Kerbal Space Oddities
aphyr.com
aphyr.com
I've been playing this game regularly for 3 years now. It has a vibrant modding community, and recently some of the more popular gameplay mods have made their way into the core game (mainly more realistic aerodynamics, resource mining, my favorite, "deadly reentry"). It's basically a SimCity game, but with rockets.
The one downside is that while it's a lot of fun at the beginning, it gets kind of monotonous at the end (if you can call it an end). Flying crew to and from Duna is hard. I've never done it. Even just sending a probe is hard to hit it.
If you put the sun at the center and kerbal at 3 o'clock, you get a good enough transfer window by waiting to having duna at 1 o'clock. You can then eject tangentially from kerbal sphere of influence and correct half way trough.
The only real plugin that I strongly suggest there is the aereobrake plugin, that'll show you the predictoion for aerobraking directly on the ksp map.
For more accurate and realistic missions, there's this tool [0] to calculate pork chop plots [1] to find minimum energy transfers. (you surely know about this)
I think calculators and mission planners like this should be a part of the game proper. Switching to a web browser mid-game to do mission planning is a big turn off for me.
It might be a part of their game design, there are very few numbers and data presented in game. But I don't think it works very well apart from some very basic moon missions. A lot of the information is there but it's just difficult to find (e.g. want to know your inclination? select moon, and then look at ascending/descending nodes in map view).
I enjoyed the eyeball method initially but you grow out of it soon. I liked the "fire prograde when moon rises over horizon" moon missions and I even achieved a rendez-vous in 0.17 [2] before there were maneuver nodes or other helpful gadgets in the map view.
But once we got maneuver nodes, intersection markers, etc that playing style was out of the window. Now I'd really want to have some proper mission planning utilities (similar to some MFD modes in Orbiter).
I think the game should (at minimum) have a transfer window planner, a patched conics solver (with optimization), a pork chop plotter and a rocket burn planner for ascent and powered descent. Perhaps a Clohessy-Wiltshire-Hill equation solver for pinpoint accuracy rendez-vous too.
[0] https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot [2] http://imgur.com/p5Dz5Ab
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/84005-1...
It was a game changer for me, and really made interplanetary transfers "click"
Flying to other planets is really difficult, something I still can't reliably do with hundreds of hours played. I've only sent probes to 3 of the other planets (Duna, Eve, Jool).
It can get monotonous, but when I play I am strongly motivated by trying to achieve something I never have before. (Or if I'm playing mods such as 'Real Solar System', but that's another step up again in difficulty).
Now that KSP lets you plan your intercepts several sphere of influences away also makes planning easier. Just adjust your maneuver nodes until you see an intercept, then follow them.
EDIT nevermind, I didn't realize SpaceX scrapped the idea too.
I think it's almost always true that your second trip to the mun in kerbal is a rescue mission...
I was... not pleased.
Or even worse, you realize as your crew is barreling towards Kerbin that you forgot to add parachutes to your lander...
I always felt like there wasn't a need to "build" much past the first Mun mission, and grinding for science performing slight variations on the same task to get new parts was really boring.
My first thought was how I wished I had to set up satellites (or some sort of infrastructure like remote fuel depots) to reach farther planets. That would also take time but be much more interesting.
A friend told me about this game, and I thought it would be perfect for my (then) 10 year old. We got it for the PS4, and it was nothing but frustration. The biggest controls were complex and confusing when mapped to the PS4 controller, you couldn't install mods, and the game was buggy, frequently crashing and corrupting saves.
We finally got the PC version (which I run under Wine on FreeBSD), and it works much, much, much better.
I used to buy them because they worked without an internet connection, and the devkits usually provided their own (well written) primitives and game engines so bug-free (or seemingly bug-free) games tended to be the norm.
Now everyone just writes things in unity and the DRM forces you to have a reliable broadband connection, I don't see the point anymore.
Given that I want to play games, my options are to spend a bunch of time and energy researching, price-shopping for parts, and building out what would likely be a $1000+ dedicated gaming Windows PC, continuing to funnel time and money into upgrades as games demand more and more horsepower; or pick up a $250 current-gen console at Walmart, knowing that it'll be able to handle anything I throw at it, and only worry about upgrading several years from now when some game I really want comes out on a future generation console.
