Better Than Wolves Forum

FlowerChild wrote:

Taleric wrote: For what KSP 1.0 is I believe the ore features are well balanced.

So yeah, this is actually one of those rare instances where I believe a stock feature is too hard to make use of :)

Impossible! Lol

Yeah it did clean me out to setup. I will be able to scoop every bit of science up off Minmus with my current setup that includes a lab. Also I think I could save a great deal fueling a large interplanetary mission at Minmus vice departing fueled from LKO.

For a novice to medium player it would be incredibly hard without the KSP knowledge and feel required to do it on the first try.

Taleric wrote: Yeah it did clean me out to setup. I will be able to scoop every bit of science up off Minmus with my current setup that includes a lab. Also I think I could save a great deal fueling a large interplanetary mission at Minmus vice departing fueled from LKO.

The thing is: will it compensate for the cost in terms of the time you invested in doing so?

Saving fuel is fine and all, but unless it would take you more time personally to launch that fuel to orbit yourself, or to generate the cash to pay for it, why are you doing it other than because you think the idea of doing so is cool (which I do as well)? Once you do it once and can say that you have, will you ever bother again?

That's what I mean about it having limited practical purpose. I've come to learn with time that player time is basically the dominant resource in KSP (and most games for that matter), way more so than fuel, funds, science, or what have you.

With my own resource system I was joking awhile ago that I thought I could spawn a full service gas station in orbit around Kerbin at the start of the game, and I doubt players would use it much as they wouldn't want to be bothered with docking. That's with the resource values being way higher in BTSM than stock as well, in terms of the effort it takes to get mass to orbit.

BTW, the above aside, Minmus strikes me as an odd choice for a refueling point given its orbit lays off the ecliptic. I suspect that will cause more problems than it's worth.

True on time investment. I still get joy out of plotting encounters and the process of docking so I am a glutton :P

As long as the additional time required is gaming joy the player is in luck. Like I know how to beat FLT but might never on all the craft because I have finally lost the joy of repetition.

On the Minmus selection I can wing rendezvous without paying attention by now, and the inclination change is easy. I stick with Minmus because the ore is much easier to liberate to orbit and there is much less risk for the miner.

Taleric wrote:True on time investment. I still get joy out of plotting encounters and the process of docking so I am a glutton :P

I enjoy docking as well in particular. People in the BTSM thread tend to freak out a bit about some of the stunts I pull, such as doing an Apollo style Mun landing and rendezvous with only the RCS fuel in the landing can itself for the docking.

All done manually without any flight or engineering aids of course, so yeah, I'm a bit of a Jedi already when it comes to docking, and usually get a kick out of random scenarios such as "hey! I forgot to even vaguely balance my RCS! Cool!" on attempting to dock ;)

Despite that though...it's hard for me to justify the time investment doing this kind of resource thing in any kind of in-game way given I could make far more funds on contracts or whatever in the same amount of time than I'll ever spend launching fuel to orbit.

As long as the additional time required is gaming joy the player is in luck.

Not necessarily. If a fun system is more hassle to use than the alternatives then there's a good chance that joy won't be experienced fully.

Not debating whether it is fun or not either. Was simply countering your statement about it being balanced, as I really don't feel it is at all so.

Is the contract system better now? Because the last time i played KSP, it was such a bad experience that i immediately gave up on it and de-installed it.

devak wrote:Is the contract system better now? Because the last time i played KSP, it was such a bad experience that i immediately gave up on it and de-installed it.

There was a mod that added a ton more contracts including building bases / stations. That mod was added to the game in one of the recent updates.

sargunster wrote: There was a mod that added a ton more contracts including building bases / stations. That mod was added to the game in one of the recent updates.

Yeah, Fine Print. While I don't really have any of the stock contracts in BTSM as I still find they occupy a weird place between being too general and too specific with too much randomization involved, that mod did contain a lot of really neat tools upon which to build more interesting contracts, like waypoints and specific orbits.

devak wrote:Is the contract system better now? Because the last time i played KSP, it was such a bad experience that i immediately gave up on it and de-installed it.

