Kerbal Space Program 0.22 anticipation thread

[FlowerChild]

Just checked the KSP sight to discover .22 has entered the testing phase. <runs around in circles chasing own tail>

VERY excited about this one and this should be the first release with actual campaign play. I'm still not sold on how they're implementing it, but I'm damn eager to give it a try :)

[Taleric]

I had a good laugh when the web detectives spotted the experimental push to steam and spoiled it on the reddit :P
Hard for squad to deal with such an enthusiastic following.

The research system could be great if it is tiered correctly. Couple gradual part unlock with specific resources that must be collected/processed to operate features and you have a solid program. Add a budget into the mix with crew traits/death and now we are really talking!

[FlowerChild]

The research system could be great if it is tiered correctly. Couple gradual part unlock with specific resources that must be collected/processed to operate features and you have a solid program. Add a budget into the mix with crew traits/death and now we are really talking!

Yup, agreed. I suspect that with .22 I will try it out vanilla for awhile, then install mission controller (extended) for the budgetary aspect, assuming the mod gets updated to the new release.

I'm *hoping* that Squad is planning on fleshing it out more in the future to include stuff like that as well, as I don't think research alone will be enough to carry the campaign.

[Katalliaan]

I found it kind of funny that I saw the Reddit post, then saw in the comments the PR guy saying that they pushed the build just as they were going home, and that he had intended to announce it in the morning.

[FlowerChild]

Hmmm...they put out the following screenshot in the KSP weekly:

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A little disappointed to see a manned capsule is available right from the start, as well as having immediate access to both liquid and solid fuel boosters.

Was really hoping there would be much more to the very early space program that would make even attaining orbit a major accomplishment with perhaps early experiments taking place at higher and higher altitudes until you hit that milestone. Would be nice in particular if you at least had to make it into orbit to collect data to start researching life support equipment for manned missions. I'd kinda like reason to launch a Sputnik equivalent and that kind of thing. In fact, if I'm reading that chart right, it looks like probe cores are very high in the tech tree, which seems rather ass backwards IMO.

On the bright side though, looks like there's zero staging parts available at start which should make early rocket design rather interesting.

I think I'm going to be tempted to play tonight just restricting myself to those parts to see what I can pull off with them :)

[Taleric]

Very much agree, there is a whole probe and aviation arch that should be touched on prior to manned missions.

Squad is a little stuck cause it is KSP vice aerospace program. Ideally pilots should need some stick time and the tech from there to have fledgling life support with a resource cost. Additionally if G force death was a factor I gaurentee probes would preceed most missions for readings as well as life support time/performance ect.

I am confident the modding community with develop the proper HC experiance but I would love to get my fill from vanilla. Unfortunately I am sure the vocal minority with not be satisfied with sandbox to feed their bellyaching and career will take a hit.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, I've already seen a few "there's nothing new in .22! It suxors!" posts from sandbox players over on the forums, so I suspect you're right there.

It's definitely a problem with public development like this in general. Players get attached to the way things work in what was never intended to be a final form, then get pissed off when you deviate from that later.

Yet another area where a healthy dose of "fuck off" can come in handy :)

[Taleric]

There is a gig for you FC, with all the turn over at squad you could get in as a Public Corrections rep and clean up the forums XD

I draw a mental image of a Sauron sized FC waiding through a sea of KSP fans smashing them with his ban hammer.

EDIT: Wait one! Doing a quick read on the forum responses to the tech tree there is a large outcry for a more proper order. I feel confident things well get sorted :)

[FlowerChild]

EDIT: Wait one! Doing a quick read on the forum responses to the tech tree there is a large outcry for a more proper order. I feel confident things well get sorted :)

Well, which thread are you in? I'm in this one:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/thr ... ekly/page3

And so far, I'm only one of two people outcrying :)

The more I think about it, the more I think I may actually rig up a small mod for KSP to get the campaign mode to be more akin to what I'm wanting out of it. I've been planning on taking a closer look at the Unity engine anyways, to *possibly* use it on RTH, so it might be a good way for me to kill two birds with one stone.

I think I've gotten to the point where it feels distinctly weird when I'm putting a lot of play time into a game to not poke around in the code to correct things that feel off to me, and I suspect I'll be putting a LOT of play time into KSP in the future.

EDIT: Ah, ok: the thread attached directly to the blog post. Got it :)

Sadly though, there seem to be just as many idiots arguing in favor of the tech tree as it is in the image as people pointing out the flaws in it :P

[Taleric]

Yeah still plenty of sandboxers :(

Way more dissenters then you normally see though.