As someone with a limited entertainment budget, the latter option is by far the more attractive option.
I build a new PC approximately every 7-10 years and so far my computers handled everything fine. My current one which I'm about to replace has a first gen i7 and a GTX480 and they worked perfectly with pretty much any game. I'm about to replace it, probably with a 7700k and 1080Ti which should again last for quite a while. The only reason why I'm replacing it at all is because some random component on the motherboard started overheating so I finally have a good reason to upgrade.
> spend a bunch of time and energy researching
This is a terrible argument, I know jack about hardware yet am able to build a relatively decent computer. It's not rocket science, a couple minutes of looking through your local computer shop should give you a good idea what sort of components are good or bad. You can also throw your build into PCPartPicker which will generally let you know if something is wrong.
Oh, not up to the challenge of playing games with a controller? /s
But seriously, adjusting controller sensitivity/etc to your liking and practicing helps a lot. You can also turn on aim assist in most shooters (it's usually on by default, actually). There are plenty of great PS4 exclusives that it'd be a shame to ignore simply because you think they're unsuitable for controllers (depending on your taste - Horizon Zero Dawn, Bloodborne, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, Nioh, Ratchet and Clank, The Last Guardian, Persona 5, Gravity Rush).
That said, there definitely are plenty of games that have terrible console controls (especially bad ports, like Kerbal) and I've never seen an RTS done well on a console.
Don't forget top-down and fighting games. RPG's too.
But if you're talking about games that have a first/third person aiming component, yeah, mouse and keyboard are better, but if you're stuck with a controller, you just aim a bit differently. You have to rely more on strafe-aiming, sweeping, and movement prediction.
It's usually not so bad the controller is a reason to give up on otherwise good console-only games.
I agree that console gaming is not really attractive nowadays if you're not on a budget and don't mind missing a few exclusives.
>the devkits usually provided their own (well written) primitives and game engines so bug-free (or seemingly bug-free) games
I don't think that's quite right, I think the main reason games seem buggier nowadays are because:
- Nostalgia goggles, some games were utterly broken even back in the day, we just don't remember those.
- Games are a lot more complicated these days, it's easier to test Pacman than GTAV.
- You can now patch games so "going gold" is not that much of a deal anymore. Back then if your Nintendo 64 cartridge shipped with a game-breaking bug you were screwed.
- Even though the games themselves are overall more complex, gamedev is also more accessible thanks to Unity and other frameworks. That lowered the bar for game devs and as a result the average skill level is probably lower than it used to be.
In my experience the "well written primitives" is a myth. Older console (anything up to the 16bit era) hardly had any primitives to speak of, you just wrote assembly and talked to the hardware directly.
Later consoles had a kernel or "BIOS" but it's really not as good as you could imagine. To take the PlayStation for instance, the BIOS is a piece of crap with poorly optimized code and buggy functions. Just read a bit trough http://problemkaputt.de/psx-spx.htm#kernelbios to get a taste.
FileSeek: Movement from the eof is incorrect. Also, movement beyond the end of the file is not checked.
FileGetc: For some strange reason, the returned character is sign-expanded; so, a return value of FFFFFFFFh could mean either character FFh, or error.
strstr: After rejecting incomplete matches, the function doesn't fallback to the old str address plus 1, but does rather continue at the current str address
Since the PlayStation doesn't have a MMU many games actually hotpatched the BIOS to fix some of these issues or add functionality.
What's happened to the console ecosystem is a whole bunch of different things. More accessible tools (e.g. Unity) and platform holder development programs have gotten more developers who are less experienced and not as well funded onto the console platforms. Availability of easy online patching has lead to physical releases, which have to be finalized months before the actual release date, being intentionally left incomplete, with gaps to be filled in by a release day patch. Changing technology cycles have made console generations blurrier. And yes, online DRM has become a thing, although I'm not sure that's quite as onerous in practice as you suggest; it's not like current consoles just refuse to run any games while offline.
That's not an exhaustive list. The appeal of consoles is what it has always been, they're still the easiest and cheapest way into modern video games. But it's true that some of the advantages over the PC platform have begun to erode.
Now we have the controllers, but no games
The whole thing is just dumb
No luck with linuxemu?
