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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

#201

Post by sjburt »

mitchty wrote: post #174
redthrowaway wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burn-flip-burn is nice. It'd be nice to see them performing realistic burns to alter orbits, but that might be too much to ask for. >minus the epstein drive which is basically magic It's canonically a fusion rocket, isn't it? So beyond today's means, but hardly "magic".

Any advanced technology... :) I don't actually recall what the in universe explanation of it was outside of it running off water as its fuel. Either way its specific impulse is crazy.

The authors intentionally made it the one thing they weren't going to try to explain using known physics. It's reactionless and fusion powered.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#202

Post by xanderstrike »

J5892 wrote: post #116
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.

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

A real hacking movie would be deathly boring. My favorite hacking in movies is either when it's cheesed up to the max (visually interesting) or happens off screen (more realistic).

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#203

Post by plopz »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #68
marcosdumay wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so weird, looking at a perfectly normal movie and the only thing you can think about is "What? It doesn't work that way!" like if everything started falling up with no explanation and the characters found that perfectly normal. But I'll disagree on Gravity and Interstellar getting spaceflight right. Unless you are going for very basic.

I'm going for the very basic. The kind of which immediately destroys any suspension of disbelief I would have. Gravity was good enough in my book, and is also somewhat rescued by the way you could feel the vastness of space when watching it in 3D.

The protagonist-seeking-debris that ignores orbital mechanics pretty much destroyed my suspension of disbelief with Gravity.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#204

Post by LoSboccacc »

yellow_postit wrote: post #18
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…

To each their own, but this kind of sandbox game to me works better with simpler graphics as it leaves more to the imagination.

simple is orthogonal with quality

https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2lryka/...

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#205

Post by xanderstrike »

Bartweiss wrote: post #113
slg wrote: 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…

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.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#206

Post by Orangeair »

I sometimes get the feeling that this is the only game HN plays. When people talk about not being able to switch away from Windows due to games, it seems like someone always responds, "Well Kerbal Space Program runs on Linux and that's all I care about." I don't think I've ever seen articles similar to this one about other games gain as much traction. Can't think of very many articles about games getting to the top of HN at all, actually, unless they're about John Carmack writing one.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#207

Post by plopz »

recursive wrote: post #134
panzagl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The orbit of the debris cloud is kind of nonsensical, since it is co-orbital to the station but somehow faster.

If the cloud was orbiting at the same speed, but a different axis, wouldn't the collision be as depicted?

It wouldn't come back to collide with the protagonist every 90 minutes then.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#208

Post by dragonwriter »

recursive wrote: post #134
panzagl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The orbit of the debris cloud is kind of nonsensical, since it is co-orbital to the station but somehow faster.

If the cloud was orbiting at the same speed, but a different axis, wouldn't the collision be as depicted?

The period of the debris cloud interactions is about equal to the orbital period of Hubble's orbit. If the orbit was a different inclination but otherwise similar and so crossed Hubble's orbit, it would do so at two points and so the period would be half of the orbital period (it would also require extremely unlikely timing to get it to cross Hubble's orbit and actually hit Hubble at the crossing point, but if it did so at one it should do so at both.)

For it to then hit the ISS, at a far different altitude and inclination is even more problematic.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#209

Post by mdavidn »

Orangeair wrote: post #206

I sometimes get the feeling that this is the only game HN plays. When people talk about not being able to switch away from Windows due to games, it seems like someone always responds, "Well Kerbal Space Program runs on Linux and that's all I care about." I don't think I've ever seen articles similar to this one about other games gain as much traction. Can't think of very many articles about games getting to the top o…

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.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#210

Post by LoSboccacc »

ferongr wrote: post #47
TeMPOraL wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KSP is nowhere close to the limits of Unity, though, as proven by the modding community which (~1 - 1.5 years ago when I was last playing) provided better textures, atmospheric effects, better particle systems, and even shader-based atmospheric scattering. It would be entirely possible to incorporate all of that, in a more polished form, into the base game, given enough development time and will. I mean, this is how…

Graphics are irrelevant, I'm talking about physics. Stock KSP graphics are "good enough".

I wonder how much of that is really true. there are unity games that show much complex physic than this, which has custom movement for orbital mechanic and uses physics mostly as a glorified stacking problem within connected rocket parts of which there aren't that many really.

I guess most of the physic slowdown is some improvised custom code around joints that makes the solver choke

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