I shelved KSP a few years ago to save my sanity. My craving for Space games is still there, I just dont have the motivation to fight the game engine anymore
I always left so many awsome savegames with so much stuff because , all of a suden that docking port just decided to not work anymore forever no matter how many backup save files you bactrack. I love the game, but I never truly got to do what I wanted with it in order to have closure
What I hated most was that every part has to have a single "parent" part, i.e. you cannot have two functional connections between the same two areas of the ship. It is all a big "tree" and that vastly exacerbates the wobble problem, but it also limits what you can design.
The vehicle hierarchy isn't directly related to the wobble issues... Although in KSP it is true that one thing did lead to the other. The tree-like hierarchy is, however extremely important for construction, especially with symmetry. Without it, there is no clear way to identify what parts should be picked up along with the one you selected, which causes the whole workflow to become a block-by-block Minecraft building experience. All that said, it is definitely possible to do better. The idea of compound parts (struts and fuel lines) came about too late and wasn't used enough in ksp. These types of parts can be used to allow a lot more freedom around the tree-like structure. They create bridges across the tree hierarchy in a way that isn't incompatible with the fundamental structure.
@@akaHarvesteR Hey Harvester. I am curious, if the KSP intellectual property could somehow be reacquired would the KSA team utilize that IP? Or would you all rather have a start fresh?
@akaHarvesteR What I'd do is write it like a flood fill, filling out from a given node, prioritizing directions away from the root node unless it's within a given distance to the root node to keep it from going backwards, until it either detects that it's self-referential to the flood start node (in which case it gives up and picks up that single node instead of picking up the entire branch), or that it finds that it's on a branch off of the root node and picks everything on the branch up. This would be more than a little bit strange, but it would be relatively intuitive while still retaining some of the QoL features from KSP. There's probably some much better way of solving this problem. My solution seems like it would work, but I have no idea if it would work better for players compared to the original system.
@nikkiofthevalley yep, you are now starting to see the mess you get into when there's no hierarchy to go by. I think the best way is to not let go of the hierarchy completely, but to definitely rely on it a lot less for the flight physics. (Ie use it only for editor/symmetry stuff)
all good points! approaching a surface base or vessel only for it to jump or explode is my most hated bug. it has ruined my playthrough several times, and usually after many hours had been invested.
@@kapytanhook almost all my Lunar base modules like to dig themselves into surface or jump to Joolian system on time warp. I hate this, but there is "Physics hold" mod for such things I use - it freezes buildings like they're in warp with working functionality and perfomance gain.
Finally someone brought up the sliding! I hate that I have to land on a perfectly flat surface otherwise my lander will slide down a hill. And the wheels on rovers too, they'll slide if you turn too much too fast. And when it comes to time, please let me time warp in a rover. I don't want to drive at 5 m/s for hours because going any faster than that will put the rover into a suborbital flight. Even with MechJeb doing the driving it still takes a lot of my time.
Also fun; I once found a magnetic hill. Put down two flags because as the plane went past that point, applying brakes would accelerate it forward and up the hill at about 5gs.
There’s a mod called time control that allows you to physics warp as fast as you want (or as your computer can handle), it also allows you to adjust the physics accuracy in time warp if you want to avoid kraken issues
Rovers are a perenial issue. J:NO has a half-fix for sliding rovers; brakes on full will stop it sliding in any direction, but it doesn't help when you're going along. However, I've been watching a lot of real-life off-road recoveries lately, and I'm thinking some of the sliding might actually be realistic. Off-road is wild! :) But if you're going suborbital, you'd probably be better off with a rocket-powered hopper (puddle jumper) rather than a wheeled vehicle. Or install Better Time Warp or Time Control.
Yeah tbh the sliding is super annoying - and it really plays into the rover gameplay too - no matter what rover I build, it has pretty much no grip in lower gravity situations ( so like basically everywhere outside of Kerbin, where you can get at the midpoint of the game relatively easily ). I did manage to solve the slow rover issue tho - atleast somewhat - I built a rover that can go around mun at like 30 - 40 m/s which increases the speeds of travel significantly. Made it very wide and with a low center of gravity so that it's hard to flip and it works relatively well, even handles the polygon terrain somewhat confidently, but it still slides on the surface as if it was on ice skates, which is kinda annoying. Also another thing pertaining to rovers - I don't think I've ever built a rover / plane, that wouldn't turn to one side for no apparent reason when going straight.
KSP is a game with lots of shortcomings, but because it's a really fun game, we tend to work around (or even with) these shortcomings to make it an acceptable experience. One of the first tips everyone gets is "Save early, save often". That tip is only given because things can fail for no apparent reason, just because. I lost count how many times I tried to make a colony/research station on another celestial body, and it was just shaking itself apart because of reasons after loading the game or even nearing it. Sure you can clamp it to the ground, which does work for the part clamped down, but it still has a high chance of shaking itself to bits. These problems should be directly fixed, and not by some extra parts or by added actions. A good example is wobbly rockets, you shouldn't need to autostrut a rigged rocket, it should automatically be rigged. It's a great game, and we take its flaws for granted and in time get used to them.
Even ground clamps themselves can fail to do their job. Oh, it'll hold the base in one place... but that place can _move._ I had Minmus bases thar lost the ability to use their mining drills because they loaded slightly higher up every time they entered physics range.
I used the ground clamps on my south pole Munar base, but the ground clamps appeared about 30 meters off of the surface after restarting the game. I ended up attaching everything on my base to that 30 meter high clamp and building towards the ground. It finally stayed in place and wouldn't bounce my base off the ground after reloads, it also looks like a tree house now.
first. Somebody get this man to 100k. Shadowzone you make incredible content and its quite frankly a travesty that youve been doing this for 10 years below 100k
What I really love about KSP is that it's sold as a space sim but you have the option to build a large variety of terrestrial vehicles as well - so please make wheels behave like wheels! Also, where KSP2 failed (beside mismanagement), in my opninon, is that it is a one to one recreation of the original game. I hope KSA will be a fresh take with novel gameplay mechanics.
I don’t think recreating KSP as a new game is a bad idea. Don’t forget KSP does have all these unsolvable technical issues that can really hurt the game play experience. While adding to the gameplay is obviously better, just solving the problems is already worthwhile.
The shaking/dissassembly effectively was the last mission I shelved in KSP1. It was my Grand tour mission, with a lander to rove all biomes on every planet/moon. It took months to design and iron out everything from a-to-z, including getting a size where lag "was not too bad" but I made it, I was proud of it. Everything was quintuple-checked in Kerbin orbit and minmus/moon to test mining craft + refueling and everything. So I decide to officially launch the mission, and was going to make lenghty posts on the forum as well... It was going to be my next KSP achievement. I get to moho, and once in orbit... POOF shake-to-dissassembly bug. I tried everything for a week or 2 to try to fix it, playing with auto-strut to different and between different parts, to even flying replacement landers and other parts, in case it was "causing resonance" within the ship. Nothing worked. So I shelved everything and hardly played (seriously) any KSP1 after that. I did some Duna missions and a couple kerbin influence thing, but no other large-scale missions. Then KSP2 dropped and it sucked. So I moved on until I get the itch to KSP1 again. Thankfully(or unfortunately) I got really busy with RL over the last 2 years so I have not had the time to dive back in. Hopeful;ly KSA will be better. If not there's always KSP1 again, provided you keep your ship simple and not try a grandtour, I guess.
9:50 It is called Kerbal Space Program, not Kerbal Rally Program. But the reason we're going to space isn't just to float around in orbit. It's to explore the bodies out there. And Kerbal like game needs exploration to be fun. That means good physics and things to explore.
I decided to list fixes as I listened. 4 of the fixes require KSPCF (Community Fixes) mod, 2 (3 & 3a) are Module Manager patches (short bits of text code), and 2 require a whole other game. :) None of the fixes are perfect, but here's the list for what it's worth: 1. J:NO has a parts list you can use to select parts. I think it's in the last tab. 2. KSPCF mod fixes some "forgetting" issues. I can't remember (heh) exactly which issues. 3. There's a Module Manager patch to remove corner nodes from those panels. It's on the forum in a big MM patch thread. 3a. You can patch all parts to surface attach with MM. Not sure where the patch is, maybe the same thread. But I think it's _very_ silly that they made some parts not be surface-attachable. Consistent behaviour is a great thing. 4. KSPCF mod fixes various parts drift/reallignment issues. 5. KSPCF includes *TimeWarpOrbitShift* to "Fix active vessel orbit moving randomly when engaging timewarp while under heavy CPU load." 6. J:NO rovers resist sliding when the brakes are fully applied, even if the sliding is sideways. Not an actual fix, but perhaps the best that might be done with Unity. 7. KSPCF improves performance in too many ways to list. It speeds loading tremendously on smaller computers. Whether it makes it fast enough, I don't know. :) Some of these might not be problems in J:NO, but I don't know. With my health issues, I've been doing little more than watching UA-cam, and sometimes not even that.
my issue with the fancy art they show is.. i never played ksp because of the graphics, i played because it was the only game of it's kind. i picked the game up years ago when a friend showed me his basic ksp build (add mooooore boooosters) and it flew into orbit, even on my old potato laptop i was hooked on the gameplay. tldr gameplay>graphics
The "sliding landing legs" problem is why I've never been able to finish my ground station on the Mun. That was frustrating. Also, the physics loading when you get back on a save, and the vessel suddenly jumps from the ground and breaks.
