There is some more recent videos showing actual clips from KSP2, here is the latest one: " Kerbal Space Program 2: Episode 6 - Early Access " - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAL3XaP-LyE
I've been playing KSP since early access, but I have concerns about the new direction. Nothing really tangible, but stuff like requiring a launcher. That's not needed, but doesn't have that plucky KSP feel anymore to me.
Same. I loved KSP and have hundreds of hours in it, but I feel like what I really want it to be is a base builder and orbital mechanics simulator, instead of just the latter.
High hopes for ksp2. Multiplayer is interesting as well, there's certainly enough space for a few friends out there.
I've played plenty of KSP, and when you launch the game the first time there's a popup where you have to agree to have your privacy violated (there's a link to iirc unity analytics where you can supposedly opt out, but it always gave me a page error when I tried to go there. In Linux, it wouldn't even launch the browser and it doesn't give you the URL, so it would be impossible to opt out even if it worked).
Their integration with the redshell spyware is well documented too.
I can confirm it's true. In particular, it tries to connect to two google cloud servers at:
from port 59946 to 35.190.78.8
from port 54192 to: 35.227.244.186
Furthermore, btdmaster's original comment regarding this was censored, which lends even more crediblity to claims, and that something very fishy is behind this.
“We take an expansive and strict stance on what constitutes spyware. We define spyware as anything that includes telemetry, phoning home, automatic updates or is listening in without the user's knowledge or consent.”
I do wonder about the economics of throwing this many free games at consumers. I think I have around 160-170 titles on my Epic Games Store account and I have never spent money on the service.
Yeah I have a couple hundred and have bought... like... two.
That's just something you can do when you have a money-printer (Fortnight) and want to buy market share, I guess. Worked in my case—sorta—since I'd only ever have bought a couple exclusives and wouldn't have it set to start-on-boot if not for the frequent free games.
But, if I'm looking to buy a game, I still check GoG and Steam first, and if it's not there give a hard think to whether I really want the game, though. Which is why I've only bought two games. I'll even pay more, or defer until a sale, if Epic has it for cheap and it's more expensive on the other two services. The only price they're winning my "business" with is free (except a couple exclusives).
They're trying to buy being the other store that all gamers have and leave open and look at pretty often. They're trying to go head-to-head with Steam—others have tried with exclusives (e.g. EA's Origin) but it's never been enough, so they're trying with exclusives and giving away like a hundred games a year, hoping that'll do it.
I dunno how everyone else is treating them, but for me, they've gotten me to leave it open and look at it pretty often, but haven't managed to get me to ever buy non-exclusives, so... partial victory?
In the Apple VS Epic suit some of the numbers for this were actually released. Its surprising how low some of the numbers where. I think for some weeks Epic was only paying $50k/week for this (which, for the scale of Epic, is peanuts). Obviosuly for bigger games (e.g. when they gave out GTA V) it was way bigger, but the YoY cost is actually not as high as you might think.
Also remember this is suppose to be a loss leader. If they can get you hooked on a few games to draw you from Steam then you start buying your games on Epic and then they make real money
>If they can get you hooked on a few games to draw you from Steam then you start buying your games on Epic and then they make real money
Hasn't happened yet and I've had an account for >2 years.
The thing is that even if they keep giving out free games, I still consider my Steam library to have the superior collection of games than what Epic has thus far given out. And since I like using the Steam client and the Steam store more, I don't see Epic Games closing the quality gap anytime soon.
Same. Only reason why I have an Epic account is for the free games. I refuse to buy anything from them on principle; especially after they did my baby Unreal Tournament dirty.
They don't pay retail price. You probably weren't going to buy those games if Epic wasn't giving them away, so you don't represent a lost sale. The developers could easily come out ahead getting payed penny's on the dollar for sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
There is a risk that a game or studio gets a reputation for giveaways/discounts which could canabalize future sales. Or the entire industry gets such a reputation. However, at least in this case, KSP is so old at this point, I don't think it is a major issue. If anything, the publicity probably will do more to boost sales of KSP2, then the notion that KSP2 may be free in 7 years.
