Johannes

Mr Manley, I don’t feel so good...

We are not using the full DOTS stack. We specifically use jobs to parallelize calculations in a few select systems where there are clear performance benefits. For example using jobs allows PQS+ to be considerably faster than the original system in KSP1 and without which the quality of terrain that we are working on would not really be feasible. Your concerns are absolutely valid. We try to be very careful when evaluating any new technologies that we might use in this project. The Unity Jobs System has been a part of our codebase since fairly early in development, but its uses are also is

Without going into too many details, we are using Unity Jobs in conjunction with the Burst Compiler and Unity.Mathematics to speed up some of the more expensive calculations.

One thing I did not address in the original post is that this is less of an issue in KSP1 since it fades out orbits based on context: When you zoom in close enough on a celestial body its orbit fades away, for example when looking at Kerbin close enough to see its Moons as I do in my mockup. This is absolutely a valid approach which makes the issue far less noticeable in most cases.

The kind of tessellation you are referring to is GPU-accelerated mesh tessellation that is a part of the rendering pipeline on modern GPUs: (image source) GPU tessellation is specifically designed to take a mesh and subdivide its triangles, which are then used in subsequent shader steps and ultimately rendered as a texture. The key takeaway is that the mesh generated by this tessellation operation is intended to be used for rendering, and otherwise cannot really be accessed directly anymore by code running on the CPU. It also requires a sufficiently detailed input mesh that you

Joking aside though: As far as the orbit tessellation system is concerned, multiplayer orbit trajectories are no different from local ones

Wait, this game has multiplayer? (yes that was a joke)

The tessellation algorithm can work for anything you can define as a parametric function that is contiguous between a given start and end parameter. The truth may surprise you! Since you asked, this one!

I don't think I can get into too much detail there, but you've got some good intuition. Only position is considered in the smoothness heuristic. Color and thickness are just stored after a point is generated using its parameter. Any effect other than a smooth gradient would probably be best done in a shader on the mesh ultimately generated from the points. But you are right, in some edge cases such as when points are too close to co-linear you may need more than just the triangle heuristic to get enough points for it to look good

Yep! When first prototyping new tech like this it can often be faster to iterate on it in isolation in a separate project until it is ready, and since I already had that it's what I used to make these visuals. The 'icons' here are just 3D spheres that scale to a specific size in screen space (which was trivial to do with the drawing library I was using), so there is really no logic that prioritizes one over the other. You may have heard of the term 'separation of concerns' in programming. The portion of what you see here that can be found in the game is just the equivalent of the Generate

Cheers all!

Excellent - I really enjoyed writing it and I hope I get more opportunities to talk about some of the other cool new systems we're working on! Heck, I could easily write another post about this system alone - I really only described the basic implementation that my first prototype used. If you were to implement it as is you might notice some edge cases where the triangle heuristic doesn't quite cut it. If you look closely enough you might even notice some slight differences between what I described and the behavior in the renders (which use the current version of the system) That'

You were my main target demographic Glad you enjoyed it! I hope not! It's a completely new system so that shouldn't be an issue any more. (it's had its own quirks, but I hope nothing as jarring as that makes it into release, knock on wood) Yep, had I left it out you know I would have been called out for it