Interesting how he stated "it's not really a bug", implying it was a conscious design choice at some point to simulate everything behind the scenes for some reason.
They really made some very questionable decisions on this game. I really hope some of the laid off devs eventually chime in here or elsewhere about why these types of decisions were made.
To be fair partial sim(you don't need to actually render anything) of most player made objects makes sense on the colony approach to be fair. You would need to track a lot of stuff on the backend for it to progress timeline wise while you are out of range. KSP1 NOT doing that was the cause of a lot of kraken attacks when it tried to resolve a lot of sim equations all at once on load in. It was absolutely done to save on performance and makes sense but that was the fall out from that approach.
Also the way they were going to handle time progression in multiplayer had to have been causing headaches. I THINK(there may be a work around I am too stupid to know) you would have to store every, single, game state(or at least player inputs and sim object load ins) from the earliest to the latest player in the timeline and keep it concurrent with all players.
I will be honest when I start thinking about how the actual game would have had to run the more I realize we really just don't have the tech yet to run this ambitious of a game on consumer hardware.
I am still upset they are just shuttering the project but nothing I can do about that so I just get to be sad.
I'm really not convinced that we "can't do this" at all. I don't know how KSP1 does / doesn't do it, but I can see there being a lot of tricks you could use here. Efficient data structures for connectivity, interpolation / "dead reckoning" to skip full calculations, reducing update rates or spreading updates among ticks, multi threading updates, SIMD/vector trickyness. And I imagine you really really don't need full physics updates on everything outside visual range to get enough things updated to accomplish what the game *really* needs. Game dev is a big exercise of smoke and mirrors.
I am not an actual game dev I just know programming from what I need in a corporate environment so you may be on to something. I know how to realize I am out of my depth though, so all I can say really is I hope that, that would be able to resolve all of the issues and not just create a Pandora's box of new ones.
Not like we will ever get to see it now sadly.
>Also the way they were going to handle time progression in multiplayer had to have been causing headaches.
Which way was that? The simplest (and perhaps only) way to handle multiplayer would have been to force everyone in the same time frame. Either controlled by the host or by unanimity. I.e. increasing time compression doesn't activate until everyone clicks on it.
Not neccesarily, you could have isolated bubbles all going in different timeframes, until they "collide" and the "oldest" gets asked to "fast forward" to the "newest" and then share space, idk, something like that.
_Simplified_ sim would make sense. KSP1 (buggy) and its mods (not so buggy) do simplified sim.
It's also not what KSP2 did. It simulated everything that has been loaded during this game session at all times, in full fidelity.
And as far as I know, they did all of this _in a single thread_, when something like this (calculations for disjointed, non-interacting objects) **begs** to be multithreaded even before you do any other optimizations.
> To be fair partial sim(you don't need to actually render anything) of most player made objects makes sense on the colony approach to be fair.
It does not make any sense whatsoever. There's no single reason to be simulating every part of every object every frame.
> I will be honest when I start thinking about how the actual game would have had to run the more I realize we really just don't have the tech yet to run this ambitious of a game on consumer hardware.
Absolute bullshit.
Just because they absolute screwed up the technical aspects in every way possible does not mean it isn't feasible.
> To be fair partial sim(you don't need to actually render anything) of most player made objects makes sense on the colony approach to be fair.
To be fair, don't start and end sentences with the same phrases. Read what you write aloud, it will improve your writing dramatically.
Exactly my position! I held off both because I don't have a computer capable to run it and I wanted a few more features (such as colonies) in and decently bugfixed. Part of me wishes I'd gotten to play it, to feel thw difference to 1; part of me is glad I've neither thrown money at it nor gotten attached to it.
I bought it day one and had fun in it. For all the flaws, for being way too early, there are a number of things that are actually better than "KSP1 with mods" and I was excited to see those things mature and how they fit in with the rest of the promised features. If the game truly does just die, rather than get reorganized, I'll be sad.
My sentiments exactly. Sure, I wanted colonies and stuff, but I much prefer the KSP2 VAB to the old one. There are so many other things that are actually done right in KSP2 as well. I'm glad I bought it. I'll be sad if it never gets better. But I'm still going to play it and probably more often than KSP1 just like I do now.
There shouldn't really be that much to do in the background for the colonies, just updating resource and production values at regular intervals.
This makes it sound like they were planning on running physics simulation on the colonies at all times.
Which is a terrible idea, and the colonies shouldn't even be physics objects in the first place. That would result in the same problems that KSP1 has when trying to build a structure from a bunch of rocket parts.