Given the timing, I suspect Private Division views this as a marketing deal in advance of the February release of KSP2. Any monetary compensation they get is just a bonus.
Game company advertising budgets can be in the hundreds of thousands per day, giving away free games like this (most likely with a bulk discount negotiated with the game creator) is peanuts compared to the traffic they bring.
I like this game, but I still can't even get shit into orbit. Pardon my language.
It makes me feel like I'm just an idiot. I don't think I am. But maybe I am. Who knows. All I know is that I feel bad for killing all of those little guys. They didn't even die in the pursuit of knowledge. They just died for my own hubris and naivety.
For me, I found a lot of satisfaction building space planes. Much different takeoff/landing procedure and completely different craft design, but a lot easier to maneuver.
As for killing all those little guys, consider adding a final-stage parachute that decouples the crew cabin from the rest of the craft. It might take them a few hours to hit the ground, but you'll despotically murder less space goblins that way.
Are you building your own rockets? Building a rocket to give you enough delta-v to get into low Kerbin orbit, or even to Mun, isn't terribly hard, just throw more boosters and more struts, go up for a bit about 80 degrees to the east, about 20k high start burning pretty much due east.
Remember you pretty much have to go up and sideways to get into orbit.
Point the navball about 45° east a little bit after lift-off (and then straight east after you leave the atmosphere) and use a lot more boosters and you'll get into orbit easy
You’re not an idiot, the game requires you to understand some rocketry and orbital mechanics concepts which has a learning curve —- the concepts are not difficult but if you don’t understand them you the game can be rough.
Thankfully there are plenty of YouTube tutorials that kind of summarize the basics.
The key lesson you need to remember about orbit (in KSP or real life) is that orbit is sideways speed, not up distance or up speed. Going up, you will come back down. Go sideways fast enough, you'll come down but keep missing the planet below you, so you stay in space.
The most efficient way to do this would be to just go sideways really fast from the ground. Problem: there's a lot of air in the way. So the right thing to do (again, both in Kerbal and in real life) is to initially go just up, but as the air reduces, gradually switch to moving sideways instead.
Then once you're up there, you need to know the basics of manipulating orbits. Lesson number 1: you can increase the height of your orbit on the opposite side of the planet by increasing your speed in the direction you're currently going. So once you get your apoapsis (highest point) above 100km or so, you can turn off your engines, wait until you get there, then burn hard in the direction you're going and your periapsis (the lowest point of the orbit) will raise up like magic.
One thing is that KSP uses manual staging, so timing of engine burns kind of matter. Is there features in vanilla KSP to automatically trigger staging?
As long as you pay some minimal level of attention this shouldn't be a problem. 10s delays between stages won't prevent something with a minimum TWR of 2 and 4000m/s of combined dv from reaching orbit.
Timing of engine burns matters once you're in orbit, but vanilla KSP had tools to help you plan the basic ones.
During launch, the only real timing or skill involved was knowing when to start turning east (around 10km, imho), and knowing how to keep your speed below the thresholds that air resistance was eating your delta-V (there's charts around to help with that, but it's not hard).
If you're using solid rocket motors that can't be throttled or stopped, you have a bit less control.
Solid rocket motors can be limited to a percentage of their maximum output while you're building the rocket! This really upped my game when I figured it out. I try to plan my first solid booster stage to end before I need to extend the gravity turn into orbit, so I can shed the solid rocket booster mass and make the best use of my liquid booster delta-V, and additionally so the jettisoned solid boosters don't end up in orbit with me.
You can automate this using the in-game programing language, but yes it does require a mod (kOS). I'm assuming/hoping that KSP2 has something similar in vanilla.
It's straightforward though, the documentation is here:
The key insight is that most of your fuel should be spent going sideways, not up. Getting to space is easy, staying there is what's (relatively) hard.
