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Wheels, Why Were They Ruined?

fruitsbar

By fruitsbar
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fruitsbar

fruitsbar

Posted
Posted

I have to admit, KSP does give some pretty decent updates, but I'll never understand why they made the wheels non - interactive. By this I mean kerbals no longer collide with them and instead go straight through them. I thought KSP was supposed to be quiet realistic? I do understand it can cause some bugs, but I'm already missing it.

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klesh

klesh

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Wheels have been iffy for several years now.  From what I recall, they are a bit of a hacked-together workaround as Unity and it's physics don't handle wheels well.  The walk-right-through-them aspect I believe is a workaround.  Prior to it, walking into a wheel or landing leg would summon the kraken, sending you and your ship flying in various ways.

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JadeOfMaar

JadeOfMaar

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There is an inherent problem with wheel collider physics in Unity, at least, in the software that enables wheel physics in KSP. Making kerbals intangible to them cures a few age-old problems. Wheels being less miserable while ignoring the kerbal body is much more important than more physics at the cost of whatever krakenbait used to be there.

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Geonovast

Geonovast

Posted
Posted (edited)

I had Val pushed down to the center of the Mun once because she walked between two wheels.  She did not survive.  I had another kerbal flung damn near to orbit because they accidentally touched one.

I'm fine with this.

Edited by Geonovast
I'm sometimes terribly redundant and repetitive at times.
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Geonovast

Geonovast

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Posted
1 minute ago, SlinkyMcman said:

Time's have changed
Our parts are getting worse
They won't obey their physics
They just want to fail first

Should we blame the government?
Or blame society?
Or should we blame the images on our screen? 

#blamecanada

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Shadowmage

Shadowmage

Posted
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6 hours ago, fruitsbar said:

I have to admit, KSP does give some pretty decent updates, but I'll never understand why they made the wheels non - interactive. By this I mean kerbals no longer collide with them and instead go straight through them. I thought KSP was supposed to be quiet realistic? I do understand it can cause some bugs, but I'm already missing it.

I hate to jump on the bandwagon for this one, but indeed, this is a case of the issue laying entirely at the fault of the Unity game engine (or rather, PhysX, the physics library used by Unity).  No matter how hard the KSP devs try and solve the problem, the best they can ever hope for is going to be 'less buggy than the default'; polishing a turd as it were.

Basically Unity released an engine with 'wheels' that were only intended for very basic vehicle use, in the complete absence of joints, with all transforms being rigidbody alligned, and with a very narrow range of stability for a specific preconfigured purpose; and never at all intended for the widely varied uses that they are put to in KSP or other lego-like games (pick any Unity game that lets the user create randomly wheeled bodies, and they all suffer from the same/similar issues).

PhysX (the physics system used by Unity) wheels are intended for vehicle use in games like Gran Turismo, or GTA -- a single rigidbody with 2/3/4/6/8/12/18 wheels.  That is it.  Anything outside of that use-case is not intended, not supported, and likely to be a bug-ridden mess.  KSP wheels happen to fall into the latter category (the buggy mess end of the spectrum).

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klgraham1013

klgraham1013

Posted
Posted

I still don't really agree with #BlameUnity.  Programmers are smart people after all.  If Squad wanted to, I believe you can purchase the Unity source.  There has to be a way to implement you're own code that would be better.  It probably just comes down to time and money.

Hopefully KSP2 can have it's own wheel code.

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Lisias

Lisias

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Posted
13 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

I still don't really agree with #BlameUnity. 

I do.  With reserves, of course. I blame them when regressions on their code tree affects the product, and the client (Squad in this case) is leave high and dry on the thing. Linux users suddenly lost the HMI interface (Joysticks!!), and even the product's flagship (Windows!!!) has suffering some unexplainable crashes where the XInput is involved. Worst, the stack dump pinpoints the Mono's JIT as involved on the mess.

It's is Unity's duty to support Squad on these issues.