If however a lost cause will force your hand on KSP while investing time in RTH engine research all I see is HC heresy!

[FlowerChild]

If however a lost cause will force your hand on KSP while investing time in RTH engine research all I see is HC heresy!

Yeah, the way I'm kinda seeing it is as a sort of "bridge mod". Basically a research framework built with a dependency on a number of other mods to create a form of standardized play experience and progression.

Like, I wouldn't want to code something like FAR myself for a side project like this, but I could easily see it being a "required mod" to be installed alongside what I would make, and I would then balance around that, along with a few others like Procedural Fairings or Ion Cross (and potentially stuff like Kethane later on).

Anyways, just an idea I'm toying with, as that screenshot made me rather depressed about the direction the campaign seems to be going in, and it occurs to me that working on something like that might be useful to me for other reasons as well.

[Taleric]

That is the frustrating part of all this, they are so close to a great game. A slight adjustment to tech ect. requiring the inclusion of a few mods would be awesome.

I believe mission controller is part way there with some mission packs.

Still some time to get vKSP filled out and stable. Would be great have a fix down the road if things still fall short.

Edit: Picking up proper gamers from that community aswell would not be half bad either.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, for sure, there's a lot of time to sort things, and they are close, but acknowledging I'm beginning to sound like a broken record: I don't think Squad has a game designer on the team :)

I just made the point in the KSP weekly blog thread that this release is the first that puts any kind of game into KSP. It's all been toy so far, and in adding this game portion is where the lack of a designer may really start to show.

I think "probes before manned missions" was such an obvious design choice to take with this that there's good cause for concern that they didn't clue into it. To me, it seems like they were far more concerned with implementing the system, basically the programming side of things, than the impact it would actually have on the gameplay experience and what it is such a tech progression system is actually meant to achieve.

I've said it many times before, but game design is a distinct skill set worthy of a professional salary, and you can't just assume that talented programmers possess it by default. As I've also mentioned before: everyone thinks they're a game designer, and thus people tend to take it for granted that such decisions are no big deal and that the lack of a designer on a team won't really affect a game.

Also, in terms of being close: as has been expressed many times here on these forums, the devil is in the details. As an example, I've spent a good six months, if not more, focused on ironing out the rough edges of MC/BTW to turn it into the game I think it should be, and I think most here would agree that the sum effect of all the small changes made is fairly staggering while they all may seem rather small on their own. "Close" really doesn't count in game design ;)

[Gunnerman21]

Maybe we just need to give 'em some time to reconfigure the tech tree after they test it a while. We have to remember that this is the first version of the game that implements a form of career mode actually visible to the average player. Before .22 the career mode button didn't even work, but it probably will once the update comes out. Plus it's not like they're.. -shiver- ..Mojang...

[FlowerChild]

Maybe we just need to give 'em some time to reconfigure the tech tree after they test it a while.

Errrr...wait for what? To point out flaws in the current design in a forum unrelated to the game? For what is effectively a released game to no longer be in some arbitrarily designated "alpha"? For wolves to be completed?

If not now, when, and if not in this manner, how?

Look man, I consistently call them like I see them, and I think I've been right a fair amount of the time with such things. Manned missions before probes is a boneheaded and obviously wrong design decision. If they can't get that right on the first shot, it says an awful lot.

[FlowerChild]

BTW: My apologies for being harsh in my tone with the above. I've been getting rather frustrated with the "problem? what problem?" attitude expressed by many on the KSP forums today, in a way that reminds me of those early discussions about wolves in MC (on a much smaller scale mind you).

This appears to me yet another one of those times where I need to remind myself to stay out of this kind of thing for the sake of my own tenuous sanity ;)

[Katalliaan]

To me, it seems like you would start with manned aircraft, move to unmanned aircraft once you collect data on the effects of higher altitudes on your kerbals, then move to probes etc. I am, of course, basing this on a Mission Controller package used in a Youtube series; there's probably better ways to do it.

[devak]

Yeah, for sure, there's a lot of time to sort things, and they are close, but acknowledging I'm beginning to sound like a broken record: I don't think Squad has a game designer on the team :)

TBH i don´t think you even need to have a game designer to get research right. "all" they have to do is do some research on our own space program to get a pretty good tree.

Drawing a parallel with BTW here: i always felt like the first Windmill was one of the most memorable moments in BTW. After waiting so long, after getting through those stages and all this work, you unlock a whole new playing field. IMHO, getting to orbit should be just that experience.