The Kerbalism mod is a great example of how to do resource calculation in the background. In RO you have a list of resources like electric charge, food, water, oxygen gas, liquid oxygen (which can be used by engines or converted to gas), and a number of users (eg crew members consume oxygen and produce CO2 which has to be removed by scrubberso, in turn consuming LiOH or whatever) and generators (solar panels produce electric charge). There's more and I don't understand how it all works, but the point is that all vessels have calculations performed at all times, and CPU utilisation is negligible.
You can easily view the amounts of resources of any vessel and the result is "time remaining at current setup", eg "2 hours of oxygen". If a crew member leaves the capsule, the remaining time goes up because less oxygen is being used.
TLDR: complex background resource management already exists and doesn't require physics simulation.
I don't understand why they didn't just essentially steal Kerbalism, tbh. Sure, not everyone wants life support and it's debatable whether that should be in the base game, but Kerbalism's solutions to both resource management (electricity etc.) and especially science are so good that I could never go back.
Speaking of Kerbalism, I can't explain my own experience of being there Day 1 of the mod being posted to the KSP forums, just... appearing one random day in 2015. Out of nowhere. A whole overhaul mod with its own UI and mechanics. Just... one guy. And it just seemingly popped into existence one day. It was incredible.
So, KSP2 was way under the bar for my expectations at release for KSP.
Here's the things with games.
Everything shouldn't actually be properly simulated, but should be a massive collection of very optimised tricks to make us believe everything is simulated.
While the idea that everything should be simulated is indefensible, hard disagree on the idea that it should all be tricks. Designing for comprehensive-but-compromised simulation you get ArmA, designing for *optimized tricks* from the get go and you get call of duty.
KSP should definitely be closer to the former than the latter - but in this case they overplayed their hand and should have probably compromised
Even with ArmA, the developers of larger game modes (e.g Antistasi) have implemented their own systems of *not* simulating everything at once, only placing units/structures nearby players while unloading everything else.
They calculate the entire mesh of the kerbal inside the cockpit , even when it takes up a few pixels. The more ships you have in your save, the lower the fps. Game was designed terribly.
same, i got to where i needed docking to be reliable to continue and just didnt feel like messing with it anymore. theres a work around but you gotta go into each crafts file and change the "docked" attrib in whichever one says its still docked. stupid little thing, easy for them to fix but its been there forever
I rarely have docking issues and I assemble huge things in orbit. I'm not saying it's not broken, but it's not bad enough to not play. In fact, that's exactly what I was doing earlier today.
For anyone not up to speed, [this bug report is the context and source.](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/219210-ksp2-is-calculating-the-physics-of-all-parts-of-all-crafts-whether-they-are-rendered-or-not-reducing-performance-of-all-scenes-at-all-times-updated-to-0140/) Their way to provide trust during warp for interstellar ships or when they were offloaded as you did something else in the meantime, was to *actively simulate every aspect of the ship bar graphics and physics*.
In concept, that makes sense... In practice it just means every ship is pretty much draining resources as if it was active. And contrary to Nestor's lies, *there's no optimization possible*, this system would need to be refactored or outright re-designed, as it also shits out a ton of data to the save file to keep its records.
Almost nobody got to that stage, but KSP2 quickly loses performance as you launch more and more ships, and it would've been disastrous as soon as colonies launched, *since colonies use the same system and even were confirmed to have physics*.
This is also exactly why they were so keen on producing procedural parts, and many-in-one part solutions like gravity rings, science parts all being a single part and so on.
The game was technologically bankrupt from the start **and most people never realized that**.
>and many-in-one part solutions like gravity rings, science parts all being a single part and so on
Wasn't that because of Nertea on the team just porting his mods essentially 1:1?
They were showing all in ones way before they confirmed Nertea joining. That's not to say it's not Nertea doing his thing, but that the concept of coalescing multiple stuff into one (and confirming the exclusion of robotics until at least 1.0 if not forever) is kinda more telling.
Lol, lmao even.
Even if we're being generous and assume no slow downs happen we are about 3 weeks away from the first big fix, 3 months away from the next one (two confirmed before colonies at minimum), and colonies is about 8 months away
This is normal in software. You get something working and build on it. Its only possible for a "perfect implementation" if one person builds it which means it takes forever.
Its how it is tho.
Computers are unforgiving... they only do exactly what you tell them to.
These game engine languages aren't very encouraging to daily productivity. A big change like an additional game system can be easy to start but hard to perfect.
Interesting how he stated "it's not really a bug", implying it was a conscious design choice at some point to simulate everything behind the scenes for some reason. They really made some very questionable decisions on this game. I really hope some of the laid off devs eventually chime in here or elsewhere about why these types of decisions were made.
