15 ms·

Kerbal Space Program 2

661 points by xucheng 7y ago

sarcasmatwork 7y ago
Looks fun, anyone play previous versions? The trailer was hilarious without sound. Watching guy fall out landing module, or they wreck their entire space ship.
- pinewurst 7y ago
  It's a great game - played the original KSP since early beta.
- BitwiseFool 7y ago
  Highly recommend picking up a copy. It's the most rewarding game I have ever played.
  - opsiprogram 7y ago
    Seriously!!! I literally have told so many people this and they just think I'm insane but I love this game!!
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Absolutely. Just landing on the mun is one of those moment you never forget. And then the rescue mission to get the first lander from the mun. And then the rescue mission for the rescue mission.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      And then you pronounce the resulting pile of wreckage the first Mun colony, and set sights on Minmus, which is somewhat more forgiving.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        Now I want to build a giant tangle of lander modules with solar cells and batteries attached and crash it into the Mun to see how many viable "colonies" I can create at once.
      - DuskStar 7y ago
        And then, eventually, you'll have done everything in the game... And then you'll install RSS+RP-0 [0] and struggle to get back into orbit again. The mods add a ton of depth beyond what the base game can provide. For those curious, RSS stands for Real Solar System - replacing the Kerbol system with ours. This is a large difficulty ramp, since things in our solar system are far larger than those in Kerbol, so even with the same surface gravities delta v requirements end up much higher. (For instance, ~2.7km/s is enough to hit orbit on Kerbin if flown properly, while 9.5km/s is more common on Earth) To partially compensate for this you have RP-0, a modpack that (among other things) replaces all the engines, fuels, tanks and other parts with their real life counterparts, making the higher delta v requirements actually achievable. (And also adding a ton of complications, such as life support, communications delay, cryogenic fuel boil off, limited restarts, fuel ullage, and more!) 0: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0 https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0
- Hates_ 7y ago
  Yes. I found it extremely challenging while managing to remain fun and educational.
- gnulinux 7y ago
  It's a pretty good game with a very realistic physics simulator. They simulate everything from orbital mechanics to aerodynamics. There is a planet in the "solar" system with an atmosphere close to Earth's (Kerbin) so you can go there with a gigantic rocket, bring your airplane and fly in a different planets atmosphere. Pretty amazing.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    I wouldn’t call it very realistic. The aero modeling is quite hacks/primitive and even the gravity is rather simplify... afaict they only calculate to the dominant object in the sphere of influence so you don’t get Lagrange points, for instance. I mean, it’s playable, certainly but it’s realistic in the at something like Forza is Realistic. So, sorta, but no.
    - wolfgke 7y ago
      > I wouldn’t call it very realistic. The aero modeling is quite hacks/primitive and even the gravity is rather simplify... afaict they only calculate to the dominant object in the sphere of influence so you don’t get Lagrange points, for instance. Perhaps this will change with KSP 2?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Correct. Air and gravity models in KSP are simple (though aerodynamics has been improved in the past years). Gravity simulation is essentially planet vs. active vessel, everything else is "on rails" and non-interacting. That means no Lagrange points, no sun-synchronous orbits, no need for station keeping. However, mods come to the rescue. For flight, you have Ferram Aerospace Research, which gives you much more realistic (and much more punishing) aerodynamics, including all the interesting supersonic effects. For space, you have Principia, which introduces n-body physics, with all the Fun coming from it.
      - zaarn 7y ago
        As counterbalanced to FAR, there is NEAR, which is FAR but the supersonic flight behaves as if it was subsonic, so it makes things a bit easier.
- celeritascelery 7y ago
  > The trailer was hilarious without sound. There was no foley, so it was just as funny with sound.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  I've been playing it semi-regularly since 2012. I can't recommend it enough.
- joveian 7y ago
  To counter the glowing reviews others have left, it really depends what you want out of it and if you install mods or not (and if you do if all the mods you want work together). I don't use mods and want a more relaxing gamelike experience than a lot of folks here (but with lots of building and little micromanagment or random limitations just for difficulty) and it is meh in my opinion, although there aren't a lot of alternatives that are available DRM free and in some ways it is better than the alternatives. Look at actual gameplay, these trailers are useless for evaulating it as a game. Kerbals falling off the rocket is mildly amusing but they are mostly there to fly the rockets and don't really do much or have much to interact with. If they add ways to build stuff to interact with when you go somewhere (it sounds like they are) that would be nice. There is a quite a bit of fun in building and launching a rocket. The learning curve is very steep but can be its own challenge if you like that kind of thing (I do). It takes quite a long time to do anything. Lots of people have posted interesting stuff that they built if you get frustrated and want inspiration. The wiki [0] has extensive documentation (except for the recent Breaking Ground extension so far) although the game much less so. Look at threads of the month in the Announcements forum for some amazing stuff people do with KSP [1] (seems like it would take an unreasonable amount of time to do any of that). [0] https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Main_Page [1] https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/11-announcements/ https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/11-ann... Each version has lots of bugs [2] and some fundamental stuff was only implemented recently or not at all. DeltaV estimation and accurate maneuver planning are two things that only appeared about a year ago and are huge improvements. There is still no quick base game way to check the center of gravity of a plane with empty fuel tanks, although it won't fly well after a while if that is much different from the full center of gravity and you might not find out for a half hour or more since it takes forever to get anywhere and it is hard to balance a plane well enough to be able to use time warp. There are a few auto direction holding options if you have the right tech but nothing to keep your plane wings level with the ground or fly holding altitude. You can recover the parts of rockets that you land but you can't recover anything you separate before getting your main craft in orbit so you can switch focus to the debris (the huge fuel tanks that some people complain about in other comments are for those of us who want to recover everything and not leave space junk). [2] https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues I'd recommend both of the extensions if you are going to try it (although maybe try the base game first to make sure you minimally like it), particularly Breaking Ground that adds some minimal automation ability and the ability to get science by crashing stuff in to a planet or moon (this has bugs, although it should be fixed shortly). In career mode it takes forever to unlock all the science and almost none of it is at all related to building rockets, it is just doing the same few trivial things in a variety of locations. Once you do get somewhere, on your home planet or elsewhere, there isn't really anything there, even with Breaking Ground that does improve it a bit. It used to be all terrain scatters (tree, rock, etc. looking stuff that you can go right through) and hills, now there seem to be two things you can interact with (also rock and tree looking things) that are the same all over a planet. So much of the fun is in the building and making up your own stories as you test a design. Or you can make stations and visit your stations. I've played quite a few games due to poor health. Better in many ways IMO are Infinifactory (other than the horrible story), RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (and 1 and 2 for that matter, with OpenRCT2 a nice requires-the-original-game upgrade mostly to be able to use higher resolution), and SimCity 3000 (unfortunately the GOG version crashes randomly after a few hours). Tropico (any version) and Surviving Mars also but they do the mandatory micromanagement and random limitations thing that I don't like (Surviving Mars more so but it has some good ideas too, like a number of camera options for taking in game photos). Theme Hospital (difficulty focused) and Banished (fairly building focused once you figure out the mechanics, although not that many layout options) are much simpler games but have some advantages from the game aspect and at least some building (Project Hospital looks nice and has more building but still has game breaking bugs nine months after release). Spore is also worth a mention; the building is mostly cosmetic and the gameplay has a bunch of issues, but it is still one of the few others that have a build and fly a space ship aspect (only with no atmosphere at all :/). OpenTTD (fully open source) and Cities in Motion focus on transportation building and are limited but decent for what they are. Widelands and Unknown Horizons are also fully open source builder clone games that are IMO improvments over the games that inspired them, Settlers II and the Anno series, although still not all that great. I hear Planet Coaster is good but it isn't avilable DRM free. There are a few more DRM free options but I get the impression they are difficulty focused rather than building focused.