About KSP abusing the Unity's guts to reach its goals? Nope. It's the other way around - Unity's flexibility to be heavily abused and still doing the job is something that worth to be mentioned.  It was not a mistake to choose Unity for the first versions of KSP. What can be an error is to insist on it for the forthcoming versions. Not only KSP is way bigger than Unity nowadays, Unity Tech has proven to give a barely acceptable level of support to their paying customers - and this is something that is unforgivable. Squad's paying customers are trying to give them (and sometimes, managing to accomplish it!) a better support level than Unity appears to be giving to Squad.

 

24 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

Programmers are smart people after all. 

Programmers are, above all, people. Just like you and the fellow Kerbonaut (there're some controversy about me, however.  :sticktongue:).

The "smartness" of the group is the Least Common Multiple of the smartness of the involved people. Unity's programmers are very smart (make no mistake about it), and yet...

 

26 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

If Squad wanted to, I believe you can purchase the Unity source.  There has to be a way to implement you're own code that would be better. 

There's no lifetime enough for a group of content developers to learn and fix all that code. There's a reason we pay someone else to provide us with such code. :) 

It's plain too much. You need a team of specialized people in order to get into all of that. Very good generalists can learn and even deliver a good result - but you need specialists to accomplish that on a budget.

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Superfluous J

Superfluous J

Posted
Posted
17 minutes ago, Foxster said:

TerraTech.

I've never played TerraTech but I watched someone play it on youTube just now, and it looks like it has an extremely simplified construction system compared to KSP. It is possible that if KSP limited your options as much as TerraTech does, the wheels would work better. Also, I not once saw anybody walking around in the game so that eliminates the OP's issue entirely.

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Foxster

Foxster

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Posted
10 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

I've never played TerraTech but I watched someone play it on youTube just now, and it looks like it has an extremely simplified construction system compared to KSP. It is possible that if KSP limited your options as much as TerraTech does, the wheels would work better. Also, I not once saw anybody walking around in the game so that eliminates the OP's issue entirely.

It is a simple construction system but having wheels that bolt onto the craft is exactly the same and serves the same purpose. They go around, don't do weird stuff in collisions and look like real turning wheels. 

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Superfluous J

Superfluous J

Posted
Posted
6 minutes ago, Foxster said:

It is a simple construction system but having wheels that bolt onto the craft is exactly the same and serves the same purpose. They go around, don't do weird stuff in collisions and look like real turning wheels. 

As someone not involved in the programming of either game, I can only guess. Which I did.

It appears from the 30 seconds of video I watched that wheels must be attached at specific points, of which there seem to be 6 on each cube-shaped vehicle piece. There seems to be no radial attachment, no translation or rotation of parts, and no clipping. It's possible that if all of these were removed from KSP that wheels would work better, or that there is a wheel package that TerraTech bought that if you stick to these restrictions works but KSP doesn't have that option. It's also possible that TerraTech devs are just amazing at wheels while KSP devs aren't, but that's not the only option by a long shot.

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Kerbart

Kerbart

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11 hours ago, klgraham1013 said:

I still don't really agree with #BlameUnity.  Programmers are smart people after all.  If Squad wanted to (...)

It can easily be turned around; despite having smart programmers, it still cannot be fixed; that's how hard of a problem it is!

In the end, yes, it comes down to the willingness to spend time and money on it—meaning it will not be spent on other things. Look at the comments whenever Squad posts a development update:

  • No new features! Fix the bugs!
  • Why bother with this update? You're only fixing bugs and not introducing anything new
  • The game looks outdated and clunky
  • Why waste time on updating the way parts look? There's mods for that?!

And in that environment you want to delay everything (remember, it's a hard problem that requires many resources) to fix the wheels? When they work fine for most of us? There will be torches and pitchforks, I'll tell you.

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Xurkitree

Xurkitree

Posted
Posted

Also, what's wrong in Kerbals phasing through wheels? It barely affects gameplay, because this a Space program, not runover fellow inhabitants of your planet program.

Also you can kill kerbals in more interesting ways then running over them. They seem pretty robust in face of that as well.

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