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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

I’ve spent a lot of time playing KSP. This game has an incredibly steep learning curve. The best thing they could do is build a player autopilot that lets them get to orbit with basic rocket builds. There’s a ton of hardcore players (like me) who do things like write kOS scripts to run rockets to the mun and beyond. But that kind of thing is lost on the person who first downloads this game.

If the devs are reading this, that’s the package you need: a basic autopilot for noobs.

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I disagree. Half of the value of this game comes from the fact it forces you to learn a few things about real physics along the way. Beginnings ain't hard. You can easily get to orbit manually, and you can even eyeball your way to the Mün.

That said, something like the per-stage ∆v display from KER (a mod) should IMO be stock, both during construction and in-flight - without that one piece of information, any trip past Kerbin orbit gets too difficult - you either end up seriously overbuilding your vehicle, or run out of fuel in the middle of a mission.

100% of the value of the game is that it's a sandbox that lets you play with a bunch of different things - rocket design, orbital mechanics, exploring a technology tree, resource management, etc. etc.

To that end, any feature that makes it easier for different players to approach the game in their own ways will make for a game that appeals to more people. Let people who want to control the rocket manually control it manually, and let those who want to just have nice, automatic, repeatable launches use the autopilot. Let people who want to fiddle with rocket designs do that, but also hand out a bunch of prefab rocket designs for when you just want to sit down and fly a rocket. Let the same people play the game in different ways in different sessions, depending on their mood.

Just don't try to tell them that there's only one proper way to have fun, because all you'll do with that is ensure that they tend to get bored more quickly.

That's a nice idea in theory, but in practice, players will take the most efficient method of completing a task, even if that method isn't fun. If you give players autopilot, they will use it, even if they would prefer the game without it.

I'm sure I've read research on this, but I'm not sure how to dredge it up from the internet. So I apologize for the lack of citation.

Anecdotally, in the Elder Scrolls series, I vastly preferred Morrowind's lack of unlimited fast travel. But I still used fast travel liberally in future installments, in no small part because the games were designed under the assumption that fast travel would be used. The takeaway is that you can't assume that players will ignore a feature just because they don't like it.

KER gets latitude when it screws up, because it's a mod. The game itself needs to be damn-near perfect - and it can't be, because some rocket configurations are inherently impossibly to calculate total dv for (eg, a lunar-orbit rendezvous mission a la Apollo).

I totally agree about not adding the autopilot. Mechjeb exists for those people.

> some rocket configurations are inherently impossibly to calculate total dv for (eg, a lunar-orbit rendezvous mission a la Apollo).

I think this fact should be communicated clearly. After all, the game has a bunch of "sorta but not quite" indicators already - like the burn time in maneuver nodes, or the orbit display that doesn't take into account atmosphere when deorbiting/projecting deorbiting with a maneuver node, etc.

I loved this game, even wrote / helped maintain some mods, but stopped playing due to performance degradation that gets worse the longer the application runs (especially slow scene changes). In my humble opinion the best thing they could do is plug the memory leaks, refine the architecture to make it more robust and uniform, sharpen the performance and make the game I loved playable again. I'd love an extension that tracks cycles spent on a function-by-function basis and aggregates data to track down misbehaving mods.

I'm not sure how long its been since you played but the 64 bit version running on Unity 2017 is pretty good from the limited time i've spent with it.

They did claim (even) more performance improvements in the release from last week, and I'm sure there's still a lot more to tweak.

I think they don't need autopilot or something, but to have a better onboarding and tutorial, a fun tutorial that teaches players the basics of spaceflight and rocket building step by step. Narrated by Scott Manley of course. Just get a smooth tutorial into the game. Modders / the community could probably make that with the new mission editor.

Honestly, Scott Manley's "going to orbit" and "changing orbits" videos were a huge chunk of what made the game work for me. I'd done both without guidance, but learning to do them efficiently and consistently was what opened up creative designs for me.

I'd love to see Manley's info promoted to a game component or tutorial mod - it's already a huge contribution to the game as-is.

At least having automatic staging would make beginners life easier. Crashing and burning because you didn't press he button at the right moment, is quite video-gamey.

And also the fact that stages are numbered reverse from popular usage convention, adds a bit to the confusion.

Having voiced count downs and space chatter out of the box would also have added a bit more polish.

I haven't played in a long time, but isn't MechJeb essentially this?

MechJeb is a mod. Imagine how many play it on original build, or on consoles.

The same could be said about the Kerbal Engineer, which shows useful stats (dV, altitude, periapsis, apoapsis, etc).

MechJeb could be considered cheating though; I'd make it a bit more idk, lore-friendly and only gradually add it. Those stats could definitely be added though, with stat availability based on what pod you're using. For immersion you could have a mode that hides the UI so that info is only available from inside the cockpit - although of course most rockets are remote controlled or automated nowadays.

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