I think the lack of progression aggravates how much time KSP seems to steal from you. Doesn't matter if you accomplish the greatest mission or not, nothing ever really changes around you, the game just gets laggier because there is more stuff for it to handle.
5:23 This is why my favorite mod in the whole game is Precise Editor Continued. You can press P to not only precisely control the angle and xyz coords of any part, but also toggle two things: "enable surface attachment for this part" and "allow other parts to surface attach to this part." SO helpful :D
13:01 Hits differently when my partner of 2.5 years broke up with me two weeks ago 🥺Always need to address problems as soon as they are brought up and make your partner feel heard. It's too easy to get complacent with the normal day-to-day.
I am sorry to hear that. Not sure if you're already at a stage where it helps, but my mother once said to me after a rather crushing breakup: "Partners are like trains. The next one will come for sure." Hang in there!
@@ShadowZone Thank you, I really appreciate the kind words and the advice! And the fact that you took the time to read one of many, many comments not directly related to the video! I'm definitely going to do my best to take some growth out of this and be a better person because all the people in my life deserve that 🙂
Hang in there Alex. Your future depends on it. If you stop believing things can go your way or at least a way you like then you recursively doom yourself. If you believe things will go well then your actions will point you towards a good path. There isn't a secret sauce to these things: life is a complicated sequence of causes and effects. Don't buy into the idea that past patterns must be repeated: everything that has ever happened at one point happened for the first time. Godspeed.
@@ryanspence5831 I really appreciate the kind words and good advice. I always do my best to avoid repeating past mistakes. I'm doing my best to learn from my mistakes and grow as a person. This has been a big and difficult learning experience, but a valuable one.
there are two main things that I want ksa to have that would take it from an improved ksp to a proper successor. I want a more complex resource system, that you could extract to refuel or build craft off world. Assaying and searching for said resources could also give ‘science’ giving more of a reason to make repeated surface sample missions. And a weather system, like storms on planets making missions more perilous or making solar panels non functional.
I am not sure that batched rendering will have any influence on the problems you described and it also shouldn't hint at how the parts will behave. From my understanding it should not alter anything, except for the FPS counter.
One thing i hope we get it really strong hinges, the ability to color a single tank different colors, and the ability to custom design the shape of flaps or structural panels by dragging pounds or something because i wanna build atarship
Considering I play Stationeers since the early days, and I have the say that the journey to where it was was a bit rough. But right now it's in such an incredible state that it builds confidence in KSA. I stopped playing KSP a while ago and wanted to wait before buying KSP2 but alas, it never got anywhere.
No matter the question, KSA can always do better. I've known this studio for years, talked with devs many times and even discussed with them their issues with implementing new stuff. I'm super confident that their game will rock.
One example of KSP stealing time is vessels that can land on a planet just fine but when you switch to them after doing other stuff they just spontaneously explode because some part clipping into some other part causes KSP grief just because something flexed a little due to gravity. There are also some parts that just do not like other parts clipping into them, and often you can't tell if the parts are clipped until after the vehicle explodes. "Oh you want to add a thermometer to the surface of a box? That change means the entire vessel will now spontaneously self-destruct. Isn't that fun?"
9:44 itd be cool if different planets had different friction, so kerbin/earth had very high because of like grass n stuff, but minmus had really low friction because ice
The parts drifting apart is such an easy bug to figure out (if you are a somewhat competent programmer, which I think was not there in KSP or KSP2): The game saves the part locations where they currently are, but does not save the point where they would be without bending. Each time you save and reload, the base shape is set to the saved locations, which were previously bent, but now the forces are 0 so they are bent again. I actually wrote a script that resets the part locations to the unbent state by editing the save file so I could fly propeller planes and actually use the save feature.
Have you ever played "Take on Mars"? That had so much potential with the probes and then turned into an Elon Musk fever dream (or the other way around). Too bad "Orbiter" never had easy build rockets like KSP.
2:00 Blender has many features that would make building so much easier. And be it only that you can select stuff and hide it with H and reveal it with Alt-H. I do agree that there's huge potential in improving the workshop.
another pain point for me is that the surface of some planets ie the mun will have a seam of misaligned terrain that flings you up or destroys parts when you cross it and when within about 2k every reload will fling your vessel off the surface.
One thing I really hope they add is more procedural parts. Right now all we have is tubes and plates, so if we want to build intricate shapes we have to spam these tubes and plates everywhere to get the curvature we want. Making parts more procedural will reduce craft complexity, increase performance and decrease chance of Kraken attacks. KSP 2 was a step in the right direction with its procedural wings but a lot more can be done to improve the system
One of the things that irks me the most is that, normally, I don't want or need part-to-part interactions within one vessel, especially in vacuum. I've already built my ship such that thrusting won't bend my joints - you really don't need to check every frame when nothing's changed. I've looked into the source for ksp a few times before for modding purposes, and looking at how they do part physics is actually programmer torture (IMO). There's this whole nested part tree structure that gets checked and recalculated every physics frame, like the world's least efficient IK system being used to simulate character physics on an IK with the most joints the artists could possibly fit. No optimizations like "This group of parts is basically rigid, no need to calculate it," "Already checked this last frame, still the same, no need to calculate." I get it, it's a hard system to program, and I'd have trouble doing it right, and I'm not even sure if the way I'd do it is right, and it'd take months of work, so it's just programmer fighting in this case. That's why I'd almost prefer it wasn't even in the game, or was built to be easily turned on and off (eg a non hacky version of part welding where the system is just disabled).
There used to be a mod that would allow you to weld multiple parts together into what the physics considered a single part. Unfortunately it was complicated to use and I don't think it works with the most recent version.
KSP's manual is pretty good, but I'm pretty sure that isn't in it. Or if it is, it was introduced after 1.8 when I started playing. Therin lies a hint of the eternal problem with introduced features: How to let existing users know about them?
I generally agree. However, I think you failed to mention on important bug: landed vehicles and infrastructure off-Kerbin bouncing uncontrollably whenever you switch to them. A real fun killer..
I have been having a huge problem with timewarp. Everytime I do over 4x my craft teleports or slows down or something and ruins my mission completely. This is why I stopped playing KSP for now. It is a great game, if you are willing to troubleshoot for a long time.
Honestly I think there‘s quite a lot KSA (or any future space game) could learn from Space Flight Simulator. There are no physics between the parts of the same vehicle, but when building giant craft, that is exactly what I want. Honestly, there should be an option in KSP to turn structural integrity physics off for select vehicles. For the vehicle building tab, I would recommend NavalArt. The panning and part placement (also coordinates for parts!!) is much better than KSP‘s. Or heck, just take some ideas from Blender‘s workspace. I think what is essential for any more complex build would be what Space Flight Simulator did with its blue print editing option. The craft‘s save is a txt. file with all the parts having a rotation, location, scale etc. written in them in text format. If one found the game-internal building tab too restrictive or imprecise, once could always go and edit the file itself using a text editor. I‘m really excited for KSA, but _pleeeease_ I hope there will be more support for giant craft than KSP had!
All I want from KSA is a meaningful progression system, a goal, and maybe even a story. KSP is purely a sandbox game with a primitive progression system. Every time I return to KSP I quit after landing on Minmus or Dune because nothing changes after that. Mods mostly just add new parts, but do not fundamentally change the gameplay. I want my space stations to have a purpose, and not just be decorations. I want every landing on every planet to have a purpose. Maybe even a rival space agency controlled by AI. I want a game, not a tool. The problems listed in the video are just improvements to the toolkit, not the gameplay itself.
Every open-world game turns into a sandbox after you finish the main story. And after this it is the toolbox that matters, because it determines how much of your own ideas you can bring to life. Not the ideas of someone else who is guiding you through the so called "progression" but your own ideas that progress together with your actual skills. Did you try to explore Duna with a helicopter? Or build a refueling base for SSTO's on Laythe and then use it to explore other moons of Jool? Build a reusable Tylo lander? There are many design challenges that give you a sense of progression and open new horizons once you achieve them.
@@PalassCat I can come up with hundreds of challenges for myself, but what good will that do? The game doesn't give any rewards for the work done, except for useless achievements in you steam account. Unfortunately, KSP has very few diverse game mechanics, so it quickly becomes boring. I had huge hopes for KSP2, but unfortunately we all know how it ended. By the way, you just confirmed my statement that KSP is a tool for designing and testing spaceships, not a game. From KSA I want particularly a game, not a tool.
