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I don't like Unity (Split from "Blocker features in KSP2")


ronson49

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11 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

That's what he's advocating. His argument is that TT is rich and should spend some of that money to build an engine for KSP2 from scratch.

I will leave it to the reader to decide how reasonable that proposal is.

As reasonable as us launching a mission to Alpha Centauri in the next year. 

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3 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Well they had their bit in making Moonbase Alpha and we all know how that ended up. John Madden.

That's because they were dealing with amateurs.
Now they can give a chance to the interplanetary expansion professionals.

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3 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games

Subnautica

It's 3-D, beautiful, runs well, has free building in a lego like manner similar to kerbal, and is built in unity

Unity may be a free engine available to everyone, so many amateurs may make sub par inefficient games using it but that doesnt mean in the correct hands it cant be used to make something great.

But please tell me that subnautica chugs or looks ugly to defend your point

Agree.

Also youtube below:

Spoiler

 

But to tackle the point, part of the reason KSP was so successful was because it focused on gameplay and not graphics. Many of the most fun games are pretty graphically simplistic, just well-executed. It's much more important that they're supporting an immersive engaging game design, and of course it always helps that that design is also well executed and not infested with showstopping bugs - World of Warcraft and Minecraft are outstanding examples. I don't see any reason to doubt Unity is adequate to the task.

On a personal note, I genuinely don't care if KSP2's effects are 2nd rate or 10-years-old as long as the game is a genuine iterative improvement on the original in various ways.

Edited by The_Rocketeer
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4 hours ago, GoldForest said:

As reasonable as us launching a mission to Alpha Centauri in the next year. 

Hey now, I intend to launch a mission to Alpha Centauri next year.

(Or whatever they'll call the neighbouring system.)

More seriously... that may be overstating the case a bit. Building KSP2 from scratch would be technically completely feasible. It would just be economically unlikely. The market just isn't big enough to support that sort of thing.

The only way I could see it happening is if someone could identify a whole range of different games involving complicated rigid-body physics and space stuff, and then build an engine that could be reused for all of them. Which IMO would not be that far-fetched, even if some of them were KSP variants -- a hardcore realistic space sim, a Star Trekky exploration game with aliens and stuff, an Elite-style trade and space war thing, and so on and so forth.

Edited by Guest
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1 hour ago, Brikoleur said:

Hey now, I intend to launch a mission to Alpha Centauri next year.

(Or whatever they'll call the neighbouring system.)

More seriously... that may be overstating the case a bit. Building KSP2 from scratch would be technically completely feasible. It would just be economically unlikely. The market just isn't big enough to support that sort of thing.

The only way I could see it happening is if someone could identify a whole range of different games involving complicated rigid-body physics and space stuff, and then build an engine that could be reused for all of them. Which IMO would not be that far-fetched, even if some of them were KSP variants -- a hardcore realistic space sim, a Star Trekky exploration game with aliens and stuff, an Elite-style trade and space war thing, and so on and so forth.

Alpha Kentauri*

But in all seriousness, I was talking more along the money side, not the technical side.

Heck, you'd probably have more chance getting modders to build it for free in their off time, than TT to cash out for it.

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6 hours ago, The_Rocketeer said:

But to tackle the point, part of the reason KSP was so successful was because it focused on gameplay and not graphics. Many of the most fun games are pretty graphically simplistic, just well-executed. It's much more important that they're supporting an immersive engaging game design, and of course it always helps that that design is also well executed and not infested with showstopping bugs - World of Warcraft and Minecraft are outstanding examples. I don't see any reason to doubt Unity is adequate to the task.

On a personal note, I genuinely don't care if KSP2's effects are 2nd rate or 10-years-old as long as the game is a genuine iterative improvement on the original in various ways.

As much as I'd like to agree with this as I agree gameplay >>>> graphics, the lack of surface features and environment on any planets/moons definitely took away from the exploration incentive to the game for me

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I'm a unity dev.  Sort of.  I play with it to make demos for certain things.  Some day in the distant future I might get off my butt and release a game I've been working on.

My Grandma would burn the computer if she tried to use it.  So would most average Joes.  Gamemaker is for Grandma, not Unity.

Edited by R-T-B
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9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Once NASA becomes an official sponsor...

