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The single biggest challenge would be input - you'd have to make KSP work on a touchscreen, AND still have room for the game view itself. I don't really see a way around this without requiring external input.

Second big challenge would be performance, but that would be surmountable - modern smartphones are pretty dang fast, probably comparable to the power of a decent laptop as of the time KSP first went public. You'd hit a memory ceiling, but that's easily solved by using lower-resolution textures and disallowing mods (which they most certainly have had to do with the console versions).

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Very likely no, but not simply "because it's android"; it's because of the hardware android is typically built for. KSP physics is very CPU-intensive, and mobile processors simply don't have the power to keep up.

Now, that said, not all of the physics going on is hard. The orbital mechanics calculations, for instance, are pretty straightforward. It's the part where relative deflections and internal forces are calculated that curbstomps CPU's. Simplerockets may get around this by…ignoring it and not caring. But it's an integral part of the KSP experience, and much of the gameplay is balanced against building rockets that are strong enough. I haven't played Simplerockets, so I don't know whether that is a concern or not.

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8 hours ago, StarManta said:

modern smartphones are pretty dang fast, probably comparable to the power of a decent laptop as of the time KSP first went public.

Not remotely accurate. Performance is about more than core count and clockspeed. ARM is underpowered junk compared to x86, performance-wise.

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14 hours ago, StarManta said:

Second big challenge would be performance, but that would be surmountable - modern smartphones are pretty dang fast, probably comparable to the power of a decent laptop as of the time KSP first went public. You'd hit a memory ceiling, but that's easily solved by using lower-resolution textures and disallowing mods (which they most certainly have had to do with the console versions).

Uhhh.... no. From what I understand the thermal power output (which can give you an idea of just how fast it actually is) for ARM is, from what I've found 3W... The nearest x86 that is on that scale is the ATOM processers from Intel. I had an ATOM based netbook, No WAY that thing could handle much in the way of simple games, heck, it struggled under simple web browsing.

The reason smartphones "seem fast" is because they are working under extremely scaled down programs, lots of features and whatnot available for a desktop are simply not there in a smartphone because the phone has neither. To give you an idea, I ran across this graph that can really sum up the argument

PowervPerf.png

We can see ARM's new A8 and A9 dont even reach 1B Instructions Per Second, meanwhile the best i7 comes in at about 25w power  but delivers a whopping 6+ BIPS, thats roughly 10.3 times the computing power, and even with onboard graphics, its unlikely to see above 15FPS... For that you need something along the lines of a dedicated GPU, which can range wildly, but the PS4 (the better of the consoles IMO) offers a whopping 1.8 TeraFLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second).

FLOPS and IPS dont really equate apples to apples, and better applies to GPUs, But according to Wiki, The ARM-8 dual core clocked at a blistering 1.8Ghz (blistering? BUWAHAH) offers an underwhelming 172.8 GFLOPS. Ladies and gentlemen... my ancient GTX 460, not even top of the line when it was new, offers over 4 times this @873.6 GFLOPS.

So what you are saying... is that a top of the line smartphone that offers .3BIPS and 172 GFLOPS is just as capable as a massively outdated desktop (which could be matched... and surpassed by laptops) that can offer up 3.5 BIPS (give or take an older i5), with 873 GFLOPS. ummm, no... just no. Anyone who thinks this needs to stop fanboying mobile devices and do some research.

Don't even get me started on the memory.

And yes, I am aware that a "nextgen" console beats the heck out of my PC... I really need an upgrade.

Edited by Sovek
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9 minutes ago, Zoidos said:

Wasn't simple rockets developed by a former Squad-dev? If I remember correctly, he left just after the release of 1.0.

I don't think so. SimpleRockets is much older than KSP 1.0, I've had it since fall of 2014 and it's likely older than that. AFAIK the developer is not affiliated with Squad but does credit KSP as the inspiration for SR.

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I don't have pertinent insight about ship and architecture performance, but I have a practical insight.

Porting KSP on another platform will mean that devs will work on that instead of working on the PC. To game improvement would stall.

We can see it about Minecraft (even before Microsoft transaction). Even the 1.1 porting have stall the KSP content. Even if Squad says otherwise, console ports have also stall the devs for new features. But I can understand the need of increase the public a game to increase income.

As for android, I'm not sure a tablet or smartphone would be a comfortable environment to play the KSP. Dealing with nodes is hard enough with a laser mouse, imagine doing that with our fat fingers on a 4" smartphone...

