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Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

kerbalspaceprogram.com

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Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#281

Post by ekianjo »

ouid wrote: post #145
TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

KSP was possibly my best entertainment spending ever. It definitely is the best game for me in terms of costs / time played. If you haven't played it yet, do yourself a favour and buy it now. If you have a kid with even tangential interest in space, get a copy for them. Side effects of playing KSP include: - getting an intuitive feel for basic orbital mechanics - finding yourself reading up on actual math to better u…

Interstellar had really bad orbital mechanics. You remember when they used the staged rocket to get off earth? Do you remember later, when they landed on that other planet with 1.5 times the mass of earth? Do you remember the machine that they used to leave that planet?

even the way time passes faster on The planet with tidal waves is complete bullshit. It does not match any of the assumptions aT all and is just used as a stupid trope.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#282

Post by phire »

marcosdumay wrote: post #135
Pharylon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gravity was a good movie. And for a movie set in space, it's pretty realistic...ish. But it's orbital physics are terrible. Just terrible. I mean, most movies don't even try. Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars don't deal with orbital physics at all. Gravity tries, and gets it all wrong.

> ... Star Wars don't deal with orbital physics at all. Except at the times when a ship is disabled in an attack, and then changes course and "sink" into the nearby planet. But yeah, I do agree. It's much easier to watch that kind of atrocity in a movie that makes no effort to look realistic than it is to watch something like gravity.

That actually makes sense if you get rid of the assumption that they were in orbit in the first place.

Once you have cheap, powerful thrusters like starwars/startrek has (thrusters that can hold the mass of the whole ship against gravity in any direction, independent of the main engine), it makes little sense to actually bother going into orbit, unless you actually want to turn the thrusters off.

Instead, just pick a point on the planet and hover over it. Or pick a circular orbit-like path around the planet for maximum coverage. Just pick whatever position or path through space makes the most strategic sense.

If you have a ship operating like this, and it loses power to it's thrusters... then of course it will 'sink' into the nearest planet as gravity suddenly becomes the primary force acting on the ship.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#283

Post by Florin_Andrei »

logfromblammo wrote: post #222
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I was just watching yesterday an episode from TNG, where Geordie detects a "deuterium leak", and Riker immediately asks "toxic?" Dude, it's hydrogen, you need to have different concerns there. At least they did acknowledge that firing a weapon in a deuterium-rich atmosphere might not be wise, depending on concentration. Eh, just push the non-chewy bits to the edge of the plate and enjoy the rest of the culinary…

As a nitpick, deuterium actually is toxic. The hydrogen bonding in molecules that substitute deuterium for light hydrogen is affected, such that if you drink enough heavy water, you will experience symptoms similar to radiation poisoning. It interferes with how your chromosomes line up during cell division. Presumably, if you inhale enough dideuterium monoxide vapor, you may experience a similar effect. It would not…

Well, they were not about to drink heavy water, they were just breathing air with some percentage of heavy hydrogen.

How much D2 can you breathe in before you suffocate anyway?

Of whatever amount you do breathe, how little is absorbed?

Of the tiny amount that is in fact absorbed, how much ends up exchanging D atoms with your body?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but my bet is the airborne process is orders of magnitude less efficient than drinking D2O.

Their main concerns should be:

1. Suffocation from lack of O2

2. Risk of explosion if the D2 percentage is in the danger zone

3. If that think was leaking out of a reactor, maybe there were some byproducts leaking out with it? Like, I dunno, tritium? That would be really, really nasty to breathe in.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#284

Post by parisidau »

Shameless self-promotion, but together with some friends I wrote a book for O'Reilly Media on KSP!

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-Program/...

O'Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do

Safari: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-kerbal-pl...

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#285

Post by simonbarker87 »

j9461701 wrote: post #244
mdavidn wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'm surprised Factorio hasn't surfaced more frequently on HN. The game's automation play is just as addictive and creative, and it runs on Mac and Linux.

The people who have found Factorio have yet to come back from playing Factorio. Their children miss them.