Wait.. That's it. A petition to NASA to fund KSP.

We do that, and KSP 2.0 and we get the annual budget halfened and the launch postponed to 4 years after SLS first lanuch!

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7 minutes ago, Lisias said:

We do that

We don't, lol. Only users from USA, I think, as it's their NASA and money.

7 minutes ago, Lisias said:

the annual budget halfened and the launch postponed to 4 years after SLS first lanuch!

This gives additional four years of the forum Artemis discussion, and anyway some users take SLS sceptically, so why not.
Who needs that Moon when there is this Mu:n.

Edited by kerbiloid
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10 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

That's what he's advocating. His argument is that TT is rich and should spend some of that money to build an engine for KSP2 from scratch.

I will leave it to the reader to decide how reasonable that proposal is.

Depending on how well KSP2 goes, this is something feasible for KSP3. For 2.0, no way - they would not risk a second substantial investment on the franchise without recovering the first one on sales.

Edited by Lisias
tyops!
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On ‎10‎/‎19‎/‎2019 at 9:04 AM, mcwaffles2003 said:

Just made a >1000 part ship, I have a 2700x and 1080Ti... it ran fine. 

I find this EXTREMELY hard to believe. 
Unless by fine you mean Game clock vs Real time Clock was 1/6th or worse.
And that is NOT fine.  It's an exercise of patience.

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6 hours ago, Francois424 said:

I find this EXTREMELY hard to believe. 
Unless by fine you mean Game clock vs Real time Clock was 1/6th or worse.
And that is NOT fine.  It's an exercise of patience.

I've done a few hundred part ships fine on a 1080...  but graphics aren't going to even be a factor there.  What is his CPU?  Mine is an 8-core 9900k running at 5Ghz allcore, so yeah, it's fine.  Doesn't mean the game is efficient either.  I mean it uses like two cores tops, for starters.

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8 hours ago, Francois424 said:

I find this EXTREMELY hard to believe.

I find it impossible to believe, at least at any sane definition of "fine" framerate.
 

2 hours ago, R-T-B said:

Doesn't mean the game is efficient either.  I mean it uses like two cores tops, for starters.

The physics engine is pretty much single-threaded on a per-vessel basis, and it's by far the biggest bottleneck. Not much to be done about it either as far as I can speculate, besides changing the way the game handles craft to reduce the number of rigidbodies involved.
I'm curious as to how KSP2 is going to handle this, given the apparent emphasis on high part-count performance in the hype.
 

2 hours ago, R-T-B said:

9900k running at 5Ghz allcore

Gah, you're making me think of spending money on PC parts again. I'm still running an old 4960X @4.6.

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On 10/19/2019 at 10:03 AM, GoldForest said:

There are no fanboys here. Only people telling you the truth. Unity isn't the problem. It's how you code in unity that is. KSP 1 was coded poorly, and slowly but surely they are trying to fix it. Look at KSP 1.8. It has better performance. 

Also, if you want a thread deleted, it's always a good idea to ping the mods directly so that they don't have to just go looking for threads that want to be deleted. 

@Snark @Vanamonde Are the main two I see poking around the KSP 2 section, so probably best to ping them. 

I'm sorry but 1.8 has worse performance and the performance is going in the same circle it always does.

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6 minutes ago, Arugela said:

I'm sorry but 1.8 has worse performance and the performance is going in the same circle it always does.

I dont know about you, but I have better performance. Shadow zone did a video, even he has better performance. There is better performance.

If you have poor performance, it's your CPU. 

Edited by GoldForest
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i

1 hour ago, GoldForest said:

I dont know about you, but I have better performance. Shadow zone did a video, even he has better performance. There is better performance.

If you have poor performance, it's your CPU. 

Can guarantee this, I've obliterated 40% more Kerbals with 1.8 per hour compared to previous versions

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3 hours ago, GoldForest said:

I dont know about you, but I have better performance. Shadow zone did a video, even he has better performance. There is better performance.

If you have poor performance, it's your CPU. 

It's not my CPU. it's the coding and the stutter from the coding of older parts that haven't been rehauled to work with proper code. Stutter tripples lag time. Without the stutter the game would be playable at high parts counts 3x more efficient compared to now and I wouldn't be complaining as much. It's a coding problem. I've already documented it, but as it's takes high parts counts(only 688 in this case) to demonstrate and bring out the issue. So, nothing will be looked into or fixed.

