Input from other communities

[RagnarDa]

Hi! As you probably noticed I frequent this forum quite a lot. I do however visit other community-forums also. One of those is the Kerbal Space Program forums and I have noticed a few things that might be worthwhile to discuss here:

 

1. They had a forum-crash where most of the forum was lost. Not sure how this happened, and I'm sure that ED has backups and such, but I think it might be a good idea to plan ahead what might happen if the forum goes down so not all the resources accumulated here over the years are lost.

 

2. They have a different forum structure. Specifically the Add-on section is divided in general discussion sections, add-on requests and a add-on release section (for finished work). Here it's pretty difficult to get an idea of what mods, missions, liveries and scripts are out there and currently under development. Most of the time you have to sift through multiple forum pages to find what you are looking for if you can't use the search function because they are mixed up with general questions about how to use specific features or the other. The user-files section on the EDs web page is not really the same thing IMHO.

 

3. They use GitHub extensively, for almost every mod. There also seems to be a tradition of continuing other peoples work (forking) instead of just letting it die when the original creator loses interest. I think that's a good thing and they are related to each other, I think, and also the fact that they require you to post a license with your mod. I've been asked numerous times if it's ok for others to use my scripts I posted on the forum, apparantley it's not clear that the scripts are free as in free speech AND free as in free beer aswell, that they are free to do whatever they like with it.

 

4. Not really related just to KSP and should probably have it's own forum thread, but: the quality over quantity discussion. ED has chosen a route and business-model that work against modders and people adding content in one way. It does ensure we don't have all that low-quality stuff that has plagued other games but I think we can all agree that the release rate of medium to high quality content haven't been exactly overwhelming either. Question is what can the community do to help? I have a few ideas that I don't know if they are feasible but I just want to test the water first and see what others have to say.

 

Your thoughts?

 

tl/dr: Ideas for the community.

[NineLine]

4. Not really related just to KSP and should probably have it's own forum thread, but: the quality over quantity discussion. ED has chosen a route and business-model that work against modders and people adding content in one way. It does ensure we don't have all that low-quality stuff that has plagued other games but I think we can all agree that the release rate of medium to high quality content haven't been exactly overwhelming either. Question is what can the community do to help? I have a few ideas that I don't know if they are feasible but I just want to test the water first and see what others have to say.

 

First, I dont claim to know all the inner workings of the official 3rd Parties, so most of this is opinion or what I derived on my own, but it seems the 3rd Party modding system is very much a work in progress, that it will improve over time and get easier to see aircraft be added. I will use the Hawk guys as an example... development for the Hawk seems to have taken quite some time, but on the other hand they are hoping to have their next aircraft out by the end of the year.

 

I also get your point on the smaller modders and such maybe not getting the support, and I would love to see this bolstered a little more as well, but on the other hand, there is a lot of stuff out there for other games that just isnt very good, or so sloppy, any enjoyment is outweighed by all the work it takes to make it work with your game. So I do prefer the system they have in place for the most part, its more work for the common modder to get in a better position to get access to better support, but I think its nothing but benefits in the long run. I hope this is the course of action with the Map tools when they come out, I want to have quality over quantity... so I hope they hand out those tools on the same basis that they have been handing out 3rd Party status.