I agree, and my comment on this video is basically saying the same thing in different words. I love KSP. I have enjoyed it a lot as a sandbox game. I think KSA should have a sandbox mode. I've done jet flight on Laythe. I've done Eve land and return. It's not that I can't set myself challenges. I hope and expect to set myself many new challenges as I learn KSA. It's that I hope KSA (career mode) is actually a game, in a way that KSP never has been. I want my successes to have value, and my failures to have consequence. That's going to be hard to include in a game about learning through trial and error. But that's the challenge.
I agree with performance being KSP1's biggest pain point. There needs to be a "right-click-and-occlude" feature where you can omit crafts from the physics call stack. Imagine a refinery with lots of "buildings" that you can "bolt down" and instead of simulating all those parts and dragging things down, it just makes a collide mesh and that's it.
Despite all issues with the original, I just *started a new, heavily modded KSP 1 carreer game on Linux* (I left the Windows world at early 2024) including stuff like life support. Some of the mods also fix the landing legs slippery, once landed, you can lock your vehicle in place. I also own KSP2, but I never liked it. Yes, it's faster, but mostly void of content and I hate the new editor. *I really hope KSA will do better.* Did anyone consider that it might be Rocketwerkz who acquired KSP from Take2? Or that a new KSP owner might pay Rocketwerkz to develop KSP2/3 for them, as in the new owner acting as publisher and Rocketwerkz as the studio? Wouldn't that be great? Bear in mind, Rocktwerkz has already put out successful niche games like STATIONEERS before (that is also one I like). And it has working multi-player including a Linux-based game server.
i think 2 of my biggest annoyances were that even on a flat and levelled surface, the vehicle drifts. (maybe cause i play RSS and scales are bigger?) and then the fact that my staging is always messed up if i dock or undock and sometimes even just resetting a flight... stages should be groups, like each vessel a section that has it's own staging and they should not move around.
Excellent priorities! If KSA can improve on these it will do well. I think a lot of these will be helped by moving on from the LEGO brick style of craft that KSP used. Craft wobble, attachment problems, loading scrambles all come from having a messy list of ‘parts’ attached to each other instead of a large user-built model. Sounds like they’re working on that
I've never had an epic computer, so I chose to live vicariously through videos to experience the 1,000 + piece builds of the more masochistic Kerbal creators. I cant imagine the utter frustration you would have after waiting a half hour to get to your first staging event just to have the ship blow up and have to do it "AGAIN " after making a small tweek to the design. I have, however, had my more modest builds explode because I had the audacity to clip a couple parts together or come out of time warp at exactly the wrong time. The wobble monster also ate a few of my space stations until someone figured out the problem with competing reaction wheels. Luckily, the devs for KSA have this hindsight and a lot of people to help them. Fingers crossed. 🤞🤞👍
My 1 of 1 most hated things about KSP: the garbage collector. It has ended more campaigns for me than any other factor. Even on a system with 64GB of RAM, any modestly advanced campaign ends up putting so many things on the heap that the single-threaded garbarge collector pauses the game for a few seconds (increasingly long with more stuff in the universe, not just within physics range) every three seconds, which is the schedule for the gc. The _one_ thing I wanted out of KSP2, above all others, was a multi-threaded garbage collector capable of running without pausing the game. Or better yet, a memory allocation system smart enough to do reference counting and automatic memory freeing and not need a gc at all. (I'm aware of some mods that claim to help. One manages to delay the onset for a couple minutes, but then it comes back and never leaves again.)
I've played KSP heavily modded almost as long as I've played KSP. Even now- when the game is complete and theoretically as optimized as it will be- the load time is very long. I can start the game, get up, make a nice toasted sammy, and eat it before it's done loading. Luckily, I'm fairly patient, so the tedious nature of the VAB and SPH don't bother me much. I definitely notice the same problems you point out there, though. For people who aren't math-oriented like myself, interplanetary transfers are quite a pain without the assistance of mods like Astrogator. I've always enjoyed surface work- rovers and bases and such- but it's plagued by the same issues you mention. One thing I don't think you mentioned though- Kerbals are so. Damn. Slow. Which isn't helped by time warp, given their tendency to rather comically trip and explode while under acceleration.
Honestly these are the main reasons I actually still play KSP 2 over KSP 1, because as mad as I am at the lying and failed development, and though it has a few little bugs I regularly encounter, the whole experience is not only faster but UI and control and part wise so much less aggravating to deal with too. Plus I love the visuals and music. If I feel like doing anything with mods or a huge spacecraft, which is rare, I switch back to KSP 1 for its strongsuit with that.
Another issue that plagues me when i am using triangle shaped structural panels in stock/modded, is symmetry entanglement syndrome. The mirror is not mirroring the vertices correctly, so the mirror attachment is more like radial
The first thing the title brought to mind for me was the vehicle sliding down hills and poor wheel physics. The loading times are also super panful. I've got high hopes for KSA
Propellers never worked properly. Example: Two prop plane (simple setup) with counter rotating motors, would induce Yaw into the craft from nowhere. Worse yet, switching from clockwise (CW) to counter clockwise (CCW) would often show to thrust / torque moving in the wrong direction with respect to the motors orientation.
A lot of these issues were fixed by mods, ie the fuel lines, enabling fuel to transfer through couplings etc, camera mods, ubizorb welding add on etc, etc. and that was the best part of KSP, the game was able to be easily modified. But yeah those annoying bugs were super frustrating, thats what i was hoping ksp2 would have eliminated, but day one of ksp2 and wobbly rockets was a holy crap they havent fixed anything on this moment.
My issue might just be the real lack of something like heat tiles. I get most parts end up veing able to handle a lot of heat anyways but still would have been cool
u forgot manuvernodes click problems i can stand when im looking at a planet and trying to click the manuvernode and it will fk click whatever, same with ships when they are close together
I know this is too much to ask, but I would like them to optimise the parts to not take up majority of the computational resources, make physics in parts much more simplified in very large part builds, so that I can build large Capital ships that can refuel at each planet (except gas giants) and make interplanetary modular explorer ship fleet!
what i hate about ksp is when i want to make a gigantic aircraft when im trying to take off the wings rip off bc the parts cant carry the weight of it when it should
I was playing GPP with station science installed. I had the most basic station you could build and it even used 3.5m docking ports. I get anywhere close to the station to deliver one of the experiments and bam! it just flies apart randomly. I'm not even touching it. Then I downloaded kerbal joint reinforcement. That fixed the issue. I haven't had anymore kracken attacks. Then again........I dont' build crazy things like you do.
I have kerbal joint reinforcement aswell and i get the rare kraken attack on my largest fuel station, 700-800 parts i think, and usually when it happens a quickload fixes it.
@@JasonGrim-y4r I never build anything that big. lol KSP has me trained to not build anything more than about 200 or so. I probably can on my big computer, but I rarely play KSP on that.
opened this video hoping you'd talk about sliding. Every surface is ice. I really need to like bring those ground mounts and connect my ship to the earth somehow.
I don't remember the intercept problem. I played in stock mode for about 6 months everyday until I landed kerbals and returned them from every planet and moon. I must have saved my intercepts differently. I do remember most of the other problems he mentioned.
If you can tame the kraken and manage KSPs many glitches you can build some amazing crafts and builds. I cant wait for KSA because the engine is built from the ground up for this kind of game. Example being the part limit will be 65,000+ and batched rendering.
I love KSP. I've been playing since 0.17 and it has taught me SO much. I can forgive a lot of the issue your video highlights. Wonky physics and inconsistent behavior are almost part of the charm. But I'm not sure I can ever forgive the way it squandered the promise of Career Mode. The whole premise of the game (once it stopped just being a demo) was that you're running a space agency. But there was never any GAME to that. Completing contracts and gathering science is mostly dull and repetitive. Sandbox is the way to play KSP, because Career Mode offers no added challenge or enjoyment or consequence or achievement -- just a few tedious chores. If there's one thing I hope KSA does (beyond getting the core game loop right) it's that I think Career Mode should be an actual GAME. I want there to be decisions to make. I want to unlock tech in a sequential manner that makes sense as my agency gains capabilities. I want those capabilities to naturally springboard me into grander exploration and more ambitious missions. Career mode has the potential to teach you the game a little at a time. KSP never really did that very well. Even just adding experiments I have to perform that are related to the tech I'm trying to unlock would be an improvement. A complete re-work of Science and Career modes is in order. Let's think about what resources are relevant for the player to manage, what decisions they might make that could affect their playthrough, how we scaffold the player's learning and exploration by unlocking technologies and capabilities as the player reaches farther into space.