Yes and no. The system remain fundamentally unchanged, but as sargunster pointer out, there is more variety to it, and they've smoothed out the rougher edges a bit and reduced its dominance on science a tad so that experiments have a bit of a purpose again.

The building upgrades also help in terms of giving you a bit of something to do with your massive surplus of cash :)

Many of the initial contracts have been automated into "world records" so you don't have to select them to complete say 22k and 70k height ect.

Play wise it depends on what you like to do. They still have the collect data from orbit or surface, position a satellite, flyby X, rescue X from Y, recover X part from Y, test part at X, take X kerbal to Y and back, plant flag, mine and return ore.

So a good variety and the more outlandish testing missions are gone.

Looks like 1.1 is on the way with antennae restrictions line of sight and range. No delay but that is ok, nothing revolutionary but it is progress :P

Taleric wrote:Looks like 1.1 is on the way with antennae restrictions line of sight and range. No delay but that is ok, nothing revolutionary but it is progress :P

Yeah, I dunno man. I'm still so disappointed by the whole 1.x thing, that I think I'm all out of optimism on how it'll turn out.

Would love to see a solid system for communication relays in stock, I just don't have a whole lot of faith it'll turn out solid and the game is still in pretty sad shape considering it is "released" with hardly a mention from Squad on wanting to address that, or even being aware of it.

I thought it was all over so it was a welcome announcement with no expectation. My chief desire is that being a stock feature I don't have to fiddle with RT2 and I would suspect it is better optimized although no guarantee.

I have had a rough time with RT2 and other mods that cost me some big saves :(

Taleric wrote:I thought it was all over so it was a welcome announcement with no expectation. My chief desire is that being a stock feature I don't have to fiddle with RT2 and I would suspect it is better optimized although no guarantee.

Yeah, I can hear that man. I think much like Minecraft, I got way too wrapped up in this game's development due to making a mod for it, and it's lead to a cycle of disappointment. I gotta stop doing that :)

I don't believe Squad plans to end development any time soon btw. As far as they've said, the whole "release" thing was for fairly ambiguous reasons that have never really added up and they just plan to keep developing as they have been during early access.

For all intents and purposes, nothing has really changed other than the label attached.

BTW: If RemoteTech has been giving you grief for whatever reason, you might want to check this out as an alternative:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/thr ... -Diversity

It seems to be solid, and looks like a lighter version of RT that's fairly similar to what Squad has planned for 1.1.

My best guess about the "release" label is that there was pressure from elsewhere to have a "finished" version - maybe from their parent company, maybe from the studio that's porting it to console. It seems like it's a PR nightmare - releasing a "1.0", then having to make additional changes to the features they released with because they didn't work as expected or because players were using them in ways they didn't expect. And even now, there's a memory leak when you switch scenes; it seems that about 100MB isn't released every time you change scenes, which means that eventually the game will crash because it tries to access something outside the memory it can address (a measly 3.5GB on Windows because there's no working 64-bit version).

Katalliaan wrote:My best guess about the "release" label is that there was pressure from elsewhere to have a "finished" version - maybe from their parent company, maybe from the studio that's porting it to console.

Yeah, that's my feeling on it as well. The only thing that seems to contradict that though is that rather lackluster attitude towards fixing that situation post release. I can understand being forced into a premature release by external factors, but not so much that lack of apparent desire to correct it once it's already happened.

The game is still completely unbalanced. Career mode is downright terrible and feels like it's in a very unfinished state. There's numerous bugs, especially in the new heat system they introduced in 1.03, and there seems to be very little acknowledgement that any of that is happening.

I'm thinking they may be putting all their eggs in one basket and hoping the move to Unity 5 corrects most of the major issues remaining with the game, but that still doesn't explain ignoring the low hanging fruit of issues that can be solved immediately.

Anyways, like I said, I really need to work on not caring so much, because right now I have a tendency to just get unduly frustrated about the whole thing :)