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The “For Science!” update for Kerbal Space Program 2 was released yesterday, so I gave it a try. I haven’t really tried playing the game since shortly after the early access release, and there have definitely been fixes since then. For the most part, they’re still playing catch-up with KSP1, but they went a long way towards that with the new version:

  • Last time I played, the ship editor went crazy on me multiple times while I was trying to build a simple ship. None of that this time.
  • The ship editor shows delta-v for the whole ship and for individual stages, which helps a lot. The numbers did keep jumping around a bit on me, though, so I’m not sure how far to trust it.
  • Rockets don’t wobble around like floppy noodles any more, and are much more controllable
  • Fuel feeding between stages seems to be working properly now, last time I played I eventually quit mainly because any time I built multiple stages, they would all drain their fuel into the first stage no matter what I did.
  • Atmospheric heating is now a thing, so you can’t just plow in from high orbit and expect to survive… just felt silly without that.
  • The “Science” is a re-working of the KSP1 science mode that lets you progressively unlock a tech tree as you reach new goals. And, they’ve added backstory and flavor text that rounds things out. It’s a little cleaner in places than KSP1 was, and guides things a little better.

Overall… much more playable. I have one big remaining issue: maneuver nodes for planning a burn. Unlike in KSP1, KSP2 plans your maneuver as though you are starting the burn at the node, rather than with the node halfway through. The result is that instead of focusing primarily on acceleration and fine-tuning with direction changes, you instead must juggle both variables in order to plan any new orbit. It’s made more difficult due to needing to zoom in to reliably grab the node’s handles, but zoom out to see the actual results of changes. And you can’t do it while paused, so juggle fast!

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Yeah, Kerbal seems really interesting, but I think I’d get motion sickness, like with 1st-person shooters, and I don’t think I’d be able to handle the timing and coordination.

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Here’s what mine looks like, although it is influenced somewhat by my daughter’s playtime:

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I’m guessing the Action Roguelike spike is primarily due to Vampire Survivors and the Investigation spike is due to Murder by Numbers

That graph is almost definitely built on tags, so here’s what my library looks like if I filter for Action Roguelike and Played:

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I’m only showing back to January, since that’s all that should be relevant for the graph.

That confirms what I suspected. From that list, I’ve spent the most time on Vampire Survivors, followed far behind by Time Wasters, and then it’s probably a toss-up between the rest. I don’t think I can filter playtime by year, or even sort by playtime at all, so that might be difficult to rank them accurately.

For fun, here are the rest, in descending order based on that graph:

Investigation

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Again, this supports my guess. I probably played The Case of the Golden Idol the second most of that list, and Contradiction is an anomaly because I’ve never actually played it, I just accidentally launched it the other day.

Wholesome

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This one is almost entirely my daughter. I played some of A Little to the Left, but she finished it out and there’s only one save game…

Dog

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There’s a fair bit of overlap with the previous results. Again, it’s mostly not me, with the exception of Retro Game Crunch which I have essentially no playtime in since it won’t run on my Steam Deck, and Grapple Dog, which is great, and I highly recommend it if you want to play a game that is essentially the puzzle platformer version of Bionic Commando.
I don’t know why the icon for Dogs Organized Neatly appears to be a cat…

Loot

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This is probably 99% Borderlands 2 which I spent a few hours in on the Steam Deck. I’ve played maybe an hour of Deep Rock Galactic total. It seems neat, but also seems like something that only really works well in a group.

Pinball

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Demon’s Tilt is great. Peglin is technically pinball, just not flipper pinball, so it’s a lot more like Peggle than something like Demon’s Tilt.
Senran Kagura Peach Ball is a surprisingly decent pinball experience in much the same way that the Dead or Alive games are surprisingly good fighting games. The primary appeal is not entirely in the quality of the gameplay, however.

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I’m glad you broke things down, because I was looking at the category of “Dog” and wondering what the heck kind of game(s) that was. :smiley:

And, yep, looks like if I look for the “Pinball” tag Roundguard is the only game with recent activity.

