Please do not support Xbox 1 and PS4

[MKI]

On 8/24/2021 at 5:29 PM, The Doodling Astronaut said:

2013 specs feels like the game is unnecessarily being nerfed.

I could see the reason why they are doing it is because of business, but it feels like this could possibly lead to a bunch of disappointed KSP 2 console players disappointed that their new copy of a long waited game doesn't run smoothly on a near-decade old hardware

This is where Unity comes in, it can degrade the build to get the game to run better for different platforms up to a point.

The game will be nerfed to run on older hardware, but it should be made available. Obviously if you want a better experience, you need newer hardware. If your a gamer running old hardware and the game doesn't look as good, you shouldn't be surprised, let alone cut off from playing the game.

I personally want the game to release on as many platforms as possible so its as successful as possible. As long as the gameplay isn't horrible on older hardware, nerf away and give it out on those platforms. I think its fair to assume players on older platforms will expect the game to look worse, but at least be able to play the game. Cutting them off should only be done if the level of optimization needed ends up not being worth that section of the market. 

So its less of a technical problem, and more of a business decision. 

 

I played the KSP 1 demo on a decade plus old laptop and it ran, it ran horribly but it ran. The experience made me eventually buy the game in full, and get the game on better hardware for a better experience. The fact the game ran at all on my older machine where I ran the demo led to a purchase. 

 

 

 

[K^2]

8 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

I heard it would continue being single thread for all the RBD, hence a lot of my skepticism when talking about old consoles. I know @K^2 is pretty knowledgeable on this subject matter, maybe he might have some insight on the subject?

KSP2 should have much better threading than KSP. Both because Unity itself has improved and because, hopefully, Intercept is taking this into account during development. At the same time, I still suspect that the overall performance will be main-thread-limited. That is, how fast each individual thread runs on particular CPU will matter more than thread count - within reason. If you have 4-thread CPU, maybe don't expect KSP2 to run well on it.

That said, as far as what it means for the Gen8 console support, I don't expect anything good. If this was a custom engine, I'd be way more optimistic. Even if we simply had reason to believe that KSP2 will run on Havok. But it sounds like Intercept is sticking with the same basic tech that Squad used for KSP, with improvements to core engine and some physics optimizations, of course, so it sounds like we're still looking at all the components being processed on the main thread and PhysX running single-threaded as well.

Not being involved in development I can't say any of this with certainty, but my bet is on KSP2 being released primarily for PC and Gen9 consoles. So PS5 and XBSX/S. If the game is even getting released on Gen8, I don't expect it to support base models of these consoles at all, and I expect the PS4 Pro/XB1X versions to be in some ways reduced in scope. I don't know if that would come as part limits, colony count limits, or something. It's just too easy otherwise to completely overwhelm the system with all that's going to be going on in the game, and unlike KSP, being an indy title that people expect to be rough, KSP2 needs to look professional.

Personally, I'm not fundamentally against the game getting back-ported to Gen8, but I do think it needs to be a back-port and possibly not even handled by Intercept internally. There are plenty of studios out there that can do a good job of taking a Gen9 Unity game and striping it down to run on Gen8 hardware, and if Take Two/Private Division really want a Gen8 release, that's a more efficient investment.

 

Edit:

2 hours ago, MKI said:

This is where Unity comes in, it can degrade the build to get the game to run better for different platforms up to a point.

Pretty sure it's limited to graphics settings. Graphics aren't a bottleneck. I'm sure you'd have to dial it down a bit to run on Gen8, but that's the easy part. KSP2, just like KSP, is going to be CPU-bound. And Unity can't scale things down for CPU performance. No engine can do that, really. This is something that has to be hand-tunned by somebody, and the sacrifices made will be far more drastic than shorter render distance. Odds are, you'll have to drop features.

Edited August 31, 2021 by K^2

[asap1]

well thats all fine and dandy but when is ksp 1.11/1.12 coming to console. ps4 and xb1 are both 2 major updates behind.

[BekfastDerp13]

I would say support for consoles now, but I am trying to get a good enough laptop or PC to play KSP 2. Maybe later my answer will change.