eropple 7y ago
I was pretty bummed to hear about Squad doing their people dirty; the company seemed to consistently underpay and burn out their developers. Have they improved? (With cites?)
- philipov 7y ago
  Squad is not developing this game.
albertzeyer 7y ago
Last time I read about KSP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16581913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16581913), there was lots of criticism about the developers, or their working conditions. It sounded so bad that this was one of the reasons for me to not buy it. Has this improved?
- enragedcacti 7y ago
  It was purchased by Take-Two so the developers are probably only treated as badly as normal game devs now. https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/161355-ksp-acquired-by-take-two-interactive/ https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/161355...
- philipov 7y ago
  Squad is not developing this game.
shostack 7y ago
Is KSP1 any fun for casual gamers with only an hour or two and a joystick? Will I have to read up on lots of math and orbital mechanics to get anywhere in it?
- godtoldmetodoit 7y ago
  Can definitely just pick it up and go, no need for a joystick. Just slap some boosters together and have fun blowing stuff up.
  - Diederich 7y ago
    > Just slap some boosters together and have fun blowing stuff up. This might sound like a flip comment to some, but it's 100% legit. After playing KSP way too many hours over the years, I'll still get an unreasonable amount of joy from creating a new sandbox game (which has unlimited resources), creating an absurd but monstrous rocket and spend two hours trying to get it into orbit. Yes, that process will cause many explosions. Yes, you will destroy parts of the space center. Yes, it's all-together fun.
- ziddoap 7y ago
  It's one of those games that has a fair amount of breadth for those who just want to jump in and have some fun, but a ton of depth for those who get hooked.
- standardUser 7y ago
  I consider myself a connoisseur of ridiculously time-consuming single-player games (Civ series, Crusader Kings, city builders and the like) and I have found no game as ruthlessly time consuming as KSP. If you happen to have heroic self-control, you could find a lot of enjoyment simply doing a few moon landing missions over the course of 5-10 hours.
  - skykooler 7y ago
    > I have found no game as ruthlessly time consuming as KSP. I wonder if you've tried Factorio?
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
I've sunk a ton of hours in the original Kerbal Space Program, its pre-launch state is one of my favourite games ever. The only thing there that excites me here is interstellar travel. I'm worried about this being a soul-less cashing in, with a "less, but pretty" situation - much like every versions of the Sims.
- AcerbicZero 7y ago
  Same here. My hope is that they don't try to add to much to KSP1, and just focus on fixing the obvious issues. Most of those problems were due to the engine anyway so perhaps this will work out.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    I've found that coming back to KSP now is overwhelming - there's already so much I have a hard time finding the right tools for the job. Kind of miss when there was a smaller pile of tools to choose from. The rocket engine sizes are absolutely ridiculous now.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Ever since they introduced Career and Science modes, I've been using them as a guide to ease out the otherwise overwhelming choice of engines and fuel tanks. Having to unlock the tech tree not only makes the vanilla game somewhat more pleasant (and suitable for roleplay) - my now unburdened psyche can suddenly deal with tons of more parts coming from mods.
      - Faark 7y ago
        Totally agree with career mode being a great guide to the tech tree, but it also stopped me from doing grand tours and the like. Just never got that far and tended to start fresh after putting the game down for a while. Self-imposed challenges like no save scumming also didn't help, though.
- TylerE 7y ago
gzu 7y ago
Will be excited to see if it uses a re-vamped game engine. KSP 1 is based on Unity and bottlenecks at single core cpu.
- legohead 7y ago
  from the dev interview [1] it looks like they are still using Unity for KSP2? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wmJlnTqjSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wmJlnTqjSg
- siekmanj 7y ago
  Unfortunately, looks like KSP 2 will also be using Unity: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315-kerbal-space-program-2-master-post/ https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315...
  - warrenmiller 7y ago
    Won't be a problem if they're using ECS and DOTS
    - Buttons840 7y ago
      What do those acronyms mean?
      - inopinatus 7y ago
        ECS = Entity Component System. DOTS = Data Oriented Tech Stack, which is the new implementation of ECS in Unity. Current KSP is plagued by performance issues during advanced gameplay, particularly threading granularity issues with physics simulation when running large craft such as space stations or complex rocketry. There are some amazing KSP videos on YouTube with orbital construction on a grand scale, gigantic interplanetary vehicles, complex planetary bases and so on; their dirty secret being that the original gameplay is actually occurring at a painfully frustrating <10 fps and has been massively sped up for consumption. GP is suggesting that using DOTS those issues can be relieved, by making more efficient use of available system resources. refs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system https://unity.com/dots https://unity.com/dots
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I was a huge fan of KSP, bought into it back in like ~.8/.9 days before there was anything to actually do, and I loved it. Talked tons of people into playing it and I got a lot of joy out of it. I didn't like the way Squad did things, and the bigger they got the worse things seemed to get, but they still ended up producing a solid, relatively stable game, which made space "fun" in a way not many games could. Squad threw away the majority of the good will they originally generated (mostly by treating their community, and especially their modders, like crap) but the core concept of KSP is solid enough that even with their questionable behavior it still managed to thrive. I wont be backing this early on, but perhaps when it gets closer to release it'll be easier to judge what kind of product they're going to end up with.
- philipov 7y ago
  It looks like Squad threw away more than just good will, because they're not developing this. Some studio named Star Theory Games is listed as the developer for this on Steam. Does anyone have any more color on them?
  - tomatotomato37 7y ago
    The only concrete thing I could find on their website claims they were a big part of "Monday Night Combat", though the wikipedia for that credits it to Uber Entertainment. Their facebook is equally empty, with the only non-KSP post being that of a mildly nervous chihuahua. It seems they are a spinoff of Uber Entertainment best as I can tell. As for the quality of Uber Entertainment, their later works tended to be unsuccessful, though they seemed to have some luck with VR.
    - perseusmandate 7y ago
      For what it's worth Monday Night Combat was an excellent game
    - mr_notorious 7y ago
      Per the official press release, Star Theory was formerly known as Uber Entertainment.
Shivetya 7y ago
Very nice they kept the pilots fairly simple and dressed up their surroundings as much. granted as we seen in this video I suspect the much higher details are going to lead to all sorts of videos people out doing each others for disaster launches.
daniel_rh 7y ago
I can't find any information on linux support with KSP2. Does anyone have a link with more linux information? One of the many reasons I loved KSP was robust linux support.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  KSP is the only case I've seen where people actually learned to use Linux just so that they could play the game - KSP actually worked better on Linux, because for a long time Windows didn't have a 64bit build, and 32bit build run out of RAM very quickly once you started modding the game. (And mods for KSP are a thing to behold; they turn a somewhat curious game into a masterpiece and deepest treatment of space exploration in videogames to date.)
- sikhnerd 7y ago
  Looks like no :( https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315-kerbal-space-program-2-master-post/page/2/&tab=comments#comment-3653099 https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315...
  - kelnos 7y ago