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9 hours ago, Sovek said:

Uhhh.... no. From what I understand the thermal power output (which can give you an idea of just how fast it actually is) for ARM is, from what I've found 3W... The nearest x86 that is on that scale is the ATOM processers from Intel. I had an ATOM based netbook, No WAY that thing could handle much in the way of simple games, heck, it struggled under simple web browsing.

The reason smartphones "seem fast" is because they are working under extremely scaled down programs, lots of features and whatnot available for a desktop are simply not there in a smartphone because the phone has neither. To give you an idea, I ran across this graph that can really sum up the argument

PowervPerf.png

We can see ARM's new A8 and A9 dont even reach 1B Instructions Per Second, meanwhile the best i7 comes in at about 25w power  but delivers a whopping 6+ BIPS, thats roughly 10.3 times the computing power, and even with onboard graphics, its unlikely to see above 15FPS... For that you need something along the lines of a dedicated GPU, which can range wildly, but the PS4 (the better of the consoles IMO) offers a whopping 1.8 TeraFLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second).

FLOPS and IPS dont really equate apples to apples, and better applies to GPUs, But according to Wiki, The ARM-8 dual core clocked at a blistering 1.8Ghz (blistering? BUWAHAH) offers an underwhelming 172.8 GFLOPS. Ladies and gentlemen... my ancient GTX 460, not even top of the line when it was new, offers over 4 times this @873.6 GFLOPS.

So what you are saying... is that a top of the line smartphone that offers .3BIPS and 172 GFLOPS is just as capable as a massively outdated desktop (which could be matched... and surpassed by laptops) that can offer up 3.5 BIPS (give or take an older i5), with 873 GFLOPS. ummm, no... just no. Anyone who thinks this needs to stop fanboying mobile devices and do some research.

Don't even get me started on the memory.

And yes, I am aware that a "nextgen" console beats the heck out of my PC... I really need an upgrade.

A modern atom can handle simpler KSP ships - I gave it a try in an atom powered, 2gb of ram windows tablet and stock ksp can run at minimum quality. So maybe a powerful Android device (as "powerful" means in Android) running intel chips could run it... but

 

It has to be redesigned for touch. And you need at least 2GB of ram, while most Android devices are happy with just 1gb. So given the mininum system requirements are high for the Android world, it doesn't seem like it's worth porting.

Then again... it's coming for the Wii U, somehow

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12 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

I don't think so. SimpleRockets is much older than KSP 1.0, I've had it since fall of 2014 and it's likely older than that. AFAIK the developer is not affiliated with Squad but does credit KSP as the inspiration for SR.

Ok, then I might have mixed sthg up. I think I remember that just after the release of 1.0. one of the devs left who meant to develop a game for smartphones with a similar theme as KSP. 

Thanks for the clarification.

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On February 11, 2016 at 6:43 PM, Red Iron Crown said:

Not remotely accurate. Performance is about more than core count and clockspeed. ARM is underpowered junk compared to x86, performance-wise.

What benchmarks are you looking at that bring you to this conclusion? I'm not looking at core count and clockspeed, I'm looking at benchmarks and my own experiences. I am, btw, using the iPhone 6S as my definition of "a modern smartphone".

iPhone 6S: 2490 single-core, 4332 multi-core on Geekbench 3

Intel Core i5-2435M @ 2.40 GHz (found on a Macbook Pro that was newly released in 2011, when KSP was first released to the public): 2003 single-core, 4098 multi-core

If the physics multithreading pans out as we hope it will, we should be comparing the multi-core score on the phone to the single-core score on the old computer (because 2011 KSP did not support multithreading), giving it an even bigger advantage. (Realistically, it will be somewhere in between; I expect the multi-core improvements to provide a slight performance bump but it will probably not fully utilize all cores)

My anecdotal experience backs up the benchmarks - any game I've ever run on my iPhone 6S looks and performs considerably better than any games I've ever run on my 2012 Macbook; the difference is actually even more extreme than the benchmark would suggest, probably because it's a lot easier to optimize a game for several models of smartphones versus an infinite number of computers - an advantage KSP would share. My professional Unity experience backs this up as well - we have a lot more performance and memory trouble on older PCs than we have on modern smartphones, running the same simulation.