What i find lacking though is that research is implemented too gamey. I would prefer to stick some extra thermometers on my craft to see if my engines don't overheat, resulting in a nice "engineering department" tab where i get a throttle/power graph showing it's all OK. Or an atmospheric sensor that tells me the atmosphere composition of Kerbal, turning the atmosphere-bar into a colored one (rather than an initial empty bar). I don't see why performing research can't help the player directly. I don't need complex technology to design a rocket efficiently. Unlocking enough research to get a Delta-V graph versus altitude graph for Kerbal would be worth gold.

[FlowerChild]

Not sure if this post from the blog thread is to believed, but it feels legit:

It really is a disappointment. Maxmaps has released his comments on this criticism elsewhere, and it basically goes "We're releasing techs in the tree in the same way they were released in the game development cycle", which is simply stupid. The reason we get manned missions before probes is because new players "will be happier" that way, which is also bull feces. It would be more fun to send up some unmanned probes, and then getting to move on to manned spacecraft, as it would give you a "Yay, I unlocked manned spacecraft!" feeling, instead of what is basically going to be "Why the fluffy bunnies would I want to send up a probe when I already have manned spacecraft? Not going that path.".

And is full of all kinds of face palm.

This is why a designer is needed. Otherwise, you wind up with decisions being made for all kinds of secondary or metagame reasons other than the ones that really count.

[Jay42]

I must admit, I'm not really convinced about that tech tree either... Not much more I can add here. For now I'll consider it as "still being worked on". I mean, there must be more to this career mode, no? Surely?
And to be honest, the thing I'm currently most excited about is official support for sub-assembly stuff. I will make it much easier if I don't have to build the exact same carrier rocket for every new payload I create.

On a tangentially related note, I built this:

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Hurr Durr

I actually took FC's idea of restricting myself to the Kerbin "System" until career is more fleshed out. As a positive effect, I've pretty much nailed down docking.
On the other hand, I found out the hard way that my CPU can't handle more than around 500 parts without stuff going boom.
So much for my giant space-colony of awesome :(

[FlowerChild]

I must admit, I'm not really convinced about that tech tree either... Not much more I can add here. For now I'll consider it as "still being worked on". I mean, there must be more to this career mode, no? Surely?

Yeah, I suspect there has to be *more* to it (at least I really hope so too), but what I'm flipping out about is more the apparent low-hanging design decisions that were messed up even in this small part of it.

There's stuff that strikes me as very much "in development" which I tend not to freak out about. Like the lack of a decent aerodynamic model for example, making it possible to create totally out there rockets even with the parts in the first node of the tech tree. I'm confident that's the kind of thing that will be fixed in time, so no biggy. I'll just play with FAR installed until that gets sorted, and even without it installed, I tend to naturally avoid unreasonable looking rocket designs anyways.

What tends to get under my skin are design decisions that are taken that seem to be very much as intended and indicate a questionable design direction overall. While it may seem like a small thing, that's exactly what those starter parts represented to me.

[obl1terat1ion]

Well this may not be the news you want but there was a thread on reddit about the same thing with the probes... the PR Manager had to say this..

"The tech tree both emulates KSP development (long time fans may recognize the parts available from the starter node) and serves to give players a more structured learning experienced. While probes at the beginning would have been more historically accurate from a sentient primate-centric point of view, throwing the more power consuming and less torque capable parts at our new players right away is less than ideal.
Plus we kinda want to introduce everyone to Jeb right away, he's quite the extrovert."

source: http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProg ... st/ccoasxn

[FlowerChild]

Yup, I saw that. I asked for a reference to the comment I quoted above and was linked to that post earlier today.

As I said in the blog thread, at least we now have confirmation to commence face palming :)

[BinoAl]

Well this may not be the news you want but there was a thread on reddit about the same thing with the probes... the PR Manager had to say this..

"The tech tree both emulates KSP development (long time fans may recognize the parts available from the starter node) and serves to give players a more structured learning experienced. While probes at the beginning would have been more historically accurate from a sentient primate-centric point of view, throwing the more power consuming and less torque capable parts at our new players right away is less than ideal.
Plus we kinda want to introduce everyone to Jeb right away, he's quite the extrovert."

source: http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProg ... st/ccoasxn

That right there is why I'm not a big fan of Reddit; Downvoting just serves to hide the less popular opinions. The only 2 people to point out flaws in what the PR guy had to say have their comments hidden due to downvotes

[Taleric]

Yeah I saw that post and the quip about Jeb sickened me :(

Pandering to sandboxers and the weak minded in the worst way. Then I think of it from a pure sales view to secure the purchase and screw any play beyond that...