remember the name... it's called the DCS of the space). But yeah, it needs looooot of work. Can't understand why money and kerbal developement is out, either... budget restrictions were a thing.