Even if you don't break out spreadsheets or game-specific calculators or whatever, you develop an intuition over time for what looks right as far as stage sizes, payload-to-fuel ratios, that kind of thing. I've done it all by eye & guesswork and have had successful out-and-back missions as far as Minmus and solar orbit (but my not taking it seriously enough and running some numbers ahead of time is probably why my attempts to reach the Mars-alike planet have just been big wastes of time—I just don't have the patience to figure out the ideal launch window and run the time ahead to then, to work out a proper budget for my fuel, and all that—plus those missions are easier with orbital rendezvous and I hate those, I can do them but they're such a pain in the ass)
Agreed, I got started by copying rocket designs from some youtubers and watching them launch them and attempting to copy their flights, starting off quite badly but once you get the hang of it you're able to go from low kerbin orbit to mun/minmus orbits to minmus landings/returns to mun landing returns and then work out towards duna then the moons of jool.
You really have to follow a youtube video or text walk through to get it right for most of us limited amount of free time humans. After that it all sort of coalesces in your brain and you can get better at it. Kind of like learning a new computer language.
You need somebody to show you the basics. I got an introductory 1 hour course from a friend and that made it.
As others said, you need to go sideways to get into orbit.
This translates to going vertically for 5k meters,slightly sideways (e. g. 10°) until 10k, then like 25° until 15k, then keep going until 30k, as you feel like you can go more sideways without making your rocket explode, do it. Do it by trial and error if needed, without trying to minmax, better to go more vertically and then horizontal. Consider that you want to keep going up so that your apoapsis (highest point of the orbit) is above 70k, which is when there is no air at all. You can notice that the "space" music starts only when you hit 70k.
Once the apoapsis is out at above 70k (ideally 80 or more), shutdown engine and wait in map until spaceship is about at the apoapsis. When that happens, point sideways (same direction you were always doing) turn on engine and keep them running until the periapsis get to 70k or more. If it's less than 70k, you will fall back.
That's about it!
To continue, start playing with plotting in the orbital map, it will give you a good idea of what you can do. Keep in mind that the way you measure how far you can go is by checking the spaceship delta V.
So other than the going-sideways thing, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with the construction of your rocket so you get more headroom for mistakes.
The main thing is "asparagus staging", which is where you set up fuel transfer pipes between stages on the same vertical level such that the outside engines run out first, and the inside engines last. Say you have a single stage, Add two fuel tanks to the side of the main tank with separators and hook up a fuel line feeding fuel from the outside tanks to the inside tanks. Add engines to the outside tanks. Repeat for more layers, transferring fuel from each layer to the previous. Doing this can get you a rocket powerful enough to almost go in a straight line to wherever. Whenever an engine runs out of fuel you can jettison that stage, and have the remaining fuel tanks all entirely full.
The second thing is to make sure your final stage is as small as you can get it. Use a tiny capsule, a tiny fuel tank, and a tiny engine. This makes the final stage more maneuverable but more importantly it exponentially decreases the size of the rest of the rocket. As a rough rule of thumb each next stage should be around 4x the size. Once your rocket starts getting kinda tall switch to building a massive set of asparagus stages. Use struts to make the whole thing stop wobbling.
Cannot recommend this game enough if you haven't played it before. It gave me an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics. Few things more satisfying than nailing an orbital insertion by the seat of your pants.
I had a lot of fun with it by landing a guy on Duna (Mars basically). But then I felt like I should rescue him, so ended up going on the even harder mission of bringing him back home, which required being able to land and then take off and make it back, as well as landing in a specific spot on the planet vs just landing anywhere.
" due to the publisher’s decision, Unreal Tournament 2004 Editor's Choice Edition, Unreal 2: The Awakening Special Edition, Unreal Tournament GOTY, and Unreal Gold will be delisted from our catalog on December 23rd (Friday), 2 PM UTC."
A complete a*hole move, if you ask me. I understand they might want to release an UT-like "remastered" MMO, but Unreal? Unreal 2? Those are very good single player games. Currently there's no legal way to get those games anywhere. Should you want a copy, you should resort to ask the people with the casette tape and the crossbones, if you know what I mean. It's despicable when the rights holder of a game closes all avenues for a legal license, in my opinion.