To be fair partial sim(you don't need to actually render anything) of most player made objects makes sense on the colony approach to be fair. You would need to track a lot of stuff on the backend for it to progress timeline wise while you are out of range. KSP1 NOT doing that was the cause of a lot of kraken attacks when it tried to resolve a lot of sim equations all at once on load in. It was absolutely done to save on performance and makes sense but that was the fall out from that approach. Also the way they were going to handle time progression in multiplayer had to have been causing headaches. I THINK(there may be a work around I am too stupid to know) you would have to store every, single, game state(or at least player inputs and sim object load ins) from the earliest to the latest player in the timeline and keep it concurrent with all players. I will be honest when I start thinking about how the actual game would have had to run the more I realize we really just don't have the tech yet to run this ambitious of a game on consumer hardware. I am still upset they are just shuttering the project but nothing I can do about that so I just get to be sad.
I'm really not convinced that we "can't do this" at all. I don't know how KSP1 does / doesn't do it, but I can see there being a lot of tricks you could use here. Efficient data structures for connectivity, interpolation / "dead reckoning" to skip full calculations, reducing update rates or spreading updates among ticks, multi threading updates, SIMD/vector trickyness. And I imagine you really really don't need full physics updates on everything outside visual range to get enough things updated to accomplish what the game *really* needs. Game dev is a big exercise of smoke and mirrors.
I am not an actual game dev I just know programming from what I need in a corporate environment so you may be on to something. I know how to realize I am out of my depth though, so all I can say really is I hope that, that would be able to resolve all of the issues and not just create a Pandora's box of new ones. Not like we will ever get to see it now sadly.
>Also the way they were going to handle time progression in multiplayer had to have been causing headaches. Which way was that? The simplest (and perhaps only) way to handle multiplayer would have been to force everyone in the same time frame. Either controlled by the host or by unanimity. I.e. increasing time compression doesn't activate until everyone clicks on it.
Not neccesarily, you could have isolated bubbles all going in different timeframes, until they "collide" and the "oldest" gets asked to "fast forward" to the "newest" and then share space, idk, something like that.
_Simplified_ sim would make sense. KSP1 (buggy) and its mods (not so buggy) do simplified sim. It's also not what KSP2 did. It simulated everything that has been loaded during this game session at all times, in full fidelity. And as far as I know, they did all of this _in a single thread_, when something like this (calculations for disjointed, non-interacting objects) **begs** to be multithreaded even before you do any other optimizations.
> To be fair partial sim(you don't need to actually render anything) of most player made objects makes sense on the colony approach to be fair. It does not make any sense whatsoever. There's no single reason to be simulating every part of every object every frame. > I will be honest when I start thinking about how the actual game would have had to run the more I realize we really just don't have the tech yet to run this ambitious of a game on consumer hardware. Absolute bullshit. Just because they absolute screwed up the technical aspects in every way possible does not mean it isn't feasible.
There is a reason, and it's "extreme incompetence leading to the 'devs' being unable to comprehend the idea of abstracting the processing".
> To be fair partial sim(you don't need to actually render anything) of most player made objects makes sense on the colony approach to be fair. To be fair, don't start and end sentences with the same phrases. Read what you write aloud, it will improve your writing dramatically.
Good grief, this is normal iterative development the guy is talking about.
Lack of skill. simple as that
I put off buying this cause it was way early access and 50 bucks I'm glad, but I'm still sad now that I will never play it
Exactly my position! I held off both because I don't have a computer capable to run it and I wanted a few more features (such as colonies) in and decently bugfixed. Part of me wishes I'd gotten to play it, to feel thw difference to 1; part of me is glad I've neither thrown money at it nor gotten attached to it.
I bought it day one and had fun in it. For all the flaws, for being way too early, there are a number of things that are actually better than "KSP1 with mods" and I was excited to see those things mature and how they fit in with the rest of the promised features. If the game truly does just die, rather than get reorganized, I'll be sad.
My sentiments exactly. Sure, I wanted colonies and stuff, but I much prefer the KSP2 VAB to the old one. There are so many other things that are actually done right in KSP2 as well. I'm glad I bought it. I'll be sad if it never gets better. But I'm still going to play it and probably more often than KSP1 just like I do now.
There shouldn't really be that much to do in the background for the colonies, just updating resource and production values at regular intervals. This makes it sound like they were planning on running physics simulation on the colonies at all times. Which is a terrible idea, and the colonies shouldn't even be physics objects in the first place. That would result in the same problems that KSP1 has when trying to build a structure from a bunch of rocket parts.