    Eh, that post is left deliberately ambiguous. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Linux port eventually. And if not, there's always wine...
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Or modders saying "we'll keep backporting your work on KSP2 to KSP1, only better, until you change your mind".
loudmax 7y ago
The Original Kerbal Space Program is playable on Mac and Linux. If its sequel is a worthy successor, I hope it will follow suit.
- mitchty 7y ago
  Looking like a no so far: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315-kerbal-space-program-2-master-post/&do=findComment&comment=3653099 https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315...
  - meemo 7y ago
    Will it be available for Mac? I've read that it'll be available for "PC, PS4, and Xbox One."
    - ryandrake 7y ago
      Such disappointing backward progress. They obviously have developers who know how to write cross platform, since they are also targeting consoles. Would it kill them to compile and release unsupported Mac and Linux binaries?
      - Hammershaft 7y ago
        This is likely very much on Apple for depreciating OpenGL for a proprietary standard, making cross platform development a hell of a lot of work for such a niche market. Combine that with the lack of Nvidea drivers and Macs are in an especially dismal place for 3D gaming for the forseeable future.
roddux 7y ago
I wonder if version 2.0 is written in Unity? I hope not. I recall a lot of the performance issues in KSP1 being blamed on the choice of engine...
- crysin 7y ago
  Unity is not inherently bad. It's garnered that reputation because its super easy to learn and make a somewhat workable game out of, even if you have absolutely 0 understanding of the workings of your code. I'm not familiar with Kerbal's code or any blogs / videos on it but I would imagine they're doing Newtonion physics simulations which are going to be rather intense for a game and probably add an unavoidable burden to the overall performance of the game. They also could have just been doing things that are not efficient in Unity and not realized at the time and maybe will not repeat the same mistakes in Kerbal 2 if it is written in Unity. This meme that Unity is inferior to either Unreal or a custom built engine are annoying. Sure, if the Kerbal team built their own engine from the ground up and hired on their own engine team I'm sure they'd be able to make micro-optimizations to make the game run better but at a much higher development cost.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    Is it really a meme? Every large AAA Unity game I've ever played has a certain jankyness to it...microstutters, glitchy UI. At some point you just have to accept that the common variable is: Unity.
    - penagwin 7y ago
      I've played plenty of games both ways, and as a developer I have to agree with something I've heard before - The reason that so many Unity games have "cartoony graphics" or performance issues is because Unity is one of the easiest game engines to learn (also cartoony graphics are one of the easiest styles to achieve because of it's inherit lack of details). So you end up with more asset flips, unexperienced devs, etc. on the Unity engine than say the Unreal engine.
    - _qwfv 7y ago
brianolson 7y ago
I laughed, I cried, it was better than "Interstellar"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gnulinux 7y ago
Ah, what a coincidence I just bought KSP about a month ago. Very good game but lacks a lot of automation. kOS and MechJeb solves some of these issues, but if you want to play "non-cheaty" it's still a very manual game; there is no way to make use of computers whereas in real space programs everything is computed and organized so precisely.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  RemoteTech gets you there. It adds a flight computer that can be set to execute maneuver nodes for you - which is crucial for remote operations e.g. when you have to execute a burn at a point where the planet of interest is between your probe and your comm network (before they added comm networks to stock, RemoteTech was what you used to introduce comm range, relays and speed of light delay).
- nkrisc 7y ago
  I always thought MechJeb and such should have already been part of the base game. Learning how to do manoeuvers manually is an important and rewarding part of the game. But after flying your 1000th craft into orbit, I just want to automate and manually fly the stuff I haven't tried yet.
  - godelski 7y ago
    I think in career mode automation should be something you unlock. Not sure why it doesn't exist. Seems like a natural thing to be in the tech tree. Even as varying levels.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Modding community thinks so too. Like with many other mods, MechJeb can be restricted to operate only when appropriate parts are included on your vessel, and those parts are unlockable in the tech tree. There's a mod called Community Tech Tree, which exists solely as a way to incorporate other mods into a somewhat coherent, extended tech tree.
    - Aperocky 7y ago
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Little context for the trailer: it seems to be a homage to this fan video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDOOsGg-9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDOOsGg-9I, which is one of the most well-known videos in the KSP community, and something people show to people to get them into playing this game. I must say the new, "official", video does capture the atmosphere very well. If the game will look a third as well as on the trailer visualization, I'll buy it without thinking (who am I lying to, I'll buy it anyway). One thing though: I hope the modding capability and freedom won't be diminished. If KSP is a great game by itself, mods make it a literal order of magnitude better - a huge amount of solid fan work was done to expand every imaginable aspect of KSP. And I mean it: among many things, mods give you many more realistic and unrealistic building blocks, life support management, communication networks including speed of light delay, trajectory planning, UI/UX improvements, graphics improvements, orbital assembly, working space telescopes, realistic aerodynamics model (including supersonic physics), n-body simulation and non-symmetric gravity fields,... I don't think there's another game where so much of such highly skilled effort was spent for free to make it deeper. I really hope they won't do anything that would make this depth of modding impossible.
- Diederich 7y ago
  > ...n-body simulation and non-symmetric gravity fields... I want to agree with everything said here, and add that the KSP mod ecosystem is no joke. The few things mentioned here barely scratch the surface. As a point of comparison: I'm aware of and long involved with the Minecraft community, and it is huge and excellent. While the total amount of mod material is likely greater for Minecraft compared to KSP, I'm comfortable saying that the mods in KSP are deeper and wider in scope.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Someone should marry the two
    - Geenkaas 7y ago
      You should have a look at StarMade: https://www.star-made.org/ https://www.star-made.org/
nodesocket 7y ago
I am so excited about this. Curious how the gameplay/graphics will be on Xbox.
t0astbread 7y ago
KSP always looked very cool but I've heard a couple of things that threw me off: - KSP devs are or were treated poorly by their employer (low pay, no compensation for the success of the game) - apparently the program collected a lot of data (I can't remember what exactly) about its users and the machines it was running on, to the point where even non-privacy minded people were calling it spyware Does anyone know anything about this? Afaik discussion about these issues just kinda stopped after a while but we never got a conclusive answer to these points.
- t0astbread 7y ago
  Aside from those controversies, does anyone else find it kinda weird that KSP is not FOSS? I mean, I don't wanna sound like the guy that points an index finger at devs making proprietary software but I would've guessed they have the right kind of audience for that. (In the sense that their audience would still pay for the program and they might actually benefit from open sourcing it.)
  - jstummbillig 7y ago
    Weird, yes, in a way. KSP always looked and felt very OSS to me. But in hindsight it seems very hard to argue with the route they chose, given the immense, improbable success they had.
  - derefr 7y ago
    I wonder how difficult it would be to build a FOSS clone of the base game of KSP, that's ABI-compatible with all the mods.
    - therein 7y ago
      The game targets Mono and written in C# so reverse engineering it should be simpler than a game compiled into a native binary.
  - liability 7y ago
    Not so weird when you consider that there are very few open source games with open source assets. An open source engine, similar to OpenTTD, OpenRCT2, OpenMW, etc sure would be nice though.
everyone 7y ago
"Not actual gameplay" So this flashy expensive trailer is utterly pointless. This is a game sequel that I am worried about. The original is a fantastic game. The sequel is being made by different people. Maybe they dont have as good an understanding of the medium of games. This trailer is a bit of a red flag in that regard already.
astrodust 7y ago
