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Deported B.V. and Flying Tiger Entertainment, Inc. today announced the following:


SQUAD

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@Violent Jeb Let me try one more time to make it clear what I mean. Maybe I've said it too nicely for people to comprehend my opinion on the matter. Squad made a bad decision. I hope they have learned from it. It seems likely they have since they have chosen a new company to develop the port. It seems likely that at the time they must have thought FTE could do the job. Otherwise why would they give them money? That was my point with the remodeling analogy. You wouldn't give someone money to do a job they couldn't complete. They had more info at hand than we do to assess the situation. They also had most likely already signed the contract. Those typically have very real consequences if breached, so they may have had very little choice after signing. They probably had to hope for the best.

I am by no means defending Squad's decision or action. I am only trying to understand it and explain it as I do. Everyone already knows they messed up. All I'm trying to point out is that it is unlikely they did so with malicious intent. It doesn't change the fact it happened, but at least they're now trying to fix the mistake. Would it have been better had they fixed it sooner? Absolutely. That could be said about every mistake by anyone ever, and in every situation it's really easy to say when uninvolved.

My comment about being positive was cynical. I understand that often doesn't come across well in text form online, but what I truly meant was I hope FTE did not make off with a bunch of money for their poor quality work.

I hope this makes it clear.

Edited by Mako
Changed a word in the last paragraph to be more accurate.
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On 4/20/2017 at 8:22 AM, weissel said:

It might be that a console port, knowing exactly what hardware there will be, can move the physics calculations (partially) to a coprocessor or GPU or whatever, but otherwise, KSP is a very demanding game --- due to physics, not due to graphics!

I meant it's not a very demanding game by modern standards.

When your baseline of comparison hoard shooters with thousands of bullets and hundreds of NPCs in physics simulation at a time, the term is relative.

The Wii U is a lot more powerful than people give it credit for.   It does have some limitations in video memory size, memory size and GPU parallel processing, but none of those should affect a game like KSP.  It's processor in particular is particularly good for games with two threads, compared to the PS4 which really gets crippled on anything less than 5 fully active threads.  Since the physics engine in KSP has a lot of world-stops and wait-stats this means the PS4's design is horribly crippled for it. 

On 4/20/2017 at 0:08 PM, John FX said:

Obviously Squad are not at the beck and call of all forums users but when a large amount of people express concerns about your new chosen partner, business or otherwise, it might be prudent to have a closer look at them, what they claim, and whether that matches reality. Warning bells should sound for any new development they are basing their reputation on. New hires especially.

It seems in this case a closer look was warranted.

Yes, but when you have a contract already and it's a done deal, you really can't make any changes unless the other side fails to hold up to their end.  Otherwise you end up paying fees to break the contract, and then go through additional costs to sign a new one with someone else.

That's just how business works. 

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KSP is a demanding game on the CPU and one that isn't well multithreaded. It might not look it, you might think it shouldn't be (ie you might think it's badly optimised), but it is. Simulating one complicated interconnected thing is potentially harder than simulating thousands of simple things. And while the Wii U's processor is very different to the PS4/XBone ones, I doubt it's significantly faster per-core.

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9 hours ago, Ruedii said:

It's processor in particular is particularly good for games with two threads, compared to the PS4 which really gets crippled on anything less than 5 fully active threads.

If you want a real comparison, line the Wii up against a PC. The result, in terms of both RAM and CPU performance, isn't particularly encouraging.
The slowest Intel CPU on the market will beat it to a pulp.

That thing has a 1.2Ghz PowerPC CPU clocking in at a whopping 0.35Tflops. It's gonna be slow for KSP.

A (very) rough and (highly) inaccurate back-of-a-fag-packet comparison puts it at about half the per-core performance of the Jaguar chip in the PS4.

Edited by steve_v
Oops, wrong console generation.
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On 4/21/2017 at 11:39 PM, Ruedii said:

when you have a contract already

is too late. A sensible business should investigate fully any possible partners because your reputation rests on the quality of their work.

From all accounts it seems the evidence of previous good work was sadly lacking.

Edited by Frybert
Fixed some forum wonkyness.
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On 4/22/2017 at 8:56 AM, steve_v said:

If you want a real comparison, line the Wii up against a PC. The result, in terms of both RAM and CPU performance, isn't particularly encouraging.
The slowest Intel CPU on the market will beat it to a pulp.

That thing has a 1.2Ghz PowerPC CPU clocking in at a whopping 0.35Tflops. It's gonna be slow for KSP.

A (very) rough and (highly) inaccurate back-of-a-fag-packet comparison puts it at about half the per-core performance of the Jaguar chip in the PS4.


First, let's not start with console wars.

I don't know where you got the 0.35Tflops for the Wii U processor.  I haven't seen specs anywhere that state that.

The 1.2Ghz PowerPC64 in the Wii U is a 3 core, 12 execution units, 12 instructions per a cycle, and up to 48 results per a cycle.

