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Is it just me, or is Unity 5 going to be AMAZING for KSP?


StarManta

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Unity (the engine KSP runs on) has version 5 coming out soon (most likely this fall?), and it seems like many of the announced features/improvements are things that KSP has been begging for for quite some time.

- 64-bit! Finally, run all the mods your heart desires without the need for texture reduction packs or anything!

- New version of PhysX, including better utilization of multiple cores

Unity's quote: "From what we’ve seen so far, it’s reasonable to expect a doubling in performance generally just as a result of having a better code base and improved multithreading. In some instances, the improvement is dramatic, with up to tenfold improvements." Given KSP's reliance on complicated physics, I would expect it to be on the high end of that scale.

- Physically-based shading

This is harder to explain, but the important point is that PBS makes it much easier to create shaders and materials that just look far better for realistic rendering. This will have a dramatic impact on the look of the game, for the better.

In short, by the end of this year, a version of KSP that runs at double the framerate while looking better and running every mod you could want is not at all out of the question, IMHO.

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Physx gaining multithreading support is one of the things I'm most looking forward to because of its possible use in KSP. Squad has made no confirmation that they will be incorporating Unity 5 when it comes out, but man, I really hope they do!

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Physx gaining multithreading support is one of the things I'm most looking forward to because of its possible use in KSP. Squad has made no confirmation that they will be incorporating Unity 5 when it comes out, but man, I really hope they do!

Man, they really need to.

I mean, the single-threaded physics were fine when people were only able to build tiny rockets with a few parts in earlier versions. But now, a lot of the fun in the game comes from building space stations, and elaborate ships, and docking things together, and so on. The part counts are high now. We need the performance.

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Physx gaining multithreading support is one of the things I'm most looking forward to because of its possible use in KSP. Squad has made no confirmation that they will be incorporating Unity 5 when it comes out, but man, I really hope they do!

The only reason not to is that upgrading to a new version of anything has the potential to create lots of work. But consider this scenario: the upgrade to U5 takes so much extra work that, for 2 months, Squad is consumed with nothing but getting KSP working under U5 (This is probably an extreme worst case scenario; I'd predict a couple of days would be more likely). In other words, let's say that in that one release, KSP adds no new features except the PhysX upgrade and 64-bit that you get "for free" with U5.

....even with no other features, wouldn't that still be one of the biggest, best KSP releases ever?

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....even with no other features, wouldn't that still be one of the biggest, best KSP releases ever?

For some - yes. For other - not really.

I rarely have performance issues, and I'm yet to build something that would make my game unplayable (yep, I'm one of these guys that invested in their hobby) so I wouldn't be bothered.

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Hm. I wonder how they are doing that without Unity being fully 64bit. The only thing I can imagine is that they must be using this hack, which according to that poll (mind you, I haven't dug through the rest of that thread yet) has a 25% "catastrophic failure" rate, which is not great for a publicly distributable game... (hopefully if that failure rate is not compensated for somehow, they will be releasing the 32bit "standard version" alongside a 64bit "risky but all the plugins" version for the people that need it.

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64 bit isn't new in unity 5. However the unity editor will be in 64 bit for the first time with unity 5. The average user(anyone who isn't making mods or working at squad) isn't going to notice it at all. As already mentioned .24 will already come out as 64 bit on windows.

The thing I'm most excited about is the newer PhysX version. Not only does it allow multithreading, but also hardware accelleration for those of us with nVidia graphic cards.

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According to Maxmaps, they're basically using that hack, with a few tweaks they've done over the years to improve stability of it (they knew about the unstable experimental 64-bit Unity player on Windows since before Maxmaps was hired, and had improving stability on a back burner, so it got some dev time when a dev wasn't doing anything more pressing). The thread you mentioned convinced them there was enough demand to release a somewhat buggy version; the 64-bit version of 0.24 will not be as stable as the 32-bit one.

That said - 64-bit is not a panacea; all it does is let KSP address more memory. That doesn't magically give a computer more physical RAM, nor does it mean that memory usage is no longer an issue -- excessive memory usage almost never means "this program tries to allocate more memory than it can address", it means "this program is a memory hog, meaning I need to make sure my computer has lots of physical RAM, and that it sucks up a lot of system resources that could otherwise go to other programs". It's a band-aid solution; the actual solution would be to revise how resources are loaded.

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That said - 64-bit is not a panacea; all it does is let KSP address more memory. That doesn't magically give a computer more physical RAM, nor does it mean that memory usage is no longer an issue -- excessive memory usage almost never means "this program tries to allocate more memory than it can address", it means "this program is a memory hog, meaning I need to make sure my computer has lots of physical RAM, and that it sucks up a lot of system resources that could otherwise go to other programs". It's a band-aid solution; the actual solution would be to revise how resources are loaded.