Is financial constraint an interesting restriction for Career mode? I'm not certain, but potentially. If the player has to look at their balance sheet and weigh their annual operational cost, consider the pros and cons of various sources of funding, and consider whether to sink their dollars into blue-sky R&D or invest in a larger VAB... yeah that could definitely be interesting. Adding annual cost (which scales with the number and complexity of missions running, size of facilities, etc.) would put a different pressure on players. Want to run a seven year mission to the outer planets? You'll need to manage some other projects while that one is in flight, in order to keep the lights on. It's just so disappointing to me that KSP only ever implemented this as repetitive procedurally generated contracts to execute. Lemonade Stand (on Apple II) is a better game than KSP's Career Mode. I pray KSA aims higher. Yes, I know it's a game about building and piloting space missions. Yes, I understand it's essentially a sandbox game where you set your own goals. I just want my successes and failures to have more weight. When I leave a kitten stranded somewhere, I want the public to cry out for her rescue! If my craft experiences a spontaneous rapid disassembly on the launchpad, I want to see the newspaper headline and feel the impact to my public relations and ultimately my agency's success.
Another irritation I've noticed with KSP is ram usage. Vanilla KSP1 seems to have a nasty memory leak that just causes it to just eat up all your ram no matter how much your system has, and as it does so gets slower and slower to load up crafts and revert back to the vab or sph. 32gb of total system ram will easily get devoured by KSP in my experiance especially if its modded :P I'm prob experiencing this because I've using like 500 part+ crafts, but even still stays bogged down after lots of parts are stagged away and or dockable crafts are undocked. I swear prob 10-20% of my KSP playing time has to be just waiting for the loading times :P
Nah, you pretty much covered most of it. Don’t forget the weak robotic parts that wobble or the fact that if you use symmetry on robotic parts they will bug out. 😢 Fixing the lighting would be nice as the light from lights 💡 currently passes through parts and Kerbals like they’re not there. 😭
Have just started a new modded play through of KSP after two years away from the game. It's running on the most powerful computer I've ever owned and I fully expect to get to the same stage as I have with every other playthrough of the game, where the limitations of the game engine make doing anything with complex craft so time consuming and frustrating that I end up quitting and going and playing Factorio and it's Space Age DLC.
SO MANY surface problems. IMO the sliding is the least bad of the surface problems. KSP1 never really got rid of the bug that caused landed craft to jump when leaving time warp or switching vessels and I feel like it was still basically there in KSP2. And there were also times when had crafts or kerbals clipping through the terrain or vanishing when switching vessel, especially with KSP2. I was surprised these sorts of bugs never topped the list for KSP2, because they were the ones that broke the game the most for me.
Gotta remember that ksp started as a 2 dimensional very simple rocket builder, essentially a flash game with 3d graphics. The game's genes are old and archaic. I think KSA has a lot of advantage just because of the technology benefits today before anything.
Thats something Ive been thinking throughout the video, ksp is an ancient game, running on a dinosaur engine, with code that Ive seen only described as spaghetti and kerbals. Its almost a miracle that the game works at all and that's why i love it, because it shouldn't work but whenever it does its a beautiful game.
I hope someone will deliver a game like what KSP2 promised to be. I was really looking foreward to that interstellar part with all the new celestial bodies. Also deposited my 50€ eary-access buy-in, so i would'nt mind if KSP2 wouls be continued, but would be fine with kittens too - especially if the game was programmed more intelligently.
100% agree with all your points! KSP is an awesome game, but it is certainly not perfect! For the things i liked most about what KSP2 did better, was the loading time and the VAB! You could work on a few different ships at the same time and assemble them without importing, combining or any of the other KSP1 non sense. I dont want to join the hype, so we will see what KSA brings or if it ever becomes a finished product.. also lets see how long it takes to get there.. like you said, time becomes more precious with age, and the longer we have to wait, the less time we will be ready to sink in a new game.
For many things, there should not even be small parts. There should be procedurality-by-function, where you can take a part, add to it's mass and use part of it's volume to add a function. I do not want thermometers sticking on things. I would like sections that incorporate all my experiments, for example. I want to pack a parachute and antenna in the top of my command module, for example. Adding parts should be used when locality matters. A robot arm in the cargo bay should be a part. A wing should be a part. If it does not matter where something is, stop running up the part count for no reason.
What are your thoughts on the current development of space flight simulator 2? It's similar to the first but in 3D and has absolutely stunning graphics from the released content
As for myself, I always dreamt of building large complex bases on other planets and moons, but as soon as I tried, the game started lagging. Once more than one vessel is loaded and more than a hundred parts can be seen, the framerate gets really bad.
I don't give a flying copulatory action about any atmospheric scattering at this point. The first thing I want to see is a working beta with a good feature set and halfway decent if untuned physics. A project that fiddles with graphical effects early in its development is more likely than not going to get sidetracked from the important points and getbogged down. Just because they _named_ it Kitten Space Agency doesn't mean they should have the attention span of one.
The team know what not to do, that's an encouraging sign. Art design is the easiest part, yet it's the part that decided also if a game is loved or not. Look at Juno, it's technically better than KSP but very few people like it because it's not as charismatic by a long shot than KSP. KSP has that LEGO feel (just the shape of the characters themselves is enough and the same kind of goof...), that's why it was so successful.
Yup all of this, I could care less if the planets are wire frame and there is no scatter. If my crafts shake themselves apart, the game is a slide show, and I can't plan manoeuvres I might as well play OG ksp. These are the issues that made me give up on my more ambitious missions and consequently ksp as a whole.
Batch rendering does not have anything to do with parts breaking apart, but I do still think KSA will fix that issue, since they are making the engine from scratch and will probably catch the issue early in development.
Not expecting much from KSA unless Dean Hall passes it off to someone qualified and driven after he sees something else shiny and wanders off to work on that. Hopefully *someone* makes a really good KSP successor, might be KSA. We're going to find out.
My ship drifts during time warp. I genuinely don’t know how I can time warp for 200 days and end up facing 180° the wrong way after aligning with the maneuver node.
JNO has some really good decisions about connecting parts and etc. If there were more developers for Juno, it would he really a great successor, they wouldn't spend 60 millions for nothing... But even now their result is ok: you can create any ship you like. Or download a ready solution and disassemble it for the parts you need 😅
it used to take 20 minute to load ksp when it was modded on my last pc ... i finally build myself a nasa computer this year, whit double the mods it take 1 min xD
I was not building too large rockets so I wasn't affected by most of your problems but unreliability of orbital mechanics predictions alone was enough for me to leave KSP completely in the end. I still hope that whatever comes after it will finally have these things polished.
I shelved KSP a few years ago to save my sanity. My craving for Space games is still there, I just dont have the motivation to fight the game engine anymore
I totally feel you! Especially the older I get the less willing I am to deal with this kind of issues.
I always left so many awsome savegames with so much stuff because , all of a suden that docking port just decided to not work anymore forever no matter how many backup save files you bactrack. I love the game, but I never truly got to do what I wanted with it in order to have closure
Try KSP Community Fixes! It fixes some bugs and does some things better. Can't say it will bring you back though
Talki about sanity, have you ever tried war thunder?
Give space engineers a go, a fun game and massive community. Also nice to be able to dictate your own storyline and goals
What I hated most was that every part has to have a single "parent" part, i.e. you cannot have two functional connections between the same two areas of the ship. It is all a big "tree" and that vastly exacerbates the wobble problem, but it also limits what you can design.
The vehicle hierarchy isn't directly related to the wobble issues... Although in KSP it is true that one thing did lead to the other.
The tree-like hierarchy is, however extremely important for construction, especially with symmetry. Without it, there is no clear way to identify what parts should be picked up along with the one you selected, which causes the whole workflow to become a block-by-block Minecraft building experience.
All that said, it is definitely possible to do better. The idea of compound parts (struts and fuel lines) came about too late and wasn't used enough in ksp. These types of parts can be used to allow a lot more freedom around the tree-like structure. They create bridges across the tree hierarchy in a way that isn't incompatible with the fundamental structure.
@@akaHarvesteR Hey Harvester. I am curious, if the KSP intellectual property could somehow be reacquired would the KSA team utilize that IP? Or would you all rather have a start fresh?
@akaHarvesteR What I'd do is write it like a flood fill, filling out from a given node, prioritizing directions away from the root node unless it's within a given distance to the root node to keep it from going backwards, until it either detects that it's self-referential to the flood start node (in which case it gives up and picks up that single node instead of picking up the entire branch), or that it finds that it's on a branch off of the root node and picks everything on the branch up. This would be more than a little bit strange, but it would be relatively intuitive while still retaining some of the QoL features from KSP. There's probably some much better way of solving this problem. My solution seems like it would work, but I have no idea if it would work better for players compared to the original system.
@nikkiofthevalley yep, you are now starting to see the mess you get into when there's no hierarchy to go by.