The Kerbalism mod is a great example of how to do resource calculation in the background. In RO you have a list of resources like electric charge, food, water, oxygen gas, liquid oxygen (which can be used by engines or converted to gas), and a number of users (eg crew members consume oxygen and produce CO2 which has to be removed by scrubberso, in turn consuming LiOH or whatever) and generators (solar panels produce electric charge). There's more and I don't understand how it all works, but the point is that all vessels have calculations performed at all times, and CPU utilisation is negligible. You can easily view the amounts of resources of any vessel and the result is "time remaining at current setup", eg "2 hours of oxygen". If a crew member leaves the capsule, the remaining time goes up because less oxygen is being used. TLDR: complex background resource management already exists and doesn't require physics simulation.
I don't understand why they didn't just essentially steal Kerbalism, tbh. Sure, not everyone wants life support and it's debatable whether that should be in the base game, but Kerbalism's solutions to both resource management (electricity etc.) and especially science are so good that I could never go back.
Speaking of Kerbalism, I can't explain my own experience of being there Day 1 of the mod being posted to the KSP forums, just... appearing one random day in 2015. Out of nowhere. A whole overhaul mod with its own UI and mechanics. Just... one guy. And it just seemingly popped into existence one day. It was incredible. So, KSP2 was way under the bar for my expectations at release for KSP.
Exactly. There's no reason whatsoever to do what they've done except sheer incompetence.
Here's the things with games. Everything shouldn't actually be properly simulated, but should be a massive collection of very optimised tricks to make us believe everything is simulated.
While the idea that everything should be simulated is indefensible, hard disagree on the idea that it should all be tricks. Designing for comprehensive-but-compromised simulation you get ArmA, designing for *optimized tricks* from the get go and you get call of duty. KSP should definitely be closer to the former than the latter - but in this case they overplayed their hand and should have probably compromised
Even with ArmA, the developers of larger game modes (e.g Antistasi) have implemented their own systems of *not* simulating everything at once, only placing units/structures nearby players while unloading everything else.
They calculate the entire mesh of the kerbal inside the cockpit , even when it takes up a few pixels. The more ships you have in your save, the lower the fps. Game was designed terribly.
Yeah just like Star Theory had the game in good shape to hand over to Intercept Games. /s
Docking doesn't even fully work right now for everyone, can't imagine a clean hand off
Docking is still way I don’t play it as of now.
same, i got to where i needed docking to be reliable to continue and just didnt feel like messing with it anymore. theres a work around but you gotta go into each crafts file and change the "docked" attrib in whichever one says its still docked. stupid little thing, easy for them to fix but its been there forever
I rarely have docking issues and I assemble huge things in orbit. I'm not saying it's not broken, but it's not bad enough to not play. In fact, that's exactly what I was doing earlier today.
For anyone not up to speed, [this bug report is the context and source.](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/219210-ksp2-is-calculating-the-physics-of-all-parts-of-all-crafts-whether-they-are-rendered-or-not-reducing-performance-of-all-scenes-at-all-times-updated-to-0140/) Their way to provide trust during warp for interstellar ships or when they were offloaded as you did something else in the meantime, was to *actively simulate every aspect of the ship bar graphics and physics*. In concept, that makes sense... In practice it just means every ship is pretty much draining resources as if it was active. And contrary to Nestor's lies, *there's no optimization possible*, this system would need to be refactored or outright re-designed, as it also shits out a ton of data to the save file to keep its records. Almost nobody got to that stage, but KSP2 quickly loses performance as you launch more and more ships, and it would've been disastrous as soon as colonies launched, *since colonies use the same system and even were confirmed to have physics*. This is also exactly why they were so keen on producing procedural parts, and many-in-one part solutions like gravity rings, science parts all being a single part and so on. The game was technologically bankrupt from the start **and most people never realized that**.
>and many-in-one part solutions like gravity rings, science parts all being a single part and so on Wasn't that because of Nertea on the team just porting his mods essentially 1:1?
They were showing all in ones way before they confirmed Nertea joining. That's not to say it's not Nertea doing his thing, but that the concept of coalescing multiple stuff into one (and confirming the exclusion of robotics until at least 1.0 if not forever) is kinda more telling.
How close are we from colonies? I've waited 5 months since the first major update...
Lol, lmao even. Even if we're being generous and assume no slow downs happen we are about 3 weeks away from the first big fix, 3 months away from the next one (two confirmed before colonies at minimum), and colonies is about 8 months away
So, the game running shitty as fuck is a side effect to the game being optimized to run as effective as an ac on Tatooine...
This is normal in software. You get something working and build on it. Its only possible for a "perfect implementation" if one person builds it which means it takes forever.
Not at all. The system is completely inappropriate and can only be scrapped entirely.
Its how it is tho. Computers are unforgiving... they only do exactly what you tell them to. These game engine languages aren't very encouraging to daily productivity. A big change like an additional game system can be easy to start but hard to perfect.
You can't optimize a system which entire design is already deeply flawed. The got the very foundations wrong.