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Kerbal Space Program 2 - Pre-Release Notes


Intercept Games

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41 minutes ago, Master39 said:

O mighty @K^2 , I dare to ask for your insight on this theory.

Joking aside this should be at least adjacent to your area of expertise, am I wrong?

It's something that sounds obvious to me but I wouldn't want to reinforce misinformation or misinterpretations of facts.

The main speculation Ive heard about it is the big lag creator is joints, itd explain why the game especially slows when someone adds lots of struts. So in short for EA you probably shouldnt do asparagus staging

Edited by Strawberry
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Just now, Strawberry said:

The main speculation Ive heard about it is the big lag creator is joints, itd explain why the game especially slows when someone adds lots of struts. So in short for EA you probably shouldnt do asparagus staging

I was more talking about the fact that the staging proves it's not a GPU problem but surely a simulation one (whether it's the joints, the fuel flow, the struts or the engines is irrelevant to us)

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22 minutes ago, dansiegel30 said:

True - if they let you choose the craft for the simulation.  Going from the VAB to the training center could be tedious to simulate your current design however.  On the otherhand, building switch apparently is vastly improved so far, but IMO is all dependent on the memory your PC has - if you have to resort to using virtual memory, I expect a significant delay.

Yeah, I would not want to switch to the training center to run simulations either.  It would need to be right there in the VAB as you are designing.  

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5 hours ago, Master39 said:

O mighty @K^2 , I dare to ask for your insight on this theory.

Joking aside this should be at least adjacent to your area of expertise, am I wrong?

It's something that sounds obvious to me but I wouldn't want to reinforce misinformation or misinterpretations of facts.

It's hard to say with certainty that it's a physics lag. You can see that, like most people who tried building bigger rockets, Everyday Astronaut had to add a lot of struts to the boosters to keep them stable, so that could be it, or we might see a return of a fuel pathing algorithm being really bad - like if the boosters are having hard time "convincing" themselves that they can't find a path to the main tank, or some other issue.

But yeah, regardless of whether or not it's specifically a problem with physics simulation, this is definitely a CPU lag, and likely because of something that's taking entirely too long to process on the main thread. Since we know from the min spec that the game is main thread bound, much like the original KSP, I don't think we'd see such a stark contrast in performance if the bottleneck was on the worker threads.

A lot of it is speculation, though. I should be able to take a closer look at which cores are doing what when I can run the game on my PC. I promise to share anything I can dig up without breaking the EULA.

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On 2/20/2023 at 9:33 AM, snkiz said:

This bullet point explains a lot of the performance problems all on its own. I'm surprised that such a large complaint of the first game (Lack of computer resource utilization.) Didn't get top billing, but I'm not a programer. Please, use it all! I paid for 16 threads, I want to see them hurt. Use all the ram, everything. I see why the specs are what they are, and I feel bad for the team. I don't honestly think that anyone thought it was a good idea. I know you guys are not making the next crysis. But a deadline is a deadline and here we are. Good luck and fingers crossed for some sanity in the coming months.

I think that even though it may not be super well optimized yet, it should still be able to run I think even the min is more than enough, my pc doesnt meet all requirements but it can run no mans sky, so the required specs will go down and probably wont be that bad.

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I'm very excited by this and will be tinkering at the first opportunity.

Let's not lose sight of the fact this is early access and our constructive feedback at this point (hopefully) will help direct the course of development.  Opening things up to coded mods will be a key moment but I can understand that they want to get a number of things right before that.

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On 2/21/2023 at 6:23 PM, lordcirth said:

When Everyday Astronaut was playing, the lag ended the moment he staged away his boosters. This is the exact behavior we see now with KSP1 being single thread CPU limited. The GPU would be doing the same or more work rendering the same parts; but the CPU's main physics thread suddenly offloaded 8 boosters to their own threads.

He build the rocket with 8 liquid fueled side boosters each made of 9 segments of the second longest 1.25 m tanks (Read this, don't remember from video), not strutted at the top as I remember so they was wobbling causing increased physic and drag calculations. 
It might be part on part collision in KSP 2 so if an side booster hit the core or another stuff get destroyed. 

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On 2/21/2023 at 9:21 AM, Joker58th said:

some sort of simulation capabilities

Amen to that.  In ksp1 I have a whole seperate save (named "simulator", naturally) that I use to build and test craft, and mission plans, before moving them to my main save.  Would be so nice if the game itself had some such mechanic.  Perhaps the devs can add that to their already ungodly long list of things to do.

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On 2/21/2023 at 6:17 AM, Monger said:

I am a developer, ... and I can tell you there are few things harder than parallelization. Half of the time you try it, performance gets worse and you get weird side effects depending on your hardware.

1*G93vt6VRasohfOery4AKQQ.png

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I must say, I am a bit underwhelmed from the videos on youtube from the last couple of days. I understand it is early access and not a full game. But still, I am a bit shocked how raw it still is in its core mechanics after four (?) years of development .
I am not interested in fancy graphics for a successor of KSP 1, so having not very polished graphics does not bother me.

My core expectation for KSP 2 is that I can build ships I can't build in KSP1. The main limitation for this is performance of the physics calculation. Physics calculation limits the size and complexity of the vessels and projects I can build massivly in KSP1 and as far as I can judge from the videos, from KSP2 at this stage as well. It is hard to understate the importance of performance right now.