I think the best way is to not let go of the hierarchy completely, but to definitely rely on it a lot less for the flight physics. (Ie use it only for editor/symmetry stuff)
Yes yes yes yes! This is exactly what I wanted to say! It’s so damn frustrating
all good points! approaching a surface base or vessel only for it to jump or explode is my most hated bug. it has ruined my playthrough several times, and usually after many hours had been invested.
Yes! I probably should have turned the "Everything slides" chapter into a "ground + vehicle = disaster"
Yeah, the ground is the biggest enemy. Loading landed stuff is like a casino
@@kapytanhook almost all my Lunar base modules like to dig themselves into surface or jump to Joolian system on time warp.
I hate this, but there is "Physics hold" mod for such things I use - it freezes buildings like they're in warp with working functionality and perfomance gain.
Finally someone brought up the sliding! I hate that I have to land on a perfectly flat surface otherwise my lander will slide down a hill. And the wheels on rovers too, they'll slide if you turn too much too fast.
And when it comes to time, please let me time warp in a rover. I don't want to drive at 5 m/s for hours because going any faster than that will put the rover into a suborbital flight. Even with MechJeb doing the driving it still takes a lot of my time.
Also fun; I once found a magnetic hill. Put down two flags because as the plane went past that point, applying brakes would accelerate it forward and up the hill at about 5gs.
I use a hydraulic leg or two to stop sliding
There’s a mod called time control that allows you to physics warp as fast as you want (or as your computer can handle), it also allows you to adjust the physics accuracy in time warp if you want to avoid kraken issues
Rovers are a perenial issue. J:NO has a half-fix for sliding rovers; brakes on full will stop it sliding in any direction, but it doesn't help when you're going along. However, I've been watching a lot of real-life off-road recoveries lately, and I'm thinking some of the sliding might actually be realistic. Off-road is wild! :) But if you're going suborbital, you'd probably be better off with a rocket-powered hopper (puddle jumper) rather than a wheeled vehicle. Or install Better Time Warp or Time Control.
Yeah tbh the sliding is super annoying - and it really plays into the rover gameplay too - no matter what rover I build, it has pretty much no grip in lower gravity situations ( so like basically everywhere outside of Kerbin, where you can get at the midpoint of the game relatively easily ).
I did manage to solve the slow rover issue tho - atleast somewhat - I built a rover that can go around mun at like 30 - 40 m/s which increases the speeds of travel significantly. Made it very wide and with a low center of gravity so that it's hard to flip and it works relatively well, even handles the polygon terrain somewhat confidently, but it still slides on the surface as if it was on ice skates, which is kinda annoying.
Also another thing pertaining to rovers - I don't think I've ever built a rover / plane, that wouldn't turn to one side for no apparent reason when going straight.
KSP is a game with lots of shortcomings, but because it's a really fun game, we tend to work around (or even with) these shortcomings to make it an acceptable experience.
One of the first tips everyone gets is "Save early, save often". That tip is only given because things can fail for no apparent reason, just because.
I lost count how many times I tried to make a colony/research station on another celestial body, and it was just shaking itself apart because of reasons after loading the game or even nearing it.
Sure you can clamp it to the ground, which does work for the part clamped down, but it still has a high chance of shaking itself to bits.
These problems should be directly fixed, and not by some extra parts or by added actions. A good example is wobbly rockets, you shouldn't need to autostrut a rigged rocket, it should automatically be rigged.
It's a great game, and we take its flaws for granted and in time get used to them.
Even ground clamps themselves can fail to do their job. Oh, it'll hold the base in one place... but that place can _move._ I had Minmus bases thar lost the ability to use their mining drills because they loaded slightly higher up every time they entered physics range.
I used the ground clamps on my south pole Munar base, but the ground clamps appeared about 30 meters off of the surface after restarting the game. I ended up attaching everything on my base to that 30 meter high clamp and building towards the ground. It finally stayed in place and wouldn't bounce my base off the ground after reloads, it also looks like a tree house now.
@@brettbrewer6091 That sounds pretty cool
first. Somebody get this man to 100k. Shadowzone you make incredible content and its quite frankly a travesty that youve been doing this for 10 years below 100k
So true!
What I really love about KSP is that it's sold as a space sim but you have the option to build a large variety of terrestrial vehicles as well - so please make wheels behave like wheels!
Also, where KSP2 failed (beside mismanagement), in my opninon, is that it is a one to one recreation of the original game. I hope KSA will be a fresh take with novel gameplay mechanics.
I don’t think recreating KSP as a new game is a bad idea. Don’t forget KSP does have all these unsolvable technical issues that can really hurt the game play experience. While adding to the gameplay is obviously better, just solving the problems is already worthwhile.
Time to ride the KSA hype train all the way to 100k! You can do it ShadowZone! :D
The shaking/dissassembly effectively was the last mission I shelved in KSP1.
It was my Grand tour mission, with a lander to rove all biomes on every planet/moon. It took months to design and iron out everything from a-to-z, including getting a size where lag "was not too bad" but I made it, I was proud of it. Everything was quintuple-checked in Kerbin orbit and minmus/moon to test mining craft + refueling and everything.
So I decide to officially launch the mission, and was going to make lenghty posts on the forum as well... It was going to be my next KSP achievement.
I get to moho, and once in orbit... POOF shake-to-dissassembly bug. I tried everything for a week or 2 to try to fix it, playing with auto-strut to different and between different parts, to even flying replacement landers and other parts, in case it was "causing resonance" within the ship. Nothing worked. So I shelved everything and hardly played (seriously) any KSP1 after that. I did some Duna missions and a couple kerbin influence thing, but no other large-scale missions.
Then KSP2 dropped and it sucked. So I moved on until I get the itch to KSP1 again. Thankfully(or unfortunately) I got really busy with RL over the last 2 years so I have not had the time to dive back in. Hopeful;ly KSA will be better. If not there's always KSP1 again, provided you keep your ship simple and not try a grandtour, I guess.
Try Juno, it is far more flexible and much more stable. If not as charismatic as KSP.
9:50 It is called Kerbal Space Program, not Kerbal Rally Program. But the reason we're going to space isn't just to float around in orbit. It's to explore the bodies out there. And Kerbal like game needs exploration to be fun. That means good physics and things to explore.
bipedal kittens would be not creative enough i need realistic cats in astronaut suits and idk they plant flags with a robotic arm
I want Khajiit.
@@jackplouf2813 Khajiit got oxygen if you got credit.
@@calluxdoaron1903 what?
@@jackplouf2813 "Khajiit got wares if you got coin"
I decided to list fixes as I listened. 4 of the fixes require KSPCF (Community Fixes) mod, 2 (3 & 3a) are Module Manager patches (short bits of text code), and 2 require a whole other game. :) None of the fixes are perfect, but here's the list for what it's worth:
1. J:NO has a parts list you can use to select parts. I think it's in the last tab.
2. KSPCF mod fixes some "forgetting" issues. I can't remember (heh) exactly which issues.
3. There's a Module Manager patch to remove corner nodes from those panels. It's on the forum in a big MM patch thread.
3a. You can patch all parts to surface attach with MM. Not sure where the patch is, maybe the same thread. But I think it's _very_ silly that they made some parts not be surface-attachable. Consistent behaviour is a great thing.
4. KSPCF mod fixes various parts drift/reallignment issues.
5. KSPCF includes *TimeWarpOrbitShift* to "Fix active vessel orbit moving randomly when engaging timewarp while under heavy CPU load."
6. J:NO rovers resist sliding when the brakes are fully applied, even if the sliding is sideways. Not an actual fix, but perhaps the best that might be done with Unity.
7. KSPCF improves performance in too many ways to list. It speeds loading tremendously on smaller computers. Whether it makes it fast enough, I don't know. :)
Some of these might not be problems in J:NO, but I don't know. With my health issues, I've been doing little more than watching UA-cam, and sometimes not even that.
Damn, hope you are going to be okay man
@@patpat9803 Thanks 😊
if you dont mind me asking whats your health problems?
my issue with the fancy art they show is.. i never played ksp because of the graphics, i played because it was the only game of it's kind. i picked the game up years ago when a friend showed me his basic ksp build (add mooooore boooosters) and it flew into orbit, even on my old potato laptop i was hooked on the gameplay.
tldr gameplay>graphics
KSA definitely does look more like it's at a mucking about with shader code than anything actual gameplay wise
The "sliding landing legs" problem is why I've never been able to finish my ground station on the Mun. That was frustrating. Also, the physics loading when you get back on a save, and the vessel suddenly jumps from the ground and breaks.
I think the lack of progression aggravates how much time KSP seems to steal from you.
Doesn't matter if you accomplish the greatest mission or not, nothing ever really changes around you, the game just gets laggier because there is more stuff for it to handle.