"Multiplayer/Modding" I'm in.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Oh yes. A proper multiplayer is the final thing I miss in KSP. I'm not really sure how it could work reliably, given the need for regular timewarping, but I would so love to build and operate a space station with other players simultaneously.
  - LoSboccacc 7y ago
    they promised the same for 1.0 so don't hold your breath https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-committed-to-multiplayer-career-and-sandbox-modes/ https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-committed-to-mu... I'm still mad because that article killed all momentum between the multiplayer mod
- martindale 7y ago
  As long as I can self-host and keep it running on the LAN throughout our 6-month playthrough as a family!
twic 7y ago
I spy an Orion AND a Daedalus - be still my beating nuclear heart!
cydonian_monk 7y ago
I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. Maybe when there's a real game and more details, or some actual meat regarding what they mean when they say "deeper mod support", and an absolute answer on Mac/Linux support.... But even then I'm not sure. What worries me more is how this announcement seemingly came out of nowhere, all while the actual KSP is still receiving updates. Even little quality of life updates like new textures for most (or all?) of the planets in the next update. Something just seems off. And let's be honest - half the charm of KSP is its lack of polish, and the janky little things at the corners that just don't quite work right and probably never will. Maybe this is successful and introduces a new (half)generation of simulation gamers to space/physics sims. Or maybe it blows up and we never hear about it again. Who knows. I'm just not "hyped" at all.
haberman 7y ago
Love KSP and I'll be looking forward to this! I really don't get cinematic trailers though. If it's not actual gameplay, then what does it tell me about the game? What does it tell me that I don't already know from KSP1?
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  They are communicating their aspirations. That they want to do colonies. That they want bigger stations. Interstellar travel. Multiplayer. Unusual drive concepts. And they tell you the tone. Note all the stuff crashing, but also the hopeful message of expanding. It's an emotional appeal to you. It's a way to communicate to your audience that, "Hey, we get you. We know what you want from this series, and it's in good hands."
mesozoic 7y ago
Wait where are the Kerbals? I didn't see a single one. Looks like it's just space flight simulator now or universe sandbox.
Teknoman117 7y ago
I wonder what the modding support is going to actually be like. I'm the one of the two original coauthors of the Kopernicus mod (although I handed off development of it to Dorian years ago when I got my first job after graduation because I was having trouble finding time while settling into working life). Writing that mod was already difficult as hell, because while the game supported mods, there was no SDK or any supporting documentation. There was essentially a gentleman's agreement between the KSP modding scene and the developers that ripping apart the game assemblies for the purposes of making mods wasn't didn't violate the terms of service, even though it explicitly forbid such activities. Building Kopernicus by spending days in the Mono .NET Assembly Decompiler figuring out how to override pieces of the game to make the custom solar systems was pretty darn fun though. I can't tell you how much time I spent trying to figure out how to programmatically make something that PSystem.systemPrefab would accept as a Unity Prefab object. Or the fun of learning about attributes in .NET to build a reflection based configuration system that would actually process KSP's configuration file format into said systemPrefab object. One of the things that the modding community felt at the time was that as Take-Two starting getting more aggressive about hiding the way the internals of the game worked (it's very murky if said gentleman's agreement is still in place), and in it's place producing some documentation, that the way forward may be just making an open source KSP-style game with original content and a completely different engine as to avoid any legal problems (we'd all seen how the internals of KSP worked, so we needed to make sure to do ours entirely differently). But no one (including myself) really ever found the time to work on it or made a serious effort to do so... If they solved the performance issues with large ships, and have somewhat more realistic physics (e.g. Lagrange points/Parking orbits are impossible in KSP), that may just be cause to drop the idea completely. I've mainly found my time spent exploring the depths of orbital integrators, Eric Bruneton's atmosphere paper, and Vulkan.
abledon 7y ago
what was the song playing during the trailer? edit: M83 - Outro
parisidau 7y ago
Shameless plug, I wrote a book on KSP (for O'Reilly!) with some friends: https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-Program/dp/1491913053/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=kerbal+space+program&qid=1566273650&s=gateway&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-Program/...
frittig 7y ago
What I liked about the current KSP is that everything is real. NASA actually sent a satellite to all of our Soler system's planets. They actually developed a rover that can drive on the moon, and they preformed rendezvous with two spaceships. They also had to deal with a finite amount of fuel and parts that could be destroyed if there was too much pressure or heat on them. Now with colonies and mining it is less realistic and more sci-fi. I can see the appeal of that, but it is a different appeal. I would have preferred that they spent energy developing things to make it more realistic. For example, Lagrange points, different forms of propellents, n body physics, automation, ets. Recently with Bereshit I learned that before (certain?) rockets can fire their main engines they have to fire small ones to provide acceleration in order to move the fuel in the big tank closer to the main engine. It would have been nice if KSP also took that into account. On an unrelated topic, I wonder how KSP 2 will make multiplayer work with timewarp
- topmonk 7y ago
  There are some mods for ksp that make things more realistic, including a real solar system and more realistic rockets.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It doesn't seem to me that the new things stray much from the "real but not necessarily actually done in the humanity's past" path. Colonies and mining is what you did (or at least many people did) after nailing their first couple landings and dockings. It's what real people in real space exploration business want to do, it's what they're preparing to do. The video seemed very realistic to me, in the hard sci-fi, "this is how it might look like under constraints of known physics and technology" way. The most outlandish things they've shown on KSP2 video are Orion and Daedalus rockets, rings for centrifugal gravity, and domed greenhouses, all of which are things taken out of real plans done decades ago, and have no reason for not working in reality except that we run out of funding for Space Race 40 years ago. There's also precedent with original KSP, which had its version of NERVA nuclear-thermal rocket engine, which never flown in space either.
- exDM69 7y ago
  > On an unrelated topic, I wonder how KSP 2 will make multiplayer work with timewarp This is what I'm wondering too. I have had a "multiplayer space simulation with time warp" game design brewing in my head for quite some time, but it's a turn based concept. Essentially you submit a turn saying "this is everything I intend to do from today until Mars launch window 2033", and the server consolidates the moves of all players. Space is a pretty big place, so direct interaction between two players' spacecraft is a relatively rare occasion. In real-life space mission close encounters there is usually only one "active" spacecraft (e.g. Dragon or Soyuz) and the other party is "passive" (like the ISS). Even when both craft are capable of maneuvering (like Apollo Lunar Orbit Rendez-Vous or Gemini/Agena missions), only one of the spacecraft were assigned an active role. So I have an idea how you could make a pseudo-realtime simulation with a turn-based multiplayer. This wouldn't allow going on EVA or doing some rendez-vous shenanigans in real time with your friends, though. And that's the kind of thing I imagine appeals to the "kerbal crowd". > Recently with Bereshit I learned that before (certain?) rockets can fire their main engines they have to fire small ones to provide acceleration in order to move the fuel in the big tank closer to the main engine. It would have been nice if KSP also took that into account. Afaik there's a mod for this which adds "realistic" rocket ignition, throttling and the need for ullage motors for liquid fuel rockets. What comes to space colonies and other sci-fi elements, I think they might be a welcome addition to KSP. Now the career mode contains too much grinding for "science points" and when you've advanced far enough down the tech tree, you get to grind for minerals and biomes. The gameplay could certainly use some late-game goals.
ansible 7y ago
Scott Manley has a reaction video to the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D353IVwY_1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D353IVwY_1g He seems to think it holds promise and is looking forward to playing it.