Aside from performance, things like action groups and and a proper work space in VAB / SPH are on the top of the list. Symmetry mode, I look at you.
Even if the product is far from finished, being able to feel you're not working against the program eases handling and acceptance.

Given that development was announced in August 2019 with a release date of early 2020, which got postponed to Q3 2021, then 2022, then early 2023, I fear we are stuck for quite a while with the early access phase. I expect a full release not before end of 2025 / 2026.

I really appreciate the work of the developing team and I see the effort going into this, but given the raw first impression and lack of performance I am a bit reserved, whether my core expectation for KSP 2 can be fulfilled. And even if so, in a reasonable timeframe.


Edit after early access release: Boy, that post did not age well. KSP2 struggles with 50-100 parts, has severe bugs in its core mechanics and the physics handling. For comparison: Solid works can handle upwards of 100.000 parts with different joint and material properties in rela time. In a version from ten years ago.

Edited by Mephisto81
Hindsight.
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My core expectation are orbital mechanics not possible in ksp1

- lagrange points
- multiple gravitational influence
- continuous acceleration and deceleration for short travel times (like shown in the expanse)

Edited by Tahib
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1 minute ago, Tahib said:

My core expectation are orbital mechanics not possible in ksp1

- lagrange points
- multiple gravitational influence
- continuous acceleration and deceleration for short travel times (like shown in the expanse)

I don't think that's going to be a vanilla feature. The first two. But principia might be updated to ksp 2 sometime.

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1 hour ago, Tahib said:

My core expectation are orbital mechanics not possible in ksp1

- lagrange points
- multiple gravitational influence
- continuous acceleration and deceleration for short travel times (like shown in the expanse)

- Lagrange points: I doubt it will be a feature in vanilla, as they have stated that with few exceptions, they're continuing with their standard 2-body physics calculations and using arbitrary SOI boundaries. However, I'm sure someone will create a N-body mod like Principia for ksp 2 at some point.

- Multiple Gravitational Influence: One of the exceptions to their 2-body system that they've revealed will be Rask & Rusk, two planets of equal(ish) mass orbiting on the border of each other's Roche limit in one of the new interstellar star systems. My guess is that they will have a singular SOI, that when entered, switches to pseudo-3-body physics temporarily.

- continuous acceleration and deceleration for short travel times: Already confirmed, I doubt they will be in from day one, but there are some far future technologies like the torch drive that are designed for precisely this. Secondly, in Lowne's latest video, Nate commented that the new manoeuvre tool is designed from the ground up to work properly with baristochrone trajectories.

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Does it not worry anyone that the interstellar flight, which should have been the main feature of this game is not included in the early-access? Seems strange to me honestly, and I'm a bit worried... but let's see, hopefully it will come soon and the early access has enouth features

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17 minutes ago, atzepengPK said:

Does it not worry anyone that the interstellar flight, which should have been the main feature of this game is not included in the early-access? Seems strange to me honestly, and I'm a bit worried... but let's see, hopefully it will come soon and the early access has enouth features

This early access is more for people who are going to be writing bug reports and want to explore the game on a technical level, than people who wanted to make interstellar ships and run casual missions.

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Regarding mods, this was on the steam page (and probably a bunch of other places, that's just where I read it) 

In general, every feature goes through the following steps:

  1. Get it working
  2. Get it stable
  3. Get it performant
  4. Get it moddable

So it sounds like, while basic modding will happen early, it will probably be rather limited for a while as they do the primary stability and optimization work

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Related to above!

 

44 minutes ago, atzepengPK said:

Does it not worry anyone that the interstellar flight, which should have been the main feature of this game is not included in the early-access? Seems strange to me honestly, and I'm a bit worried... but let's see, hopefully it will come soon and the early access has enouth features

 

Interstellar flight was stated quite a while ago to be included in a later stage of the Early Access program. See:

 

 

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On 2/17/2023 at 6:32 PM, Intercept Games said:

Kerbal Space Program 2 encompasses many new features

Dear @Intercept Games, beside features, will it also support multiple operating systems ?

I'm asking, because it feels to me that pretty graphics are creating a lock-in into DX ecosystem. ( Anyone typing now, suggesting VM or VINE, please don't ;) ).

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2 hours ago, atzepengPK said:

Does it not worry anyone that the interstellar flight, which should have been the main feature of this game is not included in the early-access? Seems strange to me honestly, and I'm a bit worried... but let's see, hopefully it will come soon and the early access has enouth features

Not at all.

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On 2/20/2023 at 8:05 AM, illectro said:

Also, I hope the Mohole still exists since I couldn't find it during my brief testing.

They probably, tragically, fixed the bug that causes it and failed to reimplement it in the heightmap.  KSPCF/Kopernicus recently ran into the same thing in the modding scene.  Fix the MapSO bug, you lose the Mohole.

10 hours ago, tomk said:

I'm asking, because it feels to me that pretty graphics are creating a lock-in into DX ecosystem.

Not at all.  Vulkan exists now.  But yes, it is windows-only at launch.

And if you haven't tried WINE recently, I'd say you'd be in for a shock, but due to lack of optimization it will probably still run badly.

Edited by R-T-B
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