Little context for the trailer: it seems to be a homage to this fan video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDOOsGg-9I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDOOsGg-9I</a>, which is one of the most well-known videos in the KSP community, and something people show to people to get them into playing this game. I must say the new, "official", video does capture the atmosphere very well.<p>If the game will look a third as well as on the trailer visualization, I'll buy it without thinking (who am I lying to, I'll buy it anyway). One thing though: I hope the modding capability and freedom won't be diminished.<p>If KSP is a great game by itself, mods make it a literal order of magnitude better - a huge amount of solid fan work was done to expand every imaginable aspect of KSP. And I mean it: among many things, mods give you many more realistic and unrealistic building blocks, life support management, communication networks including speed of light delay, trajectory planning, UI/UX improvements, graphics improvements, orbital assembly, working space telescopes, realistic aerodynamics model (including supersonic physics), n-body simulation and non-symmetric gravity fields,... I don't think there's another game where so much of such highly skilled effort was spent for free to make it deeper.<p>I really hope they won't do anything that would make this depth of modding impossible.
KSP always looked very cool but I've heard a couple of things that threw me off:<p>- KSP devs are or were treated poorly by their employer (low pay, no compensation for the success of the game)<p>- apparently the program collected a lot of data (I can't remember what exactly) about its users and the machines it was running on, to the point where even non-privacy minded people were calling it spyware<p>Does anyone know anything about this? Afaik discussion about these issues just kinda stopped after a while but we never got a conclusive answer to these points.
I wonder what the modding support is going to actually be like.<p>I'm the one of the two original coauthors of the Kopernicus mod (although I handed off development of it to Dorian years ago when I got my first job after graduation because I was having trouble finding time while settling into working life). Writing that mod was already difficult as hell, because while the game supported mods, there was no SDK or any supporting documentation. There was essentially a gentleman's agreement between the KSP modding scene and the developers that ripping apart the game assemblies for the purposes of making mods wasn't didn't violate the terms of service, even though it explicitly forbid such activities.<p>Building Kopernicus by spending days in the Mono .NET Assembly Decompiler figuring out how to override pieces of the game to make the custom solar systems was pretty darn fun though. I can't tell you how much time I spent trying to figure out how to programmatically make something that PSystem.systemPrefab would accept as a Unity Prefab object. Or the fun of learning about attributes in .NET to build a reflection based configuration system that would actually process KSP's configuration file format into said systemPrefab object.<p>One of the things that the modding community felt at the time was that as Take-Two starting getting more aggressive about hiding the way the internals of the game worked (it's very murky if said gentleman's agreement is still in place), and in it's place producing some documentation, that the way forward may be just making an open source KSP-style game with original content and a completely different engine as to avoid any legal problems (we'd all seen how the internals of KSP worked, so we needed to make sure to do ours entirely differently). But no one (including myself) really ever found the time to work on it or made a serious effort to do so...<p>If they solved the performance issues with large ships, and have somewhat more realistic physics (e.g. Lagrange points/Parking orbits are impossible in KSP), that may just be cause to drop the idea completely. I've mainly found my time spent exploring the depths of orbital integrators, Eric Bruneton's atmosphere paper, and Vulkan.
Last time I read about KSP (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16581913" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16581913</a>), there was lots of criticism about the developers, or their working conditions. It sounded so bad that this was one of the reasons for me to not buy it. Has this improved?
I was a huge fan of KSP, bought into it back in like ~.8/.9 days before there was anything to actually do, and I loved it. Talked tons of people into playing it and I got a lot of joy out of it. I didn't like the way Squad did things, and the bigger they got the worse things seemed to get, but they still ended up producing a solid, relatively stable game, which made space "fun" in a way not many games could.<p>Squad threw away the majority of the good will they originally generated (mostly by treating their community, and especially their modders, like crap) but the core concept of KSP is solid enough that even with their questionable behavior it still managed to thrive. I wont be backing this early on, but perhaps when it gets closer to release it'll be easier to judge what kind of product they're going to end up with.
I've sunk a ton of hours in the original Kerbal Space Program, its pre-launch state is one of my favourite games ever.<p>The only thing there that excites me here is interstellar travel. I'm worried about this being a soul-less cashing in, with a "less, but pretty" situation - much like every versions of the Sims.
Ah, what a coincidence I just bought KSP about a month ago. Very good game but lacks a lot of automation. kOS and MechJeb solves some of these issues, but if you want to play "non-cheaty" it's still a very manual game; there is no way to make use of computers whereas in real space programs everything is computed and organized so precisely.
What I liked about the current KSP is that everything is real. NASA actually sent a satellite to all of our Soler system's planets. They actually developed a rover that can drive on the moon, and they preformed rendezvous with two spaceships. They also had to deal with a finite amount of fuel and parts that could be destroyed if there was too much pressure or heat on them.<p>Now with colonies and mining it is less realistic and more sci-fi. I can see the appeal of that, but it is a different appeal. I would have preferred that they spent energy developing things to make it more realistic. For example, Lagrange points, different forms of propellents, n body physics, automation, ets. Recently with Bereshit I learned that before (certain?) rockets can fire their main engines they have to fire small ones to provide acceleration in order to move the fuel in the big tank closer to the main engine. It would have been nice if KSP also took that into account.<p>On an unrelated topic, I wonder how KSP 2 will make multiplayer work with timewarp
I can't find any information on linux support with KSP2. Does anyone have a link with more linux information? One of the many reasons I loved KSP was robust linux support.
I was pretty bummed to hear about Squad doing their people dirty; the company seemed to consistently underpay and burn out their developers. Have they improved? (With cites?)
Looks fun, anyone play previous versions?<p>The trailer was hilarious without sound. Watching guy fall out landing module, or they wreck their entire space ship.
I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. Maybe when there's a real game and more details, or some actual meat regarding what they mean when they say "deeper mod support", and an absolute answer on Mac/Linux support.... But even then I'm not sure.<p>What worries me more is how this announcement seemingly came out of nowhere, all while the actual KSP is still receiving updates. Even little quality of life updates like new textures for most (or all?) of the planets in the next update. Something just seems off.<p>And let's be honest - half the charm of KSP is its lack of polish, and the janky little things at the corners that just don't quite work right and probably never will.<p>Maybe this is successful and introduces a new (half)generation of simulation gamers to space/physics sims. Or maybe it blows up and we never hear about it again. Who knows. I'm just not "hyped" at all.
"Not actual gameplay" So this flashy expensive trailer is utterly pointless.<p>This is a game sequel that I am worried about. The original is a fantastic game. The sequel is being made by different people. Maybe they dont have as good an understanding of the medium of games. This trailer is a bit of a red flag in that regard already.
Shameless plug, I wrote a book on KSP (for O'Reilly!) with some friends: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-Program/dp/1491913053/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=kerbal+space+program&qid=1566273650&s=gateway&sr=8-2" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-Program/...</a>
Very nice they kept the pilots fairly simple and dressed up their surroundings as much. granted as we seen in this video I suspect the much higher details are going to lead to all sorts of videos people out doing each others for disaster launches.
Love KSP and I'll be looking forward to this!<p>I really don't get cinematic trailers though. If it's not actual gameplay, then what does it tell me about the game? What does it tell me that I don't already know from KSP1?
Scott Manley has a reaction video to the trailer:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D353IVwY_1g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D353IVwY_1g</a><p>He seems to think it holds promise and is looking forward to playing it.
Is KSP1 any fun for casual gamers with only an hour or two and a joystick? Will I have to read up on lots of math and orbital mechanics to get anywhere in it?