661 points by xucheng 7y ago

Looks fun, anyone play previous versions? The trailer was hilarious without sound. Watching guy fall out landing module, or they wreck their entire space ship.

pinewurst 7y ago
It's a great game - played the original KSP since early beta.
BitwiseFool 7y ago
Highly recommend picking up a copy. It's the most rewarding game I have ever played.
- opsiprogram 7y ago
  Seriously!!! I literally have told so many people this and they just think I'm insane but I love this game!!
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Absolutely. Just landing on the mun is one of those moment you never forget. And then the rescue mission to get the first lander from the mun. And then the rescue mission for the rescue mission.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    And then you pronounce the resulting pile of wreckage the first Mun colony, and set sights on Minmus, which is somewhat more forgiving.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Now I want to build a giant tangle of lander modules with solar cells and batteries attached and crash it into the Mun to see how many viable "colonies" I can create at once.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      And then, eventually, you'll have done everything in the game... And then you'll install RSS+RP-0 [0] and struggle to get back into orbit again. The mods add a ton of depth beyond what the base game can provide. For those curious, RSS stands for Real Solar System - replacing the Kerbol system with ours. This is a large difficulty ramp, since things in our solar system are far larger than those in Kerbol, so even with the same surface gravities delta v requirements end up much higher. (For instance, ~2.7km/s is enough to hit orbit on Kerbin if flown properly, while 9.5km/s is more common on Earth) To partially compensate for this you have RP-0, a modpack that (among other things) replaces all the engines, fuels, tanks and other parts with their real life counterparts, making the higher delta v requirements actually achievable. (And also adding a ton of complications, such as life support, communications delay, cryogenic fuel boil off, limited restarts, fuel ullage, and more!) 0: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0 https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0
Hates_ 7y ago
Yes. I found it extremely challenging while managing to remain fun and educational.
gnulinux 7y ago
It's a pretty good game with a very realistic physics simulator. They simulate everything from orbital mechanics to aerodynamics. There is a planet in the "solar" system with an atmosphere close to Earth's (Kerbin) so you can go there with a gigantic rocket, bring your airplane and fly in a different planets atmosphere. Pretty amazing.
- TylerE 7y ago
  I wouldn’t call it very realistic. The aero modeling is quite hacks/primitive and even the gravity is rather simplify... afaict they only calculate to the dominant object in the sphere of influence so you don’t get Lagrange points, for instance. I mean, it’s playable, certainly but it’s realistic in the at something like Forza is Realistic. So, sorta, but no.
  - wolfgke 7y ago
    > I wouldn’t call it very realistic. The aero modeling is quite hacks/primitive and even the gravity is rather simplify... afaict they only calculate to the dominant object in the sphere of influence so you don’t get Lagrange points, for instance. Perhaps this will change with KSP 2?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Correct. Air and gravity models in KSP are simple (though aerodynamics has been improved in the past years). Gravity simulation is essentially planet vs. active vessel, everything else is "on rails" and non-interacting. That means no Lagrange points, no sun-synchronous orbits, no need for station keeping. However, mods come to the rescue. For flight, you have Ferram Aerospace Research, which gives you much more realistic (and much more punishing) aerodynamics, including all the interesting supersonic effects. For space, you have Principia, which introduces n-body physics, with all the Fun coming from it.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      As counterbalanced to FAR, there is NEAR, which is FAR but the supersonic flight behaves as if it was subsonic, so it makes things a bit easier.
celeritascelery 7y ago
> The trailer was hilarious without sound. There was no foley, so it was just as funny with sound.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
I've been playing it semi-regularly since 2012. I can't recommend it enough.
joveian 7y ago
To counter the glowing reviews others have left, it really depends what you want out of it and if you install mods or not (and if you do if all the mods you want work together). I don't use mods and want a more relaxing gamelike experience than a lot of folks here (but with lots of building and little micromanagment or random limitations just for difficulty) and it is meh in my opinion, although there aren't a lot of alternatives that are available DRM free and in some ways it is better than the alternatives. Look at actual gameplay, these trailers are useless for evaulating it as a game. Kerbals falling off the rocket is mildly amusing but they are mostly there to fly the rockets and don't really do much or have much to interact with. If they add ways to build stuff to interact with when you go somewhere (it sounds like they are) that would be nice. There is a quite a bit of fun in building and launching a rocket. The learning curve is very steep but can be its own challenge if you like that kind of thing (I do). It takes quite a long time to do anything. Lots of people have posted interesting stuff that they built if you get frustrated and want inspiration. The wiki [0] has extensive documentation (except for the recent Breaking Ground extension so far) although the game much less so. Look at threads of the month in the Announcements forum for some amazing stuff people do with KSP [1] (seems like it would take an unreasonable amount of time to do any of that). [0] https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Main_Page [1] https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/11-announcements/ https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/11-ann... Each version has lots of bugs [2] and some fundamental stuff was only implemented recently or not at all. DeltaV estimation and accurate maneuver planning are two things that only appeared about a year ago and are huge improvements. There is still no quick base game way to check the center of gravity of a plane with empty fuel tanks, although it won't fly well after a while if that is much different from the full center of gravity and you might not find out for a half hour or more since it takes forever to get anywhere and it is hard to balance a plane well enough to be able to use time warp. There are a few auto direction holding options if you have the right tech but nothing to keep your plane wings level with the ground or fly holding altitude. You can recover the parts of rockets that you land but you can't recover anything you separate before getting your main craft in orbit so you can switch focus to the debris (the huge fuel tanks that some people complain about in other comments are for those of us who want to recover everything and not leave space junk). [2] https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues I'd recommend both of the extensions if you are going to try it (although maybe try the base game first to make sure you minimally like it), particularly Breaking Ground that adds some minimal automation ability and the ability to get science by crashing stuff in to a planet or moon (this has bugs, although it should be fixed shortly). In career mode it takes forever to unlock all the science and almost none of it is at all related to building rockets, it is just doing the same few trivial things in a variety of locations. Once you do get somewhere, on your home planet or elsewhere, there isn't really anything there, even with Breaking Ground that does improve it a bit. It used to be all terrain scatters (tree, rock, etc. looking stuff that you can go right through) and hills, now there seem to be two things you can interact with (also rock and tree looking things) that are the same all over a planet. So much of the fun is in the building and making up your own stories as you test a design. Or you can make stations and visit your stations. I've played quite a few games due to poor health. Better in many ways IMO are Infinifactory (other than the horrible story), RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (and 1 and 2 for that matter, with OpenRCT2 a nice requires-the-original-game upgrade mostly to be able to use higher resolution), and SimCity 3000 (unfortunately the GOG version crashes randomly after a few hours). Tropico (any version) and Surviving Mars also but they do the mandatory micromanagement and random limitations thing that I don't like (Surviving Mars more so but it has some good ideas too, like a number of camera options for taking in game photos). Theme Hospital (difficulty focused) and Banished (fairly building focused once you figure out the mechanics, although not that many layout options) are much simpler games but have some advantages from the game aspect and at least some building (Project Hospital looks nice and has more building but still has game breaking bugs nine months after release). Spore is also worth a mention; the building is mostly cosmetic and the gameplay has a bunch of issues, but it is still one of the few others that have a build and fly a space ship aspect (only with no atmosphere at all :/). OpenTTD (fully open source) and Cities in Motion focus on transportation building and are limited but decent for what they are. Widelands and Unknown Horizons are also fully open source builder clone games that are IMO improvments over the games that inspired them, Settlers II and the Anno series, although still not all that great. I hear Planet Coaster is good but it isn't avilable DRM free. There are a few more DRM free options but I get the impression they are difficulty focused rather than building focused.