5:23 This is why my favorite mod in the whole game is Precise Editor Continued. You can press P to not only precisely control the angle and xyz coords of any part, but also toggle two things: "enable surface attachment for this part" and "allow other parts to surface attach to this part." SO helpful :D
13:01 Hits differently when my partner of 2.5 years broke up with me two weeks ago 🥺Always need to address problems as soon as they are brought up and make your partner feel heard. It's too easy to get complacent with the normal day-to-day.
Sorry about that 😢
I am sorry to hear that. Not sure if you're already at a stage where it helps, but my mother once said to me after a rather crushing breakup: "Partners are like trains. The next one will come for sure."
Hang in there!
@@ShadowZone Thank you, I really appreciate the kind words and the advice! And the fact that you took the time to read one of many, many comments not directly related to the video!
I'm definitely going to do my best to take some growth out of this and be a better person because all the people in my life deserve that 🙂
Hang in there Alex. Your future depends on it. If you stop believing things can go your way or at least a way you like then you recursively doom yourself. If you believe things will go well then your actions will point you towards a good path. There isn't a secret sauce to these things: life is a complicated sequence of causes and effects. Don't buy into the idea that past patterns must be repeated: everything that has ever happened at one point happened for the first time. Godspeed.
@@ryanspence5831 I really appreciate the kind words and good advice. I always do my best to avoid repeating past mistakes. I'm doing my best to learn from my mistakes and grow as a person. This has been a big and difficult learning experience, but a valuable one.
there are two main things that I want ksa to have that would take it from an improved ksp to a proper successor.
I want a more complex resource system, that you could extract to refuel or build craft off world. Assaying and searching for said resources could also give ‘science’ giving more of a reason to make repeated surface sample missions. And a weather system, like storms on planets making missions more perilous or making solar panels non functional.
I am not sure that batched rendering will have any influence on the problems you described and it also shouldn't hint at how the parts will behave.
From my understanding it should not alter anything, except for the FPS counter.
WASD camera control mod solved the entire needle in a haystack problem, at least in the VAB. Just put that in stock KSA lol
I use a 6dof mouse, free camera in the VAB and flight. RCS control is a dream with it once set up correctly.
One thing i hope we get it really strong hinges, the ability to color a single tank different colors, and the ability to custom design the shape of flaps or structural panels by dragging pounds or something because i wanna build atarship
-"Fine, il do it myself!"
@community probably
Considering I play Stationeers since the early days, and I have the say that the journey to where it was was a bit rough. But right now it's in such an incredible state that it builds confidence in KSA. I stopped playing KSP a while ago and wanted to wait before buying KSP2 but alas, it never got anywhere.
Good call waiting.
No matter the question, KSA can always do better. I've known this studio for years, talked with devs many times and even discussed with them their issues with implementing new stuff. I'm super confident that their game will rock.
One example of KSP stealing time is vessels that can land on a planet just fine but when you switch to them after doing other stuff they just spontaneously explode because some part clipping into some other part causes KSP grief just because something flexed a little due to gravity. There are also some parts that just do not like other parts clipping into them, and often you can't tell if the parts are clipped until after the vehicle explodes.
"Oh you want to add a thermometer to the surface of a box? That change means the entire vessel will now spontaneously self-destruct. Isn't that fun?"
9:44 itd be cool if different planets had different friction, so kerbin/earth had very high because of like grass n stuff, but minmus had really low friction because ice
Speaking about friction, I'm so glad I could build my hanging base on the munar arch back in 1.9 without slipping down.
The parts drifting apart is such an easy bug to figure out (if you are a somewhat competent programmer, which I think was not there in KSP or KSP2):
The game saves the part locations where they currently are, but does not save the point where they would be without bending. Each time you save and reload, the base shape is set to the saved locations, which were previously bent, but now the forces are 0 so they are bent again.
I actually wrote a script that resets the part locations to the unbent state by editing the save file so I could fly propeller planes and actually use the save feature.
Have you ever played "Take on Mars"? That had so much potential with the probes and then turned into an Elon Musk fever dream (or the other way around). Too bad "Orbiter" never had easy build rockets like KSP.
2:00 Blender has many features that would make building so much easier. And be it only that you can select stuff and hide it with H and reveal it with Alt-H. I do agree that there's huge potential in improving the workshop.
another pain point for me is that the surface of some planets ie the mun will have a seam of misaligned terrain that flings you up or destroys parts when you cross it and when within about 2k every reload will fling your vessel off the surface.
One thing I really hope they add is more procedural parts. Right now all we have is tubes and plates, so if we want to build intricate shapes we have to spam these tubes and plates everywhere to get the curvature we want. Making parts more procedural will reduce craft complexity, increase performance and decrease chance of Kraken attacks. KSP 2 was a step in the right direction with its procedural wings but a lot more can be done to improve the system
One of the things that irks me the most is that, normally, I don't want or need part-to-part interactions within one vessel, especially in vacuum. I've already built my ship such that thrusting won't bend my joints - you really don't need to check every frame when nothing's changed. I've looked into the source for ksp a few times before for modding purposes, and looking at how they do part physics is actually programmer torture (IMO). There's this whole nested part tree structure that gets checked and recalculated every physics frame, like the world's least efficient IK system being used to simulate character physics on an IK with the most joints the artists could possibly fit. No optimizations like "This group of parts is basically rigid, no need to calculate it," "Already checked this last frame, still the same, no need to calculate." I get it, it's a hard system to program, and I'd have trouble doing it right, and I'm not even sure if the way I'd do it is right, and it'd take months of work, so it's just programmer fighting in this case. That's why I'd almost prefer it wasn't even in the game, or was built to be easily turned on and off (eg a non hacky version of part welding where the system is just disabled).
There used to be a mod that would allow you to weld multiple parts together into what the physics considered a single part. Unfortunately it was complicated to use and I don't think it works with the most recent version.
@@ReddwarfIVI believe it still works, but it requires game restart, and some parts can't be combined without losing their functionality
For #5 on the wonky orbits, it’s an issue sure but it’s rarely a problem if you use the “warp to” feature until shortly before SOI transition.
You can pan the camera in the vab by holding mmb and moving the mouse...? I hope you know that 1:50
In SPH yes, in VAB holding mmb and moving results in zooming.
@@ShadowZone move the mouse not the scroll wheel
KSP's manual is pretty good, but I'm pretty sure that isn't in it. Or if it is, it was introduced after 1.8 when I started playing. Therin lies a hint of the eternal problem with introduced features: How to let existing users know about them?
We also need a level indicator for lunar or other bodies landings, to know what landing leg spring to lock.
I generally agree. However, I think you failed to mention on important bug: landed vehicles and infrastructure off-Kerbin bouncing uncontrollably whenever you switch to them. A real fun killer..
Karbals interacting with ladders, not being able to climb back inside a hatch to violently being flung off the craft or just imploding for no reason
1:16 what mods ads those kapton plates? Do they help with heat?
I have been having a huge problem with timewarp. Everytime I do over 4x my craft teleports or slows down or something and ruins my mission completely. This is why I stopped playing KSP for now. It is a great game, if you are willing to troubleshoot for a long time.
Honestly I think there‘s quite a lot KSA (or any future space game) could learn from Space Flight Simulator. There are no physics between the parts of the same vehicle, but when building giant craft, that is exactly what I want. Honestly, there should be an option in KSP to turn structural integrity physics off for select vehicles.
For the vehicle building tab, I would recommend NavalArt. The panning and part placement (also coordinates for parts!!) is much better than KSP‘s. Or heck, just take some ideas from Blender‘s workspace.
I think what is essential for any more complex build would be what Space Flight Simulator did with its blue print editing option. The craft‘s save is a txt. file with all the parts having a rotation, location, scale etc. written in them in text format. If one found the game-internal building tab too restrictive or imprecise, once could always go and edit the file itself using a text editor.
I‘m really excited for KSA, but _pleeeease_ I hope there will be more support for giant craft than KSP had!
KSP saves are all text too.
There's definitely a lot to be desired for KSP in it's stock state, but I don't regret a second of the many, many hundreds of hours I've played it
All I want from KSA is a meaningful progression system, a goal, and maybe even a story. KSP is purely a sandbox game with a primitive progression system. Every time I return to KSP I quit after landing on Minmus or Dune because nothing changes after that. Mods mostly just add new parts, but do not fundamentally change the gameplay.
I want my space stations to have a purpose, and not just be decorations. I want every landing on every planet to have a purpose. Maybe even a rival space agency controlled by AI. I want a game, not a tool.
The problems listed in the video are just improvements to the toolkit, not the gameplay itself.
Every open-world game turns into a sandbox after you finish the main story. And after this it is the toolbox that matters, because it determines how much of your own ideas you can bring to life. Not the ideas of someone else who is guiding you through the so called "progression" but your own ideas that progress together with your actual skills. Did you try to explore Duna with a helicopter? Or build a refueling base for SSTO's on Laythe and then use it to explore other moons of Jool? Build a reusable Tylo lander? There are many design challenges that give you a sense of progression and open new horizons once you achieve them.