So true, I spent about 150 hours on that game in 2 months and apparently that's pretty light compared to a lot of people (probably explained by me not being a gamer and this being the only game I've completed in the last decade other that Leo's Fortune), I launched a rocket and have since uninstalled it. Fortunately I found the latter stage of the game such a trudge that I've got little inclination to go back to it - although I think 0.15 will solve many of my gripes so I'm avoiding reading about it for now.

Factorio is nicknamed Cracktorio for a reason :-(

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#286

Post by ajmurmann »

princekolt wrote: post #186
dragonwriter wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its likely the lack of excessive monetization and the lack of pay to developers are not unrelated.

The game is not cheap.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. I waited for months for the usual 80% off steam sale. I finally gave in and bought it at full price. I almost never do that on Steam.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#287

Post by deciplex »

slg wrote: post #77
mediocrejoker wrote: post #16

I hope this goes well. I would love to see a remake that retains the exact same gameplay with more modern graphics. Hopefully all the people who paid for the current in-development version are not left high and dry in terms of updates and bugfixes. I also have heard the rumors that the team was not treated well, and that the game was never really the focus of the company. I think it may have been a side project of on…

>Hopefully all the people who paid for the current in-development version are not left high and dry in terms of updates and bugfixes. How long is a developer expected to keep improving a game? Maybe it is the old console gamer in me, but it wasn't that long ago that a game developer was done with a game when it was released. This game has been public for 6 years, been on Steam for 4 years, and been out of beta for 2…

To add to this: at some point I want a developer to stop development on a game. This is especially true for games with a lot of mod content, and it's especially true when developers start prioritizing new features over bug fixes (looking with great consternation in your general direction, Mojang). It gets very tedious when a game has been out for a while and yet all your mods still break twice a year because of updates, and you've got to roll back / wait for the mods to update (which doesn't always happen) / etc.

With the exception of perhaps some bug fixes if necessary, KSP 1.3 is done. Stick a fork in it and start work on something else.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#288

Post by stormbeta »

rxhernandez wrote: post #157
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no longer being able to watch most space movies due to frustration caused by the filmmakers not grokking basic orbital physics Meh. I've a degree in Physics and I still enjoy Star Trek. I agree with the rest.

I too have a degree in Physics but have trouble enjoying sci-fi entertainment that includes basic physics screw ups in its story. I about pull my hair out when I hear them insert quantum entanglement in random places to make up for a lack of creativity and/or ability to hire a decent science adviser.

You'd probably enjoy Greg Egan's work then.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#289

Post by deciplex »

xanderstrike wrote: post #205
Bartweiss wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting balance. On one hand, games were historically 'dead' at release. On the other, they were at least theoretically done at release. That's no longer even a goal for many developers today - features get deferred, and players get used as a massive QA team. KSP as it first hit Steam was fun, but obviously incomplete. KSP 1.0 was viable as a finished product, but had obvious, planned upgrades unfinished.…

> features get deferred It's actually the opposite, bug fixes get deferred in favor of more features. Fixes make your player base happy, but they already paid and are therefore not worth any more money, new features drive sales.

Mojang is particularly aggravating about this. They spent like a year completely reworking The End and adding hang-gliders or whatever, and meanwhile furnace carts have been broken for like three years, and the fix is apparently like a dozen lines of code or something. In fact the entire mine cart and track system should be overhauled if they're really serious about improving the game - but instead they just keep adding more stupid shit nobody asked for.

Not to mention a lot of the good mods are still on like 1.6 or something because obviously no one is going to diligently update their mod over the course of ten years or however long Mojang wants to keep this up.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#290

Post by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

KSP was possibly my best entertainment spending ever. It definitely is the best game for me in terms of costs / time played. If you haven't played it yet, do yourself a favour and buy it now. If you have a kid with even tangential interest in space, get a copy for them. Side effects of playing KSP include: - getting an intuitive feel for basic orbital mechanics - finding yourself reading up on actual math to better u…

The most egregious example I recall recently was in the Flash TV show, where a character lamented that the energy required for their weapon against the main villain was more than the sun could provide. Except, of course, the writers got it wrong by orders of magnitude.

I could call Shakespeare a Jazz musician, and and still be closer to being correct than they did.

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