eropple 7y ago

I was pretty bummed to hear about Squad doing their people dirty; the company seemed to consistently underpay and burn out their developers. Have they improved? (With cites?)

philipov 7y ago
Squad is not developing this game.

albertzeyer 7y ago

Last time I read about KSP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16581913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16581913), there was lots of criticism about the developers, or their working conditions. It sounded so bad that this was one of the reasons for me to not buy it. Has this improved?

enragedcacti 7y ago
It was purchased by Take-Two so the developers are probably only treated as badly as normal game devs now. https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/161355-ksp-acquired-by-take-two-interactive/ https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/161355...
philipov 7y ago
Squad is not developing this game.

shostack 7y ago

Is KSP1 any fun for casual gamers with only an hour or two and a joystick? Will I have to read up on lots of math and orbital mechanics to get anywhere in it?

godtoldmetodoit 7y ago
Can definitely just pick it up and go, no need for a joystick. Just slap some boosters together and have fun blowing stuff up.
- Diederich 7y ago
  > Just slap some boosters together and have fun blowing stuff up. This might sound like a flip comment to some, but it's 100% legit. After playing KSP way too many hours over the years, I'll still get an unreasonable amount of joy from creating a new sandbox game (which has unlimited resources), creating an absurd but monstrous rocket and spend two hours trying to get it into orbit. Yes, that process will cause many explosions. Yes, you will destroy parts of the space center. Yes, it's all-together fun.
ziddoap 7y ago
It's one of those games that has a fair amount of breadth for those who just want to jump in and have some fun, but a ton of depth for those who get hooked.
standardUser 7y ago
I consider myself a connoisseur of ridiculously time-consuming single-player games (Civ series, Crusader Kings, city builders and the like) and I have found no game as ruthlessly time consuming as KSP. If you happen to have heroic self-control, you could find a lot of enjoyment simply doing a few moon landing missions over the course of 5-10 hours.
- skykooler 7y ago
  > I have found no game as ruthlessly time consuming as KSP. I wonder if you've tried Factorio?

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago

I've sunk a ton of hours in the original Kerbal Space Program, its pre-launch state is one of my favourite games ever. The only thing there that excites me here is interstellar travel. I'm worried about this being a soul-less cashing in, with a "less, but pretty" situation - much like every versions of the Sims.

AcerbicZero 7y ago
Same here. My hope is that they don't try to add to much to KSP1, and just focus on fixing the obvious issues. Most of those problems were due to the engine anyway so perhaps this will work out.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  I've found that coming back to KSP now is overwhelming - there's already so much I have a hard time finding the right tools for the job. Kind of miss when there was a smaller pile of tools to choose from. The rocket engine sizes are absolutely ridiculous now.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Ever since they introduced Career and Science modes, I've been using them as a guide to ease out the otherwise overwhelming choice of engines and fuel tanks. Having to unlock the tech tree not only makes the vanilla game somewhat more pleasant (and suitable for roleplay) - my now unburdened psyche can suddenly deal with tons of more parts coming from mods.
    - Faark 7y ago
      Totally agree with career mode being a great guide to the tech tree, but it also stopped me from doing grand tours and the like. Just never got that far and tended to start fresh after putting the game down for a while. Self-imposed challenges like no save scumming also didn't help, though.
TylerE 7y ago

gzu 7y ago

Will be excited to see if it uses a re-vamped game engine. KSP 1 is based on Unity and bottlenecks at single core cpu.

legohead 7y ago
from the dev interview [1] it looks like they are still using Unity for KSP2? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wmJlnTqjSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wmJlnTqjSg
siekmanj 7y ago
Unfortunately, looks like KSP 2 will also be using Unity: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315-kerbal-space-program-2-master-post/ https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315...
- warrenmiller 7y ago
  Won't be a problem if they're using ECS and DOTS
  - Buttons840 7y ago
    What do those acronyms mean?
    - inopinatus 7y ago
      ECS = Entity Component System. DOTS = Data Oriented Tech Stack, which is the new implementation of ECS in Unity. Current KSP is plagued by performance issues during advanced gameplay, particularly threading granularity issues with physics simulation when running large craft such as space stations or complex rocketry. There are some amazing KSP videos on YouTube with orbital construction on a grand scale, gigantic interplanetary vehicles, complex planetary bases and so on; their dirty secret being that the original gameplay is actually occurring at a painfully frustrating <10 fps and has been massively sped up for consumption. GP is suggesting that using DOTS those issues can be relieved, by making more efficient use of available system resources. refs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system https://unity.com/dots https://unity.com/dots

AcerbicZero 7y ago

I was a huge fan of KSP, bought into it back in like ~.8/.9 days before there was anything to actually do, and I loved it. Talked tons of people into playing it and I got a lot of joy out of it. I didn't like the way Squad did things, and the bigger they got the worse things seemed to get, but they still ended up producing a solid, relatively stable game, which made space "fun" in a way not many games could. Squad threw away the majority of the good will they originally generated (mostly by treating their community, and especially their modders, like crap) but the core concept of KSP is solid enough that even with their questionable behavior it still managed to thrive. I wont be backing this early on, but perhaps when it gets closer to release it'll be easier to judge what kind of product they're going to end up with.

philipov 7y ago
It looks like Squad threw away more than just good will, because they're not developing this. Some studio named Star Theory Games is listed as the developer for this on Steam. Does anyone have any more color on them?
- tomatotomato37 7y ago
  The only concrete thing I could find on their website claims they were a big part of "Monday Night Combat", though the wikipedia for that credits it to Uber Entertainment. Their facebook is equally empty, with the only non-KSP post being that of a mildly nervous chihuahua. It seems they are a spinoff of Uber Entertainment best as I can tell. As for the quality of Uber Entertainment, their later works tended to be unsuccessful, though they seemed to have some luck with VR.
  - perseusmandate 7y ago
    For what it's worth Monday Night Combat was an excellent game
  - mr_notorious 7y ago
    Per the official press release, Star Theory was formerly known as Uber Entertainment.

