RTS321

1288 hours, or as I prefer it 4.6268 megaseconds. I once tried to calculate it as a percentage of my life. It was not a pleasant surprise.

I agree with you that the biggest CPU drain is a result of parts, however, I and many others have found that large numbers of flights (which these asteroids will have to be treated as if not 'on rails') do significantly detract from the framerate. For example, I have found that a Kerbal X on the launchpad and no other flights will give me 40 fps, whereas with 50 other flights it drops to 26 fps (the full results can be seen in the thread linked in my above post). I very much hope that if Squad does find a way to optimise the effect that asteroids will have on performance, the optimisation will be applicable to ships as well. For people who tend to stick to one save for a long time and in the process accumulate many flights, this will be incredibly helpful.

I found something rather interesting whilst playing today: the framerate in map view is related to the proximity of a body (such as Kerbin). Specifically, there seemed to be a threshold below which (i.e. zoomed in) I recieved 14/15 fps in map view, and suddenly after moving beyond this boundary it bounced up to the significantly better 22 fps. This made no sense, until I saw that whilst zoomed relatively far in Kerbin obstructs the visibility of orbit drawings, so you couldn't see any lines directly behind Kerbin, however, after zooming out a certain distance, the section of the orbits that went behind Kerbin become visible, accompanied with a sudden fps jump. I would like to no if anyone else has experienced this (if not I'll put it down to mods misbehaving ). It would be interesting to see if any settings.cfg files can be modified to remove the obstruction completely, thus permanently increasing the fps in map view.

This is what I find the most interesting, albeit purely from a technical standpoint. If they are not 'on rails', then as far as I can see the game will need to do physics on them to calculate their velocity and draw their orbits, just like flights in progress that you can see from map view. This is fine with small numbers, but as demonstrated here, as the number of flights increases, it has a very noticeable effect on the framerate. I wonder if, unlike part count, it will be possible to address this source of poor performance. I hope this gives the devs the incentive to try.

I have a few: Firstly, after landing a rover and then a Kerbal to drive it next to a Munar arch, I decided to take a 400m trip south to a crater biome to get more science. I did not realise until it was far too late that 300 of those 400m was a vertical drop. Several seconds of panic followed, cut short abruptly by the impact. Miraculously, although the rover bounced off into a very rapid spin, every one of the five-or-so collisions after that were absorbed by the wheels until it landed upright and settled. The rover had survived with every wheel and every solar panel but one broken, it was quite simply incredible. Secondly, aiming to return a probe to within 20 kilometers of the KSC. Without any further input after the deorbit burn, it landed on the roof of the Spaceplane Hanger. Lastly, I think what delighted me the most was the fact that my SSTO spaceplane to Laythe actually worked. I sent two, they didn't have near enough fuel to make it to Laythe from LKO, so I came up with a system of undocking the ascent rocket engine and replacing it with an LV-N, which in turn could be decoupled to reveal a replacement rocket. The first one deorbited and flew fine, but the landing site was too bumpy and it ended up crash-landing with minor structural damage and only one out of three engines. I wasn't particularly hopeful about the second, as it was identical to the first and in the time between launch and reaching Laythe my spaceplane building skills had advanced enough to realise it didn't really have enough wing area. But it descended and landed at a flatter site perfectly, ready for refuel!

Without a doubt resources. I have used and still enjoy the Kethane mod, I would love anything that expands the game in this direction. I can only agree with others who have said that complexity is a major part of what makes the game fun, and am therefore very disappointed at the news that it (probably) wont happen. I just don't see the appeal of multiplayer in the context of this game, unless the developers think of some amazing features that can only be achieved through multiplayer (and surpass the problems that come with it), it will become a small part of the game that people will try, and become bored with very quickly.

Actually, just adding 'Kethane' without the 'KSP' prefix reveals about twice as many (assuming the scale is linear) searches, it is also considerably higher than 'ksp life support'. Back on topic, I would like to see resources in the game however the situation does not look favourable.

Remember that the number of flights in progress also has a large effect on framerate.

Yes, but only in the initial tests shown on the first page. The more detailed ones on page four were done without Remote Tech 2 or indeed any other mods installed, and consequentially I believe that the effect on the framerate was not as great, but still very much significant.

In regard to Brotro's question, apparently the display filters are meant to reduce clutter on the map screen purely for aesethics; as all but one of the 'other flights' were in fact debris and therefore not automatically shown. I think this would only explain it if the lag was due to drawing the orbits on the map view. I am using an AMD Athlon II quad core (ugh!) 630 at 2.8 GHz, certainly not the best for KSP but by no means the worst.