I'm a cheapskate, I buy things from Epic because sometimes the offer or the price is too attractive for me, but they are fully deserving of any hatred they get. I buy from them only when their price is the lowest (or free). If their price is equal to somewhere else, I'd buy from that other place.
I'll have to say, very few games gave me the combination of extreme frustration as well as extreme satisfaction as KSP. Highly recommended if you're willing to spend some time learning it while failing a lot.
I have gone to the moon several times in Kerbal Space Program. Going to the moon is super easy. Not smashing into the moon at 1.5KM/sec, on the other hand, is pretty difficult.
Once you learn to use and read the map, together with the guidance/markers you can put manually on the map, it gets relatively easy as long as you have a good ship.
I'm a big fan of the recent Hitman trilogy, and I remember there being _outrage_ when the 3rd installment launched first on Epic. So far as I could tell, the primary criticisms of Epic Games Launcher were 1) it didn't have as-good social features as Steam (for a game that doesn't support multiplayer, who cares?), and 2) it didn't have a cart to which you could add multiple items before checkout - have you _ever_ bought more than one item from Steam at once, not counting game-and-DLC (which would typically be available as a single-purchase bundle)?
I mention this here because it's a valuable reminder that not everyone uses or experiences software in the same way as you. These people weren't wrong, they just had different evaluations of the "point" of a launcher than I did.
EDIT: and this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265872) lists a third reason - "exclusivity is bullshit". To which, uhhh.....sure, philosophically, I would _prefer_ for all content to be available on all platforms so I can pick-and-choose exactly the platform that I prefer. But if a) the platforms are all free, and b) the platforms all hit a minimum-bar of quality, such that being forced to use one of them doesn't majorly impact my experience, why would I care that "the icon to launch Hitman results in a different under-the-hood launcher than the icon to launch Half-Life"? (Note this is _different_ from disliking fragmentation of shows across Netflix/Disney+/Hulu/etc., because those aren't free)
I think the main objection I remember seeing was around exclusive games, with the rest of the complaints being largely nitpicking. (Which I get. Having to remember which launcher I need to run to find a game I want to play is a pain, albeit very much a first world problem.)
> have you _ever_ bought more than one item from Steam at once, not counting game-and-DLC
Yes. Generally during sales, admittedly, when I'll sometimes pick up a few games at once. As I recall it felt a bit strange that Epic lacked it, because they were promoting themselves at launch with a lot of heavy sales, which really maximized the odds that someone might want to pick up a few games at once.
My general argument for not liking it when publishers force an alternative game platform goes like so: I don't want to support companies making me install and sign up for a zillion different software distribution platforms. I like steam, it works great and I think they give a pretty decent revenue split to creators and are overall not an obviously unethical POS company. As long as they keep that up I jsut want to use steam because it makes my life easier.
I have well over a hundred games purchased on GoG or game website or humble bundle (many of them also on my steamdeck - kudos to Valve for building an open platform).
I also have many hundreds purchased off of Itch (in large part due to the ukraine bundle).
I prefer to purchase off GoG/humble just due to how locked down Steam is. I've bought the same game in a series on GoG versus Steam. On GoG I can LAN game with my kid to play co-op. On steam, I would need to purchase a controller, figure out how to use it, since basically no games support using 2 keyboard configurations on 2 USB keyboards, and steam requires purchasing multiple copies for LAN play.
Also the steam client often sucks up gigs of RAM (seems to be due to the chrome web portion when checking process list) for no obvious reason that I have better use for.
Epic on the other hand, I have purchased exactly one game at my kid's request and it being an epic exclusive. Due to no linux support of any kind. I've snagged a fair number of their freebies in the past, but only a few work somewhat under Wine, often only if circumventing their client, so it's not worth dropping my money on.
Epic gets hate for anticompetitive behavior and essentially trying to buy success with exclusivity deals. They aren’t winning business by being better at anything they do, just by owning things and using that for leverage, and then people who care about a game feel forced to use a store they don’t want to use, sometimes after a last minute rug pull before release.
Content + distribution houses shouldn’t be allowed to do these things in any industry.
