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Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

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321–330 of 344 posts

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#321

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.

They also got a guy that zips around the place at speeds he should burn up in the atmosphere to be fair though

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when he let go of the spacecraft and fell into the black hole?

I don't recall the exact scene, but wouldn't the different relative centers of mass, and the corresponding difference in distance from the black hole cause some drift. I assume it would be slow. Possibly VERY slow, so it likely wouldn't look like falling, but I think they would separate, right?

I read that as you fall into a black hole, there comes a point where the gravitational difference between your head and toes would be large enough to rip you apart. (Not that you wouldn't have other problems anyway :-) )

If they're as close to a decently-sized black hole as dramatic movie pictures require, I suspect they would be close enough for the separation not to be gentle at all, assuming their individual limbs wouldn't separate.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#323

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…

I often think good games are criminally under priced. I must have played Age of Empires a good 1,000+ hours. Possibly even more. That works out to 6 cents per hour of entertainment.

Try NetHack. infinite hours of replayability (the whole game is algorithmically generated and every time you die, every item/tool/weapon/map has a different name and effect) and it's FOSS ;-)

Also it's a pretty hard game on its own. If you're a fan of challenge i'd suggest you try it.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#324
post #116

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.

And I think all of us here love hacker movies. Sneakers, Hackers, Swordfish, etc. :)

I enjoy when older, unrealistic movies become more realistic over time.

Remotely hacking the sprinkler system in Hackers was so unrealistic when it came out but today it's scary how real that could be.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#325
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Remember when he let go of the spacecraft and fell into the black hole?

I haven't see the movie, but this only makes sense if the spacecraft is actively using thrusters, and the human obviously is not.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#326
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Skyline: Cities seems to be taking a DLC approach (with the newest being Mass Transit) to continue to develop the game engine and content.

I like the approach that the Cities: Skylines devs are doing because it's actually MEANINGFUL DLC, not "buy an extra hat" or something similar. I'd buy the DLCs if I could afford to do so right now...

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#327
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KSP doesn't have Lagrange points. I mean, it's understandable, the n-body problem is hard.

It's not hard. > Principia is a mod for Kerbal Space Program (KSP) which implements N-body and extended body gravitation. Instead of being within the sphere of influence of a single celestial body at any point in time, your vessels are influenced by all the celestials. This makes it possible to implement missions that are more complex and more realistic than in the stock game, especially if used in conjunction with a…

Nice, this might get me back into KSP. Never did like the spheres of influence mechanic.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#328
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way was swordfish like Sneakers/Hackers? The latter are cyberpunk-ish, a bit ideological. Swordfish is more of a "caper" movie with a cheap tacked-on hacking bit. Bad guy wants money, uses hacker and LOTS OF CRIME to get it.

I realised in Swordfish that the 'hacking' bit (with the 3D shapes rather than anything real) isn't meant to be literally hacking, but instead emotive of it, for the 98.2% of the audience who doesn't know what actually goes on.

Hackers has a couple scenes like that, I don't have a problem with the device.

But in Swordfish it's completely ancillary to the movie that it's computer hacking that's going on. The goal is money, not any part of any "hacker ethos" or anything.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 add…

This is a big reason behind why I gave up on Minecraft years ago. I wanted to build big crazy rail systems that auto-returned the carts to me and it was just too glitchy and I had no interest in the new stuff they kept releasing.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#330
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skyline: Cities seems to be taking a DLC approach (with the newest being Mass Transit) to continue to develop the game engine and content.

I like the approach that the Cities: Skylines devs are doing because it's actually MEANINGFUL DLC, not "buy an extra hat" or something similar. I'd buy the DLCs if I could afford to do so right now...

Yep, that's the key. Mass Transit is really a new experience and a lot of refinement, plus the price is low (~$13). They had a big sale right before the DLC that discounted a lot of their older stuff at 50% - 70%.
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