There is stutter at high parts counts(which has been an issue since the dawn of the game) even at 0% throttle just from turning on the engine. Even a single engine. And it wasn't fixed by the garbage collection. The new rotary parts with massive amount of parts does not create this stutter at all. It's a flaw in the code related to older engines!

I have a ship with like over 100 rotor wings and 14 rotors going at nearly 700 parts. It does not stutter and runs at a cool 5 seconds per second from actual lag that is from my CPU. If you turn on one older engine with no throttle. every second a stutter happens that takes 2 seconds a piece for 10 extra second. Making it 15 seconds per second for 3x the lag. The 5 seconds per second would be fine for me in comparison. Which is from my CPU.

Note: I've even provided the ship and description to test this by just going onto the runway and not even having to fly. It takes nothing to see the problem. And yet nobody cares about anything. Nobody will listen. Nobody will help.

And don't tell me to use the rotors. I would like to get into space thank you!

 

Edit: This problem also seems to be related to the number of older engines on a ship. It increases the stutter with with how many are on the ship. Even if not throttled up. The game is doing something just because the engines are there physically. but even one engine with the same parts count causes stutter. New parts like rotors cause absolutely none! Note: The stutter goes away the moment you turn the engines off. But is compounded by how many engines are present even if turning on only one engine.

I think the stutter is down to 1 second per second for only double the lag now.

 

Edited by Arugela
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4 hours ago, steve_v said:

Gah, you're making me think of spending money on PC parts again. I'm still running an old 4960X @4.6.

Don't.  I will always be one step ahead of you and several dollars shorter.  It comes with being a former IT journalist, I must have the latest for no reason at all.  Heck, until last year, I was still getting retail samples and having to return them explaining I don't do reviews anymore (ethics mandate that).  I had a fully boxed Ryzen 1800X that I'm sure was cherrypicked (because you know they want that for reviews, if you didn't buy it retail pretty much everyone does that) as the last thing I returned.

Now that my free parts supply has dried up, right now my brain is telling me I want a RTX 2080 Super and I have absolutely no valid reason to get one (I don't even write reviews anymore and everything runs fine on my 1080).  Guess what I'll probably be ordering before months end?

Oh, and this 9900k I love?  It has no games that take advantage of it's cores, and I upgraded from an 8700k that still probably had at least 1 core free at any given scenario.  It also clocked even higher, so I actually am doing worse.

It's a disease, and it wastes away at your wallet. 

Too bad it's lots of fun otherwise.  Totally off topic but really, this is real advice.  Run.

Edited by R-T-B
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22 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

As much as I'd like to agree with this as I agree gameplay >>>> graphics, the lack of surface features and environment on any planets/moons definitely took away from the exploration incentive to the game for me

I couldn't agree more, I have been around long enough to remember the disappointment when updates started to focus on improving models and textures instead of adding this much-needed content. At the time, I found myself in the minority...  vOv

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On 10/19/2019 at 2:44 AM, ronson49 said:

[Moderator note:  This topic has been split from another thread here.]

The choice of using the Unity Engine means I can't play KSP2 :(

 

KSP was one of the greatest games I have played in 2 decades, but Unity destroyed the game.   Performance just fell off a cliff edge with a few dozen parts on your Mun Base.    Even on the latest technology of the time.


KSP2 is going to run straight into those same issues and there is nothing that you can do about it.      Unity has make assumptions so that my grandmother can make a game this weekend too.     Trying to code a solar system in there based on physics of this scale.....    
 

I am happy to put how much I love the game on hold until the day where it is done properly so I may properly enjoy it.  KSP2 is just a long Pre Alpha until a later game (or competitor)  is made in a reasonable and performant engine.
 

Sure, Unity is partly responsible for KSP's performance limits, but it is not the cause for KSP's performance woes.

When KSP was originally built, it was done so by one guy in his spare time who didn't really know what he was doing at the time. This meant there would be optimizations that would be missed, bugs that wouldn't be fixed, and all around just bad code. Despite all that, KSP proved to be still good enough for people to fall in love with it.