Graphics performance is pretty good on mobile, though likely not as good as a 2011 desktop video card (the wide variety of video cards available at any given point in time makes this kind of a waste of time to try and pull any numbers on). Anecdotally, my 2012 MBA with integrated Intel graphics runs KSP at around 20-30 FPS with small ships and chokes to 5-10 fps on big ships, while my desktop which has a real video card (offering many times the benchmark score of Intel integrated graphics) and a CPU about twice as fast as my MBA runs at... you guessed it... about twice as fast as my MBA. In other words, I don't think the video processor is an issue, because KSP is and always has been bottlenecked at the CPU thanks to physics calculations, including on crappy integrated graphics.

Memory is not as good on mobile, as mentioned in my first post (the linked 2011 MBP has 4GB of memory, the iPhone 6S has 2GB), but mobile OS's are a lot better at optimizing the memory they have than desktop OS's are. This is also far and away the easiest to adjust for without compromising gameplay: if needed, they can drop the resolution of the textures by half, and suddenly it's using a quarter of the RAM.

Would KSP be able to handle the huge space stations and ships that players are constructing these days on a phone? Maybe not - by 2013 (when docking was introduced, and people started really building the big stuff), the Macbook Pro line's benchmarks outstrip the 6S at 2856 for single core and 11,033 for multi-core. But for what most players do all the time, and for what even advanced players do 90% of the time, it'd be acceptable.

As to @Sovek's post, your desktop numbers all include video cards (which, as described above, have NEVER been a performance bottleneck for KSP), which is reason enough to discount your entire comment. And since everything CPU-intensive in KSP uses floating points (physics, meshes, graphics preprocessing), I'm going to use that instead of BIPS. Check any of the floating point benchmarks in the Geekbench links above, and they are all pretty comparable (within about 10%) between the 6S and the 2011 MBP.

Edited by StarManta
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17 minutes ago, StarManta said:

What benchmarks are you looking at that bring you to this conclusion? I'm not looking at core count and clockspeed, I'm looking at benchmarks and my own experiences. I am, btw, using the iPhone 6S as my definition of "a modern smartphone".

I was looking at floating point benchmarks the last time we were discussing mobile versions of KSP (sorry, I haven't got the links handy anymore). TBH, I was unaware of the performance leap represented by the 6S, if the FP performance scales with the aggregate benches it might be possible indeed.

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37 minutes ago, StarManta said:

As to @Sovek's post, your numbers include video cards (which, as described above, have NEVER been a performance bottleneck for KSP), which is reason enough to discount your entire argument. And since everything CPU-intensive in KSP uses floating points (physics, meshes, graphics preprocessing), I'm going to use that instead of BIPS. Check any of the floating point benchmarks in the Geekbench links above, and they are all pretty comparable (within about 10%) between the 6S and the 2011 MBP.

Nope... just no.. A synthetic benchmark DOES NOT equate gaming performance. And my GPU comparison is very relavant as the OP wants a 3D based game, something thats going to be VERY DIFFICULT to do on a GPU that has half the processing power of a R7 240, a card that even Linus from LTT thinks is garbage. Also, you trying to tell me that a phone (the 6S in this case) with a quarter of the power, can play a 3D game just like an AMD A10 that pushes 770GFLOPS, I call utter nonesense.

Could we have a 2D version of KSP with CPU performance... maybe, I'm still questionable. But thats not what the OP is wanting, is it.

Edited by Sovek
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14 minutes ago, Sovek said:

And my GPU comparison is very relavant as the OP wants a 3D based game

Just because a game is 3D doesn't mean it is performance-limited by the GPU. Kerbal's limitation has always been in the CPU, thanks to its reliance on physics calculations. At most, the GPU-intensive re-entry effects would have to be simplified for the phone, and particle effects on smoke might push fillrate limits on lesser GPU's. But those intensive effects are few and far between, and (like texture size) are extremely easy to reduce without affecting gameplay.

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44 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

I was looking at floating point benchmarks the last time we were discussing mobile versions of KSP (sorry, I haven't got the links handy anymore). TBH, I was unaware of the performance leap represented by the 6S, if the FP performance scales with the aggregate benches it might be possible indeed.

Honestly I actually just went back to the beginning of the thread, and I'm surprised no one has called me out that I'm using an iPhone 6S for my "modern smartphone" when the OP had specifically asked for an Android version, where no Android phones come remotely close to the 6S's performance. The best score listed for Android on Geekbench is 1882 for a tablet and 1342 for a phone, compared to the 6S's 2490 - using Android phones, you guys would very likely be correct - they're far weaker than any computer one would play KSP on. (I used the 6S as my example mostly because I hadn't realized the performance gap between platforms was nearly that large. How do people live on phones so slow...?)

Edited by StarManta
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