“Point & Click” in my library has a spread of games that I’m not sure I’d classify all as that. II definitely think Scarlet Hollow doesn’t fit, and Escape Simulator is a stretch for the category as well:
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And “Turn-Based” has Roundguard in it again, so if it’s counting twice in mine then that’s kinda cheating. :smiley:
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One very interesting thing… my most-played game for the year, with far more time than Roundguard: The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection, which doesn’t seem to be part of any of the tags in my spider graph at all. I suppose maybe it clamps the highs and lows to make a more interesting-looking graph.

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I’m guessing it’s either that or it’s only showing in the graph if there is more than one game with that tag in the playtime. Here are the tags for The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection:

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I have no idea what these graphs would look like for someone who only plays one game all year. I’m sure they’re an edge case, but I guarantee they totally exist.

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They’ll still show it if there’s only 1. I only played 8 Steam games this year.

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‘Automation’ is Last Call BBS, 1 session in July.

‘Racing’ is just Rocket League (3 sessions in May - which is also counted as ‘Football/Soccer’) and Burnout Paradise (1 session in January).

‘Fighting’ and ‘2D Fighter’ is just Skullgirls, 1 session in May.

‘Roguelike Deckbuilder’ is just Slay the Spire.

It’d be more interesting if it could also count my Epic and GOG games, as well as others that I got directly without one of the launcher companies.

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I have loads of played games for the year in the “Singleplayer”, “Casual”, and “2D” categories, so I’m not sure it could be that either. Though maybe those are filtered out for whatever reason? :man_shrugging:

With differing levels on the graph? Yeah, these things are weird. :smiley:

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https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/ghostwire-tokyo

Free on Epic today for the next 20 or so hours. Highly recommended if you’re into Japanese culture and/or light horror-based games. I spent about 40 hours with it on Xbox. It’s really really good.

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I’ve been working around this issue primarily by eyeballing my circularization burns, and otherwise fiddling with things. There is a mod (Flight Plan) that can help with those, though it relies on another mod that was just fixed for the new version of KSP2 today… that can be installed with ckan, and I haven’t played in so long I hadn’t realized ckan supports KSP2 now :smiley:

So far, I’ve visited the Mun and Minmus… though not gracefully, and I’ve only technically landed on Minmus (partway there I realized my lander legs had somehow not made it on the lander, so I ended up “landing” with my “transfer stage” and then immediately detaching and taking off with the lander to head home, in the True Kerbal Way.) There’s the beginnings of an actual “storyline” that sent me to specific places on the two moons and next wants me to go to Duna, which is an interesting addition and I hope it goes somewhere.

In order to (hopefully) make things easier for myself, I’ve also established a space station/refueling platform. And docked one ferry to take Kerbals back to the planet below. Doing an orbital rendezvous entirely from vague memories of the method (I refused to hunt down a tutorial again) was interesting, and I don’t want to talk about the clownshow fumbling when 1) I couldn’t entirely remember what I needed to do, and 2) I’d forgotten to put RCS thrusters close to the ferry’s center of mass, so every attempt to move sent things twisting all over the place.

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I soloed The City at the Center of the Earth for Savage Worlds. I felt lost at times. I also hadn’t created any combat-oriented characters, so I didn’t use many of the possible combat encounters. I felt like I reached a satisfying conclusion anyway.

Elke Egger has a giant Mole Machine and wants to explore below the surface. Klaus Weiss hates her. Elke Egger leads an expedition including her servant-coworkers Waltrun and Petr, as well as (my additions) the physician Antonio, biology student Katrin, and aspiring reporter Anna. They reach the lost underground city of Phar. It’s in ruins due to damage from earthquakes and due to plague from their last contact with the surface. Klaus also reaches there. They rescue a wounded local, and find out that everything is in ruins and the cult of Lor is taking people for sacrifice. Elke has an amulet from her grandfather, and Antonio has medical skills, which earn trust from the other people. Eventually they have to rescue someone from the cult, and repair the artificial sun which sustains the city. They split up. (I decided) Klaus captured 2 of them. He reaches the cult’s stockade and threatens to have them sacrificed if Elke doesn’t surrender to him. But while everyone’s debating what to do, (I decided) since one of them really likes fire, the stockade eventually erupts in flame. Klaus escapes and the cultists surrender the prisoners since the sun is back, they’re not sure what to believe, and they blame Klaus for the fire.