Shivetya 7y ago

Very nice they kept the pilots fairly simple and dressed up their surroundings as much. granted as we seen in this video I suspect the much higher details are going to lead to all sorts of videos people out doing each others for disaster launches.

daniel_rh 7y ago

I can't find any information on linux support with KSP2. Does anyone have a link with more linux information? One of the many reasons I loved KSP was robust linux support.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
KSP is the only case I've seen where people actually learned to use Linux just so that they could play the game - KSP actually worked better on Linux, because for a long time Windows didn't have a 64bit build, and 32bit build run out of RAM very quickly once you started modding the game. (And mods for KSP are a thing to behold; they turn a somewhat curious game into a masterpiece and deepest treatment of space exploration in videogames to date.)
sikhnerd 7y ago
Looks like no :( https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315-kerbal-space-program-2-master-post/page/2/&tab=comments#comment-3653099 https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315...
- kelnos 7y ago
  Eh, that post is left deliberately ambiguous. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Linux port eventually. And if not, there's always wine...
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Or modders saying "we'll keep backporting your work on KSP2 to KSP1, only better, until you change your mind".

loudmax 7y ago

The Original Kerbal Space Program is playable on Mac and Linux. If its sequel is a worthy successor, I hope it will follow suit.

mitchty 7y ago
Looking like a no so far: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315-kerbal-space-program-2-master-post/&do=findComment&comment=3653099 https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315...
- meemo 7y ago
  Will it be available for Mac? I've read that it'll be available for "PC, PS4, and Xbox One."
  - ryandrake 7y ago
    Such disappointing backward progress. They obviously have developers who know how to write cross platform, since they are also targeting consoles. Would it kill them to compile and release unsupported Mac and Linux binaries?
    - Hammershaft 7y ago
      This is likely very much on Apple for depreciating OpenGL for a proprietary standard, making cross platform development a hell of a lot of work for such a niche market. Combine that with the lack of Nvidea drivers and Macs are in an especially dismal place for 3D gaming for the forseeable future.

roddux 7y ago

I wonder if version 2.0 is written in Unity? I hope not. I recall a lot of the performance issues in KSP1 being blamed on the choice of engine...

crysin 7y ago
Unity is not inherently bad. It's garnered that reputation because its super easy to learn and make a somewhat workable game out of, even if you have absolutely 0 understanding of the workings of your code. I'm not familiar with Kerbal's code or any blogs / videos on it but I would imagine they're doing Newtonion physics simulations which are going to be rather intense for a game and probably add an unavoidable burden to the overall performance of the game. They also could have just been doing things that are not efficient in Unity and not realized at the time and maybe will not repeat the same mistakes in Kerbal 2 if it is written in Unity. This meme that Unity is inferior to either Unreal or a custom built engine are annoying. Sure, if the Kerbal team built their own engine from the ground up and hired on their own engine team I'm sure they'd be able to make micro-optimizations to make the game run better but at a much higher development cost.
- TylerE 7y ago
  Is it really a meme? Every large AAA Unity game I've ever played has a certain jankyness to it...microstutters, glitchy UI. At some point you just have to accept that the common variable is: Unity.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    I've played plenty of games both ways, and as a developer I have to agree with something I've heard before - The reason that so many Unity games have "cartoony graphics" or performance issues is because Unity is one of the easiest game engines to learn (also cartoony graphics are one of the easiest styles to achieve because of it's inherit lack of details). So you end up with more asset flips, unexperienced devs, etc. on the Unity engine than say the Unreal engine.
  - _qwfv 7y ago

brianolson 7y ago

I laughed, I cried, it was better than "Interstellar"

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

gnulinux 7y ago

Ah, what a coincidence I just bought KSP about a month ago. Very good game but lacks a lot of automation. kOS and MechJeb solves some of these issues, but if you want to play "non-cheaty" it's still a very manual game; there is no way to make use of computers whereas in real space programs everything is computed and organized so precisely.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
RemoteTech gets you there. It adds a flight computer that can be set to execute maneuver nodes for you - which is crucial for remote operations e.g. when you have to execute a burn at a point where the planet of interest is between your probe and your comm network (before they added comm networks to stock, RemoteTech was what you used to introduce comm range, relays and speed of light delay).
nkrisc 7y ago
I always thought MechJeb and such should have already been part of the base game. Learning how to do manoeuvers manually is an important and rewarding part of the game. But after flying your 1000th craft into orbit, I just want to automate and manually fly the stuff I haven't tried yet.
- godelski 7y ago
  I think in career mode automation should be something you unlock. Not sure why it doesn't exist. Seems like a natural thing to be in the tech tree. Even as varying levels.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Modding community thinks so too. Like with many other mods, MechJeb can be restricted to operate only when appropriate parts are included on your vessel, and those parts are unlockable in the tech tree. There's a mod called Community Tech Tree, which exists solely as a way to incorporate other mods into a somewhat coherent, extended tech tree.
  - Aperocky 7y ago

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Little context for the trailer: it seems to be a homage to this fan video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDOOsGg-9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDOOsGg-9I, which is one of the most well-known videos in the KSP community, and something people show to people to get them into playing this game. I must say the new, "official", video does capture the atmosphere very well. If the game will look a third as well as on the trailer visualization, I'll buy it without thinking (who am I lying to, I'll buy it anyway). One thing though: I hope the modding capability and freedom won't be diminished. If KSP is a great game by itself, mods make it a literal order of magnitude better - a huge amount of solid fan work was done to expand every imaginable aspect of KSP. And I mean it: among many things, mods give you many more realistic and unrealistic building blocks, life support management, communication networks including speed of light delay, trajectory planning, UI/UX improvements, graphics improvements, orbital assembly, working space telescopes, realistic aerodynamics model (including supersonic physics), n-body simulation and non-symmetric gravity fields,... I don't think there's another game where so much of such highly skilled effort was spent for free to make it deeper. I really hope they won't do anything that would make this depth of modding impossible.

Diederich 7y ago
> ...n-body simulation and non-symmetric gravity fields... I want to agree with everything said here, and add that the KSP mod ecosystem is no joke. The few things mentioned here barely scratch the surface. As a point of comparison: I'm aware of and long involved with the Minecraft community, and it is huge and excellent. While the total amount of mod material is likely greater for Minecraft compared to KSP, I'm comfortable saying that the mods in KSP are deeper and wider in scope.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Someone should marry the two
  - Geenkaas 7y ago
    You should have a look at StarMade: https://www.star-made.org/ https://www.star-made.org/

nodesocket 7y ago

I am so excited about this. Curious how the gameplay/graphics will be on Xbox.

t0astbread 7y ago

KSP always looked very cool but I've heard a couple of things that threw me off: - KSP devs are or were treated poorly by their employer (low pay, no compensation for the success of the game) - apparently the program collected a lot of data (I can't remember what exactly) about its users and the machines it was running on, to the point where even non-privacy minded people were calling it spyware Does anyone know anything about this? Afaik discussion about these issues just kinda stopped after a while but we never got a conclusive answer to these points.

t0astbread 7y ago
Aside from those controversies, does anyone else find it kinda weird that KSP is not FOSS? I mean, I don't wanna sound like the guy that points an index finger at devs making proprietary software but I would've guessed they have the right kind of audience for that. (In the sense that their audience would still pay for the program and they might actually benefit from open sourcing it.)
- jstummbillig 7y ago
  Weird, yes, in a way. KSP always looked and felt very OSS to me. But in hindsight it seems very hard to argue with the route they chose, given the immense, improbable success they had.
- derefr 7y ago
  I wonder how difficult it would be to build a FOSS clone of the base game of KSP, that's ABI-compatible with all the mods.
  - therein 7y ago
    The game targets Mono and written in C# so reverse engineering it should be simpler than a game compiled into a native binary.
- liability 7y ago
  Not so weird when you consider that there are very few open source games with open source assets. An open source engine, similar to OpenTTD, OpenRCT2, OpenMW, etc sure would be nice though.

everyone 7y ago

"Not actual gameplay" So this flashy expensive trailer is utterly pointless. This is a game sequel that I am worried about. The original is a fantastic game. The sequel is being made by different people. Maybe they dont have as good an understanding of the medium of games. This trailer is a bit of a red flag in that regard already.