Besides, last time I looked the native Linux version was still 32 bits only. KSP has many problems with 32 bits platforms.
The 32-bit version crashes immediately after a failed mmap()
The 64-bit version has issues with nvidia GL libs that I didn't try to get past.
Wine just worked.
There has been some work recently with mmap and linux compat, so I will retry again when I have the chance..
Is there a good tutorial that y'all used to learn how the game works?
The game is fun, and I definitely recommend putting in the time to figure it out. There will come points where things just click, and suddenly getting to orbit becomes easy, then orbital rendezvous, then Mun and Minmus landings, etc., etc.
The funny thing was, I went out and splashed 1.5k on a new PC just for Kerbal, I loaded my save file of my moon base, and now I had 7fps....
Absolutely useless. KSP is like a Mr Universe Body Builder wearing a 3 year old girl's dress.
Unity has nothing to do with KSP being laggy. KSP is a very ambitious game written by a beginner team; without Unity it couldn't have been made at all.
How, exactly, do you confirm these?
- Hearthstone
- Night in the Woods
- Hidden Folks
- Enter the Gungeon
- Superhot
- Ori and the Blind Forest
- Broforce
- Grow Home
- Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
There're these, for a start. (Though I don’t know why "modern" is qualified as being within three months.) Perhaps the problem is that no one can recognize a game made with Unity at a glance? The cheaper, lousier games can’t or don’t pay to remove the "Made with Unity" splash, so Unity has acquired something of an [image problem].
[image problem]: http://www.thejimquisition.com/unity-has-an-image-problem-th...
(And i say this as someone who hates Unity for the actual graphics handling bugs it has.)
We're not talking about Python here, C# is a JIT compiled language not an interpreted one. The performance could be roughly comparable given the same code.
I think they actually just released a new version that supports a more newer runtime but I doubt KSP upgraded.
More importantly, as others have stated, the performance has really improved over the last 12-18 months. Give it a shot again and you might be surprised.
I played KSP all the way up until 1.0 on a $900 Thinkpad x220, and I was usually getting 15-20 FPS. My old $1.5k-ish gaming PC was getting a nice solid 60fps until I started making launchpad monstrosities. So I find it hard to believe that your new $1.5k PC is actually struggling with KSP under "typical usage," as opposed to some weird corner case in your save or just a really huge moon base.
You can always use mechjeb for that.
I eventually merged my mod into mechjeb, adding a whole slew of orbital calculation functions, and many fun space times were had by all.
However MechJeb is a bit overkill for that, I prefer to use Kerbal Engineer[0]. It's simple and offers a few quality of life improvements without actually playing the game for you.
The other mod I consider vital is the docking alignment indicator[1] which makes docking massively less painful.
[0] https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/222685-kerbal-enginee... [1] https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/220299-docking-port-a...
Sorry you don't also enjoy programming after a hard day of (presumably) work.
The controls feel "wonky" for the most part because, since it's a game more than a simulator, you tend to have way more control authority than is realistically possible, specially with reaction wheels. There are some mods to rebalance that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_turn
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q_8TO4Ag0E
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel
PS: For someone who always dreamt about working in aerospace, KSP is a blast!
Also if you don't do it already pay a great attention to you engine's specific impulse. It's often a lot more important than thrust, at least outside of first stages and landers.
My go-to combination in the mid game is Mainsail engine for first stage from kerbin launchpad (high thrust and good Isp in the atmosphere) and then switch to the Poodle while in space (not-so-great thrust but high Isp in vacuum). Oh and a healthy amount of "asparagus" staging, it's always a bit annoying to set up but well worth it in KSP.
Later on you unlock even more efficient engines, such as the "Nerv" nuclear engine with an Isp of 800 in vacuum.
Finally you can also mine fuel on planets and asteroid to refuel your tanks, I generally like setting up a "filling station" on minmus to avoid having to haul massive amounts of fuel out of the kerbin gravity well.
Only yesterday I ended up doing a return from mun orbit with bingo fuel by spinning a craft up to crazy longitudinal rpm and decoupling the descent stage at just the right moment.
That said, using more efficient staging designs is usually superior to the naive "moar boosters!" philosophy that new KSP players typically start with.