Elke decides she finally feels at home, and wants to stay. Antonio feels he’s needed. The others prepare to return home when Klaus ambushes them, looking for Elke. He finally decides to disable their mole machine, and return to the surface in his. “A fitting punishment. To live with those primitives you love so much.” Which gives them time to explore while Elke, with occasional help, repairs the mole machine.

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Steam Families is, on the surface, more permissive than Family Sharing. You can play a game from a family member’s library even if they’re already online and playing something else. Multiple members of a Steam Family can play the same game at the same time, although the total number of people playing must match the total number of purchased copies among household members.

It’s about F’ing time! The restriction of completely locking the library owner out of their entire steam library if a family member wanted to play any single game was such an incredibly brain-dead choice.

There’s still some silly restrictions that can really test the meaning of “family”, but… a step in the right direction?

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Family Sharing is the worst, except for all of the other worse implementations (Nintendo comes to mind…) I’d like to try this out, except for a couple of issues:

  • It’s only in beta, so I wanted to give it some time to mature, since it appears to be a one-way conversion.
  • Nowhere does it address the problem of creating an account for a child under 13. Family Sharing currently sidesteps this by re-using the same account. Searching around leads to advice from the Internet that suggests that only the responsible party (the parent) needs to be over 13, but it would be nice to have an official guide/response on that.
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Do you possibly mean “Family View”? I don’t recall anything specific in the older Family Sharing that involved the same account.

You can’t (legally) be a Steam subscriber if you’re under 13, but the Steam Families FAQ does mention child accounts created by a parent or guardian. The main issue would be that they can’t collect data on someone under 13, but running an online store and handling licensing means they must collect data on the accounts. If the parent/guardian is legally the owner of the account and accepting responsibility for it, that sidesteps that issue… but they’re not going to be able to legally say someone under 13 can have an account.

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You’re right. I got those two mixed up. I had originally planned to use Family Sharing and set up an account for her, but decided against it when I couldn’t get a clear answer on whether or not I was effectively breaking the rules by doing so.

I’ll see if I can find that and read over it. Thank you.

I disagree that it’s impossible. The closest analogue would be XBox, where my daughter definitely has a child account that is managed as part of a family, and I am designated as a parent that can set limits, approve purchases, etc. It’s not perfect by any means, and maybe there’s some language in the TOS that lets them weasel around the regulations, but it should at least be possible for Valve to do something similar. That they haven’t is probably due to a lack of interest rather than capability.

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My apologies, I should have linked: Steam Support :: Steam Families User Guide & FAQ . It doesn’t go into detail about ages, though, so I’m not entirely sure how much of the concern it addresses.

The Steam Families child account settings sound like it has some of those kinds of features, but without specifically saying that it can be under 13.

It does look like even Microsoft got this function wrong initially, so it probably isn’t entirely straightforward.

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“Safe”.

From all indications, the developer for KSP2 (Intercept games) is being completely shut down. According to Take-Two, the Private Division publishing label “continues to make updates” for KSP2, which sounds like it could mean just about anything. A development update was posted just last week announcing an upcoming round of much-needed bug fixes, no information is available on what impact this news will have on that.

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One of the unfortunate realities of the games industry, although I do not think it is unique but merely more apparent, is that by and large the consumers care more about the product than the people producing it. Even those who take some effort to pay attention to who the developer is instead of merely the publisher may not be fully aware of the people involved, such that two games produced by the same developer may have few or no individuals in common. I’m not sure what the solution to this should be, but I think it’s telling that the headline is about the game being safe rather than those who were previously working on it.

One of the (many) things that I like about Stephanie Sterling is that she refuses to comment/report that a given studio/developer is suffering layoffs, but rather that they are indulging in them.

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