astrodust 7y ago

"Multiplayer/Modding" I'm in.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Oh yes. A proper multiplayer is the final thing I miss in KSP. I'm not really sure how it could work reliably, given the need for regular timewarping, but I would so love to build and operate a space station with other players simultaneously.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  they promised the same for 1.0 so don't hold your breath https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-committed-to-multiplayer-career-and-sandbox-modes/ https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-committed-to-mu... I'm still mad because that article killed all momentum between the multiplayer mod
martindale 7y ago
As long as I can self-host and keep it running on the LAN throughout our 6-month playthrough as a family!

twic 7y ago

I spy an Orion AND a Daedalus - be still my beating nuclear heart!

cydonian_monk 7y ago

I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. Maybe when there's a real game and more details, or some actual meat regarding what they mean when they say "deeper mod support", and an absolute answer on Mac/Linux support.... But even then I'm not sure. What worries me more is how this announcement seemingly came out of nowhere, all while the actual KSP is still receiving updates. Even little quality of life updates like new textures for most (or all?) of the planets in the next update. Something just seems off. And let's be honest - half the charm of KSP is its lack of polish, and the janky little things at the corners that just don't quite work right and probably never will. Maybe this is successful and introduces a new (half)generation of simulation gamers to space/physics sims. Or maybe it blows up and we never hear about it again. Who knows. I'm just not "hyped" at all.

haberman 7y ago

Love KSP and I'll be looking forward to this! I really don't get cinematic trailers though. If it's not actual gameplay, then what does it tell me about the game? What does it tell me that I don't already know from KSP1?

Pfhreak 7y ago
They are communicating their aspirations. That they want to do colonies. That they want bigger stations. Interstellar travel. Multiplayer. Unusual drive concepts. And they tell you the tone. Note all the stuff crashing, but also the hopeful message of expanding. It's an emotional appeal to you. It's a way to communicate to your audience that, "Hey, we get you. We know what you want from this series, and it's in good hands."

mesozoic 7y ago

Wait where are the Kerbals? I didn't see a single one. Looks like it's just space flight simulator now or universe sandbox.

Teknoman117 7y ago

I wonder what the modding support is going to actually be like. I'm the one of the two original coauthors of the Kopernicus mod (although I handed off development of it to Dorian years ago when I got my first job after graduation because I was having trouble finding time while settling into working life). Writing that mod was already difficult as hell, because while the game supported mods, there was no SDK or any supporting documentation. There was essentially a gentleman's agreement between the KSP modding scene and the developers that ripping apart the game assemblies for the purposes of making mods wasn't didn't violate the terms of service, even though it explicitly forbid such activities. Building Kopernicus by spending days in the Mono .NET Assembly Decompiler figuring out how to override pieces of the game to make the custom solar systems was pretty darn fun though. I can't tell you how much time I spent trying to figure out how to programmatically make something that PSystem.systemPrefab would accept as a Unity Prefab object. Or the fun of learning about attributes in .NET to build a reflection based configuration system that would actually process KSP's configuration file format into said systemPrefab object. One of the things that the modding community felt at the time was that as Take-Two starting getting more aggressive about hiding the way the internals of the game worked (it's very murky if said gentleman's agreement is still in place), and in it's place producing some documentation, that the way forward may be just making an open source KSP-style game with original content and a completely different engine as to avoid any legal problems (we'd all seen how the internals of KSP worked, so we needed to make sure to do ours entirely differently). But no one (including myself) really ever found the time to work on it or made a serious effort to do so... If they solved the performance issues with large ships, and have somewhat more realistic physics (e.g. Lagrange points/Parking orbits are impossible in KSP), that may just be cause to drop the idea completely. I've mainly found my time spent exploring the depths of orbital integrators, Eric Bruneton's atmosphere paper, and Vulkan.

abledon 7y ago

what was the song playing during the trailer? edit: M83 - Outro

parisidau 7y ago

Shameless plug, I wrote a book on KSP (for O'Reilly!) with some friends: https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-Program/dp/1491913053/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=kerbal+space+program&qid=1566273650&s=gateway&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-Program/...

frittig 7y ago

What I liked about the current KSP is that everything is real. NASA actually sent a satellite to all of our Soler system's planets. They actually developed a rover that can drive on the moon, and they preformed rendezvous with two spaceships. They also had to deal with a finite amount of fuel and parts that could be destroyed if there was too much pressure or heat on them. Now with colonies and mining it is less realistic and more sci-fi. I can see the appeal of that, but it is a different appeal. I would have preferred that they spent energy developing things to make it more realistic. For example, Lagrange points, different forms of propellents, n body physics, automation, ets. Recently with Bereshit I learned that before (certain?) rockets can fire their main engines they have to fire small ones to provide acceleration in order to move the fuel in the big tank closer to the main engine. It would have been nice if KSP also took that into account. On an unrelated topic, I wonder how KSP 2 will make multiplayer work with timewarp

topmonk 7y ago
There are some mods for ksp that make things more realistic, including a real solar system and more realistic rockets.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
It doesn't seem to me that the new things stray much from the "real but not necessarily actually done in the humanity's past" path. Colonies and mining is what you did (or at least many people did) after nailing their first couple landings and dockings. It's what real people in real space exploration business want to do, it's what they're preparing to do. The video seemed very realistic to me, in the hard sci-fi, "this is how it might look like under constraints of known physics and technology" way. The most outlandish things they've shown on KSP2 video are Orion and Daedalus rockets, rings for centrifugal gravity, and domed greenhouses, all of which are things taken out of real plans done decades ago, and have no reason for not working in reality except that we run out of funding for Space Race 40 years ago. There's also precedent with original KSP, which had its version of NERVA nuclear-thermal rocket engine, which never flown in space either.
exDM69 7y ago
> On an unrelated topic, I wonder how KSP 2 will make multiplayer work with timewarp This is what I'm wondering too. I have had a "multiplayer space simulation with time warp" game design brewing in my head for quite some time, but it's a turn based concept. Essentially you submit a turn saying "this is everything I intend to do from today until Mars launch window 2033", and the server consolidates the moves of all players. Space is a pretty big place, so direct interaction between two players' spacecraft is a relatively rare occasion. In real-life space mission close encounters there is usually only one "active" spacecraft (e.g. Dragon or Soyuz) and the other party is "passive" (like the ISS). Even when both craft are capable of maneuvering (like Apollo Lunar Orbit Rendez-Vous or Gemini/Agena missions), only one of the spacecraft were assigned an active role. So I have an idea how you could make a pseudo-realtime simulation with a turn-based multiplayer. This wouldn't allow going on EVA or doing some rendez-vous shenanigans in real time with your friends, though. And that's the kind of thing I imagine appeals to the "kerbal crowd". > Recently with Bereshit I learned that before (certain?) rockets can fire their main engines they have to fire small ones to provide acceleration in order to move the fuel in the big tank closer to the main engine. It would have been nice if KSP also took that into account. Afaik there's a mod for this which adds "realistic" rocket ignition, throttling and the need for ullage motors for liquid fuel rockets. What comes to space colonies and other sci-fi elements, I think they might be a welcome addition to KSP. Now the career mode contains too much grinding for "science points" and when you've advanced far enough down the tech tree, you get to grind for minerals and biomes. The gameplay could certainly use some late-game goals.

ansible 7y ago

Scott Manley has a reaction video to the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D353IVwY_1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D353IVwY_1g He seems to think it holds promise and is looking forward to playing it.