Agreed - from a philosophical perspective it's distasteful for a company to be "successful" purely because they can "do underhanded business better" rather than because they are genuinely providing a better product. If that was the sole criticism, I'd entirely understand and support it. I'm trying to understand the claim that exclusivity is "awkward" rather than the claim that it's morally distasteful. If the game-service is free, and if you can launch the game directly with a desktop icon, why is your life complexified by the fact that a different launcher is used "under the hood"?
To be clear, I am not disagreeing with your points at all. I am asking about a different point.
Steam has many problems but given it's been out there for two decades it's inevitable that people will compare it to newcomers.
Personally, I think EGS has much worse UX than Steam.
1) Slow on older computers: minimized it to the tray and brought it back? Keep looking at this blank screen and loading bar for 10 seconds now. Want to see your library? Here, wait 20 more seconds.
2) Got a free game, played it and didn't like it? Can't hide it from your library!
3) Want to know how large a download will be before you install a game? Good luck hunting that information!
Steam isn't a perfect launcher, but it had a long time to iterate and gather feedback.
(FWIW, Epic has a "Feedback and UX User Research" [1] program but it's only open to US residents — which I'm not.)
The biggest part of the Hitman 3 outrage was that IOI dropped the ball on back-compatibility, it was a bit of a hassle and poorly communicated throughout how one would gain access to the levels from Hitman and Hitman 2 from purchased copies on Steam, inside Hitman 3 from Epic.
IIRC one of the early messages was "you'll just need to own them on Epic - Hitman was free for a week a year ago and Hitman 2 was just on sale for 80% off last month (but isn't anymore)" and if you missed those you were SOL. Though I understand it's complicated by the publisher/ownership situation w/ Square Enix for the first Hitman, I'm glad they got it sorted for launch (and even happier that they're simplifying the whole trilogy behind one SKU later this month).
** epic. Wow, I was hoping to say more but I guess that's it. Waiting on their exclusivity bs to dry up so that we can get games through other stores without lockin (same reason Ive sworn off certain consoles for similar reasons). Theres no perfect solution but I may as well have a principled stand against something.
More important than anything else, what it gave me is an intuition of orbital mechanics. There's a lot about orbiting craft that's hilariously counter-intuitive to ground-based intuition (favorite example: to approach something, in front of you, you turn opposite to your current trajectory and burn. It shortens your orbit, which decreases your orbital period, which means you'll catch up to your target).
Great game, but I won't really sign up for a gaming service that is controlled (in part) by Tencent.
Don't get me wrong, Epic makes great stuff. The Unreal engine is amazing. You can argue Tim Sweeney is the CEO, but any meeting at a high level with Epic includes Tencent. You are not talking to Sweeney alone, it's Tencent and Sweeney.
The way Fortnite targets kids for Vbucks and skin sales is pretty gross too. Many stories of Mommy's credit card being ran up. A game that is essentially banned in China.
No thanks. No amount of free games will have me install the Epic Games client.
A law firm in Canada has won a class-action against Epic Games for something to do with LootBoxes/VBucks - if you're eligible you get $25 bucks! I only got it because it's somehow related to Rocket League drops as well. Thankfully I have Rocket League on Steam before they removed it and migrated over to the Epic store to get that sweet sweet microtransaction money
It's fair because Epic is part owned by a company (Tencent) that is owned/ran by a government (The CCP/CPC.) that bans such things for their children, but are OK with it in the West for their profit.
But yeah, Roblox and CoC are gross too. However you should not trust Tencent and Epic. Just go pay for Kerbal on a better platform.
A ranking CCP member must be on staff at a high level to carry out the interests of the party. I believe more than few of their upper management positions are headed by high ranking CCP members.
106 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadHigh hopes for ksp2. Multiplayer is interesting as well, there's certainly enough space for a few friends out there.
Edit: The current link.
I've played plenty of KSP, and when you launch the game the first time there's a popup where you have to agree to have your privacy violated (there's a link to iirc unity analytics where you can supposedly opt out, but it always gave me a page error when I tried to go there. In Linux, it wouldn't even launch the browser and it doesn't give you the URL, so it would be impossible to opt out even if it worked).