As KSP grew and more people got involved, rather than try to scratch what they had and start again, they tried patching bad code with slightly less bad code.

Then KSP grew to the point where it was no longer feasible to start over. Too many players, too much time invested. KSP was effectively coded into a corner. It was never going to get better performance-wise. Too much duct tape and bandages to start over.

None of that is the fault of the game engine. That's all on the development of the game. (Note that I'm not bashing the devs, I'm just saying that in the beginning KSP was built by inexperienced developers).

Now with KSP2, not only are we starting fresh from the ground up, but we also have an official Dev team who knows what pitfalls to avoid and how to optimize straight out the gate.

Given this, KSP2 should be miles better than KSP1 despite running on the same engine.

So I guess if you want to boycott KSP2 because it'll still be on Unity, that's your choice, but honestly I think you're throwing away a perfectly good successor for terrible reasons.

You do you, bro.

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Frankly, as a dev I'd be more disturbed if I heard they were writing their own engine.

Why?

With the turn around time they are expecting, there are way too many ways that deadline could become a runaway one and take two could NOT extend it and force their hand to make cuts.  Then, they'd either decide to take shortcuts with the engine (bad performance, likely sub unity, you can do a bad engine quickly but that's not what anyone likes) or they'd take shortcuts with the end game product (game that just...  is buggy or not fun).  Neither of those appeal to me.

Unity is the fastest and most performant way to produce a game quickly.   And honestly, it's no slouch either.  They make several solarsystem simulation games and models in it.  It's not a new idea.

They COULD have went with Unreal or Cryengine, but neither of those have been tested for a large scale Solar System simulation, so that'd be totally uncharted waters.  The only other one that is marketed that might fit is Cobra:  The one "Elite: Dangerous" is made in.  But it's entire ecosystem is closed, limited, the product is very expensive and can only be worked on by Frontier directly, and to my knowledge right now it has almost 0 physics systems and is focused purely on a complete galaxy worth of generation and then fixing things to orbits at scale based on one "big bang seed."  After that you can't change much.  Not ideal.

Edited by R-T-B
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What the eff?

Comparing Unity and Java is .. not really right (as in apples and oranges.. or maybe like.. apples and machine screws), but if you consider the underlying language when in a .NET/mono build, there's an element of truth here.   People don't seem to get that .NET/mono is not native, and runs as bytecode on a VM.  Does that sound even remotely familiar?   Anyone?  Bueller?

Anyhow, I'm kinda sick of Unity cropping up everywhere.   I understand Squad's reasons (it's a lot easier than rolling your own engine or using one of the big names, and cheaper to boot, especially back then) for selecting it, plus a lot of the other indie developers (same reasons as Squad), and maybe even for KSP2 (I don't know much about these new guys - just because it's a Take Two product doesn't mean it has TT's entire budget at it's disposal), but it is in no way an optimized, high-performance engine.

Garbage-collected language will always have trouble in realtime:

It really is Java-like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Runtime

..and I have a real hard time trusting anything from Microsoft.  You know that old expression, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me five thousand, six hundred and eighty two times, I'm deeply effing idiotic and should really, REALLY stop trusting you!".

Quite funny that Disco Elysium was held up as a graphically intense game.  I think someone is confusing artistic talent with powerful graphics engines.

Anyhow, I have kerbals to land on the newly textured planets...

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On 10/19/2019 at 3:03 PM, GoldForest said:

There are no fanboys here. Only people telling you the truth. Unity isn't the problem. It's how you code in unity that is. KSP 1 was coded poorly, and slowly but surely they are trying to fix it. Look at KSP 1.8. It has better performance. 

Also, if you want a thread deleted, it's always a good idea to ping the mods directly so that they don't have to just go looking for threads that want to be deleted. 

@Snark @Vanamonde Are the main two I see poking around the KSP 2 section, so probably best to ping them. 

Yes indeed 80FPS at Mun is not bad at all, which is what I have, with full of mods, this KSPv1.8 for me besides the basic bugs in ground textures and the old bugs of camera movements in EVA, is really a good step forward and optimized Game Engine Core:

O0a8GQr.png

EVA on Mun 107 FPS:

7Lch8Vf.png

 

Edited by pmborg
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