@@PalassCat I can come up with hundreds of challenges for myself, but what good will that do? The game doesn't give any rewards for the work done, except for useless achievements in you steam account. Unfortunately, KSP has very few diverse game mechanics, so it quickly becomes boring. I had huge hopes for KSP2, but unfortunately we all know how it ended.
By the way, you just confirmed my statement that KSP is a tool for designing and testing spaceships, not a game. From KSA I want particularly a game, not a tool.
I agree, and my comment on this video is basically saying the same thing in different words.
I love KSP. I have enjoyed it a lot as a sandbox game. I think KSA should have a sandbox mode.
I've done jet flight on Laythe. I've done Eve land and return.
It's not that I can't set myself challenges. I hope and expect to set myself many new challenges as I learn KSA.
It's that I hope KSA (career mode) is actually a game, in a way that KSP never has been.
I want my successes to have value, and my failures to have consequence.
That's going to be hard to include in a game about learning through trial and error. But that's the challenge.
I agree with performance being KSP1's biggest pain point.
There needs to be a "right-click-and-occlude" feature where you can omit crafts from the physics call stack. Imagine a refinery with lots of "buildings" that you can "bolt down" and instead of simulating all those parts and dragging things down, it just makes a collide mesh and that's it.
Despite all issues with the original, I just *started a new, heavily modded KSP 1 carreer game on Linux* (I left the Windows world at early 2024) including stuff like life support. Some of the mods also fix the landing legs slippery, once landed, you can lock your vehicle in place.
I also own KSP2, but I never liked it. Yes, it's faster, but mostly void of content and I hate the new editor.
*I really hope KSA will do better.*
Did anyone consider that it might be Rocketwerkz who acquired KSP from Take2? Or that a new KSP owner might pay Rocketwerkz to develop KSP2/3 for them, as in the new owner acting as publisher and Rocketwerkz as the studio? Wouldn't that be great?
Bear in mind, Rocktwerkz has already put out successful niche games like STATIONEERS before (that is also one I like). And it has working multi-player including a Linux-based game server.
i think 2 of my biggest annoyances were that even on a flat and levelled surface, the vehicle drifts. (maybe cause i play RSS and scales are bigger?) and then the fact that my staging is always messed up if i dock or undock and sometimes even just resetting a flight... stages should be groups, like each vessel a section that has it's own staging and they should not move around.
Excellent priorities! If KSA can improve on these it will do well. I think a lot of these will be helped by moving on from the LEGO brick style of craft that KSP used. Craft wobble, attachment problems, loading scrambles all come from having a messy list of ‘parts’ attached to each other instead of a large user-built model. Sounds like they’re working on that
I totally agree with everything you say in this video. There us room for Kitten Space Program to take the crown.
I've never had an epic computer, so I chose to live vicariously through videos to experience the 1,000 + piece builds of the more masochistic Kerbal creators. I cant imagine the utter frustration you would have after waiting a half hour to get to your first staging event just to have the ship blow up and have to do it "AGAIN " after making a small tweek to the design. I have, however, had my more modest builds explode because I had the audacity to clip a couple parts together or come out of time warp at exactly the wrong time. The wobble monster also ate a few of my space stations until someone figured out the problem with competing reaction wheels. Luckily, the devs for KSA have this hindsight and a lot of people to help them. Fingers crossed. 🤞🤞👍
My 1 of 1 most hated things about KSP: the garbage collector. It has ended more campaigns for me than any other factor. Even on a system with 64GB of RAM, any modestly advanced campaign ends up putting so many things on the heap that the single-threaded garbarge collector pauses the game for a few seconds (increasingly long with more stuff in the universe, not just within physics range) every three seconds, which is the schedule for the gc.
The _one_ thing I wanted out of KSP2, above all others, was a multi-threaded garbage collector capable of running without pausing the game. Or better yet, a memory allocation system smart enough to do reference counting and automatic memory freeing and not need a gc at all.
(I'm aware of some mods that claim to help. One manages to delay the onset for a couple minutes, but then it comes back and never leaves again.)
I've played KSP heavily modded almost as long as I've played KSP. Even now- when the game is complete and theoretically as optimized as it will be- the load time is very long. I can start the game, get up, make a nice toasted sammy, and eat it before it's done loading. Luckily, I'm fairly patient, so the tedious nature of the VAB and SPH don't bother me much. I definitely notice the same problems you point out there, though. For people who aren't math-oriented like myself, interplanetary transfers are quite a pain without the assistance of mods like Astrogator. I've always enjoyed surface work- rovers and bases and such- but it's plagued by the same issues you mention. One thing I don't think you mentioned though- Kerbals are so. Damn. Slow. Which isn't helped by time warp, given their tendency to rather comically trip and explode while under acceleration.
Honestly these are the main reasons I actually still play KSP 2 over KSP 1, because as mad as I am at the lying and failed development, and though it has a few little bugs I regularly encounter, the whole experience is not only faster but UI and control and part wise so much less aggravating to deal with too. Plus I love the visuals and music. If I feel like doing anything with mods or a huge spacecraft, which is rare, I switch back to KSP 1 for its strongsuit with that.
if this game can handle my awful looking poorly constructed hell of a rocket, I'm buying it!
Another issue that plagues me when i am using triangle shaped structural panels in stock/modded, is symmetry entanglement syndrome. The mirror is not mirroring the vertices correctly, so the mirror attachment is more like radial
I agree 100%.
I wish for better fps with high amount of parts (like 1000 or so)
Shorter loading times.
Less bugs.
More grip for the tyres and legs.
1. don't be a scam
2. win
thats really all they need
For number 1, on console we can pan in the VAB easily, but it is still annoying how the camera goes insane while looking straight down
The first thing the title brought to mind for me was the vehicle sliding down hills and poor wheel physics. The loading times are also super panful.
I've got high hopes for KSA
Propellers never worked properly. Example: Two prop plane (simple setup) with counter rotating motors, would induce Yaw into the craft from nowhere. Worse yet, switching from clockwise (CW) to counter clockwise (CCW) would often show to thrust / torque moving in the wrong direction with respect to the motors orientation.
also while physics timewarp when u wanna dock both objects, the other one goes a bit far away once u click the timewarp, weird
A lot of these issues were fixed by mods, ie the fuel lines, enabling fuel to transfer through couplings etc, camera mods, ubizorb welding add on etc, etc. and that was the best part of KSP, the game was able to be easily modified.
But yeah those annoying bugs were super frustrating, thats what i was hoping ksp2 would have eliminated, but day one of ksp2 and wobbly rockets was a holy crap they havent fixed anything on this moment.
My issue might just be the real lack of something like heat tiles. I get most parts end up veing able to handle a lot of heat anyways but still would have been cool
I could have sworn I've been subbed to this channel for at least 7 years, and yet, the button needed to be clicked again!
u forgot manuvernodes click problems i can stand when im looking at a planet and trying to click the manuvernode and it will fk click whatever, same with ships when they are close together
I know this is too much to ask, but I would like them to optimise the parts to not take up majority of the computational resources, make physics in parts much more simplified in very large part builds, so that I can build large Capital ships that can refuel at each planet (except gas giants) and make interplanetary modular explorer ship fleet!
for everyone that is annoyed with the camera in the vab/sph, get the wasd mod that lets you move the camera like a source game spectator camera
what i hate about ksp is when i want to make a gigantic aircraft when im trying to take off the wings rip off bc the parts cant carry the weight of it when it should
it is definitely kerbal rally simulator with how many dune buggies and rally cars i've made in this game.
1:00 if that had clouds I’d think it was the real earth (and greener terrain)
I was playing GPP with station science installed. I had the most basic station you could build and it even used 3.5m docking ports. I get anywhere close to the station to deliver one of the experiments and bam! it just flies apart randomly. I'm not even touching it. Then I downloaded kerbal joint reinforcement. That fixed the issue. I haven't had anymore kracken attacks. Then again........I dont' build crazy things like you do.
I have kerbal joint reinforcement aswell and i get the rare kraken attack on my largest fuel station, 700-800 parts i think, and usually when it happens a quickload fixes it.
@@JasonGrim-y4r I never build anything that big. lol KSP has me trained to not build anything more than about 200 or so. I probably can on my big computer, but I rarely play KSP on that.
opened this video hoping you'd talk about sliding. Every surface is ice. I really need to like bring those ground mounts and connect my ship to the earth somehow.
If u have the breaking ground dlc, u can just make a custom robotic landing leg with a grip pad on super high friction to (attempt) to solve the issue
@@alexb-mc4jo I have done this before and I keep forgetting it exists
I don't remember the intercept problem. I played in stock mode for about 6 months everyday until I landed kerbals and returned them from every planet and moon. I must have saved my intercepts differently. I do remember most of the other problems he mentioned.