Their integration with the redshell spyware is well documented too.
from port 59946 to 35.190.78.8 from port 54192 to: 35.227.244.186
Furthermore, btdmaster's original comment regarding this was censored, which lends even more crediblity to claims, and that something very fishy is behind this.
also lists VLC as potential spyware
also lists the entire HTTProtocol as potential spyware
It’s also interesting that Steam is listed as extremely high spyware level.
“We take an expansive and strict stance on what constitutes spyware. We define spyware as anything that includes telemetry, phoning home, automatic updates or is listening in without the user's knowledge or consent.”
That's just something you can do when you have a money-printer (Fortnight) and want to buy market share, I guess. Worked in my case—sorta—since I'd only ever have bought a couple exclusives and wouldn't have it set to start-on-boot if not for the frequent free games.
But, if I'm looking to buy a game, I still check GoG and Steam first, and if it's not there give a hard think to whether I really want the game, though. Which is why I've only bought two games. I'll even pay more, or defer until a sale, if Epic has it for cheap and it's more expensive on the other two services. The only price they're winning my "business" with is free (except a couple exclusives).
I dunno how everyone else is treating them, but for me, they've gotten me to leave it open and look at it pretty often, but haven't managed to get me to ever buy non-exclusives, so... partial victory?
Maybe this isn't a money play, but an attention economy play, in the short run?
Also remember this is suppose to be a loss leader. If they can get you hooked on a few games to draw you from Steam then you start buying your games on Epic and then they make real money
Hasn't happened yet and I've had an account for >2 years.
The thing is that even if they keep giving out free games, I still consider my Steam library to have the superior collection of games than what Epic has thus far given out. And since I like using the Steam client and the Steam store more, I don't see Epic Games closing the quality gap anytime soon.
There is a risk that a game or studio gets a reputation for giveaways/discounts which could canabalize future sales. Or the entire industry gets such a reputation. However, at least in this case, KSP is so old at this point, I don't think it is a major issue. If anything, the publicity probably will do more to boost sales of KSP2, then the notion that KSP2 may be free in 7 years.
Given the timing, I suspect Private Division views this as a marketing deal in advance of the February release of KSP2. Any monetary compensation they get is just a bonus.
It makes me feel like I'm just an idiot. I don't think I am. But maybe I am. Who knows. All I know is that I feel bad for killing all of those little guys. They didn't even die in the pursuit of knowledge. They just died for my own hubris and naivety.
As for killing all those little guys, consider adding a final-stage parachute that decouples the crew cabin from the rest of the craft. It might take them a few hours to hit the ground, but you'll despotically murder less space goblins that way.
Remember you pretty much have to go up and sideways to get into orbit.
Thankfully there are plenty of YouTube tutorials that kind of summarize the basics.
The most efficient way to do this would be to just go sideways really fast from the ground. Problem: there's a lot of air in the way. So the right thing to do (again, both in Kerbal and in real life) is to initially go just up, but as the air reduces, gradually switch to moving sideways instead.
Then once you're up there, you need to know the basics of manipulating orbits. Lesson number 1: you can increase the height of your orbit on the opposite side of the planet by increasing your speed in the direction you're currently going. So once you get your apoapsis (highest point) above 100km or so, you can turn off your engines, wait until you get there, then burn hard in the direction you're going and your periapsis (the lowest point of the orbit) will raise up like magic.
You'll be orbiting in no time.
During launch, the only real timing or skill involved was knowing when to start turning east (around 10km, imho), and knowing how to keep your speed below the thresholds that air resistance was eating your delta-V (there's charts around to help with that, but it's not hard).
If you're using solid rocket motors that can't be throttled or stopped, you have a bit less control.