Okay everybody, I have performed some more tests under different conditions, and although the conclusion is similar to the original one there is one key point I would like to make, but firstly, the results: (Note, I removed all mods for these tests, which I did not for the original ones. The tests utilise a stock Kerbal X rocket on the launchpad, without moving the camera) 0 other flights - 42 fps 1 other flight - 41 fps 5 other flights - 38 fps 10 other flights - 36 fps 15 other flights - 33 fps 20 other flights - 34 fps 25 other flights - 33 fps 30 other flights - 31 fps 35 other flights - 29 fps 40 other flights - 28 fps 45 other flights - 27 fps 50 other flights - 26 fps 55 other flights - 25 fps 0 flights after removing all other flights - 40 fps So, we can immediately see that the largest changes occurred between 0 and 15 other flights in progress, the overall result being a drop of nearly 10 fps. Interestingly, the framerate stagnates at around 33 fps for the next 15 flights, before gradually declining by a rate of about 0.2 fps per flight until the end of the experiment- I assume the trend would continue if I tried more trials. Clearly, some factor was also reducing the framerate over time, with a difference of two fps recorded for 0 other flights before and after the tests. So, the question now is how easy this will be for the developers to optimise; I just hope it won't be engine restricted like the part count issue. The most important thing to learn from this is that a large number of flights does have a significant affect on framerate, arguably on par with that of increasing part count. (Oh, and yes, all flights remained in Kerbin's SOI) EDIT: I forgot to mention that the results in the range of 50 vessels achieved 10 more fps than in the first test; I wonder if the removal of mods, especially remote tech, caused this discrepancy...)

I also tried removing orbital debris: Before removal, my 100 part ship received 24 fps without moving the camera on the launchpad; After removing 54 jettisoned upper stages and other miscellaneous debris, the same ship under the same conditions achieved 26 fps. This seems very minor when compared to the large differences described above, however I have a hypothesis as to why: When returning to the first post, we can see that the largest variations occurred between 0 and 50 other parts; the increase from 50 to 75 only reduced the framerate by 2 fps in comparison to the ten-or-so achieved by the previous two.This seemed irrelevant, and I considered by above results anomalous, until I remembered that I have 50 other flights not classified as debris still in progress. Therefore I hypothesise that the negative impact of having more flights decreases sharply per flight after around 50 flights; beforehand it being relatively large. If I can, I shall try to obtain more detailed results, especially between 0 and 50 flights, where most of the change appears to be taking place.

Well, if each flight/debris is the equivalent of around a part, I now have a good reason not to leave upper stages in Low Kerbin Orbit! Seriously though, after a while any industrious space program will accumulate hundreds of vessels and pieces of debris in orbit; it's no wonder the game eventually lags so much.

I'm not sure if this is already common knowledge, but as a quick Google search yielded no appropriate results so I thought I would share an observation I made today on the subject of frames per second (I apologise if this as already been discussed): We all know that higher part counts contribute massively to lower FPS, however I have noticed with all three of my saves (0.20,0.21 and 0.23) that I can start with relatively high part counts (100+) and see no lag whatsoever, but as I progressed it seemed as if the same ships induced more and more lag. Until today, I assumed that I was just imagining this phenomenon, but as I spent a while on KSP I managed to launched several ships, increasing the number of flights by about a third. This seemed to have the overall effect of slowing the game down slightly, so I did a quick experiment to see if my hypothesis was correct in a new save; I used a 111 part rocket on the launchpad to test the number of fps with different numbers of flights in progress. These are my results: 0 Other flights: 39 fps 25 Other flights: 28 fps 50 Other flights: 15 fps 75 other flights: 13 fps I'm not claiming that these tests were perfect; to start with there aren't enough results to draw a proper conclusion and furthermore I had several mods installed (Engineer Redux, Procedural Fairings, Remote Tech 2, Kethane and KAS) potentially invalidating it completely; but it does seem to me as if there is a strong correlation between the number of flights in progress and lower frames per second; I was wondering if anyone else had experienced something similar, or has any explanations as to why it happens. EDIT: I have done more testing, the results are visible on page 4.

For me, building functioning SSTOs is the hardest part of KSP. Either that or landing on Moho, I had no idea that it would take 4 km/s delta V just to slow down enough to be captured!