Obviously you still need the physical memory there, but there's few things more infuriating than having a 16GB machine and can only effectively use 3GB of memory. In 32-bit mode there is a "ceiling" - "you're just plain not allowed to have a computer that is able to do X".

Calling 64-bit a "band-aid" solution is certainly wrong. It's more like an inevitable requirement, in the long term. Reworking the way resources are loaded is the band-aid - if you keep adding plugins and textures (and KSP players do) you can optimize all you want, and eventually you'll still run out of memory. That's not to say it SHOULDN'T be optimized (obviously, it should be both optimized for memory usage and compiled for 64-bit, in a perfect world), I think you just have those concepts backwards.

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That said - 64-bit is not a panacea; all it does is let KSP address more memory. That doesn't magically give a computer more physical RAM, nor does it mean that memory usage is no longer an issue -- excessive memory usage almost never means "this program tries to allocate more memory than it can address", it means "this program is a memory hog, meaning I need to make sure my computer has lots of physical RAM, and that it sucks up a lot of system resources that could otherwise go to other programs". It's a band-aid solution; the actual solution would be to revise how resources are loaded.

Um, can't it mean both?

In KSP's case, it certainly does. When using lots of (or just certain) mods, you end up using more memory than can be addressed. That may or may not also be more than you have, or more than you'd like to give to KSP because you like to run other memory-intensive things in the background, or whatever, but KSP is actually running out of address space in these cases.

I wouldn't call 64-bit a "band-aid" solution, but you are right that texture (especially) loading could be optimized. The problem with saying that, however, is that it's much easier to say than do, especially when you can jump instantly from one scene to another, using vastly different sets of resources, with no warning. When you go from one area to another in a first-person shooter, for example, the engine knows where you might go from where you are, and can work in the background to load whatever resources might be needed for there. In KSP, however, you might click on whatever ship from the tracking center, and each ship might need different planets, parts, etc.

Edited by godefroi
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Obviously you still need the physical memory there, but there's few things more infuriating than having a 16GB machine and can only effectively use 3GB of memory. In 32-bit mode there is a "ceiling" - "you're just plain not allowed to have a computer that is able to do X".

Calling 64-bit a "band-aid" solution is certainly wrong. It's more like an inevitable requirement, in the long term. Reworking the way resources are loaded is the band-aid - if you keep adding plugins and textures (and KSP players do) you can optimize all you want, and eventually you'll still run out of memory. That's not to say it SHOULDN'T be optimized (obviously, it should be both optimized for memory usage and compiled for 64-bit, in a perfect world), I think you just have those concepts backwards.

Yes, myself I feel I run into the 3.8GB limit all the time, plenty of mods and large projects.

And yes you can run into the 4GB limit stock if you have lots of projects of some scale, again yes the game should be optimized better, still 64bit would have benefits.

Some chance more planets are put on hold because more people will run into memory issues if they was added, both the planets and the extra missions they would generate would increase use.

The entire games don't use much memory is an old thing from then cpu and gpu was weak.

It has been keept alive by the 512MB ps3 and 360 who restricted the memory use of multiplatform games. However Sims2/3 and KSP both uses lots of memory and is pc only games.

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...if you keep adding plugins and textures (and KSP players do) you can optimize all you want, and eventually you'll still run out of memory. That's not to say it SHOULDN'T be optimized...

Agreed there. Especially since I'm going to 64 bit tonight (getting new 1TB hard drive with 64 bit windows to replace the 250mg 32 bit currently)!

I'm a bit skeptical on your "up to 10 times faster" comment as anyone who hasn't done deep research would but in the very least, KSP will be faster and that's good news by itself.

EDIT: If you look at the announcement page posted, they talked about new wheel and suspension features. Does this mean there can be more wheels and with better impact resistance and suspension?!? I hope!

Edited by Avera9eJoe
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This is very interesting. Is there any information / educated guesses what this new physics-engine would improve / make possible in Ksp?

One obvious thing is more parts, 2000 parts should be workable,

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This is very interesting. Is there any information / educated guesses what this new physics-engine would improve / make possible in Ksp?

It's actually the same engine used right now, but this update would allow it to support multithreading, which is doesn't currently. With multithreading, the physics calculations the game performs can be performed concurrently on separate threads rather than all on the same one.

Bottoms line, launching large ships, and times when you're coming in to dock with a large station should become much smoother. At least, that's been my understanding.

x64 support is nice, but I don't run mods and haven't run into any memory issues yet. I *have* run into poor performance with large crafts and reading up on it has always led me to the answer that it's the physics engine/processor being a bottle neck because of the lack of multithreading. (I'm WAY more excited for this physx update than the x64 support!)

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Y'know, the big "64-bit" announcement for Unity 5... is just that the main editor will be able to run 64-bit. Unity's been compiling 64-bit versions for ages, though they've not been working quite as well as they might.

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