If you can tame the kraken and manage KSPs many glitches you can build some amazing crafts and builds. I cant wait for KSA because the engine is built from the ground up for this kind of game. Example being the part limit will be 65,000+ and batched rendering.
I love KSP. I've been playing since 0.17 and it has taught me SO much.
I can forgive a lot of the issue your video highlights. Wonky physics and inconsistent behavior are almost part of the charm.
But I'm not sure I can ever forgive the way it squandered the promise of Career Mode. The whole premise of the game (once it stopped just being a demo) was that you're running a space agency. But there was never any GAME to that. Completing contracts and gathering science is mostly dull and repetitive. Sandbox is the way to play KSP, because Career Mode offers no added challenge or enjoyment or consequence or achievement -- just a few tedious chores.
If there's one thing I hope KSA does (beyond getting the core game loop right) it's that I think Career Mode should be an actual GAME. I want there to be decisions to make. I want to unlock tech in a sequential manner that makes sense as my agency gains capabilities. I want those capabilities to naturally springboard me into grander exploration and more ambitious missions.
Career mode has the potential to teach you the game a little at a time. KSP never really did that very well.
Even just adding experiments I have to perform that are related to the tech I'm trying to unlock would be an improvement.
A complete re-work of Science and Career modes is in order. Let's think about what resources are relevant for the player to manage, what decisions they might make that could affect their playthrough, how we scaffold the player's learning and exploration by unlocking technologies and capabilities as the player reaches farther into space.
Is financial constraint an interesting restriction for Career mode? I'm not certain, but potentially.
If the player has to look at their balance sheet and weigh their annual operational cost, consider the pros and cons of various sources of funding, and consider whether to sink their dollars into blue-sky R&D or invest in a larger VAB... yeah that could definitely be interesting.
Adding annual cost (which scales with the number and complexity of missions running, size of facilities, etc.) would put a different pressure on players. Want to run a seven year mission to the outer planets? You'll need to manage some other projects while that one is in flight, in order to keep the lights on. It's just so disappointing to me that KSP only ever implemented this as repetitive procedurally generated contracts to execute.
Lemonade Stand (on Apple II) is a better game than KSP's Career Mode. I pray KSA aims higher.
Yes, I know it's a game about building and piloting space missions. Yes, I understand it's essentially a sandbox game where you set your own goals.
I just want my successes and failures to have more weight. When I leave a kitten stranded somewhere, I want the public to cry out for her rescue!
If my craft experiences a spontaneous rapid disassembly on the launchpad, I want to see the newspaper headline and feel the impact to my public relations and ultimately my agency's success.
Another irritation I've noticed with KSP is ram usage. Vanilla KSP1 seems to have a nasty memory leak that just causes it to just eat up all your ram no matter how much your system has, and as it does so gets slower and slower to load up crafts and revert back to the vab or sph. 32gb of total system ram will easily get devoured by KSP in my experiance especially if its modded :P I'm prob experiencing this because I've using like 500 part+ crafts, but even still stays bogged down after lots of parts are stagged away and or dockable crafts are undocked.
I swear prob 10-20% of my KSP playing time has to be just waiting for the loading times :P
I would had flexible joint between parts. God it's annoying having to autostrut your entire vessels every time it get a little too big or elaborate
Encounters disappearing when warping is probably my nr. 2 worst thing about the game. Physical warping inaccuracy is probably spot 1.
Nah, you pretty much covered most of it. Don’t forget the weak robotic parts that wobble or the fact that if you use symmetry on robotic parts they will bug out. 😢 Fixing the lighting would be nice as the light from lights 💡 currently passes through parts and Kerbals like they’re not there. 😭
Have just started a new modded play through of KSP after two years away from the game. It's running on the most powerful computer I've ever owned and I fully expect to get to the same stage as I have with every other playthrough of the game, where the limitations of the game engine make doing anything with complex craft so time consuming and frustrating that I end up quitting and going and playing Factorio and it's Space Age DLC.
SO MANY surface problems. IMO the sliding is the least bad of the surface problems. KSP1 never really got rid of the bug that caused landed craft to jump when leaving time warp or switching vessels and I feel like it was still basically there in KSP2. And there were also times when had crafts or kerbals clipping through the terrain or vanishing when switching vessel, especially with KSP2. I was surprised these sorts of bugs never topped the list for KSP2, because they were the ones that broke the game the most for me.
Gotta remember that ksp started as a 2 dimensional very simple rocket builder, essentially a flash game with 3d graphics. The game's genes are old and archaic. I think KSA has a lot of advantage just because of the technology benefits today before anything.
Thats something Ive been thinking throughout the video, ksp is an ancient game, running on a dinosaur engine, with code that Ive seen only described as spaghetti and kerbals.
Its almost a miracle that the game works at all and that's why i love it, because it shouldn't work but whenever it does its a beautiful game.
What I would like from KSA, though perhaps I am asking for too much: Lagrange points.
Driving across planets needed an auto-drive or warp or fast travel. Because TIME.
Batch rendering will make displaying many parts vastly more efficient, but it cannot help with physics.
I hope someone will deliver a game like what KSP2 promised to be.
I was really looking foreward to that interstellar part with all the new celestial bodies.
Also deposited my 50€ eary-access buy-in, so i would'nt mind if KSP2 wouls be continued, but would be fine with kittens too - especially if the game was programmed more intelligently.
100% agree with all your points!
KSP is an awesome game, but it is certainly not perfect!
For the things i liked most about what KSP2 did better, was the loading time and the VAB! You could work on a few different ships at the same time and assemble them without importing, combining or any of the other KSP1 non sense.
I dont want to join the hype, so we will see what KSA brings or if it ever becomes a finished product.. also lets see how long it takes to get there.. like you said, time becomes more precious with age, and the longer we have to wait, the less time we will be ready to sink in a new game.
For many things, there should not even be small parts. There should be procedurality-by-function, where you can take a part, add to it's mass and use part of it's volume to add a function. I do not want thermometers sticking on things. I would like sections that incorporate all my experiments, for example. I want to pack a parachute and antenna in the top of my command module, for example. Adding parts should be used when locality matters. A robot arm in the cargo bay should be a part. A wing should be a part. If it does not matter where something is, stop running up the part count for no reason.
What are your thoughts on the current development of space flight simulator 2?
It's similar to the first but in 3D and has absolutely stunning graphics from the released content
As for myself, I always dreamt of building large complex bases on other planets and moons, but as soon as I tried, the game started lagging. Once more than one vessel is loaded and more than a hundred parts can be seen, the framerate gets really bad.
I don't give a flying copulatory action about any atmospheric scattering at this point. The first thing I want to see is a working beta with a good feature set and halfway decent if untuned physics. A project that fiddles with graphical effects early in its development is more likely than not going to get sidetracked from the important points and getbogged down. Just because they _named_ it Kitten Space Agency doesn't mean they should have the attention span of one.
The team know what not to do, that's an encouraging sign. Art design is the easiest part, yet it's the part that decided also if a game is loved or not. Look at Juno, it's technically better than KSP but very few people like it because it's not as charismatic by a long shot than KSP.
KSP has that LEGO feel (just the shape of the characters themselves is enough and the same kind of goof...), that's why it was so successful.
Yup all of this, I could care less if the planets are wire frame and there is no scatter. If my crafts shake themselves apart, the game is a slide show, and I can't plan manoeuvres I might as well play OG ksp. These are the issues that made me give up on my more ambitious missions and consequently ksp as a whole.
Batch rendering does not have anything to do with parts breaking apart, but I do still think KSA will fix that issue, since they are making the engine from scratch and will probably catch the issue early in development.
Not expecting much from KSA unless Dean Hall passes it off to someone qualified and driven after he sees something else shiny and wanders off to work on that.
Hopefully *someone* makes a really good KSP successor, might be KSA. We're going to find out.
My ship drifts during time warp. I genuinely don’t know how I can time warp for 200 days and end up facing 180° the wrong way after aligning with the maneuver node.
JNO has some really good decisions about connecting parts and etc. If there were more developers for Juno, it would he really a great successor, they wouldn't spend 60 millions for nothing... But even now their result is ok: you can create any ship you like. Or download a ready solution and disassemble it for the parts you need 😅
it used to take 20 minute to load ksp when it was modded on my last pc ... i finally build myself a nasa computer this year, whit double the mods it take 1 min xD
I Love KSP, I enjoy it a lot. Never played the, now abandoned, KSP 2, so my taste for KSP is still nostalgic.
I gotta ask, how come Juno New Horizons (simple rockets 2) never gets any love?
I was not building too large rockets so I wasn't affected by most of your problems but unreliability of orbital mechanics predictions alone was enough for me to leave KSP completely in the end. I still hope that whatever comes after it will finally have these things polished.