It's straightforward though, the documentation is here:
https://ksp-kos.github.io/KOS/structures/vessels/stage.html
Even if you don't break out spreadsheets or game-specific calculators or whatever, you develop an intuition over time for what looks right as far as stage sizes, payload-to-fuel ratios, that kind of thing. I've done it all by eye & guesswork and have had successful out-and-back missions as far as Minmus and solar orbit (but my not taking it seriously enough and running some numbers ahead of time is probably why my attempts to reach the Mars-alike planet have just been big wastes of time—I just don't have the patience to figure out the ideal launch window and run the time ahead to then, to work out a proper budget for my fuel, and all that—plus those missions are easier with orbital rendezvous and I hate those, I can do them but they're such a pain in the ass)
at least you didn't say "pardon my French"...
As others said, you need to go sideways to get into orbit. This translates to going vertically for 5k meters,slightly sideways (e. g. 10°) until 10k, then like 25° until 15k, then keep going until 30k, as you feel like you can go more sideways without making your rocket explode, do it. Do it by trial and error if needed, without trying to minmax, better to go more vertically and then horizontal. Consider that you want to keep going up so that your apoapsis (highest point of the orbit) is above 70k, which is when there is no air at all. You can notice that the "space" music starts only when you hit 70k.
Once the apoapsis is out at above 70k (ideally 80 or more), shutdown engine and wait in map until spaceship is about at the apoapsis. When that happens, point sideways (same direction you were always doing) turn on engine and keep them running until the periapsis get to 70k or more. If it's less than 70k, you will fall back.
That's about it!
To continue, start playing with plotting in the orbital map, it will give you a good idea of what you can do. Keep in mind that the way you measure how far you can go is by checking the spaceship delta V.
Good luck!
The main thing is "asparagus staging", which is where you set up fuel transfer pipes between stages on the same vertical level such that the outside engines run out first, and the inside engines last. Say you have a single stage, Add two fuel tanks to the side of the main tank with separators and hook up a fuel line feeding fuel from the outside tanks to the inside tanks. Add engines to the outside tanks. Repeat for more layers, transferring fuel from each layer to the previous. Doing this can get you a rocket powerful enough to almost go in a straight line to wherever. Whenever an engine runs out of fuel you can jettison that stage, and have the remaining fuel tanks all entirely full.
The second thing is to make sure your final stage is as small as you can get it. Use a tiny capsule, a tiny fuel tank, and a tiny engine. This makes the final stage more maneuverable but more importantly it exponentially decreases the size of the rest of the rocket. As a rough rule of thumb each next stage should be around 4x the size. Once your rocket starts getting kinda tall switch to building a massive set of asparagus stages. Use struts to make the whole thing stop wobbling.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/delisting_unreal_games_unr...
" due to the publisher’s decision, Unreal Tournament 2004 Editor's Choice Edition, Unreal 2: The Awakening Special Edition, Unreal Tournament GOTY, and Unreal Gold will be delisted from our catalog on December 23rd (Friday), 2 PM UTC."
A complete a*hole move, if you ask me. I understand they might want to release an UT-like "remastered" MMO, but Unreal? Unreal 2? Those are very good single player games. Currently there's no legal way to get those games anywhere. Should you want a copy, you should resort to ask the people with the casette tape and the crossbones, if you know what I mean. It's despicable when the rights holder of a game closes all avenues for a legal license, in my opinion.
I'm a cheapskate, I buy things from Epic because sometimes the offer or the price is too attractive for me, but they are fully deserving of any hatred they get. I buy from them only when their price is the lowest (or free). If their price is equal to somewhere else, I'd buy from that other place.
I mention this here because it's a valuable reminder that not everyone uses or experiences software in the same way as you. These people weren't wrong, they just had different evaluations of the "point" of a launcher than I did.
EDIT: and this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265872) lists a third reason - "exclusivity is bullshit". To which, uhhh.....sure, philosophically, I would _prefer_ for all content to be available on all platforms so I can pick-and-choose exactly the platform that I prefer. But if a) the platforms are all free, and b) the platforms all hit a minimum-bar of quality, such that being forced to use one of them doesn't majorly impact my experience, why would I care that "the icon to launch Hitman results in a different under-the-hood launcher than the icon to launch Half-Life"? (Note this is _different_ from disliking fragmentation of shows across Netflix/Disney+/Hulu/etc., because those aren't free)
> have you _ever_ bought more than one item from Steam at once, not counting game-and-DLC
Yes. Generally during sales, admittedly, when I'll sometimes pick up a few games at once. As I recall it felt a bit strange that Epic lacked it, because they were promoting themselves at launch with a lot of heavy sales, which really maximized the odds that someone might want to pick up a few games at once.