Meanwhile, the PS4 is running what is essentially an AMD A8 underclocked to the speed of a A4, and a slightly enchanced GPU.  It is certainly not a powerhouse either.  While it has 4 cores, it only has 8 execution units for x86_64 instructions, 4 for SSE/FP instructions, and these two sets cannon run in parallel. This provides a theoretical cap of 16 maximum results per a cycle.  It is certainly not the powerhouse that Sony claims it is.  The PS4 is also crippled by having only 64KB of cache.

Much like you can't compare an ARM9 processor to a PC processor based on clock speed, the same is true about these two processors.  Really, they are completely different machines, and honestly about equal.

Furthermore, both processors are very underwhelming compared to what you would find in a PC, which is about 4 times as fast as either of these. (2 times if you are talking about a standard form-factor laptop.)

So, quit with your Sony <REDACTED>and realize BOTH processors are severely underpowered, and more optimized to reduce fan noise than actual processor speed.

The bigger concern is that most developers aren't familiar with the PowerPC64 SSIMD architecture extensions used in the Wii U, and thus have trouble optimizing their code for it.  However, the PhysX toolkit used in KSP seems to handle this nicely.  This is why Sony moved away from this instruction set in the PS4, after the abysmal problems with 3rd party game performance on the PS2 and PS3.  This is why it is so important to get a good team to do console ports.

Edited by Frybert
Avoid the personal attacks please thank you.
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2 hours ago, Ruedii said:

Furthermore, both processors are very underwhelming compared to what you would find in a PC

 

On 4/22/2017 at 8:56 AM, steve_v said:

If you want a real comparison, line the Wii up against a PC.

The slowest Intel CPU on the market will beat it to a pulp.

 

 

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22 minutes ago, Ruedii said:

Really, they are completely different machines, and honestly about equal.

Please no. Those 2 are far from being the same. By your comparaison a high range phone has the power of a PC...

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On 4/21/2017 at 11:39 PM, Ruedii said:

I meant it's not a very demanding game by modern standards.

When your baseline of comparison hoard shooters with thousands of bullets and hundreds of NPCs in physics simulation at a time, the term is relative.

You are wrong ... by modern standards.  The problem is that KSP uses the rigid body approximation for it's physics.[1] 

If we assume a full physics simulation of each bullet[2], each bullet is interacting only with air and gravity, and only weight and air resistance of the bullet matters.  Until it strikes, of course.  So 10k bullets take 10,000 times the computing that 1 bullet does.

In a 300 part KSP vessel every part interacts with all parts it is connected to --- and these parts again interact forward and back again.  So all 300 parts do interact with all other 299 parts all the time, stressing, bending, compressing, stretching all the joint, transmitting forces ... so it's about ~90,000 times one part (and each part has much more to do than a bullet).  Unless you

Same with the "hundreds of NPCs": they don't interact with almost all other things, and while they take in information from their field of view and hearing and orders from their leaders, they do not really have physics between themselves.

 

So, by "modern standards" you have been mixing up "impressive numbers" with trivial complexity with fairly modest numbers with really high complexity.

 

[1] This is not a fault of KSP, we simply don't have any physics simulation that is at least roughly as realistic as rigid body but is cheaper in computations.

[2] the bullet trajectory does not need a full physics simulation, you can perfectly make do with lookup tables, and such lookup tables for artillery was available in WWI (100 years ago) which gave you all the information you needed to hit something 10s of kilometres away.  (And at that range and time of flight you do not only have to measure the temperature of the powder and the wear of the barrel, but also the projectile drift from the spin of it.)

Edited by Frybert
Fixed some forum wonkyness.
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1 hour ago, cfds said:

Was the FTE deal really bad from a business perspective? Profit is made with sold copies, not with sold copies that make people happy...

A company's good reputation is worth far more than quick profits.

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2 hours ago, Frybert said:

If that were true I can't think of a LOT of businesses that would have folded long ago.

Well not all companies appreciate the long-term value of a good reputation, but that doesn't mean it isn't true :P

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1 minute ago, Frybert said:

Squad strikes me as one of the ones that don't.

I wouldn't know what they care or don't care about. But when a product is particularly bad (save corruption) and there is a corporate seller party (console company's online store) refunds are a legally mandated thing over most of the world. So there is a financial incentive for Squad to get the console builds straightened up. The big online store that holds monopoly over selling to their particular console brand users certainly won't absorb any of the loss. They will have worded their contracts to ensure that.

Regarding the OP these kinds of settlements typically include strict clauses that forbid either party saying anything but objectively positive things about the other. So don't expect anyone from Squad to let spill even the slightest hint of what went wrong by whom.

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3 minutes ago, monophonic said:

I wouldn't know what they care or don't care about. But when a product is particularly bad (save corruption) and there is a corporate seller party (console company's online store) refunds are a legally mandated thing over most of the world.

This is completely wrong.

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Okay, everybody here can see apparently the future and consoles are better than PCs and/or PCs are better than consoles. 

The fact remains that Squad is no longer working with Flying Tiger. 

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