Last weekend, I keep a wishlist and check it when sales happen.
Nothing personal against epic (I like the freebies), just not a fan of exclusives.
Plus I leave steam open in background, epic I have to open and wait for a 100+ MB update (crap internet around here).
I also have many hundreds purchased off of Itch (in large part due to the ukraine bundle).
I prefer to purchase off GoG/humble just due to how locked down Steam is. I've bought the same game in a series on GoG versus Steam. On GoG I can LAN game with my kid to play co-op. On steam, I would need to purchase a controller, figure out how to use it, since basically no games support using 2 keyboard configurations on 2 USB keyboards, and steam requires purchasing multiple copies for LAN play.
Also the steam client often sucks up gigs of RAM (seems to be due to the chrome web portion when checking process list) for no obvious reason that I have better use for.
Epic on the other hand, I have purchased exactly one game at my kid's request and it being an epic exclusive. Due to no linux support of any kind. I've snagged a fair number of their freebies in the past, but only a few work somewhat under Wine, often only if circumventing their client, so it's not worth dropping my money on.
Content + distribution houses shouldn’t be allowed to do these things in any industry.
To be clear, I am not disagreeing with your points at all. I am asking about a different point.
Personally, I think EGS has much worse UX than Steam.
1) Slow on older computers: minimized it to the tray and brought it back? Keep looking at this blank screen and loading bar for 10 seconds now. Want to see your library? Here, wait 20 more seconds.
2) Got a free game, played it and didn't like it? Can't hide it from your library!
3) Want to know how large a download will be before you install a game? Good luck hunting that information!
Steam isn't a perfect launcher, but it had a long time to iterate and gather feedback.
(FWIW, Epic has a "Feedback and UX User Research" [1] program but it's only open to US residents — which I'm not.)
[1]: https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/ux
IIRC one of the early messages was "you'll just need to own them on Epic - Hitman was free for a week a year ago and Hitman 2 was just on sale for 80% off last month (but isn't anymore)" and if you missed those you were SOL. Though I understand it's complicated by the publisher/ownership situation w/ Square Enix for the first Hitman, I'm glad they got it sorted for launch (and even happier that they're simplifying the whole trilogy behind one SKU later this month).
More important than anything else, what it gave me is an intuition of orbital mechanics. There's a lot about orbiting craft that's hilariously counter-intuitive to ground-based intuition (favorite example: to approach something, in front of you, you turn opposite to your current trajectory and burn. It shortens your orbit, which decreases your orbital period, which means you'll catch up to your target).
login page loading took many attempts (one resulting in a CF 5XX page) and not it is stuck on the confirmation....(I have no given up).
Also, why is this store page fully client side rendered? the layout thrash is really noticeable. Is the store in the middle of a rewrite or something?
Don't get me wrong, Epic makes great stuff. The Unreal engine is amazing. You can argue Tim Sweeney is the CEO, but any meeting at a high level with Epic includes Tencent. You are not talking to Sweeney alone, it's Tencent and Sweeney.
The way Fortnite targets kids for Vbucks and skin sales is pretty gross too. Many stories of Mommy's credit card being ran up. A game that is essentially banned in China.
No thanks. No amount of free games will have me install the Epic Games client.
https://www.epicgames.com/help/en-US/fortnite-c5719335176219...
This isn’t exclusive to Fortnite, by FAR. Singling out Epic isn’t really fair when the same exact thing happens with Roblox, Clash of Clans, etc.
But yeah, Roblox and CoC are gross too. However you should not trust Tencent and Epic. Just go pay for Kerbal on a better platform.
A ranking CCP member must be on staff at a high level to carry out the interests of the party. I believe more than few of their upper management positions are headed by high ranking CCP members.